The Detroit News has published a hard hitting editorial demanding that the Department of Justice investigate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State. The editorial accuses Hillary of being “serially deceptive” in her answers to questions about the server.
The Clinton pushback against the NY Times had the desired effect of giving progressives in the media something to write about other than the fresh evidence that Hillary has not told the truth about her use of email. But the Detroit News sidesteps the misleading side-debate and instead gets to the heart of the story:
Did Hillary Clinton use a private email server to send classified information while she was Secretary of State? Two government watchdogs say the evidence suggests she did and are recommending a Justice Department investigation to determine whether critical security information still exists on at least ‘one private server and thumb drive that are not in the government’s possession.’
As for Hillary’s repeated denials of wrongdoing, the Detroit News says those aren’t worth much. The paper demonstrates she has been “serially deceptive” in her answers about the matter so far:
[S]he initially said she turned over to the department all of the emails that were left on the server after she destroyed thousands of them in a purge. But at least 15 potentially embarrassing documents were not given to the State Department.
Then she said she used only one device to send email, and in reality she used several. She also claimed she followed the department’s rules regarding email; the department has now acknowledged she did not.
But the big claim, made near the end of her March press conference, is that she did not send or receive classified information on her private account. That’s not true according to two different Inspectors General who issued a joint statement Friday saying the emails, “were not retroactively classified by the State Department; rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated.” The IGs added, “classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
Hillary’s team has attempted to blame all of this on the GOP (an effort Politico reported on yesterday), but the Detroit News correctly points out, “These are not Republicans or a conservative press asking for the probe; they’re government watchdogs.” And because that’s the case, the paper concludes the DOJ, “can’t ignore the legitimate questions raised by the inspectors simply because Hillary Clinton is a Democrat running for president.”
As a matter of fact, the Detroit News is probably wrong on that last point, at least as a matter of process. The DOJ can ignore the referral regarding Hillary’s email. Then we could spend another six months trying to get an FOIA response on why DOJ made the decision to do so. But the paper is right that DOJ should not ignore the IG’s findings, especially given the unreliability of Hillary’s explanations thus far.
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