In a little over three weeks former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will formally accept the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Mrs. Clinton will be the first woman to seek the Oval Office under the banner of one of the two major political parties. She also could become the first candidate under an active criminal investigation by the FBI to be nominated by a major political party for the highest office in the land.
By her resume, Mrs. Clinton is eminently qualified for the job. As a U.S. Senator for eight years and Secretary of State for four, she has the requisite experience that you would want for a president. By credentials alone, she is the most qualified presidential candidate since Richard Nixon ran for the office in 1968. But with that experience comes enough baggage to fill the cargo hold of Air Force One. I’m not going to rehash all of the controversies surrounding Hillary Clinton in the past and present but rather focus on the big one that has been dogging her for the last two calendar years: the private email server, the use of which has occupied the time of dozens of FBI agents for the past 12 months or so.
Yes, there are other controversies (small and large) involving Hillary Clinton: Whitewater, Benghazi, her harsh treatment of the other women involved her husband, the speeches to Goldman Sachs and the Clinton Foundation. With the possible exception of the Clinton Foundation, none of these scandals or “scandals” will amount to a hill of beans in the presidential election. Whitewater is old news. Benghazi was tragic but terror attacks happen and the lack of military response to the attack is more on Obama’s record than Clinton’s. Yes, it’s true that she lied to the nation and the families about how the attack was inspired by an internet video but this story is baked into the cake and is part of the overall picture that cause her low favorability numbers. Nothing significantly new will be learned about Benghazi.
The situation regarding the emails, on the other hand, is ongoing. Since the story was broken by the New York Times last March, Hillary’s use of a private server and personal email account to handle all of her electronic communications while serving as Secretary of State has been an eternal drip to her campaign, eroding public confidence in her honesty and trustworthiness. She would be the most unfavorably viewed presidential candidate in modern polling history were she not running against Donald Trump.
Just in case you’ve been in a cave for the last 16 months, let me very quickly explain the email controversy. Mrs. Clinton decided to use a home brew server and a personal email account instead of the State Department server and “state.gov” account for all of her emails. In her initial press conference after the discovery of this scheme, she said she used a personal server because of “convenience.” She claims she did not want to carry two Blackberry’s with her, one for personal, one for work. Pardon my language but this is utter bullshit. I’ve had a Blackberry for nearly 10 years and have always had multiple email accounts on it. There is one reason and one reason only that she chose a personal server: she wanted to have complete control over who would have access to her email records in the future. If you believe her preposterous story that her choice of a personal server was one of “convenience” and not of “control” then you probably also believe that Donald Trump will get Mexico to pay for a wall on our southern border.
Since the email story broke, there have been new revelations on what seems like a weekly basis. Hillary’s decision to use a personal email account, her constant defense that “it was allowed” and that she did nothing wrong ring hollow when compared to a scathing 83-page State Department Inspector General’s report. Her decision to use a private server out of “convenience” has been anything but convenient to FBI, which has had several dozen agents investigating the question about whether Clinton was criminally negligent by allowing classified material onto the unsecured server, potentially exposing national secrets to hackers. Her consistent defense has been that she neither “sent or received” classified material and that the hundreds of emails that have been released by the State Department with classified markings were marked as such after the fact. Legal experts are divided on the criminality of Clinton’s email use and, predictably, those legal experts tend to be divided according to party lines.
It appears as though the FBI investigation is nearing its end as the bureau finally interviewed Mrs. Clinton in a three and a half hour session this Saturday. The question then becomes whether or not a recommendation of indictment will be sent to the Justice Department. In a case of shocking stupidity, Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a private 30-minute meeting with Bill Clinton a couple of days ago on her private jet while both were at an airplane hangar in Phoenix. Mrs. Lynch is ultimately the person who would decide whether to act on the FBI’s recommendations and the long meeting with Clinton looks like the former president was trying to charm the AG into a favorable disposition towards his wife. Lynch has claimed that the two simply spoke about grandchildren and golf but admitted that she wouldn’t do it again and understands why many observers felt it was inappropriate. Lynch said today that she intended to follow the FBI’s recommendations, whatever they may be. Still, if there is ultimately no indictment, conspiracy theories will abound. Considering that Lynch’s boss, President Obama, is now enthusiastically backing Clinton to be his successor, anything short of criminal charges will be viewed by Hillary’s critics as a cover-up.
If any conspiracy actually occurs, my guess is that it will be regarding the timing of the indictment if one is forthcoming. If it happens in the next few weeks, before the Democratic convention, it would be very hard for the Democratic party to nominate anyone other than Bernie Sanders to be the party’s nominee. Sanders already has a slew of delegates pledged to vote for him on the first nominating ballot and there would be a revolt if somebody else were to leap-frog above him. My feeling is that, despite his popularity and favorable poll numbers, the Dems fear that nominating a 74-year old socialist might hand the election to the Republicans. (The same dynamics are in play on the GOP side, which is why it’s highly unlikely any “white knight” will unseat Trump at the convention).
On the other hand, if an indictment of Mrs. Clinton were to occur after she was the party’s nominee, the Democrats could do anything they wanted to replace her. It would be no different than if their candidate fell to a serious illness or worse after becoming the nominee. In this scenario, it seems likely to me that they would replace Hillary with Joe Biden and the well-liked Vice-President would defeat Trump easily. Millions of independent-minded voters who intensely dislike both Trump and Clinton would flock to the VP.
I have no idea whether Mrs. Clinton will be indicted: my instinct says that she will not be. The legal issue is about the potential of criminal negligence regarding the handling of classified intelligence. I personally view the crime as the use of the server itself but, while she shouldn’t have done it, it was not against the law.
Let’s be clear about something. Hillary Clinton is lying her tush off about this whole server situation. Let me count the lies:
- She used one account (a personal account) for “convenience” because she didn’t want to have two devices. This is such a load of crap. Almost every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a job has a personal email and a work email. You’re the Secretary of State of the United States of America, responsible for state secrets. Convenience??? National security information should be secure, not convenient.
- She didn’t send or received classified information. Preposterous. It turns out that nearly 1 out of 15 of the 55,000 pages of emails that she turned over had classified markings and 22 of them were “Top Secret.” Maybe they weren’t “marked” classified at the time but the mere fact that she only offered one version of electronic communications (a personal and private one) was an open invitation to state secrets being transmitted through her server.
- The use of personal email was “allowed.” Sorry, Hillary, the Inspector General disagrees. The IG report stated that Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with department officials but that, contrary to her claims that the department “allowed” the arrangement, there was “no evidence” she had requested or received approval for it.
- Previous Secretaries of State also had personal accounts. She uses this excuse a lot and specifically references Colin Powell. It’s true to a certain extent but there are significant differences. First, the use of electronic communication changed dramatically since Powell became the Secretary of State in 2000 and when Clinton took the the office eight years later. Second, Powell did not use a private server for which he had total control.
- She turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department. This is either a real doozy or evidence that Clinton was the government’s version of the employee who plays Angry Birds on their phone half of the time that they’re at work. Hillary turned over 55,000 pages of emails but deleted 30,000 emails that she determined were “personal” in nature. In her initial press conference, she described these personal emails as messages to her husband, wedding plans for daughter Chelsea and yoga. OK, let me get this straight. She was Secretary of State for four years. There are 365 days in a year so 30,000 “personal” emails amounts to 21 personal emails per day!!! If she turned over 55,000 emails and deleted 30,000, she’s telling us that 35% of the emails she sent and received were to Bill (who doesn’t use email, by the way) or talking about Chelsea’s wedding and yoga. If this were actually true, it would tell us that she’s lazy and spent more time wasting time than doing the government’s business. I went through my own emails for the last few weeks and nearly 95% are work-related.
The last point (#5) is where the true scandal lies. Here is one of the emails that Mrs. Clinton (or her lackeys) did not turn over to the State Department that were uncovered elsewhere:
“Who manages both my personal and official files? … I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want.”
–Hillary Clinton to top aide Huma Abedin (March 2009)
And also, in the IG report, the audit also cited a then-unreleased copy of a November 2010 email Clinton sent Abedin in which the secretary discussed using a government email account, expressing concern that she didn’t want “any risk of the personal being accessible.” This is the proverbial smoking gun as to Hillary’s motivation.
So what is it that Hillary Clinton wanted to hide? When I first wrote about this 16 months ago, I speculated that Hillary, being the cautious person that she is, wanted to control the release of a potentially non-controversial email that would become controversial after the fact. An example would be if, hypothetically, she had emailed Ambassador Chris Stevens in August 2012 that she didn’t think the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi needed more security. Such an email, if it existed, would have been a “who cares” along with tens of thousands of others except for the fact that the Embassy was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2012, an attack that resulted in the deaths of four Americans including the Ambassador. The point is that an email is a permanent record that expresses a person’s directives or opinions. Comments that may be innocuous at the time can become inflammatory later as events change.
There is of course the other possibility, that there are emails related to the Clinton Foundation and the potential conflict of interest that the nation’s top diplomat also had a foundation in her name to which many foreign governments donate millions of dollars. Without seeing the 30,000 deleted emails, we’ll never really know what secrets (if any) they contained.
The bottom line is, if we are to believe that Hillary Clinton chose to use one account only out of “convenience,” her decision shows that she was more interested in protecting her personal interests than the nation’s secrets. If that doesn’t disqualify you from being the Commander in Chief, I don’t know what does. If she becomes President, many will celebrate the election of the first woman president. I will not. She is unworthy of being the person honored in what should truly be a celebrated and historic first-time event.
Chris Bodig