Yesterday, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked if Hillary Clinton was “lying straight out” over her email fiasco after a new State Inspector General report noted that she had violated the Federal Records Act by deleting emails she deemed to be personal. Now, we have The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that the Clinton campaign’s position in this controversy is “not borne out by the facts.”
Mitchell played a clip from Clinton’s interview with Univision on her reaction to the IG report:
“Well, there maybe reports that come out, but nothing has changed. It’s the same story. Just like previous secretaries of state, I used a personal email—many people did. It was not at all unprecedented. I have turned over all of my emails—no one else can say that.”
Cillizza wasn’t having any of it:
“I mean, yeah—it’s not right. You can think this is a small issue or a big issue in the campaign, or no issue in the campaign, but what she said there is not borne out by the facts.”
He added that this report did look back at her predecessors, and that Secretary of State Colin Powell did have a private email address. But no one before her had exclusively used a private email for official business—“that is did not have a state.gov email address set up at all.” Moreover, Cillizza said that the rules over communications concerning government officials got stricter over time, so the rules “and what was allowable there” are not the same under Clinton.
Lastly, he said the report noted that this private system shouldn’t have been set up in the first place, and that the inspector general couldn’t find any evidence that Clinton and her team conducted a legal review over whether she could use a private email system.
In closing, Cillizza said, “What Secretary Clinton said there is not entirely accurate frankly. There are just facts that we know that have been unearthed by the independent—the independent inspector general’s office, and there’s an FBI investigation into her email set up. This is not just partisans talking back and forth.”
Earlier this month, CNN’s Jake Tapper took Clinton to task for saying that her email server was “absolutely permitted.”
“No, that’s no true. She says that because she permitted herself and there was no one absolutely prohibiting her,” he said. He concluded by saying, “A reminder to all the politicians out there. You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinions, not to your own facts.”
The Clinton campaign still contends it did nothing wrong.
BONUS: Be sure to read Guy's post about how MSNBC's Morning Joe ripped into Clinton over her emails this morning.