The background: The New York Times published a story that said as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton never used the government email account and instead used, exclusively, her own private account (which we later learned, was housed on her own server). Things like this aren’t done for convenience, they are done for secrecy and control, and next to money, that is what motivates Mrs. Clinton more than anything else. Actually, Ms. Clinton says she used her former Senate account for the first couple of months of her term as Secretary of State. Not to worry, she assures us – the private email arrangement was cleared by the State Department (which, don’t forget, she was running at the time.) Under the law, officials are allowed to use private accounts – but if they do, they must surrender them, in their entirety, to the government. That, Ms. Clinton did not do.
Now, if it is true that the State Department cleared her account and was aware of it, why in heaven’s name did they not state that fact on the day after The New York Times story? Why would the administration let the story be out there at all – if all was well, all was known, and all was OK? The President himself was – shall we say, confused. He told Bill Plante of CBS that he learned of the email story “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” 48 hours later, the President’s Press Secretary was clarifying his claim.
Anyway, Ms. Clinton assured her questioners that although she used her own email, the official ones were sent to the ".gov" account, so those who received them had to preserve them. Again, typical of the Clintons – let the folks on the other end and the underlings do the work. She also claimed that she never posted classified material – but if her own email account was “exclusively” used – does that mean she never had any communications which touched on classified secrets? She purports to have sent 62,320 emails during her tenure, and says she surrendered 30,490 of them to State Department, and deleted 31,830 emails that were private or personal. So that means less than half of her emails involved public business (and none of them – not even one - involved classified material). She did not address Cong. Trey Gowdy’s statement that there are wide gaps in the emails that have been surrendered, nor did she explain why the State Department did not disclose her email system when it was responding to subpoenas from Congress. She also didn’t tell us if any of those deleted emails concerned donations for the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments, millions of dollars of which occurred during her time as Secretary of State.
When the Hillary e-mail story broke last week, opinion was all but unanimous that it was improper, unwise, unethical and perhaps illegal, for a Secretary of State to disdain the US government email account and instead to use one of her own creation, but Ms. Clinton now declares that the State Department approved the arrangement, and then she shifted the issue to “I obeyed all the rules I was governed by.” Our first impression on hearing that was, “Well, of course, the Clintons have always made their own rules, so no rules "governed" her." Her move was not an accident: she developed her email account simultaneously with her appointment as Secretary.
Hillary took ten days to address the issue. If after ten days, she can’t come up with better answers, or with satisfactory answers, her reputation as an accomplished politician is vastly overrated (see above).