Lauren Carroll:
Hillary Clinton said that she has told the public a consistent and truthful story about classified material on her emails, and FBI director James Comey backed her up. That immediately caught our attention.
On the July 31 edition of Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace played a video montage of several times Clinton said something like: “I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time.”
Wallace remarked, “After a long investigation, FBI director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”
That’s not what Clinton heard Comey say, she responded.
“Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” she said.
Clinton appears to have selective hearing.
In saying Comey called her answers “truthful,” Clinton was apparently referring to — and putting a positive spin on — a comment Comey made in a July 7 congressional hearing regarding Clinton’s closed-door interview with the FBI as part of their investigation. Comey said, “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.”
In her interview with Wallace, Clinton was making the point that what she told the public is consistent with what she told the FBI, and Comey said what she told the FBI was “truthful,” campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin said.
So Clinton’s statement implies that Comey has confirmed that her public comments are accurate. That is incorrect.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, asked Comey at the July 7 congressional hearing, “Did she lie to the public?”
Comey responded, “That’s a question I’m not qualified to answer.”
He also said he hadn’t compared Clinton’s public comments with the FBI interview to see if there were inconsistencies. There is no transcript of the FBI interview.
When Comey announced the FBI’s findings July 5, it was clear that there are obvious inconsistencies between what Clinton said publicly about classified information on her private email server before her FBI interview and what the FBI found. Pointedly, Clinton said there wasn’t any classified information in her email, and he said there was.
Take the video Wallace played on Fox News Sunday. In it, Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials” (March 10, 2015); “I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time” (July 25, 2015); “I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified” (Aug. 18, 2015).
But Comey reported that, of the tens of thousands of emails investigators reviewed, 113 individual emails contained classified information, and three of them bore markings signifying their classification status. (Information can still be classified even if it does not have a label.) Eight email threads contained top-secret information, the highest level of classification, 36 contained secret information, and the remaining eight contained confidential information.
About 2,000 emails have been retroactively classified, or up-classified, meaning the information was not classified when it was emailed, but it is now.
Hillary Rodham Clinton LIES. She is a hot turd bag-of-lies. Get rid of her.
To people like Greg, I ask, “why does she lie?”