Interesting and telling read about the right’s hypocrisy on “Email” issues. Nina Burleigh is the author of it, and it is a tremendous take down of those who seek to make something of use of personal email to conduct official business.
xDelete all. @HillaryClinton is paying the price for her private emails. Check out the habits of some of her critics. https://t.co/sUyhQIAVEW
— nina burleigh (@ninaburleigh) August 24, 2016HILLARY CLINTON EMAIL FUROR REVEALS HYPOCRISY ON THE RIGHT
The frenzy and furor over Hillary Clinton’s email habits while at the State Department, now into their 16th month and still going strong, have predictably and effectively chipped away at her reputation, so a sizable majority of Americans (67 percent in a poll last month) find her “untrustworthy.”
….
But take a moment away from pawing through the tens of thousands of her personal and professional emails now on public view and consider the long list of elected and appointed Republicans who have done exactly the same thing as Clinton—and worse.
Between 2003 and 2005, the George W. Bush White House “lost” around 5 million emails, including messages related to the firing of federal prosecutors who didn't adhere to Bush’s conservative agenda. A federal judge ruled that the White House didn’t have to look for them.
The article goes on to explain that in addition to George W. Bush “losing” a whopping 5 million emails there are many, many hypocrisies on the right when it comes to “Email” issues. Colin Powell set up a personal email account, supposedly because he was fed up with the archaic ways the State Department handled communication. He didn’t even bother setting up a server, he relied on AOL instead, and his email account was hacked by Bulgarian hacker Guccifer.
The article also explores Powell’s advice to Hillary to set up her own personal email, something he stated to author Joe Conason for an upcoming book, but something he suddenly “forgot” has ever taken place.
NationalMemo:
Did Colin Powell Advise Clinton To Use A Private Email?
Last week, The New York Times confirmed that Powell did offer her precisely that advice, based on an account in my forthcoming book on Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. Yet Powell has responded by insisting that he has “no recollection” of such an incident.
In Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, to be published in September by Simon & Schuster, I report on a dinner party that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hosted for Hillary Clinton several months after she assumed that office in 2009, with Powell in attendance:
Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel [to Clinton].... Powell suggested that she use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer on his desk. Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department, Powell thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier.
Also explored are multitudes, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of emails eradicated by the likes of Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Scott Walker, as well as personal email accounts set up to conduct official business by Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal. Donald Trump himself was accused of destroying sensitive email evidence in a lawsuit:
USAToday:
Trump was accused of destroying email evidence in lawsuit 10 years ago
In 2006, when a judge ordered Donald Trump's casino operation to hand over several years' worth of emails, the answer surprised him: The Trump Organization routinely erased emails and had no records from 1996 to 2001. The defendants in a case that Trump brought said this amounted to destruction of evidence, a charge never resolved.
At that time, a Trump IT director testified that until 2001, executives in Trump Tower relied on personal email accounts using dial-up Internet services, despite the fact that Trump had launched a high-speed Internet provider in 1998 and announced he would wire his whole building with it. Another said Trump had no routine process for preserving emails before 2005.
Judge Jeffrey Streitfeld was stunned. “He has a house up in Palm Beach Countylisted for $125 million, but he doesn’t keep emails. That’s a tough one,” he said, according to transcripts obtained by USA TODAY. “If somebody starts to put forth as a fact something that doesn’t make any sense to me and causes me to have a concern about their credibility in the discovery process, that's not a good direction to go, and I am really having a hard time with this.”
Good stuff to open some eyes, written by Nina Burleigh here. Recommended reading.
Nina Burleigh finishes:
But, today, it is only Clinton’s private server system that has sparked federal and congressional investigations, and whose core trustworthiness is now casually and hourly questioned from coast to coast—by some of the very men whose email hygiene habits are no better and who, furthermore, have demonstrated time and again that they believe rules about transparency were invented to be broken.
About the author:
Nina Burleigh is National Politics Correspondent at Newsweek Magazine. She is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books. Her last book, The Fatal Gift of Beauty, was a widely praisedNew York Times bestseller. In the last several years, she has covered an array of subjects, from American politics to the Arab Spring. She has written for numerous publications including Rolling Stone, Businessweek, The New Yorker, Time, New York and The New York Times.