OPINION:
Hillary Clinton, in a September interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” compared her email scandal to “another conspiracy theory,” by Republicans, and said she was working with federal agencies to provide all the documentation they needed to conduct their investigations.
Mrs. Clinton spurned the idea her decision to use a private email server as Secretary of State was a way to avoid public record searches, and said it was more of a matter of convenience that was allowed by the State Department, which broke no laws.
“There’s only so much I can control,” Mrs. Clinton said of what she considered unwarranted attacks on her email server, adding her responses to federal authorities investigating the matter contained “more transparency and more information than anybody I’m aware of that’s ever served in the government.”
Not true. Lies, according to a State Department Inspector General report leaked on Wednesday.
According to the IG report, Mrs. Clinton and her top aides refused to cooperate with its investigation into her private server – although all of her colleagues did: current Secretary John Kerry and former Secretaries Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Madeline Albright.
It seems like Mrs. Clinton only likes to create the allusion of transparency. When it actually comes to cooperating, she’s out.
The IG report also concluded Mrs. Clinton didn’t comply with the agency’s policies on record-keeping.
Not only did her use of the secret server shield her communications from open-records laws, but she also broke department policy by failing to report several hacking attempts.
But I thought her email server was never hacked? That’s what she’s said anyway. Could that also be a lie?
Mrs. Clinton has continued to maintain her server was never breached and was safe. When asked last year in an interview with CNN whether attackers from Russia or China hacked into her private account, Mrs. Clinton replied: “There’s no evidence of that.”
She’s also denied the charges leveled by Marcel Lehel Lazar, the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer, who said he had successfully hacked into her server.
“There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell. In addition to the fact he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton’s server are inaccurate. It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims,” the Clinton campaign told Fox News of Mr. Lazar’s charges.
On Wednesday, Mr. Lazar plead guilty to unauthorized access to protected commuters and aggravated ID theft in federal court. Fox News reported he may have entered the plea after a deal after cooperating with U.S. authorities, though it’s not know whether the plea has anything to do with the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server.
The FBI is still investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use of the server, and how some classified information ended up on it.
Mrs. Clinton and her team says they’re cooperating with that investigation – but who knows.
After the State Department report, how can we trust her?
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