Archive for the ‘Governor’ Tag
It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
Editor, The Amazing Democrats.
Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing
“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard.
Jeb W. Bush 2016! made more than $29 million dollars since leaving the governor’s office in 2007 (in just eight years).
Jeb W. Bush 2016! owned funds run by Abbey Capital LP, so some of the tax forms include addresses in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
by Steve Eder (New York Times)
After he left office as governor of Florida, Jeb Bush’s net worth grew to at least $19 million from $1.3 million, a significant leap in wealth that reflects the power of his connections and the breadth of his entrepreneurial pursuits.
Mr. Bush and his wife, Columba, reported $28.5 million in adjusted gross income from 2007, the year he left office, through 2013, according to tax returns he released on Tuesday. Nearly $10 million came from his speaking engagements.
The Bushes’ income topped out at $7.3 million in 2013, the last of 33 years of returns he made public. The return showed that they paid $2.9 million in federal taxes on that income, for an effective tax rate of 40 percent.
Mr. Bush’s disclosure of voluminous financial records comes early in a presidential campaign that has elevated the issue of candidates’ wealth, and the way it may distance them from ordinary Americans in an era of economic uncertainty.
After he left state politics eight years ago, Mr. Bush made clear that he wanted to make money. The mystery was just how much he had made.
The Bush campaign reported that the couple’s total net worth is now between $19 million and $22 million.
The wealth of America’s political dynasties is emerging as a major theme of the 2016 campaign. And while the fortune amassed by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton dwarfs what Mr. Bush collected, the records show that he similarly had little difficulty leveraging his prominent name to gain millions of dollars in the private sector.
Mr. Bush said his wealth has also allowed for significant charitable contributions. The couple reported $110,616 in donations on their 2013 return. In a statement on his website, Mr. Bush said they donated $739,000 to charity from 2007 to 2014.
“I’m proud of what Columba and I have contributed,” he said.
The effective tax rate of 40 percent that Mr. Bush paid compares with the 13.9 percent rate that Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, reported paying in 2010, a figure that drew widespread criticism.
The release of the returns, 16 months before the general election, is intended to position Mr. Bush as particularly open to scrutiny compared with other candidates. It included filings for several years that had previously been disclosed during his campaigns for governor. The Bush campaign said he has requested extensions for filing his 2014 taxes and his financial disclosure report, which will include details of his assets and liabilities.
Deep in the 2013 filing, he reported $5.8 million in “consulting and speaking” income. Separately, Mr. Bush’s campaign provided details of his engagements showing that he delivered about 260 paid speeches from 2007 to the present, for which he earned a total of $9.95 million. He listed 10 speeches at the Poongsan Corporation, a South Korea-based copper manufacturer that has long ties to the Bush family. His most recent audiences included the National Automobile Dealers Association and the American Council of Life Insurers.
The campaign did not release details of the income from his consulting engagements.
In the early going of the 2016 campaign, the candidates’ financial and business affairs have drawn particular scrutiny. Their wealth can be seen as a double-edged sword, signifying both financial acumen but also socioeconomic distance from most voters at a time when income inequality is a pressing issue.
Among the field of candidates, Mrs. Clinton disclosed in May that she and her husband had made at least $30 million since the start of 2014, largely from giving paid speeches. Senator Marco Rubio reported that he cashed out a retirement account last year. And in June, as he announced his candidacy, Donald Trump held up a document showing his net worth to be around $8.7 billion.
Mr. Bush and his wife have paid a higher tax rate than many fellow millionaires because most of his earnings come in the form of wages and salaries, instead of investment income, which is often taxed at a lower rate.
“One thing is obvious,” said Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former staff economist in Congress, who took a cursory look at the returns. “Compared to many people in his income range, Jeb Bush clearly has less capital gains income, and therefore has a higher effective individual income tax rate.”
For several years, Mr. Bush, 62, has used an office at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., working closely with his son, Jeb Jr., while consulting, giving speeches and managing a private investment business.
One of his endeavors included serving as a paid director to the hospital company Tenet Healthcare, which backed President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The position invited questions for Mr. Bush, who as a candidate opposes the health care law.
Mr. Bush profited handsomely from his Tenet shares. According to the newly released tax returns, Mr. Bush acquired $441,203 worth of stock in Tenet Healthcare in May 2011. The stock doubled in value by the time he sold it in October 2013, earning him a profit of $462,013 in just 29 months.
Like other hospital stocks, Tenet rose sharply from October 2012 through March 2013, when President Obama’s re-election made it likely that the health care law would be carried out. The law was considered a boon for hospitals because it was expected to increase business and reduce the expense of caring for uninsured patients who could not pay their bills.
Mr. Bush resigned from the Tenet board in 2014 when he was preparing for his presidential campaign, and this year sold off his stakes in his two remaining businesses as he contemplated a run for the presidency. He sold his consultancy, Jeb Bush & Associates, to his son and business partner, Jeb Jr., while also shedding his interest in the Britton Hill entities, a group of private investment and advisory firms.
His other high-profile and controversial engagements have included working as a paid adviser to Lehman Brothers, an appointment that included seeking an investment in 2008 in the failing bank from Carlos Slim Helú, a Mexican billionaire. Mr. Bush also consulted for the building materials manufacturer InnoVida, which went bankrupt and whose founder pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
The tax forms also trace the period in the 1980s and 1990s when Mr. Bush, then a young entrepreneur, was building his own political base in South Florida. He told a reporter at the time, “I want to be very wealthy.”
The returns showed that his average adjusted gross income was about $400,000 over the 18 years before he became governor.
Josh Barro and Patricia Cohen contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
BY E.J. Donnie Jr. (Washington Post)
Scott Walker insists that when he changes his positions, he is not engaged in “flips.”
“A flip would be someone who voted on something and did something different,” the Wisconsin governor explained last week on Fox News. His altered views on immigration don’t count because he is not a legislator. “These are not votes,” he helpfully pointed out.
Sheer brilliance! Other than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Walker’s major rivals at the moment are Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). They have all cast lots of votes. So Walker can accuse them of flip-flopping while claiming blanket immunity for himself.
Unfortunately for the Republican Party and the country, Walker’s careful parsing of shape-shifting counts as one of the cerebral high points of the debate among the party’s 2016 presidential candidates.
The shortage of philosophical adventure and the eagerness of GOP hopefuls to alter their positions to make them more conservative have the same cause: a Republican primary electorate that has moved so far right that it brooks no deviation. What makes it even harder for the candidates to break new ground is that the imperatives of orthodoxy are constraining even the thinkers who are trying to create a “reform conservatism.”
The fall-in-line-or-fall-in-the-polls rule means that Walker has gone from supporting to opposing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, as has New Jersy Gov. Chris Christine. Rubio got much praise for his work in negotiating a bipartisan bill that would have allowed the undocumented to become citizens — and then, faced with hostility from tea partyers, he turned against it.
Paul, the most daring of the lot because of his libertarian convictions, deserves kudos for being true to his small-state ideology by standing up — literally, for nearly 11 hours on the Senate floor – against the Patriot Act. But even Paul has recast his foreign policy positions to make them sound more hawkish and thus more in keeping with prevailing Republican views.
Accommodating right-wing primary voters poses real risks to the party in next year’s elections. Its candidates’ messages on immigration and gay marriage could hurt the GOP with, respectively, Latinos and the young.
But the greater loss is that none of the leading Republicans is willing to offer a more fundamental challenge to the party’s rightward lurch over the past decade. L. Brent Bozell III, a prominent activist on the right, could thus legitimately claim to The Post: “The conservative agenda is what is winning the field.”
Where, for example, is the candidate willing to acknowledge that, like it or not, there’s no way that anywhere close to all Americans will be able to get health insurance unless government plays a very large role? Where is the Republican who will admit that if the party had its way on further tax cuts, many programs Americans like would fall by the wayside?
The reform conservatives were supposed to remedy this shortcoming, and they have issued some detailed proposals. But their efforts remain largely reactive. Last week, Yuval Levin, the intellectual leader of the movement, joined a symposium in Reason, the sprightly libertarian magazine, to reassure others on the right that reform conservatives are — honest and true! — no less committed than they are to “limited government,” to rolling back “the liberal welfare state” and to reducing government’s “size and scope.”
It’s not surprising that Levin’s fervently anti-statist Reason interlocutors were not fully persuaded. What’s disappointing to those outside conservatism’s ranks is that the reformicons are so often defensive.
With occasional exceptions, they have been far more interested in proving their faithfulness to today’s hard-line right than in declaring, as conservatives in so many other democracies have been willing to do, that sprawling market economies need a rather large dose of government. Conservatives, Levin says, are “eager to build on the longstanding institutions of our society to improve things.” Good idea. But somehow, the successes of decades-old governmental institutions in areas such as retirement security, health-care provision and environmental protection are rarely acknowledged.
Many Republicans, especially reform conservatives, know that most Americans who criticize government in the abstract still welcome many of its activities. Yet stating this obvious fact is now politically incorrect on the right. Conservatives who condemn political correctness in others need to start calling it out on their own side. Otherwise, Scott Walker’s artful redefinition of flip-flopping could become the 2016 Republican debate’s most creative intellectual contribution.
By Anne Gearan (The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — Hillary Rodham Clinton made no mention of her forthcoming presidential campaign, or her recent e-mail controversy, as she accepted an award here Monday for her work helping to ease the decades-long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.
Wearing green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day on Tuesday, Clinton said she accepted the Irish America magazine lifetime achievement award “on behalf of all the remarkable women that I met and admired in Northern Ireland” as first lady.
Magazine editor Patricia Harty said Clinton was honored “for her role in helping to broker the Good Friday agreement” during the administration of her husband, Bill Clinton.
The event underscored Hillary Clinton’s long history with Northern Ireland, which figured prominently in her time as first lady in the 1990s and was part of her last overseas visit as secretary of state. She faced attacks during the 2008 campaign after saying she “helped bring peace to Northern Ireland,” a claim she avoided making Monday.
Amid the Guinness toasts at lunchtime and jokes about the number of potential U.S. ambassadors to Ireland in the crowd, Clinton took a serious tone as she recalled a trip to Belfast in 1995, when she stood with her husband to light Christmas lights. The episode was part of a process that would eventually lead to a peace accord in 1998.
“They simply would not take no for answer,” Clinton said of women who pushed male leaders to make and keep the Good Friday accord that Bill Clinton counts as a signature achievement of his presidency.
Hillary Clinton returned often to Northern Ireland, including her final overseas trip as secretary of state, in December 2012. She had planned further trips but canceled them after falling and hitting her head after returning from Dublin and Belfast.
Clinton played no direct role in fostering the 1998 peace deal but is credited with helping solidify support for the reconciliation effort. Her work bringing together women from both sides of the conflict served as a foundation for Clinton’s later work as secretary of state to include women in political and peace discussions.
Clinton did not go into the particulars of her involvement Monday, while praising the roles played by others.
Bill Clinton bucked domestic political opposition to extend an invitation, and a U.S. visa, to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Hillary Clinton said. Adams sat across from Clinton at the head table Monday in a glittering ballroom along Central Park West.
Bill Clinton received the same award in 2011. The publisher of Irish America, Niall O’Dowd, is a longtime Democratic donor and served on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 finance committee.
Clinton is expected to launch her second run for the White House next month. Her appearance Monday marked her first public remarks since a tense news conference last week in which she sought to put to rest questions about her use of a private e-mail system while serving as secretary of state.
Later Monday, Clinton took to Twitter to criticize the GOP-controlled Congress, including for not yet confirming Loretta Lynch to head the Justice Department.
“Congressional trifecta against women today: 1) Blocking great nominee, 1st African American woman AG, for longer than any AG in 30 years,” Clinton wrote. “. . . 2) Playing politics with trafficking victims . . . 3) Threatening women’s health & rights.”
by Ed O’Keefe (The Washington Post)
Jeb Bush used his private e-mail account as Florida governor to discuss security and military issues such as troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants, according to a review of publicly released records.
The e-mails include two series of exchanges involving details of Florida National Guard troop deployments in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the review by The Washington Post found.
Aides to Bush said Saturday that none of the e-mails contained sensitive or classified information, and that many of the events mentioned in them were documented in press accounts, either contemporaneously or later. But security experts say private e-mail systems such as the one used by Bush are more vulnerable to hackers, and that details such as troop movements could be exploited by enemies.
An unknown number of the e-mails housed on Bush’s server were redacted or withheld from public release because they contained sensitive security issues, Bush representatives have said. Communications director Tim Miller said general policy was for Bush to discuss sensitive National Guard issues in person with only occasional briefings by e-mail that “wouldn’t contain information that should not be in the public domain. “This Democrat opposition research dump of a few innocuous e-mails that Gov. Bush voluntarily posted on a Web site only highlights how large the gap is between him and [former secretary of state] Clinton in the area of transparency,” Miller said in a statement.
Bush is actively considering a run for president and has sharply criticized likely Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton for her use of a private e-mail account when she served as secretary of state. He called it “baffling” that Clinton didn’t consider the potential security risks of discussing diplomatic and national security issues by using an e-mail account not tied to a government server.
As governor, Bush used his account, jeb@jeb.org, to conduct official, political and personal business, ranging from plans to woo new businesses to the state, judicial appointments and military matters, the e-mail records show. His e-mail server was housed at the governor’s office in Tallahassee during his two terms; he took it with him when he left office in 2007.
He later turned over about 280,000 e-mails for state archives under the requirements of Florida records laws, or about half of the total e-mails on the server.
In one e-mail sent four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the top general for the Florida Air National Guard told Bush that “we are actively planning sequences in preparation for mobilization orders should they come.”
“They have not come at this time,” wrote Ronald O. Harrison, who was adjutant general of Florida. “We are pretty good at anticipating the type of forces potentially needed and are prepared to respond to the Presidents [sic] call.”
“Keep me informed of the mobilization,” Bush wrote in reply.
Bush officials noted that many of the deployment orders issued after 9/11 were included in news reports at the time, including some of those mentioned in the Bush e-mails.
In November 2001, Bush and an aide to then-Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan exchanged messages about the deployment of National Guard troops to a nuclear power plant in Crystal River, Fla. The aide wrote Bush that a state lawmaker had called to say she thought “it is imperative that the Crystal River nuclear facility have National Guard security.”
Bush wrote back: “Florida power does not want it. We are reducing or getting rid of guard protection in the other plants.”
Aides to Bush argue that the nuclear plant discussions were innocuous and mostly public anyway. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned that terrorists might try to attack nuclear power plants.
Bush dispatched Guard troops to protect two South Florida nuclear power plants but not the Crystal River facility. The plant’s operator, Florida Power Corp., declined the governor’s offer of security, according to local news reports at the time.
Aides also say Bush’s server was secure because it was kept at the governor’s office.
But Johannes Ullrich, a cybersecurity expert who is dean of research at the SANS Technology Institute, said private accounts in general are more susceptible to attacks than government e-mail addresses, particularly attacks in which a hacker establishes a look-alike account that allows them to impersonate as the account holder.
Encryption technology was also far less sophisticated in 2001, he said, which could have made Bush’s e-mails particularly insecure while traveling. If hackers gained access to Bush’s account, he said, there’s a chance they could break into the account of the National Guard commander or other officials who Bush exchanged e-mails with.
“The bigger issue here is, what else can an attacker do?” Ullrich said. “Now I may be able to penetrate a National Guard commander’s laptop by infecting it or by impersonating Jeb Bush’s account. . . . Now you may even be able to give the order to remove troops or change deployments.”
In recent days, Democrats — reeling from the criticism of Clinton’s e-mail practices — have stepped up their critique of Bush on the same topic, arguing that he used his personal e-mail to avoid public scrutiny of his actions as governor.
“The GOP presidential hopefuls’ attacks on this issue are completely disingenuous, and there are still a litany of questions Republicans need to answer, like what e-mails has Jeb Bush not turned over?” said Holly Shulman, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.
Bush rebuffed such criticism during an event in New Hampshire on Friday. “I’m not surprised that the Clinton operatives would suggest this. It’s kind of standard operating procedure,” Bush told reporters, referring to Democratic charges that his e-mail situation was no different than Clinton’s.
He added later that he was “totally transparent. I have a BlackBerry as part of my official portrait, for crying out loud. There was nothing to hide.”
Under Florida law, Bush was required to hand over e-mails related to his time in office. Bush aides say there were about 550,000 e-mails on Bush’s server when he left office in 2007, although a portion of those came from before he began his tenure. About half that number were eventually turned over to state archives.
As noted Saturday by the New York Times, the archive process continued until last May, when attorneys for Bush delivered 25,000 additional messages. Aides have defended the pace of Bush’s compliance, saying that it took seven years because of his volume of correspondence.
In February, Bush launched a Web site, JebBushEmails.com, telling visitors that “they’re all here so you can read them and make up your own mind.”
Bush’s aides have strongly defended the process used to release his messages, noting that other potential GOP presidential candidates haven’t released any e-mails or are having e-mails released only as part of ongoing government investigations. The list includes former Texas govenor Rick Perry; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie .
Perry and Jindal have used private e-mail for government business, according to the Associated Press. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D) — who is also weighing a presidential bid — said last week that he used a private Gmail account as governor to communicate with aides and Cabinet officials.
When Bush published his e-mails in February, aides said many messages would be withheld or redacted to comply with state law barring the release of messages including Social Security numbers, confidential business issues or law enforcement and other security matters. Some of the published e-mails initially included Social Security numbers, forcing Bush’s team to quickly redact them — an early stumble for the governor’s fledgling presidential efforts.
A spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state’s office did not return a request for comment Saturday to explain why some e-mails were released and others withheld, saying any answer would require a fuller legal interpretation that wouldn’t be available until next week.
Bush’s archives include a handful of other messages from leaders of Florida’s National Guard. There are copies of the “Florida National Guard Activity Report” from August 2000 and December 2000, with information about troop deployments to the Caribbean, South Korea and Kuwait; the activation of units; and details on training exercises and drug seizures.
In October 2000, Harrison e-mailed Bush to remind him that 170 Florida Air National Guardsmen from Jacksonville would be deploying to Saudi Arabia to enforce the southern Iraq No-Fly Zone. The message said they would “coincidentally travel over with a group of 90 from the Texas Air National Guard” — a unit that was under the command of Bush’s brother, George W. Bush, who was then Texas governor.
The next month, a lieutenant commander with one of the deployed units e-mailed Jeb Bush to thank him for sending a message of support, noting that “our unit has played a key role in missions directly related” to ongoing tensions between Iraq and Israel. The officer added that “you can assure your brother the F-15s from your state could take the F-16s from his state!”
Immediately after news broke March 2 about Clinton’s use of a private server, Bush faulted her for not releasing her e-mails from her time as secretary of state, writing on Twitter that “Transparency matters.” He later raised concerns about Clinton’s decision during an interview with Radio Iowa.
“For security purposes, you need to be behind a firewall that recognizes the world for what it is, and it’s a dangerous world, and security would mean that you couldn’t have a private server,” he said. “It’s a little baffling, to be honest with you, that didn’t come up in Secretary Clinton’s thought process.”
On Friday night, after a meeting with potential supporters, Bush was asked to respond to criticism that he, like Clinton, was allowed to self-select which e-mails should be turned over for archiving.
“I was way too busy to decide,” Bush said, before clarifying that his general counsel was among those involved in selecting which e-mails to turn over.
“It was a process that was based on the law itself, and we complied with the law and all during this time we’ve complied with the law, even in my post-governorship,” he said.
Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
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