Last February, Donald Trump and his surrogates began making a comparison between Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the break-in at Democratic Headquarters and the subsequent cover-up by the committee to re-elect Richard Nixon president. Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano suggested the unavailability of every email “was far worse than an 18-and-a-half-minute gap on President Nixon’s internal office recording equipment.” Napolitano, who once served as a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, did not recognize the fact Nixon’s efforts to withhold information were related to an actual crime. And I still find it hypocritical those most disgusted with Clinton’s actions do not hold Dick Cheney, who failed to archive ANY of the his emails leading up to the Iraq war, to the same standard.
I thought the comparison was a stretch until this past weekend when Democrats on the house committee investigating the email issue released one of Colin Powell’s emails to Secretary Clinton. This new information made me realize the resemblance between these two events is less about who did what but the veracity of the principals. On June 3, 1983, White House counsel John Dean testified before the Senate select committee investigating Watergate. He told the panel he had warned Nixon further efforts at cover-up would have disastrous results.
I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.
Following his testimony, other participants in the scandal vowed no such conversation took place and Dean was attempting to cover his posterior to avoid a potential jail sentence. In other words, at this point it was just a case of he said/they said. That is, until Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a self-activated recording system in the oval office. And a March 21, 1973 conversation between Dean and Nixon included the following:
…there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer–within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself.
From that point on Dean’s account of the entire scandal was viewed as the most reliable. His accurate recollection of this conversation resulted in his being given the benefit of the doubt on other points on which he testified.
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and her FBI testimony. On August 31, 2016 the New York Times reported Clinton “told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to use a personal email account.” Four days later, the Miami Herald quoted Powell as saying Clinton was “using the private email server for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.” One more case of she said/he said.
There is only one problem. Last week a January 23, 2009 email exchange between Powell and Clinton, part of the record the FBI turned over to the House committee on Benghazi, was made public. NOTE: This is only one day after Clinton is sworn in as secretary of state, not a year as Powell had claimed. (Source: CNN.com January 22, 2009)
Clinton had asked Powell whether he used a BlackBerry. Here are excerpts from his reply.
I didn’t have a BlackBerry. What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient). So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.
However, there is a real danger. If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it it (sic) government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law. Reading about the President’s BB rules this morning, it sounds like it won’t be as useful as it used to be. Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.
As with John Dean, this is no longer an instance of she said/he said. Clinton’s recollection of the timing and content of their exchange is much more accurate than Powell’s as proven by this source document. This in no way absolves Clinton of other instances when she and her campaign have been less than transparent. But, when FBI Director James Comey testified Clinton had not lied to the FBI during her three hours of testimony, this element of the investigation affirms Comey’s assessment. Like Dean, she deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Equally egregious, we learned yesterday Powell warned Clinton’s personal attorney Cheryl Mills, in a March 19, 2016 email, not to drag him into the email fiasco. Quote: “Hillary’s Mafia keeps trying to suck me into it.” Again, this is contrary to the facts. When questioned about the use of private emails on 60 Minutes, Clinton said she had received advice about using non-official systems, but did not name Powell. And based on historical precedence, Clinton assumed her testimony before the FBI and supporting documents would not be made public. If Secretary Powell has anyone to blame, he should be pointing fingers at the House Benghazi committee which demanded the FBI turn over their notes and documents associated with Clinton’s testimony.
For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP