As the Democratic presidential nominee’s scandals continue to mount and dog her throughout the remainder of the election season, her campaign will have an increasingly hard time ignoring her scandals.
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The revelation that Clinton was unclear about the goal of one (c) marking (though that particular email lacked a classified header), combined with apparent confusion about protocol for discussing drone strikes in emails, have led to questions about whether Clinton took classified information seriously.
The FBI has said Clinton was “extremely careless” in her use of the server, but in a July report, the agency didn’t recommend bringing charges against her. At the same time, Mills purported to represent Clinton as her lawyer.
According to the FBI investigation, Clinton contacted Colin Powell in January 2009 to ask about his use of a BlackBerry when he was secretary of state.
The Clinton and Trump campaigns traded barbs over which presidential candidate Americans can trust, two days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation released notes from its July interview with Hillary Clinton concerning her handling of emails as secretary of state.
Embarrassing revelations include a passage in the report in which the 68-year-old Clinton told investigators she was unaware that confidential material was marked with a “C”.
In March 2015 Clinton claimed she turned over all material that could “possibly be work related” after the New York Times busted her for using a private server.
“Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton on Sunday for not knowing what the “(C)” label meant when it was used on her State Department emails.
Yet some State employees said they did not know her actual address since she appeared merely as the letter “H” in the sender field of the email. According to the report, the former US Secretary of State asserted that as a result of a concussion she had suffered in December of 2012, she could not remember any briefings on how to handle classified information.
Kaine pushed back on that notion, however, pointing out that Clinton actually did hold a press conference last month, just not one that the national media seems to consider as such. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Aug. 24-28, 59 per cent of registered voters viewed Clinton unfavourably, a 7-point increase from early August. 18 U.S.C. 207 (a) makes it a crime for any former government employee to communicate with the government on certain matters “in which the person participated personally and substantially while in government”.
The FBI director said the government found no direct evidence that Clinton’s private server was hacked but said foreign government hackers were so sophisticated – and the server would be such a high-value target – that it was unlikely they would leave evidence of a break-in. Are we to believe she wasn’t counseled on how to manage information she may or may not have had access to emanating from the President or the Oval Office?
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There’s an evident frustration on the part of Clinton campaign officials and surrogates that her email controversy and Clinton Foundation accusations are still generating so much attention, and dominating her coverage, especially considering that Trump was implicated this week for the very sort of quid pro quo scandal he’s been accusing Clinton of.
