The media is too hard on Hillary Clinton, most likely because Clinton is a woman, a former executive editor for the New York Times argued on Monday.
“We, for some reason, expect total purity from a woman candidate,” Jill Abramson said in a podcast for Politico. Abramson was fired from the Times in 2014 for what she said was “an issue with management in the newsroom.” Abramson caused waves prior to that with allegations that she was being paid less than her predecessor due to gender discrimination.
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“I did not feel, during my regime, that we were giving her way more scrutiny than anyone else,” Abramson added. “Where I think Hillary Clinton faces … certainly more of a burden is that the controversies she’s been in are immediately labeled, you know, travel-gate or email-gate … if you actually asked people what about any of these controversies bothers them, they don’t know anything specific about any of them.”
“The issue, to me, that’s at the crux is that everything that we know that was classified was classified after the fact, after the emails were sent,” Abramson said. “And so, why is that a big deal?”
Clinton is under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for using and trying to conceal her use of a private email during her tenure as secretary of state. More than 30,000 of those emails have been released as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, though Clinton also deleted many that she deemed of a personal nature.
Of those that were available for released, 22 were deemed “top secret” and thus withheld by the State Department. More than 2,000 are marked at lower levels of classification.
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Clinton has argued that the emails were not classified at the time they were sent or received, though that is immaterial to whether a violation of the law took place place. And in January, the FBI expanded its probe to investigate whether her work at the nonprofit Clinton Foundation as secretary of state violated public corruption laws.
