An honest criticism of Paul Thompson's email scandal thesis.

[paulthompson]

29. That is true

Here's a couple of timeline entries about that:

March 2007 - 2008: The Bush Administration gets embroiled in a private email scandal. A Congressional oversight committee investigates allegations that the White House fired US attorneys for political reasons. The committee asks Bush officials to turn over relevant emails, only to find that government work had been conducted on private email addresses. Millions of emails are deleted and permanently lost, preventing the committee from continuing their investigation. Bush officials use email accounts associated with a private gwb43.com server owned and controlled by the Republican National Committee, which is a private political entity not covered by government oversight laws. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2007) (Vox, 3/2/2015) In 2015, shortly after Clinton's use of a private email address will be revealed, Vox will comment, "That [Bush administration email] scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush's presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama's first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as secretary of state, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same." Vox will also note, "Perhaps even more stunning is that the Obama White House, whose top officials were presumably exchanging frequent emails with Clinton, apparently did not insist she adopt an official email account." (Vox, 3/2/2015)


June 20, 2007: Clinton publicly criticizes the Bush administration's use of non-governmental email accounts: While campaigning for president, Clinton says, "Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps. We know about secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts. ... It's a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok." (ABC News, 3/6/2015) (The Hill, 3/5/2015) This is a reference to a scandal that became public earlier in the month, where it was found that White House adviser Karl Rove and other officials had used private email accounts and then deleted all their emails before investigators could get them. (Vox, 3/2/2015)