On Sunday Clinton, supporter and former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said it was time to “move on” from Hillary Clinton’s emails and instead focus on the “real issues.” “It’s been investigated, no action has been taken by the Justice Department,” he said, “They found no basis for any kind of action. I really do think it’s time for the candidates and for the American people to move on and talk about the real issues,”
Is Panetta correct? Is it time to move on to what he called real issues? After all, the former defense secretary has always been a “reasonable” Democrat. In a way Panetta is correct we should talk about the real issues. But where he is wrong is that Hillary’s emails are tied to her conduct as Secretary of State and her continual lies afterwards– making it is a real issue.
Ms. Clinton’s campaign strategy is to convince America that Donald Trump is not qualified to be president, it has been successful because it draws attention away from the fact that Hillary is the one who has shown herself to be unqualified to be POTUS, and those emails is what ties it all together.
Don’t forget that the email scandal grew out of the investigation of the Benghazi attack. Along with learning about the emails, via the investigation we learned that the security for the U.S. outpost in Benghazi was woefully mismanaged by the Clinton State Department, and that Ms. Clinton’s claim the attack was caused by a trailer for a lousy movie about Mohammed on YouTube was a lie. Sorry Mr. Panetta but the question did Hillary mismanage the state department, and did she lie to the public (and especially the families of the Benghazi victims) is a real issue.
Another issue connected to the emails is the Clinton Foundation/State Dept. corruption. This is an issue that came to light long before the email scandal. Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash, exposes the link between the Foundation and State by following the Clinton money trail, revealing the connection between their personal fortune, their “close personal friends,” the Clinton Foundation, foreign nations, some of the highest ranks of government and how the cash they received for the Foundation was rewarded with favors from the state department. Clinton cash exposed the link, but new emails released by Wikileaks seem to make a direct connection between favors done by State Department officials and major foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation.” Key to finding more smoking guns may be in those 33+k missing Clinton emails.
BTW if you still haven’t seen the movie version of Clinton Cash you can watch it for free here.
The question of whether or not Hillary Clinton was corrupt is a real issue.
Finally, there are the emails themselves. The email scandal is really three scandals. First when she deleted those “personal emails” she was deleting the property of the United States. There is no way to know whether those emails were personal or not. In fact, although Hillary claimed her attorneys looked through each email to determine whether they were personal, FBI director Comey said the lawyers only used headers and search terms to make that determination.
Then there’s the classified information question. Despite what Hillary and her apologists contend, Comey they found 58 email chains which contain classified information at the Clinton received them. He also said that some of the information sent by Mrs Clinton did contain these classified markings, and just as important is that Comey went on to say that someone in her position and the others around her should have recognized the sensitivity of the information they were handling and that is gross negligence.
The third issue part of the email scandal is Ms. Clinton’s lies. She lied to America when she said that Comey concluded she did nothing wrong. She also lied to America and committed perjury in her congressional testimony when she she said her lawyers looked through each email, said there was nothing classified in the emails when she received or sent them, when she said there was only one server, and when she claimed she provided all her work-related emails to the Department of State.” Well either that or FBI director Comey lied.
We still don’t know about the emails but what we know so far is that Ms. Clinton lied about them, was reckless with national security, and didn’t really turnover all her work emails. Bringing in related issues we learn she mis-managed the state department and lied to America about what caused the attack, and she used the State Department as a tool for enriching herself in corrupt pay for play deals.
With all of these lies and corrupt acts we have to agree with Mr. Panetta and concentrate on the real issues. Hillary’s email and related scandals are real issues.
