WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton should be asked whether she put information that was not properly secured in emails sent from her personal account during her tenure at the State Department, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said on Friday.
In a brief interview at Reagan National Airport, likely 2016 candidate Paul drew a possible comparison between Clinton and David Petraeus, who pled guilty this week to sharing classified information with his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell.
"Well, apparently it's illegal for the executive branch to do it that way," Paul said when asked about Clinton's email issue. "And apparently she chastised her employees for doing that."
"There's a question also if she was talking about things — remember what happened with Petraeus, he was bringing home stuff that was not secured properly? He actually pled guilty not of giving it to anybody, but having it unsecured," Paul said.
"There is the question of whether or not if she has those emails on a personal email and they're talking about secure subjects, whether that's actually compromised," Paul said. "And that's what he pled guilty to, what Petraeus pled guilty to, having secure information unsecured."
"So I think somebody ought to ask the question, whether or not she has anything on the email that should have been on a secure server," Paul said.
Asked if he ever uses his personal email for official business, Paul said, "We have a different set of rules."
"Congress isn't under the executive branch," Paul said. "So we don't have any rules on our email that I'm aware of."
Paul said that he thought the issue of the Clinton Foundation accepting foreign government donations last year without announcing the policy change, another scandal afflicting the Clinton operation this winter, is more important than the issue of her email usage as secretary of state.
"There's a constitutional provision that says you can't take gifts from foreign countries," Paul said. "Also it just doesn't look very good even if you say it's a foundation and it wasn't personally."
Asked if the Clinton Foundation taking of foreign donations could compromise Clinton as a potential head of state, Paul said, "Taking a million dollars from Saudi Arabia, I don't know how much she got from them, but taking a significant amount of money from foreign countries in the middle east, it would definitely bring up the question."