Colin Powell: Rice & I Used Private Email Server And Republicans Didn’t Complain
The Republican presidential “candidates” and the right-wing echo chamber have been obsessing over the contents of Hillary Clinton’s emails, desperately trying to find some shred of evidence to give some credence to the relentless smear campaign that they have been waging against her for over a year now. They exploded in a frenzy following the announcement that certain emails did contain classified information – but said nothing about a follow-up story which revealed that important members of the George W. Bush administration, like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice also had kept private email servers that regularly held classified information.
After news of that broke, the State Department is refusing to release the contents of his emails and are retroactively classifying them, in a puzzling move that has many questioning the move – including Powell himself, who said that “I wish they would release them, so that a normal, air-breathing mammal would look at them and say, ‘What’s the issue?’ They were unclassified at the time, and they are, in my judgment, still unclassified.”
It just goes to show how common the practice is, and how colossal the manufactured overreaction is. Republicans are practically salivating as they try to convince themselves and the American people that Hillary could somehow be charged with a crime – which is a preposterous notion, but ignoring the fact that it was apparently very common to use personal emails for official business.
The Clinton campaign held up the discovery of Powell’s emails as a vindication, stating that “this announcement about Secretary Powell’s emails shows just how routine it is for government bureaucrats to go overboard when it comes to judging whether information is too sensitive for the public to see. Hillary Clinton agrees with her predecessor that his emails, like hers, are being inappropriately subjected to over-classification. She joins his call for these emails to be released so that the public can view the contents for itself.”
At the end of the day, however, this is nothing but petty semantics that distract us all from the real issues facing our country, and holds little value except as a symbol of how deeply the Republicans fear Hillary Clinton. All the prattling about Clinton’s emails will not be enough to hide the fact that the Republicans have no solutions to offer this country – only deceit and division.
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