Hillary Clinton tried to respond to the secret email scandal she’s embroiled in by sending off this tweet, pretending to want the American public to read her emails:
I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015
But as James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal points out, if she actually wanted to do that, she would not have sent those emails to the State Department for review the way she did it – in 55,000 pages printed out:
It turns out the reference is to literal physical pages. From Friday’s Times: “Finally, in December, dozens of boxes filled with 50,000 pages of printed emails from Mrs. Clinton’s personal account were delivered to the State Department.”
Why did Mrs. Clinton have her staff go through the trouble of printing out, boxing and shipping 50,000 or 55,000 pages instead of just sending a copy of the electronic record? One can only speculate, but there is an obvious advantage: Printed files are less informative and far harder to search than the electronic originals.
This makes it much harder for the State Department to read the emails and review them for release, and it makes FOIA requests (Freedom of Information Act) much more difficult to respond to. Not only is this a stalling tactic in hopes that the American people will move on, but it’s a huge middle finger to the American people after she said she wanted them to be released “as soon as possible.”
