Carly Fiorina Slams Hillary Clinton's Transparency

The 2016 election is shaping up to be an interesting race, with the number of hot-button issues on the list and the legitimate possibility of the country electing, for the first time in its centuries-old history, a female president. For the time being, one of the only two female candidates is engaging the other in what looks like a one-sided battle. After a string of attacks, Carly Fiorina now criticized Hillary Clinton's lack of transparency in a memo to supporters.

Fiorina's campaign manager, Frank Sadler, said in the memo that the former Hewlett-Packard executive's campaign has been keeping count of the number of questions the Republican candidate is fielding each day, which, according to their record, amounts to 322 in eight days, The New York Times reported. In contrast, it claimed that Clinton has answered a mere eight in the 30 days since she announced she was running. According to the newspaper, Sadler wrote to supporters:

This engagement has demonstrated her commitment to transparency and thoughtful, intellectual discussion of the issues.

But a large portion of the questions seems to be about Fiorina's team's failure to register the domain name for CarlyFiorina.org. An adviser to the candidate said that she responded to “well over 200 on-the-record questions” this week; in almost every interview she was asked about the domain name. The website currently shows 30,000 frowning faces, each one representing an employee Fiorina allegedly laid off during her time at Hewlett-Packard — though many have praised her for her responses to the media piling on the issue.

The accusation about Clinton's transparency is not necessarily untrue: Many have pointed to her long history of seeming disdain for being transparent about her communications and dealings. Fiorina's latest claim, however, is one of a number of attacks on Clinton, beginning prior even to her announcing her long-shot bid. On Saturday at a South Carolina Freedom Summit, she struck a similar tone, saying she was more transparent than Clinton:

Like Hillary Clinton, I too am running for president. Unlike Hillary Clinton, I am not afraid to answer questions about my track record or beliefs.

In February, Fiorina lambasted Clinton's involvement in her charity foundation's acceptance of huge sums of donations from foreign governments, simultaneously questioning the former Secretary of State's commitment to women's rights and leadership skills. She told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

She tweets about women’s rights in this country and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights. She tweets about equal pay for women but won’t answer basic questions about her own offices’ pay standards — and neither will our president. Hillary likes hashtags. But she doesn’t know what leadership means.

According to columnist Robin Abcarian for the Los Angeles Times, some have raised the possibility that the GOP leadership is using Fiorina to attack Clinton, pitting woman against woman to avoid accusations of sexism. Fiorina's chances at winning are far from Clinton's, who, according to the latest poll from The New York Times, seems to be weathering well a storm of controversies over her use of private email while as Secretary of State and the Clinton Foundation's donor practices.

As a GOP strategist told TIME last year, "The most effective way to criticize a woman is to have another woman do it."

Image: Getty Images (2)