“I know there’s a lot of smoke, and there’s no fire,” she told Cooper.

She disputed an Associated Press report this week that linked some Clinton Foundation donors to government meetings that took place when she was secretary of state. Many of those meetings occurred with “highly respected global leaders” because of their status, she said, not because of their generosity to the Clintons’ charitable foundation.

“These were people I was proud to meet with,” she said, mentioning the late Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel and Nobel laureate and economist Muhammad Yunus. To suggest otherwise is “absurd,” she said.

Sounding exasperated, she defended the Clinton Foundation for its transparency, which she argued exceeds the industry standard. And at every turn in the telephone conversation, Clinton returned to critiques of her opponent.

“You know more about the foundation than you know about anything concerning Donald Trump, his business, his tax returns. I think it’s remarkable,” she said, her voice rising.