David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, on Tuesday said that it’s fair for Republicans to use FBI Director James Comey’s comment that Hillary Clinton was “careless” with classified information against the former secretary of state during the presidential campaign.
“It is fair game for Republicans to question Hillary Clinton based on the words of the FBI director,” Axelrod said on CNN shortly after Comey announced that the FBI does not recommend bringing charges against Clinton.
Axelrod noted that Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer focused on what the FBI’s findings show about Clinton’s judgement.
“Sean Spicer took the words of the FBI director and used them as you would expect the opposition to use them and honed in on what Comey called the carelessness and recklessness and so on. That’s to be expected,” Axelrod said.
He contrasted the RNC response with Donald Trump’s tweets reacting to the FBI’s recommendation. Trump declared that the “system is rigged” and compared the investigation to the case involving former CIA Director David Petraeus.
“I think it’s dangerous to do what Donald Trump did, which is to say the system is rigged,” Axelrod said on CNN.
He also said that Trump should not have compared Clinton to Petraeus.
“It’s not fair game to say, ‘Well, Petraeus’ — as Trump has said repeatedly — ‘Petraeus got in trouble for far less.’ General Petraeus gave classified information to his biographer with whom he was having a relationship knowingly, and he pled guilty to charges related to that,” Axelrod said. “What he did was far different than what the FBI director suggested. So to say she should have been treated the way he was, it’s just flat out wrong.”
