Media Matters' Karen Finney pushed back at former Bushie Ari Fleischer's unfounded allegations over Hillary Clinton's State Department emails on CNN's New Day. While the two hosts basically sit there like a couple of potted plants, Finney did a pretty good job of knocking down statements like this one from Fleischer:
FLEISCHER: If you're in the government, you're supposed to conduct all your public business on a public site government site. That's for security reasons. Ask any security official who knows the internet, Hillary's e-mails have been read by Russia, China and Iran. This is a serious national security issue for somebody running for commander-in- chief.
Fleischer basically pulled that straight out of his hind side since he has no idea if there have been any security breaches, and as Finney pointed out, CNN's own reporting refuted the media narrative that Clinton had broken the law.
CAMEROTA: Karen, did she put the country in a national security predicament?
KAREN FINNEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS, DNC: No. And I'm sure he's equally concerned about the millions of e-mails missing from the Bush administration if we're going to play that game. Look, a couple of things to remember, as Colin Powell, himself, pointed out yesterday, he too had a personal e-mail.
He did not keep copies as he said because anything sent to someone in the government a record was kept in that system. That's exactly the same thing that Secretary Clinton's folks said last week. In addition to that, they have turned over 55,000 pages of documentation. So they actually have two copies of her records.
The second thing, CNN's own reporting on Friday, no one, not the State Department, no legal expert has said that a law was broken. Also in the spirit of the law or the regulation is the concern about the records act is that the record is preserved. She preserved the record. The State Department now has them.
Finney also made an interesting point after host Alisyn Camerota played a portion of Trey Gowdy's appearance on Face the Nation this weekend, where he was complaining that he had not gotten the emails from the day Clinton was wearing her sunglasses while looking at her phone that later went viral. It seems that picture was taken a year before the incident in Benghazi
CAMEROTA: Karen, you know, you say 55,000 e-mails have been released and it shows transparency, yet, there are some who say the very e- mails they're interested in, particularly for the Benghazi investigation are not strangely not part of that treasure-trove. Listen to Troy Gowdy for a second.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOWDY: There are gaps of months and months and months. If you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand, we have no e-mails from that day. We have no e-mails from that trip.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
FINNEY: Here's what I love about that comment. That trip was in 2011. Benghazi happened in 2012. He's requested documents related to 2012. He has 900 pages from the State Department of e-mails around the 2012 incident. So he's talking about a picture that was a year before the incident that he's saying he's missing e-mails from..
Don't count on that to slow down the media feeding frenzy or the Republicans' fishing expedition any time soon.
