From: Brad Woodhouse [mailto: [email protected] ]
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2015 1:30 PM
To: ‘[email protected] ‘ <[email protected] >
Subject: Your hypocrisy on transparency
Governor – thank you for providing your email address so people can correspond with you. As you can imagine, there is quite a lot that I and the organization I represent could take issue with concerning recent positions you’ve taken and statements you’ve made, such as: your revisionist history on Iraq (your brother broke it/gave rise to ISIS), your support for slashing Social Security benefits (on its birthday no less), your plan to phase out Medicare and your position that American workers are to blame for the economy and they should suck it up and work more hours.
All that being said, it’s your breathtaking hypocrisy on the issue of transparency that I’d like to draw your attention to. We’ve noticed that as you have dropped in the polls (5% in Iowa?!) you’ve increased your attacks on Hillary Clinton over this very issue. To start with, it should go without saying that what she did with respect to email was permissible and had precedent in the very department in which she worked.
However, notwithstanding the fact that the way Secretary Clinton handled her email was allowed, was legal and had been done similarly by previous Secretaries of State, you’ve continued to take issue with it. This is rather curious since virtually everything you have criticized her for is almost exactly how you handled your email as Governor of Florida, to wit:
You have criticized Secretary Clinton for maintaining her own server. Sir, I’m sure you don’t need to be reminded that you too owned your own server from which you conducted official and personal business.
Broadly speaking, you have criticized Secretary Clinton on the issue of transparency and held yourself out as a paragon of virtue on the subject which is curious given that:
- You have said that you received 550,000 emails on your private email account, yet you’ve only released 250,000 of those emails. How sir does that meet your standard of transparency? Why not release them all?
- You’ve bragged about your level of transparency yet you left office in 2007 and you didn’t turn over your emails until almost 2015. Why did it take youseven and a half years after leaving office for you to turn over your emails?
- Additionally, you were the Governor of the State of Florida so you must have known that the law requires you to turn over public records immediately upon leaving office, yet you didn’t turn over these emails for seven and a half years. Can you explain then sir not only why it took so long but also how you were not in violation of Florida law by failing to turn these emails over immediately as required by statute?
Sir, we understand that in politics desperate times call for desperate measures and that being 17 points down to Donald Trump and running seventh in Iowa in not exactly what you had planned. However, your attacks on this issue reek of hypocrisy given how you handled your own email when you were governor and since. You’ve gotten mighty high on that horse sir – might be time to dismount.
Sincerely,
Brad Woodhouse, President
Correct the Record