The Washington Post’s fact checker blog ripped Bill Clinton on Wednesday for his "pathetic and misleading attempt to normalize Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email account," giving the former president "Three Pinocchios" for his claim about emails marked classified on his wife’s private server.
Bill Clinton raised eyebrows on Friday when he told a group of journalists that the FBI’s claims about classified material on Hillary Clinton’s server were the "biggest load of bull" he had ever heard.
"The FBI director said, when he testified to Congress, he had to amend the previous day’s statement, that she had never received any emails marked classified. They saw two little notes with a ‘C’ on it. This is the biggest load of bull I ever heard. They were about telephone calls that she needed to make. And the State Department put a little ‘C’ on it to discourage people from discussing it in public, in the event that the secretary of state, whoever it is, doesn’t make the phone call. Does that sound threatening to the national security to you?"
Washington Post reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee ran through a history of Hillary Clinton’s misleading email statements, and she also pointed out that Bill Clinton left out the 110 emails that FBI Director James Comey said were classified at the time they were on Clinton’s server, not retroactively classified.
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 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 take away from the fact that she was the only secretary of state to use a private server.
Clinton’s decision to use the private server in the first place is at "the root of all of the political difficulties concerning her email practices," Lee wrote.
She also criticized Bill Clinton for suggesting a "different set of rules" were being applied to his wife, saying that the email conduct of her successor and predecessors at the State Department are not comparable.
Clinton’s case is not an apples-to-apples comparison to her predecessors or to her successor John Kerry for two major reasons: She was the only one to have operated solely on a private email server, and she has access to more electronic records than her predecessors.
Madeleine Albright never used email for work. Condoleezza Rice did not use personal email for work, and did not use much email in general. John Kerry uses his personal email infrequently, and forwards it to his department email when he does; Clinton never set up a department account. Kerry used his personal email most when he was transitioning from his Senate office to the State Department. It’s misleading to compare Clinton to these three.