Clinton’s dishonesty on full display
FBI chief obliterates her defenses over email scandal
Yesterday’s long-awaited announcement from FBI Director James Comey about the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server presented a damning indictment of both her leadership and judgment.
While many headlines focus on his recommendation against criminal charges, the well-respected Comey systematically obliterated a number of Clinton’s oft-repeated defenses and contradicted many of the other excuses she has hidden behind.
In fact, the event often felt like the Comey vs. Clinton show, as the former dispelled many of the lies told by the latter. Despite what Democrats may claim, the story of Clinton’s email scandal has many chapters yet to unfold over the next four months. The scandal continues to offer an illuminating window into how another Clinton White House would operate.
Since the scandal blew open in March 2015, Secretary Clinton has time and time again fallen back on the line that she did not transmit information that was classified at the time it was sent or received. Those three words — “at the time” — have remained the lynchpin of her defense since the very get go, starting at her U.N. press conference nearly 16 months ago and going all the way through her interview with Chuck Todd this weekend after her FBI interview.
Today Comey dispelled that myth with his pronouncement that 110 emails and 52 email chains did indeed contain classified information at the time they were sent. Of these, eight emails contained “top secret” information, which is the highest level of classification.
As Comey stated flatly, “None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system.”
Secretary Clinton and her team have also worked relentlessly to present Donald Trump as an unsteady commander in chief during uncertain times. Last month, she charged he was “temperamentally unfit” to be president and accused him of telling “outright lies.”
After Comey described Clinton and her staff’s handling of classified information as “extremely careless,” that line of attack is off the table. Politics 101 dictates you never accuse your opponent of a charge that will boomerang and hit you in the face.
Perhaps the most chilling section of Comey’s announcement came when he said that “hostile actors” may have accessed Secretary Clinton’s unsecure email server. Last fall, Clinton claimed, “There’s no evidence” of China or Russia hacking into her email.
We now know Clinton’s homebrew server in Chappaqua was less secure than a regular Gmail address used by millions of Americans everyday. That’s not the kind of judgment we need in someone vying to control the nuclear code, especially in an election increasingly shaping up around matters of national security.
Throughout all the email noise, it can be easy to lose sight of Clinton’s real motivations in setting up a private email server. She can never admit it, but the goal was to avoid the Freedom Of Information Act (or FOIA) and the rules that govern State Department employees. She didn’t want reporters or the American public to ever see the content of her electronic communications. It’s this kind of secrecy and the Clintons always playing by their own set of rules that have driven 69 percent of respondents to label her “untrustworthy” in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
Since that line of defense is absolutely indefensible in the public arena, she and her team of flacks have struggled for the last 16 months to come up with a coherent line of argument.
Never mind the widelycondemned secret tarmac meeting in Phoenix last week between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, one the husband of the target of an investigation, the other an appointee of President Clinton in 1999. Look past the recommendation (for now) against criminal charges.
Hillary Clinton’s trustworthiness and honesty — or lack thereof — were on full display yesterday, and the political results were catastrophic. Colin Reed was Scott Brown’s campaign manager and is now the executive director of America Rising PAC, a Republican research and communications firm.