Hillary Finally Turns Over Scrubbed Server
“I would do my very best to model [good] behavior.”
“As president, I would do my very best to model the kind of behavior that I would hope all of our citizens would have,” Hillary Clinton told a New Hampshire audience Tuesday. So what kind of behavior would that be? Using a private email server instead of a government one to conduct (classified) business as secretary of state, and then taking years to scrub it of anything inconvenient before releasing it in a phony show of “transparency.” The difference is few other citizens could get away with such a thing.
By now, everyone knows the story of her majesty’s secret server. Everyone knows she dumped 55,000 printed pages on the State Department to reprocess — after she deleted more than 30,000 emails she called “personal.” In March, she insisted the server “will remain private.” That’s because it took a village to scrub her server of anything that might implicate her in cases like the Benghazi narrative, and her geek squad needed time to erase the most damaging stuff not just to and from her, but to and from staff who also used the server.
Of course, most Democrat voters won’t care about any of this when they arrive at the voting booth next November, though it is notable that Bernie Sanders now leads the polls by seven points in New Hampshire. When the scandal broke, Hillary led by 37 points. Perhaps she’s evitable.
On Tuesday, Clinton announced she would turn over her server to the FBI, though we’re pretty sure that’s more a case of seizure than voluntary transparency. If it had been the latter, we might have been treated to a network news exclusive interview with her touting her “above and beyond” efforts to placate the vast right-wing conspiracy.
But what difference, at this point, does it make? We’ll see what the techs at the FBI are able to uncover — it all depends on how thoroughly her server was scrubbed. Though the more scrubbing that took place, the more it reveals how much work she did to cover her tracks, and that might be worse than whatever the FBI finds.
Already, Justice Department Inspector General I. Charles McCullough found emails on the server that contained “top secret” information, the highest level of classification. He warned of “potentially hundreds of classified emails” on the private server.
Just last month, Clinton told us, “I am confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received.” She went on, “The facts are pretty clear: I did not send or receive anything that was classified at the time.”
Her weasel words weren’t good enough. According to an IG statement last month, “These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department; rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to [intelligence] classification officials, that information remains classified today. This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
Classified information isn’t the only problem. Many things are sensitive if not classified, and Hillary could hardly perform her duties as secretary of state without communicating these things by email.
As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explains, “Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on classified documents diverts attention from another significant problem: Most sensitive information in government is not classified, but government officials are still not allowed to communicate, transmit or store it outside government communications channels and filing systems. And quite apart from any criminal liability in this regard, this point goes to Mrs. Clinton’s fitness for high office — since she not only flouted laws, regulations and guidelines; she was head of the State Department at the time and was thus obligated to enforce these laws, regulations and guidelines.”
Meanwhile, Hillary signed an affidavit Monday saying, under penalty of perjury, that she had turned over all copies of government records from her tenure at State. Clintons and perjury just keep running into each other.
One of Clinton’s defenses is that the State Department’s email system was also compromised. But that doesn’t excuse her own behavior, and she conveniently left out the fact that she oversaw that system for four years.
Now, back to the quote at the beginning: “As president, I would do my very best to model the kind of behavior that I would hope all of our citizens would have.” Hillary and her husband are secretive, hypocritical, serial liars. They operate without any moral code beyond what benefits them. And they want to take the reins once again. Perish the thought.
(*Updated.)