Informal policy advisor and Clinton insider Neera Tanden asked if the person who told Hillary to use a private email server has been “drawn and quartered” yet, in a tongue-in-cheek exchange with Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
“I’m doing jake tapper and they have a national poll coming out. They wouldn’t tell me results but if I had to guess it – discerning from our prep call -will show Bernie doing pretty well w Hillary and doing as well against Jeb or close to it,” wrote Tanden on July 24, 2015, in an email revealed by Wikileaks.
“PS can you imagine what the Republicans would do to him if he were the nominee?” Podesta replied that day.
“Well, let’s see what the poll actually says,” Tanden said. “Let’s hope the Democratic party is not suicidal.”
“Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?” Tanden added the next day. “Like whole thing is fucking insane.”
Clinton’s unauthorized use of an unsecured email server stored in her bathroom while working as Secretary of State has been a millstone around her neck. She willfully ignored State Department protocol while leaving sensitive and classified information open to hacks by any foreign country looking to harm or gain advantage against the United States. Why the FBI chose not to indict her despite detailing a devastating case against her is unclear, but the use of private emails leads all the way to President Barack Obama. As longtime Clinton aide and counsel Cheryl Mills told Podesta, Obama himself had emails from Clinton sent from her unsecured server. “[W]e need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov,” she wrote on March 7, 2015, after Obama claimed he only heard of Hillary’s private server “through news reports.”
Clinton tried to blame former Secretary of State Colin Powell for telling her to use a private server while conducting government business, but Powell was having none of it, as Breitbart News previously reported:
In private emails, Powell berated Clinton for trying to drag him into her scandal.
“Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris,” he scoffed, after accusing them of messing up the handling of the story.
“HRC could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me to it,” he wrote to a friend. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini tantrum at a Hampton’s [sic] party to get their attention.”
Tanden also works as president of the Center for American Progress, which Podesta founded in 2003.