Feds: Republicans Are Lying, 4 Other Secretaries of State Used Private Email
The State Department released the findings of its internal investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server yesterday, and they present a further problem for the vicious Republican smear campaign targeting Clinton. Apparently four other former secretaries of state – Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and John Kerry – have handled classified information on their private email servers. According to the report, both Mrs. Rice and Mr. Powell handled “national security information classified at the secret or confidential levels.”
The revelations of the exact same misbehavior by George W. Bush’s secretaries of state has aroused nary a peep from Republicans who have relentlessly attacked Clinton with a barrage of misinformation painting her actions as a grave threat to national security. This is despite the fact that, while numerous Clinton emails have been retroactively classified and several probably did contain national security information,
com/world/national-security/criminal-probe-sought-into-clinton-private-e-mails-for-suspected-sensitive-content/2015/07/24/b90bf598-31f8-11e5-97ae-30a30cca95d7_story.html” target=”_blank”>none were classified at the time they were handled on Clinton’s server.
Besides slandering Clinton, Republicans have led a shameful campaign of lies and misinformation, claiming falsely that Clinton broke the law and that she is under criminal investigation by the FBI. They have told these obvious falsehoods – not to mention their outrageous lies about the so-called Benghazi “scandal” – with a straight face while attacking Clinton’s integrity and calling her a liar.
To be sure, Clinton acted recklessly and her use of a private email server was a very poor decision. But the complete lack of Republican reaction, much less outrage, over the revelations about Rice and Powell – both of whom have brushed off the revelations similarly to Clinton – reveal that their campaign against her is driven not by ideology or concern for national security but rather by cynical and defamatory election-year politics.
