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Bill Clinton Fouls Up Email Spin for Hillary

August 22, 2016

Bill Clinton made a series of bold claims about the "load of bull" leveled at his wife Hillary over private email server earlier this month that are easily refuted by public statements from FBI Director James Comey.

On Aug. 12, he boiled down the Democratic nominee's entire email controversy to a couple of emails with classification markings that he said were of no threat to national security and claimed Comey had said Hillary did not receive any emails "marked classified."

In reality, Comey said she had been "extremely careless" with classified material and that 110 emails on her server bore classified material at the time they were sent and received.

The Washington Post ripped Clinton's statement, giving him Three Pinocchios for his claims, in addition to criticizing his inappropriate comparison of Hillary Clinton's email practices to her predecessors and successor at the State Department:

Bill Clinton is correct that Comey "amended" his statement in the hearing, to provide more details about what the FBI had found. But Comey did not say Hillary Clinton "had never received any emails marked classified." Two of three emails that had portion markings were call sheets that were improperly marked, and State Department considers the markings no longer necessary or appropriate at the time they were sent. Comey acknowledged that Clinton may not have known what the little-C marking meant.

The whole dispute over the little "c" versus big "C," portion markings versus header, and so on, is the political equivalent of three-card monte. Democrats, like Bill Clinton, have cherry-picked Comey’s comments from the five-hour hearing to declare Hillary Clinton vindicated. But what they conveniently sweep under the rug are the 110 emails — which were not a part of the 2,000 that were retroactively classified — that were found to "contain classified information at the time they were sent or received."

Moreover, the diversion to "little-C" markings is an effort to distract the public from the disturbing finding by the FBI that Clinton was "extremely careless" in handling her emails, and should have protected the information whether or not it had a classification marking. And it distracts voters from the fact that for more than a year, Clinton modified her excuse over and over to position herself in a way she can declare she was technically right in some form or another.

Bill Clinton also repeated the Democratic excuse that she used a personal email account just like her predecessor, and that she turned over more email records than her predecessors did. This comparison is a pathetic and misleading attempt to normalize Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email account and play down the fact that she was the only secretary of state to use a private server. The decision to use a private server is the root of all of the political difficulties concerning her email practices.