The number of Hillary Clinton’s emails flagged for potential classified information has grown to 300 and now, in an ominous sign for her, one of the Washington Post’s famed Watergate reporters is drawing comparisons between her use of emails and President Richard Nixon’s use of audio tapes.
The number of flagged emails stands to grow exponentially if the secret information continues to be found at its present rate. That’s because reviewers have screened only about 20 percent of the 30,000 emails Clinton returned to the State Department. At the present rate, more than 1,500 emails will have to be sent to intelligence agencies for scrutiny, the Washington Times reported.
Dozens of messages already released publicly have had information redacted as classified, raising questions about Clinton’s security practices when she declined to use the regular State.gov system and instead issued herself a private email account on a server she kept at her home in New York.
It also raises questions about Clinton’s forthrightness in addressing the issue from day one.
She has insisted she never sent any information that was classified and said she never received information from others that was explicitly “marked” classified at the time — though it has since been marked as such, the Times reported.
Woodward: ‘Follow the trail’
In another bad sign for Clinton, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who helped break open the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, on Monday compared her email controversy to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Woodward said it’s at least suspicious that Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state were wiped away from a server she owned privately.
“Follow the trail here,” Woodward said. “There are all these emails. Well, they were sent to someone or someone sent them to her. So, if things have been erased here, there’s a way to go back to these emails or who received them from Hillary Clinton. So, you’ve got a massive amount of data in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.”
Watch interview with Bob Woodward below:
[jwplayer BXTLgPuh]
News broke earlier this year that Clinton relied on a private email address and server, rather than a government-owned one, when she served as secretary of state. Subsequent reports said she received top-secret messages through that system.
“It’s extraordinary,” Woodward said. “Again, it’s the volume: 60,000 emails and Hillary Clinton has said 30,000 of them, half, were personal and they were deleted. Who decided that? What’s on those emails? I would love to have all 60,000, read them. It would be a character study about her personal life and also what she did as secretary of state. And step back for a moment. The big question about Hillary Clinton is, who is she? Is she this secretive hidden person or is she this valiant public servant? Look at those 60,000 emails and you’re going to get some answers.”
Woodward added, “First there was no cooperation, now they’re cooperating. This has to go on a long, long time; the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”
Investor’s Business Daily became the latest establishment news outlet to weigh in with a scathing editorial indictment of Clinton’s email practices.
“In violation of the law, she almost certainly exposed U.S. secrets on her server,” IBD declared. “If Clinton had been a Republican, criminal charges would have already been drawn up. After months of denial, lies, delay and obstruction, it’s time for Clinton to be deposed and investigated. We need a special prosecutor with the tools to do it.”
Hillary’s less-than honest response
After Clinton provided her private server to the proper authorities last week, her campaign sent out an email blast to supporters and posted on its website a briefing to bring all the “facts” about the email “nonsense” together. “Yet, the links the briefing provided to clear Clinton’s good name are a bit curious,” reported USA Today columnist Jenna Adamson.
“She deleted emails in fall 2014 after she was asked to turn over email related to Benghazi. The official subpoena didn’t come until March 2015,” but …
“Clinton’s choice of words is still somewhat misleading, especially to people who haven’t followed the controversy. ‘I’ve never had a subpoena’ implies that up to the day of the (Jul 7 CNN) interview, she has not received a subpoena related to her emails, which is incorrect. Additionally, in the months when she was sifting through these emails, there was a pending formal request — though not an official subpoena — for the emails. So she knew at the time that the State Department and the Benghazi Committee wanted to look at them.”
Adamson, after an extensive fact checking of Clinton’s statements about the email scandal, concluded, “The fact that the Clinton campaign has been forced to cite websites that conclude the candidate did everything to mislead, confuse and otherwise obscure the truth, short of outright falsehoods, suggests there’s more to this story than a lot of nonsense.”
