Clinton still insists she didn't send classified info over private server
Despite the director of the FBI, James Comey, testifying before Congress to the contrary, Hillary Clinton continues to insist she didn't send classified information over her private email server.
It wasn't just Comey making that claim. An internal State Department investigation concluded she sent and received classified documents. So did two I.G. reports – one from the State Department and another from the I.G. for national intelligence.
It's a surrealist nightmare. Clinton inhabits an entirely different universe from the rest of ours, where up is down, black is white, and where she told the truth about classified documents on her server.
The Democratic presidential nominee Sunday repeated her claim that she never sent or received classified information on her private email as secretary of state, directly contradicting what FBI Director James B. Comey said the agency found in its investigation.
“I was communicating with over 300 people in my emails. They certainly did not believe and had no reason to believe what they were sending was classified,” Mrs. Clinton said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I take classification seriously,” she said, repeating her frequent assertion that she made a mistake in using a private email account hosted on a private server kept at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
On July 5, Mr. Comey said 110 of Mrs. Clinton’s email messages contained information that was classified at the time she sent or received them, and a small number of them included markings that identified them as classified.
He also announced that he would not recommended pursuing criminal charges against Mrs. Clinton. But he said she and her staff were “extremely careless” in using a personal email account hosted by a secret email system in her home and that it jeopardized classified information.
Comey's devastating testimony is turned on its head to exonerate her when it actually condemned her for lying:
In Mr. Comey’s statement and subsequent testimony to Congress, he refuted many other claims by Mrs. Clinton:
в¦Ѓ He said the FBI had evidence that Mrs. Clinton did not turn over all her work-related email to the State Department, as she claimed.
в¦Ѓ He said Mrs. Clinton used several email devices, undercutting her claim that she set up the secret email system because it was “more convenient” to use one device.
в¦Ѓ He debunked Mrs. Clinton’s claim that her email was never hacked, saying it was possible her email was hacked, because many of the accounts of people with whom she communicated were hacked.
“I think she was negligent,” Mr. Comey said of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified material.
Fox News host Chris Wallace pressed Mrs. Clinton about Mr. Comey’s announcement, saying, “None of those things that you told the American public were true.”
“Chris, that’s not what I heard Director Comey say,” said Mrs. Clinton. “Director Comey said my answers were truthful and consistent with what I have told the American people.
Both Trump and Clinton have learned that there's no longer a penalty for lying to the voter because the media has even less credibility than the candidates. So when either candidate is called out for lies, the information is dismissed or simply disappears down the rabbit hole.
Paid ads by both candidates will highlight the lies, but those, too, will just become part of the background noise of the campaign. Those who bother to vote will make up their minds based on what they want to hear, not what the candidates are saying – true or false.