“I opted for convenience,” explained Hillary Clinton in a press conference in which she defended her preference for using a private email account for conducting official government business. On March 2, the New York Times broke a story with the headline “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.” The Times article reported Hillary Clinton used a private email account exclusively during her four years as Secretary of State, which brings the routinely questionable Clinton modus operandi into the ethically improper spotlight yet again.
According to a Washington Post timeline, on Jan. 13, 2009, the day of her confirmation, the domain Clintonemail.com was registered and allowed Clinton to communicate exclusively through private, nongovernmental servers located at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
On Oct. 2, 2009, less than a year after Clinton’s term as Secretary of State started, the U.S. Code of federal regulations on handling records was updated to read, “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system” (emphasis added).
How Clinton and her team could argue that a private server located in her own home would amount to the appropriate agency record-keeping system is beyond me, but to counter the charge that her emails were not routinely being retained, Clinton claimed, “the vast majority of my work e-mails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.” The Washington Post reports this is utterly untrue. “The State Department on March 13 acknowledged this was not the case. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that not until this February were such e-mails automatically preserved.”
Psaki’s own admission makes it cut and dry that Clinton’s emails were not preserved in the manner she describes. It is impossible to deny Clinton’s maleficence.
The impropriety continues. According to TIME magazine, “She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department — spurred by the congressional investigation — asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache — 31,830 emails — did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be ‘private, personal records.’”
This is mind-numbing. Her staff made the decision about what was personal and private without any supervision. This is not about convenience. This is a calculated, deliberate attempt to avoid oversight.
Not only is it an ethical breach, there are also unanswered questions about how Clinton’s preference for convenience related to national security. For four years, Clinton’s emails were undoubtedly the target of foreign intelligence services. Who took the time and covered the cost to properly secure these communications? Did they have clearance to deal with the sensitive information that is assuredly found in the Secretary of State’s inbox? Clinton claims there was no classified material in her account. It is difficult for me to accept the idea that our top diplomat had not a single shred of classified material in her only form of electronic communication, but even if that were true, there still must have been information in her account that would have exceeded the clearance of whatever non-State Department information security technicians who secured the Chappaqua servers.
Let’s suppose for a second that you subscribe to the idea that there was no misconduct perpetrated by Clinton and believe her homebrew server system was in fact only for convenience. Even if one takes Clinton at her word, the best-case scenario is that while she was Secretary of State, Clinton thought it too hard to carry two cell phones.
This person wants to be the President of the United States. If Clinton’s response to the inconvenience of simply carrying two cell phones is to walk right up to the edge of illegality without slipping over the cliff, what type of response is expected to other inconvenient realities faced as President?
This latest scandal will not be Clinton’s demise or prevent her from running in 2016. The common denominator in all Clinton scandals is the fact that they have weathered them without being relegated to the political doldrums.
However, this scandal feeds and bolsters the narrative that the Clintons will bend and break any rule at any cost to attain power. This scandal highlights why people are suspicious of Clinton and it underlines why she could be a weaker candidate than many chalk her up to be. She has occupied offices, sure, but when pushed for the list of Hillary Clinton’s policy achievements, most deliver blank stares. She is far more vocal about who she was than what she will do.
Hillary Clinton is a brand not built on a catalog of accomplishments, but on the coattails of a former president. This brand stumbles over itself before it even approaches the campaign starting line and shows it is indeed a long road to November 2016.
