Watchdog: Hillary in ‘damage control’ mode over emails

Written by Chad Groening

A new conservative watchdog group dedicated to exposing unethical behavior in government isn’t confident Hillary Clinton will turn over all the emails from the personal account she used while secretary of state under Barack Obama.

Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, has pledged that the State Department will move immediately to review emails that Clinton wrote on her personal account when she was secretary of state. The former first lady had urged the State Department to release the emails in question. (See earlier story)

Clinton’s use of a personal email account for official State Department business has prompted questions about her transparency – and there are some serious questions whether she violated the law.

Matt Whitaker is executive director of the newly created Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust (FACT), which focuses on exposing public officials who “put their own interests over the interests of the public good,” according to their website.

“The first concern is that we had a secretary of state who had a private email server in her own house that was running official business,” he tells OneNewsNow. “Our second concern is that emails [she] generated as secretary of state [that] we’ve asked disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act are going to be first vetted by Secretary Clinton and then vetted by the State Department. So I’m not sure we’ll ever see a full set of the emails.”

Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa, says he doesn’t know how this scandal is going to play out politically – adding that that’s not his purpose in requesting Clinton’s emails.

“No, what I’m concerned about is the relationship to the Clinton Family Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative and the State Department and her possible campaign,” he explains. “There seems to be a lot of movement of people in between all three of those entities.”

Whitaker says he doesn’t feel that Clinton wants to be open and transparent in this matter. He argues that her pledge to disclose her correspondence will “barely scratch the surface of what the public deserves to know” – and is little more than “damage control without earnest effort” to be upfront with the public.

Originally published at OneNewsNow.org.