More Records Releases Loom for Hillary Clinton Lawsuits are being heard in federal courts as the presidential campaign hits its final stretch: Byron Tau
http://www.wsj.com/articles/media-conservatives-seek-release-of-hillary-clintons-records-1473069601
Thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton’s official records are set to be released in coming weeks, testing the Democratic presidential candidate as she looks to maintain her advantage in the final two months of the campaign.
On the heels of recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation documents on Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email account at the State Department, the coming disclosures are likely to provide fodder for Republican Donald Trump. While Mrs. Clinton has held a durable if narrower lead over her rival in polls, there are signs that recent records releases have raised issues of trust with voters.
Dozens of lawsuits, mostly brought by conservative groups and Republican operatives against the State Department, are being heard in federal courts. Many of the documents still to come are expected to involve correspondence between Mrs. Clinton, her aides and employees at her family’s charitable foundation.
Similar releases over the summer generated days of news coverage about the relationship between Mrs. Clinton and the foundation’s corporate, foreign and individual donors. In September alone, government agencies are expected to hand over thousands of pages of records from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office.
The two candidates, meanwhile, spent Labor Day hopscotching around the battleground of Ohio, as did both of their vice-presidential picks. Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters on her new campaign plane, strongly suggested that the Russian government was trying to tilt the race for Mr. Trump.
Related Coverage
The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The State Department has been ordered to detail a plan for making public the nearly 15,000 emails that were deleted from the private server used by Mrs. Clinton and later recovered as part of the FBI probe into whether she or her aides mishandled classified information. The probe concluded with a recommendation that Mrs. Clinton not be prosecuted.
Mrs. Clinton has said that any emails she deleted were purely personal in nature and that she turned over all her work-related emails to the State Department.
Mrs. Clinton continues to lead her GOP rival in polling, fundraising and in campaign ground operations in key states. Yet a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month showed 59% of registered voters have an unfavorable view of Mrs. Clinton. That’s only one point better than that of Mr. Trump.
The FBI summary, released late last week, showed Mrs. Clinton having little command of basic requirements dealing with protection of government secrets and spotty recall of the details surrounding her email setup. On about three dozen occasions, Mrs. Clinton told FBI agents she couldn’t recall certain facts.
The FBI report’s findings seem at odds with Mrs. Clinton’s repeated insistence that she was scrupulous in protecting classified information and sophisticated in the workings of government.
Mrs. Clinton told the FBI she was aware that as secretary of state, she had the power to order documents classified or declassified—but couldn’t give examples of any time she had used that procedure. She told investigators that she believed a “C” on a document denoting that it was “confidential” was in fact about alphabetical order.
She further told federal agents, in their summary of the conversation, that she “did not pay attention to the ‘level’ of classified information”—only that she took all classified information seriously.
In a question-and-answer session with reporters Monday, Mrs. Clinton said, “The fact that I couldn’t remember certain meetings…doesn’t any way factor into my commitment that I had and still have to classified material.”
The FBI report also says Mrs. Clinton received no instructions about saving public records as she was leaving the State Department in early 2013. Toward the end of her tenure, Mrs. Clinton suffered a concussion and a subsequent blood clot and was ordered to work for only a few hours a day. She “could not recall every briefing she received,” she told the FBI.
Susan MacManus, a political-science professor at the University of South Florida, said that younger voters, in particular, find Mrs. Clinton’s answers unsatisfactory and her handling of email technology worrisome. “Technologically, she doesn’t seem on top of it, and to them, that suggests you’re not competent in today’s work force,” Ms. MacManus said. CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
