Hillary Clinton once said secret email accounts 'shredded' the Constitution

Hillary Clinton
(Image credit: Lisa Lake / Getty Images)

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been under fire this week after the revelation that she and several of her top aides used private email addresses while at the State Department, a move which fails to comply with federal transparency regulations. In 2007, however, Clinton explicitly said that the use of similarly private email accounts by the Bush administration was an attack on the Constitution. The quote begins at the seven minute mark below:

Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts....It’s a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok. It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our Constitution was designed to prevent. [Clinton, via a Daily Caller transcript]

In a tweet published late last night, Clinton said she has asked the State Department to release her emails, but critics have noted the emails to be released have already been reviewed and culled by her staff.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.