“Nobody even suggested it or thought about it or talked about it until the political season began, and somebody said, ‘Well, what about this?’,” Clinton said during an interview taped this week in Denver during a Clinton Global Initiative event.

No one has ever asked him for anything, Clinton said, adding that he does not know if those companies were seeking favor from his wife’s position as secretary of state. Political partisans and investigative journalists have not found anything particularly odious, apart from what “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer deemed as a “smoking gun” in the pattern of behavior.

“I don’t know. You never know what people’s motives are, but in this case, I’m pretty sure that everybody that gave to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake saw what they saw on television, were horrified and wanted to make a difference,” he said, adding that he did not “think Hillary would know either.”