Hillary Clinton On Private Email 2007 And 2015

It took Hillary Clinton two days to respond to the recent scandal regarding her use of private email without following government rules regarding archiving email, making many Democrats nervous. Back in 2007, when the Bush administration was under attack for the use of private email, Clinton was far more opinionated on the use of private email, along with other abuses during the Bush years (video above):

Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts. It’s a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok. It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our Constitution was designed to prevent.

Statements such as that gave some liberals hope that maybe a Clinton presidency would be more open and transparent than her past political life had demonstrated. Clinton again demonstrated her deceptive nature when she finally responded on Twitter:

That is a quite dishonest response, and suggests how a Clinton White House would operate. The issue is that Clinton has stored her email on a private server and has not had them archived on government servers as required. Any release of email had by the State Department would be lacking any email which Clinton has stored on her own server and has not delivered to the State Department. Clinton was clearly aware of the controversy over using private email when she took office, as demonstrated in her statement above, and should have known better than to copy the policies of the Bush administration, especially when Barack Obama was demanding greater transparency when he took office.

While David Weigel has downplayed the response among Democrats, other reports suggest greater concern among Democrats. Naturally we would not expect Democratic office holders to be very quick to attack their presumptive front runner, but their limited support does suggest reservations about her behavior. National Journal reports that Democrats Aren’t Rushing To Defend Hillary Clinton:

Everyone in Washington is talking about Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail account during her four years as secretary of State and her homebrew computer server. Everyone, that is, except for many Senate Democrats.

As operatives, strategists and opposition research groups rush to her defense, some Washington Senate Democrats are remaining silent for the moment, saying they’ve been too busy with the week’s packed schedule to be fully briefed on the crisis du jour.

Democrats have a difficult line to walk. They don’t want to be seen hitting their strongest contender to keep the White House, but that does not mean they are rushing to shield her from criticism either. For more than a dozen senators, the easiest thing to do was to shrug off questions about Clinton’s private e-mail or the fact she was running them through her own server.

The Hill reports Hillary’s penchant for secrecy rattles Dems:

Democrats are rattled by the deepening furor around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while she served as secretary of State.

They worry that the flap is just the latest example of the former first lady’s “bunker mentality” — a decades-long tendency toward secrecy that, more often than not, has blown up in her face.

Some within the party also contend that the controversy has been poorly handled by Clinton’s team, intensifying fears that she has not learned the right lessons from her famously fractious 2008 White House bid.

One Democratic strategist, who asked not to be identified, complained that the email embarrassment was a by-product of “a cadre of enablers around her, and no one has the strength to say to her, ‘We can’t do this.’ ”

Democratic nerves are even more jumpy, according to the strategist, because the story is breaking just as people are expecting Clinton to launch her presidential campaign.

“We’re probably a month or so away [from the campaign launch] and if this is not handled really well within the next three to six weeks, you’re going to see chatter among Democratic operatives saying, ‘Maybe we need another person in this race.’ And that is really problematic.”

The article also ties this scandal into previous concerns about Clinton:

More worrying to Clinton World, said Simmons, is that the story reminds people of the concerns they have about Hillary and former President Bill Clinton: that they are less than transparent about their business and political dealings.

In 1996 — before many people eligible to vote in the 2016 presidential election were born — President Clinton’s White House suddenly discovered records that had been subpoenaed two years previously as part of the Whitewater probe, pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s legal work in the 1980s.

Just last month it emerged that the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation had quietly lifted a ban on donations from foreign governments that had been in place during the time Hillary Clinton had served as secretary of State.

The two decades between those stories have been punctuated by numerous other controversies pertaining to the Clintons’ sometimes-opaque dealings.

The trait leaves some within the party scratching their heads.

“When you do stuff like this, man, you just raise a lot of concerns and red flags,” the Democratic strategist said. “It’s kinda weird.

No Comments

6 Trackbacks

Leave a comment