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Wolfowitz, who was the deputy secretary of defense for President George W. Bush in the lead-up to and start of the Iraq War, said in an interview published Friday that while he isn't enthused about it, he may be forced to vote for Clinton.

In the interview, Wolfowitz repeatedly expressed concerns about Trump, saying he agrees with 50 other former Republican security officials who recently blasted Trump as "dangerous."

"He says he admires Putin, that Saddam Hussein was killing terrorists, that the Chinese were impressive because they were tough on Tiananmen Square. That is pretty disturbing," Wolfowitz said, calling him "unacceptable."

Wolfowitz also called Trump a continuation of President Barack Obama, despite their party differences. Wolfowitz said Obama's apparent "step back" foreign policy would be exaggerated under Trump, calling him "Obama squared."

"The only way you can be comfortable about Trump's foreign policy is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says. That's a pretty uncomfortable place to be in," Wolfowitz said. "Our security depends on having good relationships with our allies. Trump mainly shows contempt for them. And he seems to be unconcerned about the Russian aggression in Ukraine. By doing this he tells them that they can go ahead and do what they are doing. That is dangerous."

Trump has been an ardent critic of the Iraq War on the campaign trail, saying he opposed it from the get-go, although the first evidence of him opposing the invasion of Iraq was after the war had begun. But Clinton voted in favor of the war when she was in the Senate, a fact that her opponents have used against in her both the 2008 and 2016 presidential elections.

The GOP candidate has also criticized Obama and Clinton for pulling troops out of Iraq too quickly and destabilizing the region, though he supported the same policy in CNN interviews during Obama's first term.

Clinton has steadily courted and landed endorsements from Republican elders in foreign policy, arguing that their support shows that Trump's election would endanger the country's security.

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Paul Wolfowitz 'might' vote for Hillary Clinton - CNNPolitics.com

Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Reno on Aug. 25, 2016.(Photo: Carolyn Kaster, AP)

Hillary Clinton continued to defend the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during her time in the administration Friday.

In an interview with MSNBCs Morning Joe,Clinton said she was sure that there were no foundation ties that could harm her chance of becoming president.

I am sure because I have a very strong foundation of understanding about the foundation, Clinton said. The kind of work that the foundation has done, which attracted donors from around the world, is work that went right into providing services to people.

Clinton also reiteratedthat neither she nor former president Bill Clinton nor their daughter, Chelsea, everaccepted money from the foundation.

My work as secretary of State was not influenced by any outside forces.I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right to keep Americans safe and protect our interests abroad, Clinton said.I believe my aides also acted appropriately.And we have gone above and beyond most of the charities that I understand, beyond the legal requirements, beyond standards, to voluntarily disclose donors, and also to reduce sources of funding that raised any questions, not that we thought they were necessarily legitimate, but to avoid those questions.

Clintons comments come at the end of a hard week for the Democratic nominee as more emails from her private server were released and reports raised questions about overlap between her familys charity and her role in the State Department.

USA TODAY

Clinton camp pushes back at Clinton Foundation reports

USA TODAY

Why the Clinton email story keeps drip-drip-dripping

Donald Trump and Republicans have accused Clinton of creating a culture of pay to play during her time as secretary of State and have called for a special prosecutor and for the Clinton Foundation to be shut down.

The Republican National Committee responded to Clinton's MSNBC interview with an email with the subject line, "Mark It Down: Clinton Promises No New Email Revelations."

"Mark it down, Hillary Clinton is really confident BleachBit worked.Today on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Hillary Clinton promised there will be no new email revelations, despite reports of more email dumps from hackers and several court-mandated productions from the 15,000 work-related documents she improperly deleted from her private server, the email said. Bleachbit is a software tool used to delete emails. On Thursday,Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said Clinton had used the software to delete emails, according to Politico.

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Hillary Clinton defends Clinton Foundation, State Department

Much in the way "birthers" (Trump was among the most prominent) sought similar ends by questioning President Barack Obama's citizenship, the "healthers" are using junk science and conspiracy theories to argue that Clinton is suffering from a series of debilitating brain injuries.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday" this weekend, former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani first accused the mainstream media of hiding evidence, then encouraged doubters to "go online and put down 'Hillary Clinton illness.'"

"I don't know why they are saying this," she said. "I think on the one hand, it is part of the wacky strategy, just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you."

But for those who want to believe, the structure of the lie borders on impenetrable -- baked into its "medical" assertions is the tightly held belief that the press is in cahoots with Clinton, protecting her political prospects by working overtime to hide her imagined ailment.

The facts, though, tell a very different story. This is it.

In a bit of dark irony, Clinton's political opponents then, most notably the Republican former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, suggested that Clinton was faking it -- that the secretary of state, as Bolton put it, had come down with a "diplomatic illness" in order to avoid the congressional inquiry.

In May 2014, more than a year after Clinton left the State Department, Republican strategist Karl Rove made headlines by suggesting Clinton had suffered brain damage in 2012.

"(Clinton) had follow-up testing in 2013, which revealed complete resolution of the effects of the concussion as well as total dissolution of the thrombosis," Bardack wrote. "Mrs. Clinton also tested negative for all clotting disorders."

The rumors have traveled with remarkable speed through the pipeline connecting small conservative and right-wing blogs to larger outlets like Breitbart, Infowars and Fox News.

First, there was the muffin shop.

"After the exchange," Lerer wrote, "(Clinton) took a few more photos, exited the shop and greeted supporters waiting outside."

End of story? Not quite.

More than a month later, pro-Trump blogger Jim Hoft picked up the video and, on his Gateway Pundit site, ran a headline blaring, "Wow! Did Hillary Clinton Just Suffer a Seizure on Camera?" She had not, of course, as had been clear to everyone present. But the video soon went viral. Less than a week later, after Clinton delivered her convention address, he was back at it, publishing a GIF of the nominee's amused face (there were a lot of balloons falling) under a similar title: "Wow! Media Missed This=> Did Hillary Suffer Another Seizure After Her DNC Speech?"

In the coming days and weeks, conservative media and the Trump campaign itself began to pick up the thread. Fox News host Sean Hannity, an unabashed supporter of the GOP nominee, dove in with particular gusto, gathering panels of "experts" to examine video clips of Clinton coughing and, again, batting her head at the D.C. muffin shop.

None of the physicians convened by Hannity had examined Clinton and at least one, Fox News medical correspondent Dr. David Samadi, is a urologist. When an actual neurologist, Dr. Fiona Gupta, joined the group, she mostly dismissed Hannity's questions, saying, "It's just so hard to speculate based on snippets (of video)."

When he pressed on ("It almost seems seizure-esque to me"), another Fox News contributor, Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist, pushed back.

"Well I'm not a neurologist," Siegel said, "and I don't think that necessarily looks like a seizure."

At around the same time Hannity was hosting his panels, a blog called the American Mirror and the Drudge Report gave a boost to a photograph that had been floating around for months. Taken back in February, the image shows Clinton being helped up a flight of stairs outside a halfway house in in North Charleston, South Carolina.

"The questionable health condition of Hillary Clinton should be a major issue of the 2016 campaign," the American Mirror post begins. "The latest evidence comes in the form of Clinton being helped up a set of stairs by multiple individuals outside what appears to be a home."

It reads: "Democratic Presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slips as she walks up the stairs into the non-profit SC Strong, a 2 year residential facility that helps former felons, substance abusers, and homeless move into self-sufficiency."

As the conspiracy theories took flight, boosted by Trump's repeated assertions that Clinton is too chronically tired or weak to handle the White House workload, "questions" from right-wing bloggers and gadflies about Clinton's security detail began to focus in on a single piece of equipment carried by one agent.

On Twitter and on assorted blogs, conspiracy theorists began to focus on images they believed to show, as one headline put it, "Hillary's Handler Carrying Auto-Injector Syringe For Anti-Seizure Drug Diazepam."

But again, this was simply not the case. Hannity broadcast the story to his millions of viewers, citing the Gateway Pundit and its sources, with no evidence of his own.

Indeed, the Secret Service has weighed in repeatedly when asked. On Monday morning, spokeswoman Nicole Mainor dismissed the report in an email to CNN.

"The item in the Detail Leader's hand is a flashlight," she said.

Breitbart News has been a house organ for Trump since the early days of his run, but the union became more formal last week when the media company's executive chairman, Steve Bannon, was hired as campaign CEO.

All this as Drudge doubled down by bannering its site with an absurd Heat Street post, titled, "MUST SEE: Photos of Hillary Clinton Propped Up on Pillows." The images, with arrows superimposed to point out the pillows, show Clinton -- fully alert, engaged, sometimes addressing large audiences -- in the presence of small pillows that she sometimes placed behind her back when she was seated.

"With all due respect to television doctors, when you have a doctor who has never seen the patient begin to give you a complicated, fancy-sounding analysis based on what?" Gingrich said.

"I mean, I would be very cautious and I would recommend to doctors for professional reasons to be very cautious deciding you're going to start analyzing people."

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Hillary Clinton health: Debunking the conspiracy theories ...

Hillary Clinton took on two controversial topics in an interview on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on Monday.

First, Kimmel quizzed the Democratic presidential candidate about news that broke earlier in the day of the release of additional emails from the time she served as secretary of state.

"The State Department said that they have to release 15,000 emails by the deadline is a couple of days before the debate," Kimmel said. "Are you concerned about that?"

"No," Clinton responded. "Jimmy, my emails are so boring. And I'm embarrassed about that. They're so boring. So we've already released, I don't know, 30,000 plus, so what's a few more?"

When he asked her about the rumors swirling about her health, she offered him her hand and said, "Take my pulse."

Kimmel agreed as Clinton said, "To make sure I'm alive." He took her hand and gasped, telling the audience, "Oh, my God, there's nothing there."

She played off his words, implying that the stories are baseless. "With every breath I take, I feel like it's a new lease on life," she quipped sarcastically.

Last week during a speech about terrorism, Donald Trump said Clinton "lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on" ISIS. He also went after the length of her speeches, saying she would rather "go back home and go to sleep."

Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani continued that attack on Fox News Sunday when he told the audience, "Go online and put down 'Hillary Clinton illness' and take a look at the videos for yourself."

Clinton called the Republican nominee's health attack a "wacky strategy" and chalked it up to the "crazy things" said by Trump and his allies.

"It absolutely makes no sense," she said. "I don't go around questioning Donald Trump's health. I mean, as far as I can tell, he's as healthy as a horse."

At one point during the interview, Kimmel asked Clinton to open a jar of pickles to prove how healthy she is.

The two also discussed how she was preparing to debate Trump.

Clinton told the late-night host, "I'm planning on drawing off my experiences from elementary school."

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Hillary Clinton Tells Jimmy Kimmel She's 'Embarrassed' by ...

She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.

With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to run out the clock, confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.

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According to allies and operatives close to the campaign, Clintons team thinks they can ride out any negative reaction to a set of new emails that show Clinton Foundation officials trying to set up State Department meetings for donors during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat.

That doesnt mean no response, one Clinton team insider said, but a muted one rather than a five-alarm fire.

It's a strategy borne, in part, of a belief held deeply by Clinton herself that the email controversy is a fake scandal and that voters are as sick of it as the candidate herself and by the profound weaknesses of Clinton's opponent.

In the campaigns view, the emails that surfaced this week do not advance the foundation storyline; while emails obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch shed light on the open line of communication between Clintons top aides and foundation officials, there is no proof positive that donors received special access or treatment from the government.

Plus, the campaign thinks Clintons commanding lead over Donald Trump in both national and battleground state polls gives her freedom to not comment indeed, largely ignore the disclosure this week that the FBI found nearly 15,000 new emails Clinton did not voluntarily hand over to the State Department last year.

While those emails could be released to the public as early as October, Clinton allies predicted that the State departments tedious review process means the release is more likely to affect a Clinton reelection campaign in 2020 than derail her this fall.

Its going to be there forever, said Clinton ally James Carville of the email controversy, holding that there was nothing new for the candidate or her campaign to add to the discussion. They should go about their business, he advised.

Clintons more pressing concern, her donors said, is raising money for the expensive ground organization she will need to deliver a win. On Tuesday, she ignored the new chapters of her old controversies while attending a star-studded fundraiser at Justin Timberlakes mansion in Los Angeles, followed by a pair of big-money events in Laguna Beach.

Some Democrats, including close Clinton allies, have started to warn that their nominee might be underestimating the danger lurking in the fall as Trump and Republicans prepare to launch negative ads on these twin controversies and remind American voters just how little they trust the former secretary of state. Their best hope is that Trump continues to veer wildly off script.

Clinton remains, as one ally described, as decidedly and defiantly puritan as she was 17 months ago that the email investigation is nothing more than a partisan attack. Close allies characterize her as frustrated by the ongoing focus on the issue of her email server because she still fundamentally believes she did nothing to bend the rules. She is also resentful that Trump is only trailing by single digits in national polls when she thinks there is no comparison between her baggage and his and that a Clintonian double standard is at play.

Theyre in a box, lamented one Clinton ally. Its an issue that wont go away, no matter what they say. Nobodys happy about it.

Because of Clinton's core belief that she did nothing wrong, allies no longer believe the Democratic nominee is her own best spokeswoman on the email issue. In July, Clinton was still tripping over questions that the campaign had hoped were finally behind it after FBI Director James Comey said he would not recommend criminal charges. Clinton told Fox News Chris Wallace that Comey said her answers to the public were truthful, when he made no such statement.

I may have short-circuited it, Clinton explained during an appearance in front of black and Hispanic journalists earlier this month, a soundbite Trump has subsequently employed to question her mental capacity to be president.

On Monday, Trump called for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton's emails a request that evokes the memory of Ken Starr and the investigations of Bill Clintons White House that began with Whitewater and ended with Monica Lewinsky.

But Bill Clinton allies on Tuesday were more upset about the decision to downsize the philanthropic organization to a fraction of its current size and remove the former president from his fundraising role and board position.

Why did no one care that Bob Dole was majority leader and his wife ran the Red Cross? said Carville, blaming the extreme downsizing on public pressure and a double standard for anything Clinton-related. Every columnist can take a great victory lap, he fumed. I will lay back and mourn for those who will die because theyre not going to get the vaccines they need. I guess at some point, politically, it probably makes sense but Im embarrassed to be around my children for saying they should do this.

But inside Hillary Clintons camp, the team is unwilling to engage more forcefully or offensively without evidence that the new emails and new foundation allegations are hurting her.

Indeed, without new information and barring a dramatic improvement in Trumps numbers, the Clinton team thinks it would be a mistake for the candidate or her surrogates to respond.

One source close to the campaign said Clinton officials want to see if the Republicans overplay their hand while hammering Clinton on an issue that close to two-thirds of voters, according to a Monmouth University poll, said they were sick of hearing about last year.

Theres a chance that Trump gets better, and that some sort of mythical new information comes out of the emails, said Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and a veteran of Clintons 2008 campaign. But in the absence of that, the Clinton people seem to be content with keeping their heads down, letting her deliver her positive case and allowing Trump to continue to cloud the national conversation with his own unforced errors.

A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment.

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