National Journal columnist Ron Fournier ripped Hillary Clinton for her media strategy on the heels of her brief Q&A with the press Tuesday in Iowa.
In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Fournier said the former secretary of state is using the playbook of the 20th century that was also used by Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and the Bushes.
“This is the old playbook, the old Clinton playbook. This is the old, like you say, the Nixon playbook. It’s, you know, the Bush playbook. It’s from a different era,” Fournier told Hewitt. “It’s from the 20th century when you only had to schmooze or bully or outlast a handful of reporters, and the page would be turned. And what they don’t realize is that we have this funny, little thing called the Internet, and now we have 300 million reporters, not just a couple dozen. And you know, you can’t just talk your way out of a problem nowadays. You have to do something.”
“So when she says something as laughable as they’re not my emails, they belong to the State Department, well, she sure treated them like they were her emails when she had a rogue server in her basement that went around the White House, violated the White House regulations on email. And when she says nobody wants the emails out more than me, well, then give them to us, ma’am,” Fournier said. “You have copies of them. It’s not like the State Department has the only copies.”
Fournier also took the former secretary of state to task over the handling of her emails, telling the host she “acted with reckless disregard for basic security measures.”
“She certainly acted with reckless disregard for basic security measures and for their value and transparency and accountability in government,” Fournier told the host. “Whether it’s national security, again, I don’t know what was in those emails and whether she actually compromised national security, although you’re fair enough in saying that if she was dealing with it all, anything that was national security, you had to assume she was, she was secretary of state, that she was putting that at risk.”
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