By Don Irvine.
CNN’s Inside Politics panel called Hillary Clinton a hypocrite for saying that Donald Trump isn’t being completely transparent for refusing to release his tax returns, while she ignored Freedom of Information requests as secretary of state.
The panel, on Sunday, said the latest round of allegations against the Clinton Foundation are her own fault because she ignored those FOIA requests as secretary of state.
The panel was responding to a clip of Bill Clinton angrily denouncing the idea that Hillary had lied about her emails, and whether or not she sent classified emails on her home brew server as the “biggest load of bull” he’s ever heard. They were also responding to the release of nearly 300 pages of emails that show a very cozy relationship between the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s State Department.
New York Times political correspondent Maggie Haberman said that Bill Clinton gets very defensive when Hillary is attacked, and that the Clinton Foundation is his baby and he is very proud and defensive of it:
“The problem is there is a tremendous amount of defensiveness by the Clintons about this. The campaign, their officials sort of walked into this problem that existed before they got there. But if you look at the emails that were released, these were part of FOIA lawsuits. The State Department under Hillary Clinton did not respond to Freedom of Information requests over several years, so the timing of this is really almost entirely at their own hand, in the sense that if they had just released them at the time, this wouldn’t be a big deal.”
“You can get into equivalent weights of the two campaigns on transparency, and lack of equivalency, but these are legitimate questions to ask of a future president, especially one who is talking about her opponents lack of transparency.”
CNN national politics reporter MJ Lee, who was at the Bill Clinton event, said that his response showed not only his frustration—but the campaign’s as well—with the trust issue and their desire to move away from it.
Lee went on to say that Hillary Clinton hasn’t always “helped her own cause,” referring to the claim that FBI Director James Comey called her statements “truthful”—which he did not—and said that if she really wants to move away from this issue she has to stop saying things that generate more questions about her emails:
“Her pivoting away from this issue hasn’t just been, look, I’m sorry, I made mistake and let’s move on,” Lee said. “She has said, at best, misleading things about Comey’s testimony, and at worst, inaccurate things about Comey’s testimony … When she talks about these issues, she has to make sure that the way in which she cherry-picks her answers don’t actually cause fresh questions of their own.”
Clinton could put an end to the questions about her emails if she would just come clean and tell the truth. But doing so would more than likely end her presidential campaign, and that’s not an outcome the Clintons are willing to face.
So the lies go on.
