Matt Drudge explodes F-bomb on Hillary
Garth Kant
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifying before the Senate on Benghazi
WASHINGTON – News shark Matt Drudge had just five words to describe Hillary Clinton’s response to the emailgate controversy, tweeting Tuesday:
“Hillary totally f—ed it up.”
Matt Drudge tweet on March 10
National Journal’s Ron Fournier, the former Washington bureau chief for the AP, tweeted:
“Democrats: It’s high time to ask, ‘Is this as good as we can do?’”
Clinton met the press but refused to address the toughest, and most important, three questions she faced about her use of private email accounts for all of her official government business during her tenure as secretary of state:
- Would she have an independent arbiter look at her private email server?
- What lengths would she go to prove she did not delete emails? (The Washington Post reports 31,380 of her emails were deemed personal and destroyed.)
- Did she clear the server with State Department security officials, or anyone?
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., critiqued Clinton’s performance by rhetorically asking WND, “What difference does it make?”
That was a pointed reference to Hillary’s previous attempt to dodge tough questions during her Senate testimony over the importance of finding out who was responsible for the deadly terrorist attack on Benghazi.
Bachmann called Clinton’s comments, “A liberal’s view on emails: If it’s government servers holding Lois Lerner’s emails, they can’t be found. If they are Hillary’s, they’re on a private server and we can forget about ever getting them. This is her Nixon moment. It is her 18-minute gap on the tape.”
Clare Lopez, a foreign policy expert with the Center for Security Policy, member of the Citizen’s Commission on Benghazi and a former CIA officer, told WND, “The only way to know with certainty what all was on that server is for an official, neutral party to take custody of that server and conduct a thorough investigation to retrieve everything that was ever on it and make a determination about whether there was ever an actual security breach or even the potential for unauthorized access.”
Lopez said Clinton already has demonstrated a willingness to circumvent official policy in ways that “reasonably may be viewed as a deliberate attempt to conceal her communications from appropriate official as well as public scrutiny. Relying on her word that she provided the lawfully required access for proper government archiving and records retrieval becomes problematic with that kind of track record.”
One of the alibis Clinton offered for using a private email account was the convenience of using just one device to retrieve emails.
“You can have two email accounts on one smartphone. I do,” retorted Bachmann. “You don’t need to use two phones.”
“Why wouldn’t a Yale law grad use her government email account for work and her personal account for personal?”
Bachmann answered her own question, speculating, “She feared access to her government emails more than getting found out. Certainly no one would ever think their official emails would never come under scrutiny, especially when she obviously planned to run for president.
“She was certainly confidant the press would cover for this. One set of rules for the Clintons, another for us.”
But even Clinton’s claim of using just one handheld device came under immediate scrutiny because it contradicted a statement she made just two weeks ago at a conference in Silicon Valley.
Asked by an interviewer about her preference between the iPhone or Android, Clinton laughed and replied, “iPhone,” then added, “and a BlackBerry.”
Also coming under scrutiny was Clinton’s claim that her private email sever was originally installed for her husband, Bill, and that they used it to exchange messages, because the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the former president “has sent a grand total of two emails during his entire life, both as president,” according to Matt McKenna, his spokesman.
The Journal reported, “Clinton’s first email was a message to John Glenn, the former senator and astronaut who in 1998 was making a return trip to space,” and, “His other email was to U.S. troops serving in the Adriatic.”
That would indicate at least one of the Clintons is not telling the truth.
Additionally, the former secretary of state admitted she had deleted 30,000 emails from her server, claiming they were all “private, personal” emails. But no independent observer has verified those emails did not contain official government business before they were deleted, so all the public has is Clinton’s word.
Also, Dana Perino, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, wondered if Clinton would consider emails about the Clinton Foundation “personal” and “private,” considering she is accused of taking massive donations to the foundation from foreign governments while she was secretary of state. Many in Washington have wondered what those governments may have received in return.
Reaction to Clinton’s press conference was swift and strong from Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chair of the Select Committee on Benghazi.
Immediately following Clinton’s remarks at a press conference held after her speech at the United Nations, Gowdy released a statement lamenting, “Regrettably, we are left with more questions than answers.”
The chairman said he now plans to call Clinton before his committee at least twice: the first time to clear up her use of emails, the second time to discuss her role in the deadly Benghazi debacle.
Gowdy insisted there “remain serious questions about the security of the system she employed from a national security standpoint, and who authorized the exclusive use of personal email despite, guidance to the contrary from both her State Department and the White House.”
He also said there were “serious question about who had access to the server from the time Secretary Clinton left office until the time – almost two years later – the State Department asked for these public records back.”
And, “who culled through the records to determine which were personal and which were public.”
“Without access to Secretary Clinton’s personal server, there is no way for the State Department to know it has acquired all documents that should be made public, and given State’s delay in disclosing the fact Secretary Clinton exclusively used personal email to conduct State business, there is no way to accept State’s or Secretary Clinton’s certification she has turned over all documents that rightfully belong to the American people.”
Bachmann also provided WND with a series of pointed questions that Gowdy’s committee is certain to address:
- Who pawed through Hillary’s emails, separating government from personal?
- It was all in one account, so someone had to read all that content. Was it a government employee?
- Was it someone from the Clinton Foundation?
- Why did Hillary incur the very expensive, technical step of setting up a private server in her home if she wasn’t trying to hide something?
- How much would something like this cost?
- Did she personally pay for the server and the connections?
- What part of any of this did the U.S. government pay for?
- Certainly she would have asked someone at the State Department if it was legal to do so.
- She had to comply with ethics requirements as a U.S. senator. Didn’t her legal team at the State Department warn her she was out of compliance with federal record-keeping requirements since she was busy emailing the people who worked for her?
- Is the president’s email account so unsecured that no one on his account noticed this was a private email address coming to him from the secretary of state?
- How does Clinton know she wasn’t hacked?
- Shouldn’t that be evaluated by a third-party evaluator?
Follow Garth Kant @DCgarth
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