There goes another name off Hillary Clinton's shrinking Christmas card list.
When Clinton loses Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Anne Gearan over Clinton's use of a private email account while secretary of state, it's not surprising that the presumptive candidate for president who was previously the presumptive Democrat nominee would decide she better get ahead of this scandal posthaste, reportedly today.
Back in January 2013, for example, Gearan gushed that some of Clinton's "greatest accomplishments" while running the State Department took the form of "just showing up." Impressive indeed, though one doubts this ever makes its way onto a Clinton '16 bumper sticker.
Gearan appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show last night and made it clear that she's no Clinton lackey, at least not anymore, at least not while a smooth landing from the latest Clinton turbulence remains uncertain --
GUEST HOST STEVE KORNACKI: So what about too that we're hearing today, like, Lanny Davis has been out there, James Carville today was out there on this network, basically saying, he kept on saying, all of this, all of the questions about her emails, all of the things she has yet to addressed publicly, these are just right-wing talking points. It reminds me of her initial response, everybody says, you know, to the Lewinsky scandal back in '98, vast right-wing conspiracy. It seems like they are trying to bring that language back into this. Can they do that?
GEARAN: Well, I mean, respectfully no. I mean, you don't have to have talked to any Republican in the last week to have the same basic question I posed a moment ago -- why did she set up a parallel email system to the State Department one? I mean, there may be an explanation for it -- great, let's hear it! But that has nothing to do with it being a Republican hit job. That's a simple question of public accountability.
KORNACKI: Right, and especially when there's the fact here as well that the president himself, this was his administration saying you can't be keeping things exclusively, privately ...
GEARAN: Right, and oh by the way the president was emailing with her on that account. It's not like it was a secret.
Doesn't that make Obama's dubious claim that he learned of Clinton's off-the-books email "through news reports" a demonstrable falsehood?
Further evidence that Clinton is the antithesis of transparency in public service comes with the revelation that 55,000 "pages" of emails given to the State Department from her in December were literally that ... printed pages. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto elaborates on the ruse --
Why did Mrs. Clinton have her staff go through the trouble of printing out, boxing and shipping 50,000 or 55,000 pages instead of just sending a copy of the electronic record? One can only speculate, but there is an obvious advantage: Printed files are less informative and far harder to search than the electronic originals.
Remember this scene from All the President's Men? Back to Taranto --
Because State has only printouts of emails, department personnel responding to a Freedom of Information Act request have to go through the whole haystack rather than type "needle" into a search engine. At best, that would mean long delays in FOIA compliance.
Likewise, printouts are not subject to electronic discovery in the event of investigation or lawsuit. The (New York) Times reports that department lawyers responding to a request from the House Select Committee on Benghazi took two months to find "roughly 900 pages pertaining to the Benghazi attacks." And printouts do not include electronic "metadata," which can provide crucial forensic evidence.
What's still missing? "Months and months" of Clinton's emails while she was secretary of state, House Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Benghazi committee, said on Sunday's Face the Nation -- including any from Oct. 11, 2011, the day that an "iconic" photo was taken of Clinton in sunglasses looking at her BlackBerry while on a plane bound for Libya.
"It strains credibility to believe that if you're on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy, that there's not a single document that's been turned over to Congress," Gowdy told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.
