AP deletes Clinton tweet from two weeks ago 
 
 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (Photo: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 The Associated Press on Thursday deleted a tweet posted two weeks earlier regarding a review the news organization had conducted of meetings Hillary Clinton held with individuals from the private sector while secretary of State. 
 
 The original tweet, posted on Aug. 23, read: "BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation." 
 
 In its place, the AP tweeted Thursday: "AP review: Many of the discretionary meetings Clinton had at State were with people who gave to Clinton Foundation." The tweet included a link to the August story. 
 
 AP review: Many of the discretionary meetings Clinton had at State were with people who gave to Clinton Foundation. https://t.co/ih6Oitgou2 — The Associated Press (@AP) September 8, 2016 
 
 In a memo explaining the decision, John Daniszewski, vice president for standards for AP, wrote the original tweet "fell short of AP standards by omitting essential context." 
 
 The story in question detailed how, among the individuals Clinton met with at the State Department who were outside of government, "an extraordinary proportion" had donated to her family's foundation personally or by way of some other entity — a finding, the AP wrote, that indicated "her possible ethics challenges if elected president." 
 
 Specifically, the AP review found that 85 of the 154 people who'd had in-person or phone meetings scheduled with Clinton and who weren't government officials were also foundation contributors, according to the State Department calendars that were available. 
 
 However, Daniszewski wrote Thursday, the tweet promoting the article "omitted the important distinction between discretionary meetings and official meetings." 
 
 In other words, the now-deleted tweet gave the impression that a far higher percentage of Clinton's total meetings while secretary were with donors than was concluded by the story's analysis, given that the 154 people included in the review did not encompass the many government officials she was interacting with during her tenure, meetings that Daniszewski wrote "made up the bulk of her workday." 
 
 Clinton and her campaign blasted the story not long after it was published. Speaking with CNN's Anderson Cooper last month, the Democratic presidential nominee said of the growing controversy regarding the relationship between the State Department under her leadership and the Clinton Foundation: "I know there is a lot of smoke and there is no fire." 
 
 Of the AP report, Clinton said: "It draws a conclusion and makes a suggestion that my meetings with people like the late, great Elie Wiesel or Melinda Gates or the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus were somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders." 
 
 Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the AP "cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary's Clinton's schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation." 
 
 The AP review included only the portion of Clinton's daily schedules it had acquired following a Freedom of Information Act request. Last week, the State Department said it would produce the remainder of Clinton's schedules by Oct. 17 after having previously said they would not be released until December, weeks after the election. 
 
 The AP memo explaining the decision regarding the Clinton tweet also addressed the organization's new policy regarding the deletion of tweets, a practice it said was formally left to "AP news managers to decide on a case-by-case basis." 
 
 “We have to be the AP, wherever our work is being distributed,” says executive editor Kathleen Carroll in the memo, which announced that messages on Twitter would now be given "the same internal review and response process as other AP content." 
 
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 The tweet in question linked to an investigation by the AP into how many Clinton Foundation donors also met with Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. | Getty AP deletes Clinton Foundation tweet 
 
 The Associated Press announced on Thursday that it is deleting a two-week old tweet about the Clinton Foundation. 
 
 “The Associated Press today is deleting a 2-week-old tweet about Hillary Clinton’s meetings as Cabinet secretary after concluding the tweet fell short of AP standards by omitting essential context,” AP's vice president for standards John Daniszewski wrote in a blog post. “At the same time, we are revising our practices to require removal and correction of any AP tweets found not to meet AP standards, including tweets that contain information that is incorrect, misleading, unclear or could be interpreted as unfair, or having a problem in tone.” 
 
 The tweet in question linked to an investigation by the AP into how many Clinton Foundation donors also met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. 
 
 “More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation,” the original tweet read in part. 
 
 What the tweet didn’t mention was that the AP analysis focused only on Clinton’s discretionary meetings with those who were not in the U.S. federal government or representatives of foreign governments, which likely made up the vast majority of the people Clinton met with as secretary of tate (though we don't know that yet because the State Department has not released Clinton's schedules for her time as secretary, something the AP has been fighting for). The tweet, and in some cases the story, was slammed by some media critics and many on the left. 
 
 The Clinton campaign initially formally requested the AP remove or amend the tweet, but spokesman Brian Fallon told POLITICO they hadn’t had further conversations with AP since their initial request. 
 
 While AP’s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, defended the report, she did admit in an interview with CNN last month that the tweet was “sloppy” but said wire service wasn’t going to change it. 
 
 The two-week old tweet will now be replaced with one that reads “AP review: Many of the discretionary meetings Clinton had at State were with people who gave to Clinton Foundation.” 
 
 “Prior to this guideline change, whether to delete or update tweets had been left to AP news managers to decide on a case-by-case basis. The new guidance is mandatory, subjecting tweets to the same internal review and response process as other AP content,” Daniszewski wrote. “In the earlier days of Twitter, there had been a belief that removing tweets was akin to retroactively editing a conversation; it wasn’t transparent. Additionally, tweets were seen more as providing paths to in-depth content and less as content in themselves that would remain in the public discussion for an extended period. Industry thinking on this topic has been changing. And the controversy over the AP tweet has led us to an extensive reflection on this evolution.” ||||| (CNN) Hillary Clinton slammed Donald Trump and issued a strong defense of the Clinton Foundation Wednesday amid the Republican nominee's claims that she used public office for personal gain. 
 
 Speaking to CNN's Anderson Cooper in her first national news interview in nearly a month, Clinton pushed back against Trump's accusations and issued perhaps her most succinct answers on her use of a private email server during her time leading the State Department. 
 
 "What Trump has said is ridiculous," Clinton said. "My work as secretary of state was not influenced by any outside forces. I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right." 
 
 She added: "I know there's a lot of smoke, and there's no fire." 
 
 Trump has recently upped his attacks on Clinton and her family's namesake foundation, saying that foreign governments and business leaders gave primarily to get something in return. 
 
 "It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins," Trump said Tuesday night at a rally in Austin, Texas. "The specific crimes committed to carry out that enterprise are too numerous to cover in this speech." 
 
 'Unique circumstances' 
 
 Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, has laid out some steps the foundation will take if his wife wins. It will only accept donations from US citizens, legal residents and US-based independent foundations, and the 42nd president will step down from the board and stop fundraising. 
 
 Asked by Cooper about why she is waiting until a possible presidency to make the changes rather than implement them immediately, Clinton said, "Obviously, there will be some unique circumstances." 
 
 "Didn't those unique circumstances exist when you were secretary of state?" Cooper interjected. 
 
 "No, no, look -- I know there is a lot of smoke and there is no fire," Clinton replied, before blasting an Associated Press report out this week that said more than half of the private citizens with whom she met while at the State Department donated to the foundation. 
 
 "It draws a conclusion and makes a suggestion that my meetings with people like the late, great Elie Wiesel or Melinda Gates or the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus were somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders," Clinton continued. "That is absurd. These are people I would be proud to meet with, as would any secretary of state would have been proud to meet with, to hear about their work and their insights." 
 
 Pushback from Powell 
 
 Clinton has reportedly told FBI investigators that her use of the private server was inspired by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has pushed back against the suggestion , saying, "Her people have been trying to pin it on me." 
 
 Cooper asked the Democratic nominee about the disparity in the two former diplomats' claims. 
 
 JUST WATCHED Hillary Clinton's many earlier explanations of her email saga Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Hillary Clinton's many earlier explanations of her email saga 02:47 
 
 "I am not going to relitigate in public my private conversation with him," Clinton replied. "I have been asked many, many questions in the past year about emails and what I have learned is that when I try to explain what happened, it can sound like I am trying to excuse what I did. And there are no excuses. I want people to know that the decision to have a single email account was mine. I take responsibly for it. I apologize for it. I would certainly do differently if I could." 
 
 She added, "I believe the public will be and is considering my full record and experience as they consider their choice for president." 
 
 Clinton's faced some criticism even among Democrats who have criticized her response to email scrutiny. David Axelrod, a former Obama senior adviser and CNN contributor, said jokes Clinton about the issue on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel earlier this week fell flat. 
 
 "I think she should not joke about this. She's done this a few times. She seemed flippant about it. Obviously there are concerns about how she handled these emails and all these jokes fall flat and it makes it seem as if she's not taking the issue seriously," Axelrod told CNN's "New Day" on Wednesday.
– After more than two weeks of controversy, the Associated Press has deleted an Aug. 23 tweet about the Clinton Foundation that critics—including Hillary Clinton—said was misleading. "More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation," read the tweet. Politico notes that the tweet failed to mention that the AP's analysis of Clinton meetings looked only at discretionary meetings and not meetings with federal officials or representatives of foreign governments, which tend to make up the majority of any secretary of state's meetings. "The tweet fell short of AP standards by omitting essential context," AP VP for Standards John Daniszewski writes in a blog post, setting out a new policy for removing tweets, an action that the AP used to see as "retroactively editing a conversation." Clinton and her campaign slammed the tweet and the Clinton Foundation story soon after it appeared, USA Today reports. "It draws a conclusion and makes a suggestion that my meetings with people like the late, great Elie Wiesel or Melinda Gates or the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus were somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders," Clinton told CNN last month.