Clinton Failed To Answer Questions About Use Of Private Server Two Years Ago

The cover-up continues to look bad for Hillary Clinton. The New York Times (not Fox for those Clinton-apologists who try to pretend this is a right wing attack) reports that Hillary Clinton Was Asked About Email 2 Years Ago and failed to give an honest answer:

Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.

“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.”

A State Department spokesman declined to answer questions from The New York Times as to why they did not respond to this question but a letter from the State Department noted their guidelines:

In the State Department’s letter back to Mr. Issa, Thomas B. Gibbons, the acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs, described the department’s records management policies and guidelines.

He said “employees may use personal email on personal time for matters not directly related to official business, and any employee using personal email ‘should make it clear that his or her personal email is not being used for official business.’ ”

The statement also noted that training was being offered on records management to the department’s employees. Under Clinton, the ambassador to Kenya was fired, with failure to use government as opposed to private email being cited as one of the reasons for the firing. (pdf of Inspector General report here.)

While Clinton has claimed she did not violate the rules, the top Freedom of Information Act official has confirmed that Clinton did violate the rules put in effect in 2009. Her claim of using private email to avoid using two devices was also contradicted by evidence that Clinton actually did carry two different devices.

Chris Cillizza points out how the scandal is not going away, and can hurt Clinton in the general election:

As I have written since the start of the story of Clinton’s handling of e-mail as secretary of state, the problem that exists here for her is that it reinforces many of the negative things that people either believe or are ready to believe about her. One of the biggest (and most negative) of those is that the Clintons don’t think the rules apply to them.  And could there be any better example of the rules not applying than what Schmidt’s story alleges — that Clinton and her team refused to answer a direct question about her use of a private e-mail at state until she left the job?

Again, I am not saying that Clinton’s camp isn’t telling the truth in their statement above about the timing and logistics of the response. But I am saying that it looks really bad — particularly given the perception of secrecy and above-the-law-ness that already swirls around the Clintons.

Close your eyes for a second and imagine it’s next October: An ad appears on your TV screen (or smartphone or tablet or laptop) that notes — in a dark and ominous voice-over — that Hillary Clinton kept her own e-mail server when she was secretary of state and that she deleted tens of thousands of e-mails from that server.  Then the narrator says: “The worst part? Clinton refused to answer questions from Congress about her e-mail address when she was in office. What’s Hillary Clinton hiding?”

In other campaign news, Clinton, like many Democrats, has called for a Constitutional amendment to address campaign finance reform. This is necessary to make serious changes in light of the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court. As is often the case when Clinton does take a liberal position, her position does fall short of what many on the left are pushing for, as discussed in this article at The Nation: Hillary Clinton Is Still Too Cautious on Campaign Finance Reform.

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