Hillary Clinton supporters are currently scrambling to minimize the damage arising from the bombshell revelation that she used a private Gmail address to conduct all of her business as Secretary of State, but in 2007, Clinton herself took a decidedly different tack, saying that secret email accounts “shred” the U.S. Constitution.
Clinton, then running for president, was speaking at the Take Back America conference held by the Campaign for America’s Future, and took the Bush administration to task for alleged violations of constitutional governance.
Said Clinton at the time:
Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts. It’s a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok. It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our Constitution was designed to prevent. [Emphasis added]
Clinton, like many other critics, bashed those private White House email accounts as a way to circumvent public scrutiny — the very charge Clinton is facing and denying this very moment.
Clinton’s sole use of Gmail and privately-owned, in-house server are not the only issues of government transparency on which Clinton appears to have shifted on since her 2007 speech. For example, despite condemning “secret wiretaps” in her speech, Clinton has recently refused to say whether she supports giving the federal government the authority to conduct searches without a warrant.
This report, by Blake Neff, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
