Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Live with Thomas Roberts,” Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s strategic communications adviser Karen Finney accused Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and other members of the Benghazi Select Committee of leaking classified information to The New York Times.
Finney said, “What we have to do is make sure that the facts are out there and one thing to mention about the emails and this whole classified, unclassified, secret sort of information. One of those e-mails as it turns out we actually know about because it was leaked, we believe, by the Gowdy committee. So what you have there is an email that the State Department determined was unclassified that Huma forwarded to Secretary Clinton in 2011, that the Gowdy committee now has that information on their unsecured servers, by the way, which the IG now says, that’s classified. Well then, you have the Gowdy committee leaking that information, making it public to The New York Times. We don’t see it as classified, the State Department doesn’t, but if we go under the idea of retroactive classification and the implications of that, well then the Gowdy committee and the members of congress have done what they’re accusing Hillary Clinton of doing.”
She added, “When you are talking about a Benghazi Select Committee dealing with classified information, national secrets, national security, if the concern is more broadly about how classified information is handled, we should have that concern no matter where it is. I certainly think it opens very serious questions about how it is that the committee and why it is the committee, we have seen a number of leaks out of that committee, we wouldn’t know about that email potentially if they did not leak it to The New York Times in April of 2015. That’s quite reckless.”
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