The perfect bookend to my previous post today, in which I flayed Hillary Clinton and her defenders for their evolving dishonesty in light of a "devastating" new Inspector General report that undercuts and explodes various lies she's told for more than a year to spin away her national security-compromising email scandal. Here is the Morning Joe crew just slamming her updated talking points, which are unadulterated garbage. Rather than perform another in-depth fact check, I'll let MSNBC (!) do the heavy lifting, as they've done before, to their credit. Seriously, watch the whole thing. "Everything she said in there was just a lie:"
The only half-hearted defense floated in the entire segment comes not from Hillary supporter Mika Brzezinski, but by a Politico reporter, who suggests that perhaps not adhering to some email rules really isn't that big of a deal in the scheme of things. What this point completely misses, as Joe Scarborough points out, is the consequences of Hillary's deliberate failure to follow those rules or alter her behavior in the face of serious warnings. Because she used her unsecure bootleg server exclusively for all of her email use, she trafficked in thousands of classified emails -- including dozens at the secret, top secret and above top secret. That's the biggest reason the Powell comparison is fundamentally dishonest. In the extremely likely event that her server was penetrated by foreign hackers (the new report reveals Hillary's email guru being forced to shut down the server because it was under sustained malicious attack), hostile actors have all of that information. Information that the State Department deemed so sensitive and potentially harmful to US interests that they declined to release 22 emails in any form whatsoever, even with heavy redactions. That's the point here. National security. Hillary's arrogance is obnoxious, of course, but the stakes here are much higher than that.
I'll leave you with an additional reminder: The one big claim the Morning Joe panel didn't get around to tackling is her assertion -- replayed at the front end of the clip -- that she's turned over all of her work-related emails. She said this, by the way, while attempting to explain away why she was the only former Secretary of State approached by the IG who refused to cooperate with this independent investigation. The fact is that she and her lawyers unilaterally deleted 32,000 emails from that private server, which the IG's findings reveal she set up for the express purpose of 'thwarting records requests,' as the New York Times has put it. Of those destroyed "personal" emails, we know for a fact (thanks to other hacks) that at least a handful of them were actually work-related. Would anyone else be surprised if there are additional work messages that magically disappeared with that batch of 32,000? If she'd wanted to be fully transparent, she would have submitted to supervision from a trustworthy independent entity (like the IG) during the deletion process. She did not, by design. Perhaps the only people who know the full truth are a small cadre of Clinton loyalists...and maybe the FBI.
