Washington Post veteran reporter and Watergate exposé legend Bob Woodward on Monday compared the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server to the missing minutes on former President Richard Nixon’s White House audio tapes.
“Follow the trail here,” Woodward said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “There are all these emails. Well, they were sent to someone or someone sent them to her. So, if things have been erased here, there’s a way to go back to these emails or who received them from Hillary Clinton.”
“So, you’ve got a massive amount of data in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes — thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.”
Woodward along with fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein broke the story surrounding Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, which eventually forced the former president to turn over thousands of hours of audio tapes (albeit with lengthy missing segments) recorded in the Oval Office and resign.
Clinton turned over the private server she used while heading the State Department to the FBI last week after investigators suspected classified information may have been transmitted over it, despite Clinton’s repeated denials she ever used it to send or receive top secret information.
The current 2016 presidential Democratic frontrunner initially said she would not relinquish the server to a third party, and deleted some 30,000 emails she claimed were personal in content before handing over the remaining emails to the State Department. Documents released by the department so far confirm top secret information was transmitted over the server, though not by Clinton. The department said the information was not designated classified at the time it was forwarded to Clinton.
“You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account,” Clinton said during a fundraising event in Iowa Friday night. “I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves.”
“I’ve said in the past that I used a single account for convenience — obviously these years later it doesn’t look so convenient,” Clinton told reporters Saturday while following up on the joke. “But the facts are the same as they have been from the very beginning of these questions being raised, and most importantly I never sent classified material on my email and I never received any that was marked classified.”
Clinton’s Republican opponents don’t find the server ordeal funny, and some said so while stumping in Iowa over the weekend.
“It was a terrible thing she did. It was a very foolish thing,” Trump told CNN at the Iowa State Fair, calling her use of a private server while in office “a criminal problem.” “There was no reason to do it. She’s got a big problem.”
“The more this story goes on, the more it becomes clear that she has lied,” former HP CEO Carly Fiorina said on ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” Sunday. “It’s clear that this server was parked in some IT firm in New Jersey getting cleaned. Boy, that raises all kinds of issues.”
Fiorina said it was “hard to believe” Clinton, as head of the State Department, never transmitted classified emails on the home-brewed server she elected to use while in office.
“Of course she did. And now we’re finding out she did,” Fiorina added. “As usual, the cover-up is worse than the crime.”
“Can you imagine, if after the bridge investigation began, I came out and said, ‘Oh, I’ve done all my business as governor on a private email server. And, I’ve deleted now 30,000 of those emails. But trust me none of it had to do with the bridge.’ Give me a break,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on CNN’s “New Day” Monday.
On Sunday ABC News reported Platte River Networks, the Denver-based cybersecurity firm Clinton hired in 2013 to maintain the server, said it’s “highly likely” a full backup of the device was made, including the thousands of emails Clinton deleted.
