Former First Lady, U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton offered a rare statement Tuesday on the situation with Donald Trump, her former political opponent and the former president who “removed” hundreds of classified and top secret documents belonging to the federal government and refused to return them despite a grad jury subpoena.
Experts like Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight say Clinton “probably” lost the White House thanks to then-FBI Director Jim Comey’s violation of DOJ rules about not doing anything to influence voters within 60 days of an election, announcing he was re-opening the Bureau’s investigation into her emails 13 days before Election Day.
At issue in the mind of many Americans, thanks especially to media outlets like The New York Times that ran page one articles about almost every detail of the issue, was Clinton’s handling of allegedly classified materials. The Atlantic’s James Fallows in the year after the election wrote that “the Times very badly erred in its wild over-coverage of the Clinton email ‘issue,’ and that this distorted coverage was, in turn, one of many factors leading to Donald Trump’s elevation to the presidency.”
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Politifact last month after the FBI seized over 20 cartons and other items from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort-slash-residence, tried to explain why one thing was not like the other.
“Hillary Clinton used a private email address for exchanges with her State Department staff. In three instances, email chains included information with ambiguous classification markings,” Politifact noted. “Of the tens of thousands of emails investigators reviewed, 113 contained classified information, and three of those had classification markers,” which does not automatically mean they are classified.
Regardless, “in 2018, a Justice Department report found that the classification markings were not clear,” further exonerating Clinton. That would be a Trump DOJ report, given it was in 2018.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump “took properly marked hard copy classified documents from the White House, shipped them to Florida, and stored them in an unsecured location at his residence,” national security attorney Brad Moss told Politifact.
The Clinton e-mails “were never marked as classified because these were communications from unclassified government accounts,” Moss added.
Hillary Clinton agrees.
On Tuesday, via Twitter Clinton served up a lengthy thread about her emails.
“I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails…” she wrote, ellipses included. “As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a ‘Clinton Standard.’ The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified.”
“Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails,” she continued. “Trump’s own State Department, under two different Secretaries, found I had no classified emails.”
“That’s right: ZERO,” she added emphatically. “By contrast, Trump has hundreds of documents clearly marked classified, and the investigation just started.”
“I’m more tired of talking about this than anyone, but here we are. If you’re interested in the facts, you can read more here,” she added, pointing to an article in The National Memo by Joe Conason.
“How Many Of ‘Her Emails’ Were Classified? Actually, Zero,” is the title.