Green Party’s Jill Stein Weighs In On the Hillary Clinton Email Controversy

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has offered a prescription, as it were, for the Hillary Clinton email controversy.

The FBI is conducting an investigation as to whether Hillary Clinton mishandled sensitive government documents while sending and receiving email on a private server rather than a presumably more secure dot.gov account.

Stein, 66, is a medical doctor who claimed in a recent interview that “politics is the mother of all illnesses” and denounced the two major parties for being controlled by corporate interests. She also encourages voters to cast a ballot for a third party rather than defaulting to the lesser of two evils.

Stein was the Green Party standard-bearer in 2012 and also unsuccessfully ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010. She is likely to formally secure the 2016 Green Party nomination in August when the group holds its convention in Houston.

The far-left Green Party is seen as a natural home for many Bernie Sanders-supporting progressives — i.e., the #BernieOrBust or #NeverHillary cohort — who are unenthused about and feel disenfranchised over Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy now that Clinton has appeared to have secured the Democratic nomination over Sanders.

Jill Stein has even offered to step aside for Sanders, her apparent political soulmate, if he decided to run on the Green Party ticket.

While Sanders wisely or unwisely was reluctant during the campaign to criticize Clinton over the email scandal, in an interview with the Observer, Stein offered this assessment of the situation.

“The investigation should go forward. This is sort of typical Hillary Clinton; to do things that are not legal, to say that they are, and then try to cover them up. Hillary Clinton severely chastised other whistleblowers for using Internet channels that were not secure and yet she herself was doing that with private, high level state department information.”

Green Party Nominee Jill Stein Blasts Clinton Over EmailGate https://t.co/z2ypYP6rJM pic.twitter.com/w28Dxdnfr5

— Observer (@observer) June 16, 2016

Stein added that the Clinton family charity should also come under further scrutiny.

“It certainly includes what she was doing with the Clinton Foundation, taking money from other countries who were seeking various favors from the state department while she was in office.”

The Green Party candidate also strongly criticized Hillary Clinton for her role in pushing for the U.S. bombing of Libya which resulted in the country devolving into an ISIS-controlled enclave.

“In war, there is hardly a more horrifying example of the head-long plunge into reckless militarism than what Hillary Clinton led the way on in Libya.”

Earlier this month, Stein chided Sanders in advance of any formal endorsement of Hillary Clinton that he would be abandoning the principles underlying his insurgent, anti-establishment movement if he did so.

The Vermont senator has yet to endorse Clinton, but Sanders has met privately with both Clinton and President Obama to advance the cause of party unity.

Sanders told his supporters today that he was prioritizing the goal of defeating GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump in the fall election. He claimed that he and Clinton strongly disagree on some issues but agree on others and that he would seek to make the party platform adopted at the convention far more progressive.

“Sanders said he looked forward to working with Clinton ‘to transform the Democratic Party so that it becomes a party of working people and young people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors,'” AP reported

Despite their ideological differences, common ground exists between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to some degree in that they both oppose international trade treaties that often result in jobs going overseas and have both denounced the Wall Street and lobbyist cash flowing into Hillary Clinton’s campaign – and the primary campaigns of other Republicans – as well as her vote for the Iraq War. Both have described the party nomination process as rigged.

In an interview with Pacific Standard, former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader praised Sanders and Trump for not being compromised by big money interests:

“So what Trump has done, brilliantly, is to say: ‘I don’t need these fat cats on Wall Street. I’m spending my own money.’ And that has huge resonance.”

In an appearance on Democracy Now, Stein asserted that “Trump says very scary things—deporting immigrants, massive militarism and, you know, ignoring the climate. Well, Hillary, unfortunately, has a track record for doing all of those things.”

Separately, rumors have surfaced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has the goods on Hillary Clinton, OilPrice.com claimed.

“Reliable intelligence sources in the West have indicated that warnings had been received that the Russian Government could in the near future release the text of email messages intercepted from U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from the time she was U.S. Secretary of State. The release would, the messaging indicated, prove that Secretary Clinton had, in fact, laid open U.S. secrets to foreign interception by putting highly-classified Government reports onto a private server in violation of U.S. law, and that, as suspected, the server had been targeted and hacked by foreign intelligence services. The reports indicated that the decision as to whether to reveal the intercepts would be made by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, and it was possible that the release would, if made, be through a third party, such as Wikileaks.”

Last Sunday on U.K. television, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange confirmed that his organization would likely be releasing more Hillary Clinton emails into the public domain. He also insisted that the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department were both too politicized to go forward with an indictment.

[Photo by Elise Amendola/AP]