Hillary Clinton’s behavior as the head of the State Department was a violation of her oath of office and should disqualify her from serving in the White House, said Michael Mukasey, who served as the nation’s top law enforcement official under President George W. Bush.
“How she treated, and what she did, with government secrets, when she was secretary of state … exquisitely sums up the case against her presidency,” he said at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday evening. “She sent and received secret and top secret and beyond top secret information and emails on an unsecure, private email system, instead of the secure government system. And she did it without authorization.”
“She said, falsely, that there was no classified information. She said, falsely, that what she did was authorized,” added Mukasey, who served as attorney general from 2007 to 2009.
“She said … when we travel to sensitive places like Russia, we often received warnings from department security officials to leave our Blackberrys, laptops [and] anything that communicated with the outside world on the plane with their batteries removed to prevent foreign intelligence services from compromising them,” he added. “And then she added, falsely, even in friendly settings we conducted business under secret security precautions, taking care when and how we used our technology.”
“We’re soon gonna hear the same infamous question we heard about the death of four Americans in Benghazi: ‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’ ” Mukasey said.
“It makes a big difference,” Mukasey said. “Hillary Clinton is running for … the presidency, whose powers and duties are defined by that law. The most important power that law gives the president is to be commander in chief of the armed forces to protect the country. That law imposes, really, only one substantive duty on the president. That law is, as written in the Constitution, to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
“Hillary Clinton took a similar oath before she became secretary of state,” he added. “Hillary Clinton is asking the people of this country … to make her the first president in history to take the constitutional oath of office after having already violated it.”
“The message from this convention to everyone watching these proceedings, and the message to her, should be loud, clear and short,” he concluded. “No way, Hillary. No way on earth.”
