GOP Should Be Last Ones to Accuse Hillary of Secrecy
March 9, 2015

 
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The GOP thinks it has finally found the chink in Hillary’s armor. The one thing that could derail her presidential prospects… the fact she used her private email account for public business while working at the State Department. But when it comes to secrecy & email, Republicans are the LAST people on Earth who should be allowed to claim the moral high-ground regarding openness and transparency in government. One needn’t go all all the way back to Nixon, the most secretive White House in history, for an example. Nor even to the Reagan Administration (whom still holds the record as the most indicted Administration in history). No, as recently as the last Republican-controlled White House puts them all to shame when it comes to secrecy & obstruction of justice. WHEN the Bush White House agreed to turn over a document/email, there was a better than average chance it would look like the one above, highly redacted with almost no useful information exposed. Subpoena them to testify before an investigation and they simply refused to show up (or demand they not be put under oath.) From cover-ups regarding the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, wiretapping, or the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to President Bush’s chief of staff Karl Rove and at least SEVEN other high-ranking WH officials using a private email system run by the RNC for nearly all of their correspondence. “Pot, meet Kettle.”

Now I’m hardly the one to defend Hillary Clinton. I’ve made known in these pages my unhappiness with the way she conducts business (mostly, how quick she seems to be to throw her fellow Democrats under the bus for the sake of her own personal political advantage, not to mention how hawkish she has always been on National Defense), but this isn’t about Hillary. This is about GOP hypocrisy… my favorite topic.

Eleven years ago tomorrow, March 10, 2004, then Attorney General John Ashcroft was near death lying in a hospital bed when his temporary replacement, acting director James Comey received an urgent late-night phone call that White House Council Alberto Gonzales and Bush’s own Chief-of-Staff Andrew Card were racing to the hospital to try and get Ashcroft to reauthorize President Bush’s illegal NSA wiretap program because they knew Comey would not. Comey later testified that he alerted FBI Director Robert Mueller before racing off to the hospital to stop them. Fortunately, after he arrived, Ashcroft pointed to Comey as the only person having the authority to authorize anything as acting AG.

When the new Democratic majority investigated the incident in 2007, most of Muller’s emails looked like the one above, highly redacted with all pertinent information blacked out in the name of “national security”.

In 2006, following the reelection of President Bush in 2004, eight U.S. Attorneys… Republicans all… were fired by the Justice Department without explanation. The “official” reason later given was that it was part of the normal turnover of any new administration to appoint new judges, but this was two years into Bush’s second term, so that excuse raised more than a few eyebrows. Soon it was discovered that all eight of these attorneys had been ordered… and refused… to investigate Democrats for Election fraud prior to the  2004 election with absolutely no basis. When Democrats demanded Bush’s Senior Advisor Karl Rove turn over his private emails regarding the matter, that is when it was discovered Rove and seven other high-ranking WH officials had been using a private email server… set up by the RNC… to eschew the rules regulating to public availability of all government communications. Rove & company never did turn over those emails.

When Republicans took over the White House in 2001, the RNC gave all of their members free laptops with access to a private email server set up by them. The claim at the time was so that they were provided so they could conduct “fundraising” without using government property to do it (prohibited). But Rove & Company didn’t just use those private accounts for “fundraising”; they used them to conduct any business they wanted to keep secret… which in the Bush Administration was anything you did between breaths.

And just WHO gave Rove and “Scooter” Libby the green light to publicly expose the identity of CIA agent Valery Plame Wilson? That information was never revealed either. Libby was indicted for “obstruction of justice” by providing false information to the grand jury to prevent them from finding out the truth. When it comes to secrecy and hiding governmental information regarding likely criminal wrong-doing, no one can hold a candle to the GOP. So to hear them now feign OUTRAGE over the fact Hillary Clinton used her “private” email for all correspondence while she worked at the White House… couched in the accusation that she did so in order to “hide” information from investigators… just as Karl Rove did, and just as her predecessor Colin Powell did (Condi apparently used an “official” email account)… two years before new rules were written prohibiting this… is just the latest example of Republicans trying to turn smoke into fire in hopes of derailing her inevitable presidential bid.

And thanks to this nonsense with Hillary’s use of a private email account while conducting official business, every ginned up Obama White House “scandal” has been given new life. Why? There’s now a TENTH investigation into Benghazi thanks to a baseless belief that the only reason NINE previous investigations turned up nothing is because the truth must have been in an email Clinton didn’t turn over… assuming there are any. I’ve often said that if a Republican accuses you of doing something wrong, it’s only because they either already did it themselves or considered doing it but never got around to it (see: “Acorn and voter fraud”), and naturally assume you’re as dishonorable as they are. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Where there is no smoke, build a fire and accuse your opponent of setting it.”

(Postscript: Former SoS Colin Powell on “Meet the Press” yesterday pointed out that any email sent BY Clinton TO a “.gov” address “would be recorded/retained by the governmental servers.”)
 

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March 9, 2015 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: Election, fake scandals, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Hypocrisy, Scandals

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