Three False Statements Hillary Made in her CNN Interview By David Freddoso
http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/three-false-statements-hillary-made-in-her-cnn-interview/article/2567836
Hillary Clinton has run a carefully stage-managed campaign so far in which she has repeatedly met with pre-selected crowds and avoided answering questions from the press. In the wake of her email scandal, several polls have shown that voters don’t believe she is an honest person, even if many are still willing to vote for her.
So it was a big deal this week when candidate Clinton gave her first big national televised one-on-one to CNN. Some have focused on the fact that she “played the victim,” blaming political opponents for many of her self-created problems. But more fundamentally, here are three falsehoods she told in the interview:
“I didn’t have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages”
She’s referring here to her work emails, which she managed to hide from at least one FOIA request (by Gawker) when she decided to conduct all of her State Department business on a private, unsecured email server.
Her statement here — that she didn’t have to turn anything over — is simply untrue, except in the sense that she literally could have broken federal records laws and deleted or withheld all of her work emails. It is doubtful that she’d want to admit she’d ever considered such a thing, but that’s one way of reading her statement here.
The fact is, she had to turn over everything. Moreover, she didn’t — the Benghazi committee has already uncovered evidence that she did withhold work emails and even altered some of the ones she handed over to State after the fact.
“There was no law, there was no regulation, there was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.”
This might bring back memories of Al Gore’s old “no controlling legal authority” comments of 1997. The technical meaning of Gore’s statement was that no one had previously been prosecuted in a court of law for doing the illegal thing he had done — soliciting campaign donations from the White House.
But Gore’s comment was more untruthful evasion than outright falsehood. Clinton’s comment is just false. This from Politifact, citing as its authority Daniel Metcalfe, the Clinton-era director of the Office of Information Policy at the Justice Department:
It would have been a violation of the [National Archives and Records Administration’s] rules in the Code of Federal Regulations for Clinton to use personal email exclusively, Metcalfe said. The code requires federal agencies to make and preserve records that duly document agency activity, so that they are readily available when needed — such as for FOIA requests or congressional inquiries. …” Anyone at NARA would have said you can’t use a personal email account for all of your official business,” said Metcalfe, who held his position in part during former President Bill Clinton’s administration.
“People should and do trust me.”
Literally, this is true — there do exist people who trust Hillary Clinton.
But in common parlance, this means that most people trust her, and that isn’t true. The last CNN poll showed 57 percent do not believe her to be “honest and trustworthy.”
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