Woodward on Clinton Emails: ‘Reminds Me of the Nixon Tapes’

Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward said of Hillary Clinton’s emails, “It, in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes” on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Woodward stated that allowing Clinton and her lawyers to decide whether to turn over information was “unprecedented,” and “follow the trail here. You know, there are all these emails. Well, they were sent to someone, or someone sent them to her. So, if things have been erased here, there’s a way to go back to who originated these emails, or who received them from Hillary Clinton. So, you’ve got a massive amount of data. It, in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes. Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively hers — his, that he was not going to get them. Hillary Clinton initially took that position, I’m not turning this over. There’s going to be no cooperation. Now, they’re cooperating. But, this is — this has to go on a long, long time, and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”

Earlier he said, “It’s extraordinary. And, again, it’s the volume. 60,000 emails, and Hillary Clinton has said 30,000 of them, half, were personal and they were deleted. Who decided that? What’s on those emails? I would love to have all 60,000, read them, it would be a character study about her personal life, and, also, what she did as secretary of state. And let’s step back for a moment, the big question about Hillary Clinton is, who is she? Is she this secretive, hidden person, or is she this valiant public servant? Look at those 60,000 emails, and you’re going to get some answers. And there’s a hydraulic pressure always in the system here. You’ve got the FBI, you’ve got the inspector generals, you’ve got lots of people in government who are furious, because they spent hours being trained, like the example of Madeleine Albright. You have to be careful about this. Hillary Clinton went in — I mean, what was the origin? Who knew about this idea of using a private server? I mean, when I first found about that, it’s unimaginable.”

Woodward added, “for Hillary Clinton to go out, as she did, in recent days, and say, [paraphrasing] ‘This is politics. This is dirty politics. They’re trying to smear me in an unfair way,’ that dog will not hunt, at all. You have got Barack Obama’s government now investigating her and looking at this. Now, at the same time, nothing’s been proven to be illegal and [Ed] Rendell there had a good point that, you know, kind of slow down. I think, in the media and political environment we’re in, where everything is driven by impatience and speed, that’s going to not be possible. But, they’re going to have to get some answers.”

Woodward concluded, in response to a question about the responsibilities of officials to ensure classified material doesn’t get out, “the first level of scrutiny is common sense. And, you know, in the world where Petraeus was dealing, either as a general or as CIA director, or Hillary Clinton was dealing [at the] State Department, almost everything is classified one way or another. And so you have to have some systems to protect it, and you have to use common sense.” He also stated that it’s “easier to describe the creation of the universe” than say how material becomes classified. And “the idea of the server, and this excuse, oh, it was all for convenience, isn’t going to work.”

(h/t Washington Free Beacon)

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett