Andrea Mitchell: Hillary Email IG Report ‘Devastating’

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Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” NBC chief Washington correspondent Andrea Mitchell reacted to a State Department Inspector General report criticizing Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was serving as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

Mitchell first dismissed the Clinton campaign’s defense, comparing Clinton’s behavior to that of her predecessor former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then declared the report to be hard to be seen as “anything but devastating.”

“It was not allowed to not return those records before she left the State Department,” Mitchell said. “She violated the official records act according to her own State Department IG appointed by President Obama. What you have shown just now, Mika, it completely undercuts the argument she’s been making for more than a year just as she’s trying to persuade voters she’s untrustworthy. I think the most surprising and shocking thing is their reaction. Claiming this is the same as what former secretaries did, comparison to Colin Powell. The facts are Colin Powell was the first secretary of state to ever use email. He used it specifically to try to launch the State Department into the new century and try to get people to communicate by email.”

“He was using it by example,” she continued. “He did use personal emails. He didn’t always separate them, but it was completely aboveboard — everybody in the State Department knew what he was doing. It was not, in fact, violating a rule that was put in place under Clinton, not after she left — It was put in place under Clinton and she was warned before hand of decades of this records act that prohibits you to leave the State Department, to leave any agency and not turn over your records. So, there are so many flaws in their argument. And you know, the politics, we’ll have to see how that plays out. But, I don’t see how this is anything but devastating given the fact they have been making a completely different argument now for more than a year.”

(h/t WFB)

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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