The panel of MSNBC’s Morning Joe agreed Tuesday that Hillary Clinton is given a pass on scandals that would disqualify a Republican politician.
Seven-thousand pages of emails from Clinton’s private server were released by the State Department late Monday night, with 150 emails redacted because they contained classified information.
"I do think if [Republican Gov.] Chris Christie had sent an email to somebody for hurricane relief after Hurricane Sandy and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea, let's move this funding project to New Jersey through the Chris Christie Foundation, that would be a disqualifier. Is that fair?" MSNBC host Joe Scarborough asked.
"Yeah, that’s fair," liberal Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart said.
"Different politicians, different standards," Scarborough said.
The emails show that Clinton often mixed her official duties as secretary of state with her unofficial duties for the Clinton Foundation, the family’s controversial charitable arm.
For example, the Washington Examiner reported that Clinton asked State Department aides to secure donations for the foundation from foreign governments, a mix of public and private interests that the Obama administration hoped to avoid—and that reveal a possible difference in how Clinton is treated relative to her Republican peers.
Fellow Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson condemned the "original sin" of having the server in the first place.
"As you know, I have been quite critical of Secretary Clinton, especially for the original sin of running the private server in the house rather than the State Department server, and it was inevitable there would be problems after that," he said. "Is it a good thing for the sitting secretary of state to be referring to both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in any email in any context? Probably not. Probably not in this way, and I don't think there's anything nefarious about it but that came from the original decision."