Hillary Fires Back at Trump Comparisons Hillary Clinton attends the Netflix film "White Noise" and opening ceremony red carpet at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2022 in Venice, Italy. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for Netflix)
By Jack Gournell | Tuesday, 06 September 2022 06:02 PM EDT
Hillary Clinton on Tuesday fired back at critics, including former President Donald Trump, who have compared her infamous "deleted emails" to the documents with classified markings found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home by the FBI this summer.
"I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails," Clinton posted in a Twitter thread. "As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a 'Clinton Standard.' The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified."
Then-FBI Director James "Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails," she continued. "Trump’s own State Department, under two different Secretaries, found I had no classified emails. That's right: ZERO."
"By contrast," Clinton said, "Trump has hundreds of documents clearly marked classified, and the investigation just started."
While Clinton is correct on her claims about Trump, the former president and his legal team say he declassified the documents en masse as he left the White House on January 20, 2020.
Still, Trump critics and many legals experts say that while Trump had the power to declassify some documents, some were beyond his legal authority to declassify. Plus, they say, a proper process must be followed, and he isn't allowed to take them to his private residence since they belong to the American people and not to him. Clinton's claims that she was found to have had no classified emails are not quite accurate.
Politico reported, for instance, in October 2015, that at least one of the emails that Clinton sent to longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal from the server was deemed "classified" by the state department — and Blumenthal had no security clearance.
A July 5, 2016, Time story noted that Comey's FBI found that Clinton had been careless, but no criminal charges were pursued because she was not found to have acted with clear criminal intent.
Comey at the time said that Clinton and her aides were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
But what he recanted in an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in April 2018 is the fact that he was "sloppy" in how he described how Clinton would not be charged. He never said that none of the documents were classified.
"I should've worked harder to find a way to convey that it's more than just the ordinary mistake, but it's not criminal behavior, and find different words to describe that," Comey said in the interview.