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Yesterday was Bibi’s speech day. Today is Hillary’s day. And luckily, it’s beginning to look like we might not have many more of these. Mark Steyn goes first again.
Re; President-Designate Clinton not using a government email address for her entire tenure as Secretary of State, a reader from Oregon writes:
“When I got my security training at the State Department in 2012 using a private email account was considered to be a security risk. A Lack of public record is one thing but communicating Top Secret material without secure communication is a crime. Note that Petraeus is pleading guilty for less.”
Well, as I said yesterday, to the Clintons rules are for the little people – like General Petraeus. I don’t doubt that using your own email is a security risk, and I would bet that somewhere out there on the planet the Chinese, the Russians, the Norks and/or Isis have plenty of fascinating Hillary emails on Benghazi and a lot of other stuff US archivists will never see.
But she did it to evade public scrutiny. I wrote previously that what the Times calls a “personal” email account is, in fact, a secret account – and consciously created as such: The domain clintonemail.com was apparently registered on the first day of her Senate confirmation hearing.
Then we’ll get a couple of comments from left/liberal/media types like Ron Fournier, who says maybe it’s time for HRC to retire her White House idea. The email revelations have opened a flood gate of liberals who say they’ve had enough.
Perhaps Hillary Rodham Clinton shouldn’t run for president.
Maybe she should stay at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, where the former secretary of State could continue her life’s work of building stronger economies, health care systems, and families. Give paid speeches. Write best-selling books. Spend time with Charlotte, her beloved granddaughter.
Because she doesn’t seem ready for 2016. Like a blast of wintry air in July, the worst of 1990s-style politics is intruding on what needs to be a new millennium campaign: Transparent, inspirational, innovative, and beyond ethical reproach.
Two weeks ago, we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted contributions from foreign countries. Assurances from the Obama administration and Clinton aides that no donations were made during her tenure as secretary of State were proven false.
I called the actions sleazy and stupid. Sleazy because any fair-minded person would suspect the foreign countries of trying to buy Clinton’s influence. Stupid because the affair plays into a decades-old knock on the Clintons: They’ll cut any corner for campaign cash. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his top aides used the White House as a tool to court and reward big donors.
Now The New York Times is reporting that Clinton used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, an apparent violation of federal requirements that her records be retained. …
The day after Ron Fournier wrote the above, Hillary tweeted she wanted everyone to read her email. Fournier responded;
A cornered Clinton is a craven Clinton, which is why we should view Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest public relations trick with practiced skepticism. “I want the public to see my email,” she tweeted Wednesday night. “I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”
If she wants us to see her email, why did she create a secret account stored on a dark server registered at her home?
If she wants us to see her email, why didn’t she give State all of her email rather than a self-censored fraction of the correspondence?
If she wants us to see her email, Clintonshould turn over every word written on her dark account(s) for independent vetting. Let somebody the public trusts decide which emails are truly private and which ones belong to the public.
Like everything else about the response to this controversy, Clinton’s tweet is reminiscent of the 1990s, when her husband’s White House overcame its wrongdoing by denying the truth, blaming Republicans, and demonizing and bullying the media. It’s a shameless script, unbecoming of a historic figure who could be our next president – and jarringly inappropriate for these times. …
Next left/liberal/media type to column on the emails was Maureen Dowd.
… The Times’s Michael Schmidt reported that, as secretary of state, Hillary did not preserve her official correspondence on a government server and exclusively used a private email account. She used a private server linked to her Chappaqua home, only turning over cherry-picked messages in December at the State Department’s request.
Given the paranoid/legalese perspective that permeates Clintonland, this made sense: It’s hard to request emails from an account you don’t know exists. And your own server can shield you from subpoenas and other requests. If you want records from the Clinton server, you have to fight for them. Clinton Inc. can tough it out and even make stuff disappear. Instead of warning the secretary that she could be violating regulations, her aides fetishized her clintonemail.com account as a status symbol. Chelsea took on the pseudonym Diane Reynolds.
Near midnight on Wednesday, Hillary tweeted that she had asked the State Department to release the emails she had coughed up when pressed, noting: “I want the public to see my email.”
Less true words were never spoken. …
Finally, Kevin Williamson lets it all hang out.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton schemed to subvert record-keeping and transparency rules for reasons that are probably more or less communicated by her surname: The Clintons are creeps and liars and scoundrels and misfits, always have been, always will be. They are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics. The Democrats’ response to Herself’s trouble has taken three main forms: 1) What she did wasn’t technically illegal, says David Brock and other slavish Clinton retainers, even hauling out that old Al Gore classic, “no controlling legal authority”; 2) What about Scott Walker, huh? say the Democratic-party operators, pointing out that as a county executive Walker also used a private email system — and, to be honest, Walker’s response to the terrorist assault on Milwaukee County’s consulate in Benghazi has never been explained to my satisfaction; and 3) the president repeats his favorite mantra:
Wuddint me!
As Politico put it: “White House press secretary Josh Earnest took care to point out that Obama himself was unaware of any issues with Clinton’s email.” And that declaration from the president’s wildly inaptronymic spokesweasel might very well be true: The president has minions for that sort of thing. But he is responsible for the conduct of his minions, and it is impossible to believe that none of them knew about Mrs. Clinton’s “homebrew” email system, because that would require us to believe that nobody ever said, “Hey, CC the secretary of state personally on that internal memo,” or “Email the secretary of state about that meeting.” Oh, but the president, our national lightworker, he didn’t know!
One of the unfortunate facets of our increasingly religious attitude toward the presidency is that we invest the question of whether the divine imperator himself was aware of a situation with great moral weight: Not a sparrow falls, etc. Still, we call it an “administration” for a reason, and Barack Obama is the chief administrator of the executive branch. But he sits in a lofty place, and the principle of fecal gravity must be intensely attractive when viewed from such a great height. …
Excellent , maybe there is hope