The New York Times has apparently been struck with a sudden and severe case of amnesia regarding its own position on Hillary Clinton and the shady things she did with her emails as secretary of state.
Here’s the Times editorial board commenting on Clinton’s email scandal six months before the 2016 election:
Now here’s the Times in a haughty editorial about a State Department investigation of itself that found no deliberate illegality among staff under Clinton’s tenure: “What about her emails? Donald Trump raised that question like a red flag for three years, as candidate and president, casting doubts on how Hillary Clinton used a private email server to communicate with her staff and others while she was secretary of state.”
Uh, was it Donald Trump who made Clinton install a private server in her home and then have it destroyed, along with 30,000 of the emails it contained?
Nope. She did that all on her own, and the Times’s editors were there at least pretending to be concerned about it. That was just three years ago.
Those 30,000 emails, by the way, were arguably the property of the U.S. government. Clinton deleted them, then bleached the server in hopes that they’d never be recovered. In essence, she tried to destroy government property.
But faster than you can say “whataboutism!” the Times editorial board on Monday attempted to equate Clinton’s email practices with those of Trump administration officials.
“Despite Mr. Trump’s professed concern about the integrity of government communications,” the paper said, “His administration doesn’t seem to take it too seriously.”
Okay, then — let’s fine, fire, and penalize anyone in the current administration that’s using private email addresses to conduct official business. But let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as Clinton hooking up her own homebrew in a basement so that she could disappear anything she wanted to be kept secret, then desperately trying to destroy evidence.
Multiple investigations into Clinton and her server scandal found malfeasance. Former FBI Director James Comey said in 2016 that she was “extremely careless” with classified information. The latest internal investigation at State found nearly 40 staff members at the department who, because of Clinton’s private server needs, had violated protocols that put government information in jeopardy. An Associated Press report last week — which was even run on the Times website — said that the investigation concluded that “Clinton’s use of the private email had increased the vulnerability of classified information.”
The Times editorial board may have forgotten all the serious problems with Clinton and her emails. But its members can remind themselves by simply looking back and reading their own position from three years ago.
