You might think that the White House would have something of substance to say about the repeated violations of a memorandum of understanding between the administration and the Clinton Foundation that prohibited it from accepting donations from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Wrong!

When pressed by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl on Friday about whether the White House was concerned by the Clinton Foundation’s various indiscretions, or even its failure to disclose foreign donations including those from Uranium One, White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest seemed to suggest that they were not (h/t Washington Free Beacon):

Earnest repeated a claim made by Clinton’s campaign team that no evidence exists to prove that foreign donations influenced the former secretary’s decision making while she served as America’s chief diplomat. This claim is supported by the fact that the evidence that might have supported this contention was destroyed weeks ago.

“I’ve been in a position where there have been other, to put it mildly, conservative authors that have launched – written books based on what they purport to be serious allegations against the President of the United States,” Earnest averred. “And I’m often in the position of responding to those incidents and trying to defend the president from accusations that are not rooted or accompanied by any evidence.”

“My point is, that’s what’s happening to Secretary Clinton,” he continued. Probed again over the impropriety of the Clinton Foundations failure to abide by the administration’s disclosure requirements, Earnest deferred to Clinton’s team.

As for the claim from Team Hillary that no incontrovertible evidence exists that proves the myriad foreign donations the Clinton Foundation accepted while the former secretary served in Foggy Bottom resulted in any favoritism, Guy Benson insisted that the Clinton’s no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Just this week, the Clintons confessed that the foundation misreported tens of millions of dollars in donations from foreign sources and would need to refile their taxes as a result. Moreover, The New York Times caught the Clintons in an outright lie when they produced photographic evidence of a meeting between Foundation officials and Central Asian energy company representatives that both parties flat out denied ever occurred. As for that evidence of corruption, perhaps it was in those 30,000 plus emails the former secretary deemed of no public value and summarily deleted.

“It is not unreasonable to infer that perhaps some of the concrete evidence of quid pro quo corruption Clinton loyalists are demanding doesn’t exist anymore because Clinton loyalists actively destroyed said evidence,” Benson wrote. “Between the smell test, the facts laid out by several news outlets, the lack of required disclosures of foreign donations, the very shady tax “errors,” the Chappaqua meeting lie, and Hillary’s eradicated paper trail, the Clintons have not earned the benefit of the doubt on any of this. Quite the opposite.”

Merely dismissing this latest scandal because it originated in a book written by a conservative journalist will not make The New York Times story disappear. It should terrify loyal Democrats that, more than 24 hours after this story broke, this their best defense of Clinton’s behavior.