Veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on Monday compared Hillary Clinton’s private email account to the Nixon tapes.
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Woodward noted that although Clinton may have erased emails from her server, those that received them have copies; the truth is out there.
“Follow the trail here”, he said.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe“, Woodward, who through his reporting helped break open the Watergate scandal, said it’s at least suspicious that Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary of state were wiped away from a server she owned privately. What brought Nixon down was his secret White House tapes of his oval office conversations.
Woodward said that the first issue in the matter is “common sense” for people like Clinton or for former Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus, who faced legal charges and ended up being fined $100,000 and ordered to be put on probation for sharing classified information with his then-mistress.
“This has to go on a long, long time, and the answers are probably not going to be pretty”, Woodward concluded.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for president in 2016, does not like what she is reading in the national media about her email scandal.
“It’s extraordinary”, Woodward said. The idea that the emails are not in government hands scares the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who collected the backup from the company. I would love to have all 60,000, read them, it would be a character study about her personal life and, also, what she did as Secretary of State. While some have expressed concern that Clinton’s servers could have been compromised, others have focused on the fact that she deleted tens of thousands of emails she deemed “personal”. Is she this secretive, hidden person, or is she this valiant public servant? They’re all asking the same question.
While Woodward does not speculate as to what may have been included in Clinton’s deleted emails, he does note that they could provide valuable insight into what kind of leader Hillary Clinton would be. The big question about Hillary Clinton is, who is she? “She’s not Nixon. If you think you can manipulate the press and stonewall forever, [when] you’re running for president and you’re president, I don’t think that works”. Look at those 60,000 emails, and you’re going to get some answers.
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Still, nothing has been proven to be illegal, he said, and perhaps it’s time to slow down a bit.
