RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nobody thinks Hillary Clinton’s email controversy is funny, which is why her past attempts to make jokes about the issue have fallen flat. But the Democrat presidential hopeful doesn’t seem to have learned from her past stumbles.

She laughed derisively when asked on CNN to respond to recent comments made by Governor Chris Christie regarding her problematic email arrangement.

At the GOP debate last night, Governor Christie, a former federal prosecutor, took aim at Hillary’s email problem, saying: “The question is, who’s going to prosecute Hillary Clinton? The Obama White House seems to have no interest. The Justice Department seems to have no interest. I think it’s time to put a former federal prosecutor on the same stage with Hillary Clinton, and I will prosecute her during those debates on that stage. She knows she’s wrong, and she cannot look in the mirror at herself and she cannot tell the American people the truth.”

Christie hit on the subject again during an appearance on Fox and Friends Thursday morning:

Chris Christie: Well, listen, I think there is real, real serious questions that need to be investigated and ultimately prosecuted, I think, regarding her handling of classified information. David Petraeus was prosecuted for it. Sandy Berger was prosecuted for it. Hillary Clinton is not above the law. But you know this, absolutely true. Steve. There’s a lawlessness to this administration. You don’t want to enforce the immigration law in cities, you’re going to have sanctuary cities across the country, the president will look the other way. I want to make it clear to the voters this morning: with a president Chris Christie, sanctuary cities will end at the beginning of this administration. And we will enforce the law, whether it’s marijuana laws across the country or whether it’s this. We’ll enforce the law. Hillary Clinton should be held to the same standard, and by the way, she should be transparent about it too and answer questions, which she is unwilling to do.

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told Hillary about Christie’s comments, she cackled like it was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard in her life.

But Wolf continued: “He says Russians, Chinese, even 18 year olds could have hacked into your server. You think that was possible — that they hacked into your server?”

“There’s no evidence of that,” Clinton said dismissively. “And you know — this is over-heated rhetoric, baseless charges — trying to somehow gain a footing in the debate and in the primary and it really doesn’t deserve any comment.”

Former intelligence officials interviewed by the AP last month seemed to think it deserved a comment.

Unless they were encrypted to U.S. government standards, “In my opinion there is a 100% chance that all emails sent and received by her, including all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA,” said former CIA case officer Jason Matthews, an expert in Russian intelligence. Then again, Clinton defenders point out, the State Department’s unclassified email system also has been penetrated by Russian hackers, so it’s unclear her use of home server made a difference.

What makes Hillary’s email arrangement so egregious is that her unclassified homebrew system apparently illegally held highly classified info.

She went on to claim preposterously to Blitzer that she has been asking for over a year to testify before the Benghazi Select Committee.

“They would not let me appear,” she stated emphatically. “Finally — and I’m very happy about this — I will be appearing toward the end of October and I will look forward to answering their questions. I’m trying to be transparent as possible,” she insisted.

(I hear Hillary has also been asking the DNC for more Democrat debates, but that awful Martin O’Malley just won’t let it happen.)

On July 31, Politifact felt the need to “fact-check” the “social media meme” that Hillary Clinton ”refuses to testify before Congress about what really happened at Benghazi where four Americans died.”

They found “no evidence that Clinton has been opposed to testifying before Gowdy’s panel.”

What has kept her from testifying so far are disagreements between the two camps over scheduling and formatting — not over whether she would testify or not. Any past disagreements about the scope of her testimony appear to have been resolved as of this writing. We rate the claim False.

In other words, Hillary hasn’t testified in the past year because of scheduling conflicts. Not because the Benghazi Select Committee refused to let her.

Seems like Politifact killed two birds with one stone with that fact-check.