Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like everyone to stop talking about her infamous emails as if the controversy that dogged her 2016 presidential campaign has anything to do with the investigation into whether Donald Trump illegally retained highly classified documents at his Florida home.
Ms Clinton weighed in on Republican calls for Mr Trump’s case to be considered under a made-up standard based on the decision by then-FBI director James Comey to not seek criminal charges against her for allegedly having sent and recieved emails later deemed to contain classified information via a personal email server while she was Secretary of State.
Many of Mr Trump’s allies have suggested that the fact that Ms Clinton never faced criminal charges should be considered precedent under which charging a prominent GOP politician for any crime related to classified records would be unfair and evidence of bias at the Department of Justice.
Writing on Twitter, the former first lady, New York senator and top US diplomat opened with a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone: “I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails”.
“As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a ‘Clinton Standard,’” she said, adding that she had actually had “zero emails that were classified” on her personal server.
Ms Clinton pointed out that Mr Comey, who would later be fired by Mr Trump in mid-2017, had not been correct in concluding that three separate classified documents had been sent via the private system, which had been located at the New York home she shares with her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
Mr Comey did admit that the documents in question had been incorrectly deemed classified after the fact. Even if they had been correctly considered classified, the retroactive classification would have been far different than Mr Trump’s retention of documents bearing clear markings of classification levels as high as “top secret”.
She further noted that the Trump-era State Department had found she’d had no such emails on that unclassified system, which she’d used instead of a government-provided email address. That State Department report brought the case of “her emails” to a close after more than a half-decade of accusations against her.
“By contrast,” she wrote, Mr Trump had “hundreds of documents clearly marked classified” at a point when the investigation into his conduct had “just started”.
“I’m more tired of talking about this than anyone, but here we are,” she said.
