Hillary said,
“We know our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts.” ~ 2007
Megyn Kelly noted the hypocrisy in the Hillary “mailgate” issue:
…“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she continued. “The federal agencies are supposed to have all these documents. They’ll screen them. They’ll take out the personal ones. Someone could be held accountable. Right now it’s just Hillary’s people whose word upon which we apparently must rely.”
She added, “It’s not just the — you can have private email, it’s what you do with the email thereafter is what’s the problem. Federal law makes it a crime punishable by up to three years in prison if someone has records and “willfully and unlawfully conceals or destroys such records.” Did she conceal those records for years when those seven committees were demanding to see her personal correspondence?”
After running a clip of Hillary Clinton criticizing the Bush Administration over secret emails, Kelly continued, “What a hypocrite. It’s obvious.”
Kelly ended the segment, which featured Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry, Judge Andrew Napolitano and “The Five” co-host Dana Perino, by speaking directly to a State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf….
When I noted all the new Benghazi emails being uncovered that were previously requested, I got this link to a story about Issa “glossing over” Bush emails (Crooks & Liars: “Issa Blamed IBM Software For Loss Of 22 Million Bush Emails“). I wish to note the difference here.
1) The new law that ex-CIA director David Petraeus is pleading guilty to and all incoming Cabinet members were filled in on, and Hillary helped pass the rules for when in the Senate ~ was made law in 2009. I will repeat, 2009. The separation of Bush emails was in trying to comply with the Hatch Amendments. Hillary has broken the law on this newer regulation which she was aware of… and as she emailed many people in the administration, they knew she was violating as well. Even Mother Jones gets it:
Since 2009, NARA’s regulations have stated that “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.”
This rule is clear: If Clinton used personal email to conduct official business—which apparently did not violate any federal rules at the time—all of those emails had to be collected and preserved within the State Department’s recordkeeping system. That makes sense: The whole point of preserving official records of government business is to have this material controlled by the government, not by the individual official or employee.
So Issa had no legal course of action to say the same thing.
2) All those “lost emails” of Bush were found. The charge was that these lost emails showed collusion by the Bush administration against Valerie Plame. They have had all these emails since early 2009… don’t you think we would have been inundated with story-after-story about these emails showing this left-wing conspiracy narrative to be true?
3) Bush did not use his own server in his home.
Ben Shapiro notes the history of Hillary thwarting documents being handed over:
Hillary’s “Thwarted Record Requests.” On Wednesday, the Times reported that Clinton used her private email address to avoid turning over documents to Congressional committees investigating the Benghazi, Libya terror attack of September 11, 2012. According to the Times, “It was one of several instances in which records requests sent to the State Department, which had no access to Mrs. Clinton’s emails, came up empty.” The State Department did the same routine with regard to a Freedom of Information Act request asking for correspondence between Hillary and former political hit man Sidney Blumenthal; in 2010, the AP said its FOIA requests had gone unanswered by the State Department on the same grounds; the same holds true with regard to FOIA requests from conservative group Citizens United.
Hillary’s First Emailgate. According to Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, Hillary’s top woman, Cheryl Mills – you remember her from Benghazi – “helped orchestrate the cover-up of a major scandal, often referred to as ‘Email-gate.’” Over the course of years, the Clinton Administration allegedly withheld some 1.8 million email communications from Judicial Watch’s attorneys, as well as federal investigators and Congress. Judicial Watchsays that when a White House computer contractor attempted to reveal the emails, White House officials “instructed her to keep her mouth shut about the hidden e-mail or face dismissal and jail time.”
Hillary’s Missing Whitewater Documents. In 1996, a special Senate Whitewater committee released a report from the FBI demonstrating that documents sought in the Whitewater investigation had been found in the personal Clinton quarters of the White House. The First Lady’s fingerprints were on them. The documents had gone mysteriously missing for two years. Mark Fabiani, special White House counsel, immediately stated that there was no problem, according to the Times: “He added that she had testified under oath that she had nothing to do with the documents during the two years they were missing and did not know how they ended up in the family quarters.” Hillary remains the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI. Those weren’t the only missing Whitewater documents later found in the Clinton White House. Rose Law billing records were found years after being sought “in the storage area in the third-floor private residence at the White House where unsolicited gifts to the President and First Lady are stored before being sorted and catalogued.”
Hillary’s Missing Travelgate Documents. In 1996, just before the Whitewater documents emerged – literally the day before – a two-year-old memo emerged, according to The New York Times, showing that Hillary “had played a far greater role in the dismissal of employees of the White House travel office than the Administration has acknowledged.” Oops.
Hillary’s “Unethical Practices” During Watergate. According to Democrat Jerry Zeifman, Hillary “engaged in a variety of self-serving unethical practices in violation of House rules” designed to keep Nixon in office long enough to guarantee a Democratic presidential victory in 1976. Zeifman said that Clinton – then Hillary Rodham — had worked with Teddy Kennedy’s political strategist. More specifically, Zeifman accused Rodham of writing a fraudulent legal brief and grabbing public documents. Zeifman fired her, and later claimed that he wished he had reported her to the Bar.
Hillary has a long history of this behavior. But that won’t stop her from moving forward. The media are less interested in governmental transparency than in picking the next president – and making sure the next president represents the hard, corrupt left….