Hillary Clinton Email Controversy: Personal Account While Secretary Of State Prompts Widespread Criticism
Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account to conduct official federal government business while U.S. Secretary of State has created dismay even among her allies/supporters.
As The Inquisitr previously chronicled, Clinton never had a government email address during her tenure at the State Department, a practice which may have violated federal record-keeping laws that requires archiving of all such communications.
Patrice McDermott, a former National Archives employee and currently executive director of OpenTheGovernment.org, told The Hill, which surveyed several legal experts, that this practice “was not technically illegal,” but “it was highly inappropriate and it was inappropriate for the State Department to let this happen.”
So far, about 55,000 pages of emails have come to light as a result of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi investigation, The New York Times reported. Gowdy asserted today that Mrs. Clinton had multiple personal email accounts, while a member of the Obama administration and that his committee would aggressively seek out all of them in connection with the probe of the terrorist murder of four Americans at the U.S. embassy compound in Benghazi.
According to the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton or her team may have set up a personal domain name about a week before her State Department appointment was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. “In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his e-mail hacked by ‘Guccifer’ — the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush’s paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the “clintonemail.com” domain… Examining the registry information for ‘clintonemail.com’ reveals that the domain was first created on Jan. 13, 2009 — one week before President Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.”
Reacting to the email scandal, influential National Journal columnist Ron Fournier today wrote that “Transparency isn’t the only issue. Clinton exposed confidential and potentially dangerous information to a nonsecure, commercial email system. She gave Chinese spies a better shot at reading her emails than U.S. taxpayers.” Fournier’s essay actually questioned whether she should run for president at all.
Fournier quoted an unnamed Democrat insider that “This story has legs as long as the election. She will be tripping over this crap until the cows come home.” Alluding to Clinton’s likely run for the presidency and her front-runner status, another high-level Clinton political operative said that “We can’t have a coronation when she’s handing Republicans an inquisition.”
Parenthetically, a former EPA administrator under Obama left office after it came out that this official used a personal email to communicate with green groups.
Hillary Clinton has also come under rhetorical fire when it was recently revealed that foreign governments lobbying the Obama administration gave millions to the Clinton Foundation before, during, and after her term as America’s top diplomat.
In the nature of things, it would be expected that Hillary Clinton’s political foes would pounce on this revelation. As suggested in the clips below, however, even Hillary Clinton’s ideological soulmates on the MSNBC network have been unwilling to give her a pass on what appears to be a burgeoning email scandal.
[image via Twitter]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nvi5YKWg08#t=111
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTNYgBtQ6oo#t=26
