Sunlight Foundation Policy Director John Wonderlich said that Hillary Clinton’s use of her private e-mail was “far more egregious” than other scandals involving e-mail use on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” on MSNBC.
“Imagine a cabinet secretary coming in and saying ‘I’m going to work out of my own office, and I’m going to hire my own security detail, and I’m going to bring in a private PR team to manage our communications.’ That would never be accepted, but for some reason, in terms of e-mail, people are getting away with that, and the last speaker [MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner had referenced Jeb Bush’s private e-mail server and other politicians using private e-mails before the interview with Wonderlich began] was right, it is common scandal, but it’s also the case that this is far more egregious. So, our hope at the Sunlight Foundation is that this inevitable political dialogue that comes out of it, that’ll take care of itself, we’re more concerned about the reforms we need so that we don’t continue to have more and more e-mail scandals like this one, so that we can be confident in what cabinet secretaries are doing.” he stated.
Earlier, he argued “I think we’re actually understating the amount of damage that this may have caused. For four years for Secretary Clinton to have designed — she basically privatized her e-mail, rather than relying on the official system. She created a system where she could personally manage who got access to her communications. And that’s not some abstract recordkeeping concern. There are a lot of concrete and specific things, whether it’s Inspector General investigations, financial auditing, Freedom of Information Act requests, or the questions about the Federal Records Act and preserving records that are all presumably concretely harmed by the way she chose to manage the records. And her tweet is somewhat telling, she called them ‘my records’ ‘I want to give Americans access to her records.’ They’re not her records. There’s been a law since 1950, that those sort of record is something that belongs to everyone, and there are very guidelines for how it’s supposed to be managed, and unfortunately, that’s not how it happened in this case.”
He concluded, “the talking points we have now are basically the exact reverse of what we had ten years ago, where the RNC e-mail server was set up in the Bush White House and Democrats were railing against it. And then now today, there’s a lot of apology coming from the left and concern about the political fallout.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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