Jeb Bush announced in an interview airing Sunday that he will release 250,000 emails from his time as Florida governor, another signal that the younger Bush brother is preparing to run for president.
“Part of serving or running, both of them, is transparency, to be totally transparent,” Bush told Florida’s WPLG. “So I’ll let people make up their mind.”
The emails will be included in a forthcoming e-book. “I was digital before digital was cool, I guess,” Bush said. “Now it’s like commonplace.”
Bush also said the emails would serve to “remind myself that if you run with big ideas and then you’re true to those ideas, and get a chance to serve and implement them and do it with passion and conviction, you can move the needle. And that’s what we need right now in America.”
“There’s some funny ones, there’s some sad ones, there’s some serious ones,” he said of the contents of his inbox.
Bush has been far less forthcoming, though, about the Senate report on the CIA’s concealed detention and torture program released this week about “enhanced interrogation techniques” — or torture — under his brother’s presidency.
He’ll “probably say as little as possible,” GOP strategist John Feheery told msnbc. “Jeb has to distinguish himself from his brother and the best way to do that is to not get in the habit of defending his brother’s record.”
Irin Carmon