White House chief of staff Mark Meadows used a personal cellphone, a Signal account, and Gmail accounts for government business without turning it over to the National Archives. This revelation triggered a reaction from a former presidential candidate:
Especially since his emails were about plotting a coup d'etat, while ours were about gefilte fish. https://t.co/XLYENxoCbn
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 16, 2021
Setting aside the debate over the legality of Meadows’s emails, Hillary’s tweet is a revisionist falsehood. It was never the “personal emails” that were problematic. It was her engagement in corrupt behavior. Let’s recall that she set up a secret server to circumvent government transparency, likely to hide favor-trading related to her bogus foundation. She then repeatedly sent unsecured, classified, and top-secret documents through that illegal server, although she surely knew — or should have known, because, after all, she was the most qualified presidential candidate in history, according to Barack Obama — that it was both risky and illegal. According to the FBI, Clinton sent 110 emails containing clearly marked classified information, and 36 of those emails contained secret information. Eight of the email chains she sent contained “top secret” information. “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” James Comey explained at the time. The New York Times also reported that the probability that those documents were intercepted by foreign powers was quite high.
Hillary was then responsible for attempts to destroy evidence related to that illegal server. Comey noted in his original congressional testimony that Hillary’s staff had “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.” It is implausible that none of her top aides informed Clinton about this effort (though Comey would shower Clinton’s staff with immunity deals, so he really had no interest in finding out the truth). And then Hillary’s top aide — a person who would have been at the highest levels of government should Clinton have the won the presidency — failed to inform the FBI of classified emails on her laptop, which would be used by her husband for sexting with a teen girl. Comey didn’t charge Hillary, asserting he couldn’t prove intent, even though “gross negligence” was the only standard he needed. Comey rewrote the law to save Hillary, but we shouldn’t let her rewrite history.