Hillary: ‘I [Fill in the Blank] for Convenience’
Clinton’s classic obfuscation over her majesty’s secret servers.
Hillary Clinton finally addressed the brouhaha over her majesty’s secret servers at a press conference Tuesday, but beginning with the first seemingly planted question it amounted to partying like it was 1999.
Last week, Clinton handed over 55,000 pages of emails from her private clintonemails.com email accounts. It’s a fair guess that hardly covers her entire tenure as secretary of state. So where’s the rest? What’s she hiding?
Since the account is hers, she has sole access and control over it (well, besides potential hackers), and she’s refusing to turn over everything. She reiterated Tuesday that she would not turn over the actual emails or the servers, which “will remain private.” She claims 30,000 emails were personal – including messages with husband Bill, who claims to have sent all of two emails, ever – and she admitted to deleting many of them because she “didn’t see any reason to keep them.” That’s nice, but as a high-ranking public official it’s not for her to decide which emails are personal and which are official, or what’s relevant for keeping.
She explained her choice to exclusively use a private email account as merely a matter of “convenience” because it enabled her to “carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” Yes, we’re very sure it was “convenient,” but we’re not clear on how her inability to walk and chew gum at the same time commends her for the presidency.
Besides, she did carry both an iPhone and a Blackberry. Nice try.
She insisted Tuesday, “I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.” But the fact that she used only private accounts during her time in office violates federal record-keeping laws. She’ll never be prosecuted, but she wants to be our next president, so these are matters of great importance.
Not only did Clinton use this email to control the flow of information, it diverted her information to the wrong hands. Case in point: An unemployed Romanian taxi driver and part-time hacker called Guccifer discovered the existence of Clinton’s secret account in 2013. If a Romanian hacker can find it, surely the Chinese, Russians and others have too.
Not to worry. The smartest woman in the world surely made her site ironclad secure. Right? No. Her site is so vulnerable that independent security expert and developer Nic Cubrilovic said, “It is almost certain that at least some of the emails hosted at clintonemails.com were intercepted.”
Meanwhile, Madame Clinton apparently takes national security as seriously as her former boss. Presidents are duty-bound to name inspectors general to police each agency of government, but Obama refused to name one for the State Department during Hillary’s entire tenure. How convenient. Whatever’s on the servers, Obama would almost certainly pardon Clinton if need be. But he can’t protect her politically if the stink of corruption rises high enough.
Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was a rocky one, filled with crises and scandals. A good chunk of the emails most likely would shed light on her cover-up of malfeasance in the Benghazi disaster, but she might be hiding even worse information. The Clinton Foundation, now known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, has been doing the legal two-step ever since Slick Willie founded it in 2001. And we believe Clinton’s real reason for refusing to reveal the emails is the Foundation. After all, the Foundation’s history of accepting money from anyone who wants to give is legendary.
Ron Fournier, a long-time friend of the Clintons, wrote a particularly damaging op-ed in which he observed, “[T]he biggest threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential dreams is not her emails. It’s her family foundation. That’s where the money is: corporate money, foreign money, gobs of money sloshing around a vanity charity that could be renamed ‘Clinton Conflicts of Interest Foundation.’”
Furthermore, Fournier concluded, “Hillary Clinton’s secret communications cache is a bombshell deserving of full disclosure because of her assault on government transparency and electronic security. But its greatest relevancy is what the emails might reveal about any nexus between Clinton’s work at State and donations to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation from U.S. corporations and foreign nations.”
From Whitewater to Lippogate to White House coffees and everything in between, the Clintons have never changed. Coming out of Arkansas with a judge in Bill’s pocket, they’ve always been about the acquisition of power and money – Hillary’s claims about being “dead broke” notwithstanding. They’ve done very well, rising from small-time lawyers to multimillionaires with a formidable political machine. But the damage they’ve wreaked on the nation is obscene. It won’t wipe away with a simple stroke of the “delete” key.
Unfortunately, nearly half the country doesn’t care. As Fox News commentator Juan Williams noted, “In terms of the big political picture, there is no evidence [the email charade] is damaging her with the Democratic base.” Far too many Americans couldn’t care less about a Democrat candidate’s behavior, as long as he or she keeps the free stuff coming.