A fascinating article explaining the hypocrisy of politics. Hillary Clinton has been under intense scrutiny for using a private email server, while so MANY Republicans against her have done the EXACT same thing.... yet, they are not being investigated. What's more is that many of them deleted emails. So for anyone who thinks the former Secretary of State has done anything different from others, or anything illegal, think again. It's all a scam from the republican party to make people not want to trust her.
The Republicans who did ‘exactly what Hillary did’
—Updated
One of the under-appreciated angles to the story about
Hillary Clinton’s email problem is that Hillary Clinton isn’t the only
one with an email problem. In fact, in an ironic twist, some of the
former Secretary of State’s leading Republican critics have also relied
on personal email accounts and shielded selected messages from public
scrutiny.
Aliyah Frumin explained
this week, for example, that “several potential 2016 Republican
presidential candidates are facing email and transparency issues of
their own” and they “also leaned heavily on private emails during their
time in office – and have been criticized in the past for not releasing
other documents – just as they skewer Clinton for not being forthright
with her personal emails.”
The Wall Street Journal today, for example, takes a look at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) record.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a likely Republican presidential candidate, primarily used a personal email account on his own computer server when he was in office from 1999 to 2007. In December, he posted online hundreds of thousands of emails from both the private and government accounts. Mr. Bush’s spokeswoman said that emails from the private account unrelated to government business weren’t turned over to the state or preserved. […]But much like with Mrs. Clinton, the decision over which emails should be considered official and which remain private was made by Mr. Bush. It is unclear how many emails Mr. Bush withheld because he deemed them unrelated to state business.
Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, told the WSJ
that Jeb Bush “did exactly what Hillary did.” The former governor and
his aides “went through those emails and decided what were public-record
emails and what wasn’t.”
By some accounts, the messages Team Bush chose not to share related to “politics” and “campaign donors asking for favors” – topics that may be relevant in a presidential campaign.
Bush is hardly the only one among the likely GOP presidential
candidates with this email problem. Indeed, most of the Republican
field should probably hope this issue goes away quickly:
* Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R): Though he called Clinton’s use of a private email address an “outrage,” Walker is at the center of a Wisconsin controversy surrounding his use of a private email address.
* Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R): The Republican lawmaker deleted emails
from his private account during his tenure in state government, despite
using his personal account to conduct business related to his official
duties.
* New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R): The Bergen Record reported
this week, “Nearly a year before revelations that former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton used her personal email account for official
business, the Christie administration was chastised because members of
its own staff communicated through private emails. And that criticism
came not from Governor Christie’s political foes, but from lawyers hired
by his team to investigate the burgeoning George Washington Bridge
lane-closing scandal.”
* Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R): Both Republican governors conducted official business from their private email accounts and have not released the emails for public scrutiny.
Just to be clear about this, I’m not suggesting the Clinton story is irrelevant. On the contrary, legitimate questions
have been raised that deserve answers. What’s more, there are some
differences between the Clinton story and the circumstances surrounding
her Republican critics, most notably the fact that they seemed to
operate two email accounts – one governmental, one private – while the
former Secretary of State used one.
But the hypocrisy matters, too. Some of the same Clinton
critics reaching for the fainting couch because the public won’t see
messages she deemed private also conducted official business from their
private accounts in emails that will receive no public scrutiny at all.
For that matter, the Clinton “scandal” seems oddly detached from the fact that (a) the Bush/Cheney White House lost millions of important emails, and the Beltway media largely ignored the story; (b) Mitt Romney went to hilarious lengths
to hide his public emails from scrutiny in the last presidential
campaign, and the Beltway media largely ignored the story; and (c)
previous Secretaries of State sent and received emails that the public has never seen, and will never see, and no one seems to find that particularly controversial.
