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Democrat: GOP showing ‘double standard’ in demand for Clinton emails

by Mark Hensch - 08/20/15 3:11 PM ET

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) on Thursday said Republicans are treating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unfairly by calling for her personal email server.

Her GOP predecessors at State never turned over their private electronic correspondences despite calls for greater transparency, Lynch added.

“I haven’t heard a word about Colin Powell,” he said on Boston Herald Radio. “I haven’t heard a word about Condoleezza Rice.”

{mosads}“Colin Powell did not have a goddamn email available for us,” Lynch said. “Zero, zero.”

“It was the same thing with Condoleezza Rice,” he added. “There was not a goddamn email that was useful to the committee.”

Lynch argued the GOP-led Congress is hounding Clinton because she is a prominent Democrat and presidential candidate.

“So why is it OK that Colin Powell, you know, in launching a war in Iraq, to not have a single available email, it’s OK for that, but Hillary Clinton, you know, she turns over 30,000 of them and you know that’s not enough, we want more information?” he asked.

“It’s just a double standard,” he added. “It’s very glaring.”

Lynch also dismissed criticisms that Clinton’s use of a personal storage device jeopardized sensitive national intelligence while she was at State.

“She’s about the only person who hasn’t been hacked yet,” he said. “She’s the smartest one of them all.”

“We have clandestine information that is now in the hands of the Chinese,” he said, citing a recent data breach at the Office of Personnel Management. “Her information now is the only information that hasn’t been hacked.”

“It’s hard to argue that if she had put it on a government server, it would have been safer.”

Lynch concluded that partisan infighting over technology habits hurts the federal government’s efficiency.

“We’ve got to come up with a different process,” he said of managing how public officials handle their emails. “We’re building a system that is fraught with weaknesses.”

Clinton announced last week she is turning over her private server and its backup thumb drive to Justice Department investigators.

Voter concerns over her transparency and trustworthiness have eroded her standing in multiple national polls.

Tags Colin Powell Condoleezza Rice Hillary Clinton Stephen Lynch