The Grio contributor Zerlina Maxwell declared Monday on MSNBC it was "old news" that Hillary Clinton ever did things solely for political purposes and called those kinds of charges leveled against her in a new book "an attack on her from the 90s."
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in his memoir Duty that Clinton admitted she opposed the troop surge in Iraq in 2007 for political purposes, as she was running against then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time. Yet Maxwell insisted this was not a story:
ZERLINA MAXWELL: Well, I think that, you know, this is old news. I think the view that Hillary Clinton does things only for political motives, that is old news. That's an attack on her from the '90s. I think that she's one of the most vetted candidates that we've ever seen, because she was First Lady, then a candidate for president, and potentially running in 2016. I think Reince Priebus is trying to do everything he can to get the news cycle off of Chris Christie, and until we learn Hillary Clinton shut down the bridge to Claire McCaskill's house because of political motives, I don't think this is a story.
The fact that Clinton was a sitting U.S. Senator from 2000 until becoming Secretary of State in 2009, not to mention her famously rough-and-tumble run for the presidential nomination against Obama in 2008, makes Maxwell's comments even more ridiculous.
Maxwell did, however, say last week that simply the fact that Chris Christie may be involved in the George Washington Bridge scandal was enough to make him unfit for higher office. Maxwell also implied Christie would use nuclear weapons against his political foes, yet Clinton's own "hit list" against political enemies who derailed her campaign in 2008 didn't seem to faze her.