The Washington Post claims that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has “gained an apparent ally…in her fight to limit the political damage from her growing email controversy.”
The supposed ally is another former secretary of state, Colin Powell. Why? Two of Powell’s emails have been retroactively classified. (He doesn’t think they should be.)
But there are obvious differences between Powell’s receipt of two emails and Clinton’s robust private email operation. Let’s compare the facts as set forth in the Post’s own piece.
First, “tens of thousands of emails…passed through the private server Clinton used while in office.” Powell did not have a private server for his State Department emails.
It is simply not reasonable to compare a small number of now classified emails – and by small, again, we mean two — forwarded to Powell’s private email account with Clinton’s decision to circumvent the use of a government server entirely.
Second, Clinton’s predecessors have had far, far fewer emails retroactively classified than Clinton.
The Post reports that “1,600 Clinton emails” have been “retroactively classified all or in part, according to a senior congressional aide with access to the material, with the vast majority in the lowest-level category of ‘confidential.'”
22 of these 1,600 emails contained “top secret” information.
At the end of the piece we learn that the inspector general’s (IG) office reviewed emails to and from Clinton’s predecessors “dating between February 2003 and June 2008.”
The IG found that a grand total of 12 – 2 emails sent to Powell and 10 to members of Condoleezza Rice’s staff – contained “classified national security information.”
Of course, 1,600 is far greater than 12.
And there is nothing in the Post‘s account indicating that any of these 12 emails contained “top secret” information.
Yet, the Post‘s article is framed in such a way as to lead the reader to believe there is some direct comparison between the two emails forwarded to Powell and Clinton’s use of a private email server.
The Post notes that Powell’s two emails were “uncovered late last year by the State Department’s inspector general and, he said, brought to his attention by the department in recent weeks.”
That is, the two emails were brought to Powell’s attention as the controversy over Clinton’s private server has grown and as the Democratic candidate has sought talking points to deflect attention away from her poor judgment. Some in the press are willing to play along.
