Hillary emails cause headaches for Obama White House
- By Mitchell Blatt
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 17, 2015
But it's more than just a Clinton scandal, it's also an Obama scandal. After all, Clinton was working for the Obama administration when she violated email protocol. Yet there have been other email controversies during Obama's term that raise similar questions.
One of the reasons Clinton's emails are an issue is because the Congressional committee investigating Benghazi says they have no emails from Clinton related to Libya from parts of 2011. The Republicans have been investigating the terrorist attack there since it happened on Sept. 11, 2012, and they keep subpoenaing documents. Clinton's emails will certainly be of interest to them, but Clinton has admitted to having 31,000, or half, of them deleted - those that she says were personal. Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy doesn't want to take her word for it; he said she should let her personal email be searched for the 31,000 deleted emails.
When another Republican oversight committee was investigating the IRS for targeting conservative non-profit groups for extra scrutiny, the IRS said that emails from the head of the agency had been lost. Her computer had crashed, resulting in the emails being lost from her hard drive, ex-IRS commissioner Lois Lerner said, and the backup tapes didn't contain her emails from that period.
Yet Treasury Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus said that he found Lerner's emails on a number of backup tapes. After discovering the missing tapes, Camus testified to Congress that the IRS had never even looked for the tapes. The IRS apparently lied not only about the existence of the emails but also lied about having looked for them.
On another issue of transparency, President Barack Obama withheld documents from Congressional investigators. During investigations of "Operation Fast and Furious," a government program that allowed gun dealers to sell to straw-buyers with the intent of following the guns and shutting down drug cartels, Obama invoked executive privilege to prevent Congress from reviewing 1,300 pages of documents. Congress found Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his role in refusing to turn over some documents.
Obama's response to the news of Clinton's private email address is typical. He says he found out about it "the same time everybody else learned it through news reports." Obama seems to have no idea what is happening in his own administration.
When it was reported that hospitals for military veterans had long wait lists, his communications secretary Jay Carney said, "We learned about them through the reports." When Obama's administration obtained the Associated Press phone records (to investigate the source of a leak), Carney said, "He found out about the news reports yesterday." He also found out about the IRS controversy from the news. God bless CNN. Without it, Obama wouldn't know anything. One wonders whether he learned about the death of Osama bin Laden by watching himself give a speech about it.
Hillary Clinton was always going to be hurt as well as helped by being related to Bill Clinton. His image as a slick politician who will say anything rubs off on Hillary and is reflected in any controversy she faces. But her relationship with the Obama administration will hurt just as much. The idea of "change" that America voted for in 2008 might still be what the American voters want in 2016.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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