Sarah Palin criticism of Hillary Clinton private email brings back memories

Sarah Palin is weighing in on Hillary Clinton’s use of private email addresses to conduct State Department business, saying it “makes a mockery of transparency.”

“When FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests bombarded us, investigators and our attorney general’s office were given full access to all of my state and private emails…Everything was done in the most transparent way possible…Contrast that with the way Secretary Clinton has handled transparency. She created private email accounts for herself and her staff on a private email server that she controls completely.”

In 2011, in response to 25,000 emails being released by the Alaskan government per the numerous FOIA requests mentioned by Palin, The New York Times and The Washington Post asked their readers to help them trudge through the cache of emails.

It was an aggressive campaign on the part of The New York Times and The Washington Post, designed to uncover any possible scandal during Palin’s tenure as Governor of Alaska.

In the end, the investigation uncovered very little. CNN’s Drew Griffin — no friend to Palin — offered the following in summary of the investigation:

“I think what we’re seeing here is a hard-working governor, working hard for the state of Alaska, a lot of discussion about policy, about taxes, about cutting budgets, a lot of just mundane state government work.”

According to Palin, the media response to Hillary Clinton’s private email servers has not met the torrent-like response to Palin’s own personal “email-gate.” And she’s asking “Why?”

“Now many of these same media outfits are pursuing access to Secretary Clinton’s emails. Will they put the same effort into her emails as they did mine?”

Palin added that it may be too late, however, because of the nature of the private server:

“[Hillary] hasn’t handed over the server to any independent party for review, and it’s already too late to do so because for all we know someone might have already deleted any trace of incriminating emails…”

Time will tell if The New York Times or The Washington Post will make similarly strong efforts to investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails, should they become public via FOIA requests.

Agencies/Canadajournal