Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine on Sunday likened the ongoing WikiLeaks release of thousands of hacked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman to the Nixon-era Watergate scandal.
“At least in my lifetime, I can’t think of a precedent of a foreign nation trying to destabilize an American election,” the Democratic vice presidential hopeful told Fox News’ Bret Baier.
Kaine continued, “I brought up a couple weeks ago the Watergate analogy of trying to destabilize an election by going in and grabbing files. This is current version of that Watergate attack, I think.”
Upon drawing the Watergate comparison, Kaine was asked whether Clinton and her allies at the State Department made a similar attempt to “cover-up” her email scandal by urging FBI officials to change the classified markings on some of the emails stored on her unsecure server.
“Senator, Watergate was also about a cover-up,” Baier noted. “To your knowledge, did anyone associated with Secretary Clinton or her campaign … seek changes to classification of e-mails?”
“I have no knowledge that that happened, absolutely not,” Kaine responded.
WikiLeaks released its latest batches of emails on Saturday and Sunday, bringing the total published so far from the archives of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to over 12,000. While Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump, continues to battle allegations of sexual assault, he has used material found in the emails to wage war against the former secretary of state.
“I love WikiLeaks,” Trump declared at a campaign rally last week.
Meanwhile, Kaine said each document dump has become less significant or troublesome for the Clinton campaign.
“I think the marginal utility of each successive dump gets less and less,” he told Baier.
