The coverup is worse than the crime in politics, and in Hillary Clinton’s case the lies might be her undoing. It was clear during her press conference on her use of a private email server that she was lying, and fact checkers quickly debunked many of her claims. Her justification for using a private server because of not wanting to use two email devices never sounded plausible considering that it was quickly established that she stated in recent interviews that she was using two devices, and that while Secretary of State she had shown her use of a large purse which contained other electronic gadgets. AP has now showed that Clinton was lying and had carried two devices for email while Secretary of State:
Hillary Rodham Clinton emailed her staff on an iPad as well as a BlackBerry while secretary of state, despite her explanation she exclusively used a personal email address on a homebrew server so that she could carry a single device, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The State Department released a total of four emails between Clinton and her top advisers as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2013 by the AP, which sought Clinton’s correspondence with senior advisers over a four-year period relating to drone strikes overseas and U.S. surveillance programs.
While limited, the emails offer one of the first looks into Clinton’s correspondence while secretary of state. The messages came from and were sent to her private email address, hosted on a server at her property in Chappaqua, New York, as opposed to a government-run email account…
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said early Tuesday that the secretary used her iPad from time to time, primarily to read news clippings…
The emails obtained by AP stem from several public-records requests filed with the State Department, starting in 2010. Most were unfulfilled until this week, when the State Department said it could find only four messages that met the search terms of one such request.
Earlier this month, AP sued the department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including those provided by the department this week.
It has also been demonstrated that Clinton was in violation of the rules in effect in 2009 despite her claims of not having broken the rules. Last Friday it was revealed that Clinton has erased the server.
Both the revelations of Clinton’s violation of rules related to government transparency, and her dishonest handling of the matter, have many questioning the wisdom of letting Clinton walking into the nomination unopposed. For example, H.A. Goodman wrote the following in a post on the challenge from Martin O’Malley (which I wrote about yesterday):
…it’s important to note that recent polls stating Hillary Clinton enjoys advantages over the competition were taken before “Emailgate” evolved into a contentious issue. For example, a Gallup Poll titled Clinton Favorability Among Dems Better Than Last Campaign reads, “Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted March 2-4, 2015.” Since March 2, the scandal mushroomed, so perhaps it’s time for a paradigm shift within the Democratic Party. People like Martin O’Malley, Elizabeth Warren, Jim Webb, and Tim Kaine are just as capable of getting 270 Electoral Votes in 2016, and none of them own their own server.