Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is going after potential 2016 competitor Hillary Clinton for using a private email address for official State Department business — even though the Republican faced similar criticism while he was Milwaukee County executive.
Walker told The Weekly Standard on Sunday after an event in Iowa that the Clinton revelation was an “outrage,” saying “it’s a logical assumption that the secretary of state is talking about highly confidential classified information. How can she ensure that information wasn’t compromised?” he said.
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The governor added, “I think that’s the bigger issue — is the audacity to think that someone would put their personal interest above classified, confidential highly sensitive information that’s not only important to her but to the United States of America. I think is an outrage that Democrats as well as Republicans should be concerned about.”
Walker was also asked if his remarks were hypocritical. Democrats noted that, when Walker was Milwaukee County executive, his staffers used personal laptop computers and set up a secret wireless router for gubernatorial campaign business — those details were part of the John Doe investigation into Walker’s time before he was elected governor.
But Walker dismissed the comparison, saying the “craziest news story” out of the private email network “is that someone who appears to have been an intern years ago wrote a draft letter in response to a request to put up a menorah candle for Hanukkah and at the end said Molotov instead of Mazel Tov. If that’s the craziest thing you can look at, most people realize that really wasn’t much of anything.”
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Walker isn’t the only potential 2016 Republican candidate to criticize Clinton over her using a private, nongovernmental email account during her tenure as secretary of state.
“It’s a dangerous world and security would mean that you couldn’t have a private server,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said during an interview with Radio Iowa. “It’s a little baffling, to be honest with you.”
Clinton has since said she has asked the State Department to release the emails she sent from her private account. While President Obama and the State Department defended Clinton, with the department arguing there were no rules at the time against on using a personal email account, critics claim Clinton may have jeopardized national security and that it may have been a deliberate move to keep some information secret.