Clinton Campaign: If She Had Classified Emails On Unsecured Server, So Does GOP’s Benghazi Committee

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is finally playing hardball, accusing the House Benghazi Committee of handling and storing classified emails on an unprotected server – the same accusation they are making against her – if they insist on claiming she did. Here’s why.

The man in the photo above is U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the GOP’s Benghazi committee. His number one task, assigned by Speaker John Boehner, is to investigate Hillary Clinton – a blatant attempt to derail her presidential campaign, considering numerous House and Senate committees have never found Clinton did anything wrong during the Benghazi attacks.

Gowdy, meanwhile, for months has been attacking Clinton, demanding she turn over her private email server, and demanding the State Department send him all of Clinton’s emails.

Clinton denies sending any emails from her private account that were marked classified at the time they were sent.

Now, in response to increased attacks and claims from the GOP that Hillary Clinton sent classified emails from her personal email account, Clinton’s campaign is hitting back.

Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon spoke to reporters on Wednesday. Here’s how the New York Times reports the charge:

If she was at fault for having classified information on her server without her knowledge, Mr. Fallon suggested, then aren’t other people in the same boat?

Fallon posits, “as an aside,” for the inspector general “to now declare the material as classified, since it was provided by State to the House Benghazi committee earlier this year in un-redacted form, presumably that means that members of the House Benghazi committee may have unwittingly handled classified material on unclassified systems within the House of Representatives.”

Oops.

“Now, I don’t think that anybody here at the Clinton campaign is going to say that members of, say, Chairman Gowdy’s staff should have their computers confiscated for having possibly trafficked in classified material,” Fallon continued. “I don’t think we would say that. But that is, fundamentally, the same logic behind the I.G.’s referral to the State Department with respect to Mrs. Clinton’s server, since she was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified. Let’s raise that as an aside.”

Just as an aside.

In other words, Clinton’s press secretary says, if Rep. Gowdy wants to claim those emails were classified when they were in Clinton’s possession, then they are classified in Rep. Gowdy’s possession.

Politico adds that on that call with reporters, Fallon said, “Gowdy treated emails, in this case, in the same way Hillary Clinton did, considering them unclassified and … storing them on unclassified computer systems.”

“So in light of this I don’t really see what leg Congressman Gowdy has to stand on in his criticisms of Secretary Clinton on this point.”

In other words, Gowdy and his Benghazi committee are just as “guilty”as Secretary Clinton is.

Just as an aside.

 

Image: Rep. Trey Gowdy (SC) meets with the other appointed majority members of the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi. Photo by Speaker John Boehner via Flickr and a CC license