Hillary Clinton, who made a practice of stonewalling as first lady on issues ranging from Travelgate, her secretive healthcare task force, and the Whitewater scandal, is facing new pressure to come clean on Emailgate.
Just as in April of 1994 when she donned a now-famous pink suit to emerge from her “zone of privacy” to take questions for 70 minutes, the media and some Democrats are clamoring for her to fight the latest scandal with more than a tweet.
On NBC’s “Today” show, for example, Mark Halperin, co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics, said the former secretary of state’s email affair, in which she operated her own internet server and didn’t comply with rules to use a State account and store emails for history and transparency, demands a human response.
“Today” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie: “Going to take more than a tweet, then?”
Halperin: “It’s going to take more than a tweet. She’s gonna have to talk.”
Halperin and MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said the email affair reminded many of the tactics used to block the press during the Clinton administration.”It’s so Clintonesque,” said Scarborough.
“It’s destructive, it’s distractive, and you know you’re going to get more,” said Halperin. “This plays to all the worst things people have thought about her over the years, secretive and playing by her own rules,” said added.
For some, Clinton’s reaction and that of her team harkens back to the early days of the Clinton administration when they circled the wagons amid a growing list of scandals. It also provides an easy model for congressional critics to use as they chart out which committees might want to open hearings.
One Clinton expert said that “everything in her past is relevant and is fair game” for critics and the media to go over as they try to paste a pattern of behavior together.
In 1994, the pressure for Clinton to personally address the scandals prompted her to host the “Pink Press Conference,” during which she deftly handled mostly easy questions from the media.
According to a New York Times report of the event, “Mrs. Clinton said she was setting aside her desire for a ‘zone of privacy’ to set the record straight on commodities and real estate investments that she and Bill Clinton made while he was Attorney General and Governor of Arkansas.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
