Not really presidential

It’s good to have President Obama on record regarding Hillary Clinton’s insecure private email system for her official business as Secretary of State. In his interview with Chris Wallace broadcast on FOX News Sunday yesterday, Obama explained that the classified information on her server wasn’t really classified and that the Top Secret information on the email server was not “really top secret top secret.”

FOX News has posted the transcript of the interview here; I quote the relevant passage here. I have embedded a video of the interview below (about 16 minutes). Obama is asked about Clinton’s email setup at 8:35 of the video.

The media coverage of Clinton’s email scandal has been pathetic. Perhaps it is too much to expect any member of the press at the White House daily press briefing today to ask the logical follow-up questions, but I offer a few in the spirit of constructive criticism.

Will Obama now see to the immediate release of the 22 emails withheld in their entirety by the State Department from its production of Clinton’s official email? Obama has told us that the documents are not “really top secret top secret.”

Will the White House now hand over a complete set of unredacted Clinton emails? Clinton herself wrote and sent at least 104 emails containing classified information. Obama has told us that the redacted passages do not really contain classified information.

At least two emails contained information for “Special Access Programs” (SAP), a level of classification even higher than “top secret.” Obama didn’t specifically address those emails in the interview broadcast yesterday. Will someone ask the White House today if these emails were not really SAP SAP? If so, we’d like to see them now.

If one remains detached from the seriousness of the issues, Obama’s comments are laughable. Taking them at face value, Obama’s comments undermine laws that his administration has otherwise enforced against journalists and government officials. Insofar as Obama is duty bound to enforce the laws of the United States, his comments are, to say the least, not really presidential. They constitute the apologetics of a pathetic hack.

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