Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said Hillary Clinton has done the 21st-century equivalent of what Richard Nixon could have done to survive the Watergate scandal.
“Today you don’t burn tapes. You delete emails,” Krauthammer wrote in his new column published Friday. “Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual: ‘I didn’t see any reason to keep them.’ After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone. How do we know that? She says so.”
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
Krauthammer wrote, “She burned the tapes.”
“Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate,” he continued. “Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned.”
Clinton held a press conference this week to respond to questions about why she used a private server for emails while serving as secretary of state, and did not even have a State Department email account. Though she has provided 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department, she said at the press conference this week she deleted about 30,000 email messages because they were private.
Krauthammer predicts that by April 1, Clinton supporters will dismiss the email flap as “old news.” But he said it will have carry over into the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay,” Krauthammer said. “It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.”
