Oklahoma City
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker says Hillary Clinton’s habit of communicating with Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton Foundation employee, while serving as secretary of state is “wrong on so many levels.”
“It’s part of a troubling trend across the board where the Clintons seemed to be held to a different standard than everyone else,” said Walker in an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD following his address to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on the revelation that Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton associate who had been denied a post at the State Department in 2009, had been emailing the secretary of state briefings about Libya, before and after the upheaval in that North African country. At the time, Blumenthal was on the payroll of the Clinton Foundation and was also consulting for American businessmen with interests in Libya. Clinton frequently forwarded the emails, sent to her personal address, to other State Department employees. Twenty-four of the emails from Blumenthal have been released.
Walker, who may be running for president, said “more information” should be released about who Clinton may have had email contact with and what information was being sent to and from un-secure servers. “The thing that she did appears to be, if not confidential, at least sensitive State Department information,” he said. “I think anything that is anyway related to that should absolutely be made available.”
The Republican also touched on other recent scandals involving the Clintons, including the allegations that former president Bill Clinton was paid for speeches by foreign governments while Hillary was secretary of state. “For the sake of argument, assume all this isn’t criminal and isn’t violating rules, though it’s hard to argue that,” said Walker. “Just, at what point does basic common sense kick in that this is a conflict of interest? All my kids are in college, they’ve probably taken basic ethics courses. They can tell you right off the bat that if you’re secretary of state and your spouse is making millions of dollars off of speeches paid for by foreign countries, that’s probably a conflict of interest.”
Do these conflicts and scandals preclude Clinton from the White House? Walker didn’t go quite so far. “If you don’t understand that basic sense of conflict of interest, do you have enough common sense to be the president of the United States?” he said.
