Lawrence O’Donnell has pretty much become MSNBC’s resident Hillary Clinton fact checker in recent days.
The MSNBC host appeared on Alex Wagner’s “Now” Tuesday to discuss the press conference earlier that day during which Clinton alleged that she chose to exclusively use a personal e-mail account during her four years at the State Department because it was more “convenient” than carrying around two separate devices.
“Convenience is not a choice you have in government,” O’Donnell declared on the MSNBC program. “She had a regulation, a 2009 regulation that applied only to her, meaning applied to her for the first time. This was not a regulation Jeb Bush lived under because he wasn’t secretary of State. It was not a regulation that [former secretary of State] Colin Powell lived under.”
“That regulation said that her e-mail must be preserved in the State Department record-keeping system, and it wasn’t,” O’Donnell clarified, suggesting that Clinton lied during the news conference Tuesday when she alleged that she “fully complied with every rule that [she] was governed by.”
“It was not in compliance with that regulation,” O’Donnell emphasized.
During Wagner’s show last week after reports of Clinton’s personal e-mail account surfaced, O’Donnell debunked comparisons being drawn between Clinton and Jeb Bush, who owns the server that operates the private e-mail address he used while serving as Florida governor and made his e-mails available for everyone to see online.
O’Donnell also said that Clinton’s e-mail system was “designed to defy the law.”
Despite her clear effort to dismiss the e-mail controversy by holding the press conference Tuesday, Clinton merely raised more questions and provided fuel for her critics ahead of her likely announcement of her bid for president in 2016.
