Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I tend to view Salon-dot-com as a bit of a diet version of Mother Jones, but often no less hilarious. Both Salon and MJ make no secret of their obvious leftist bias, which in its own weird way is respectable given how most media outlets at least feign neutrality even when it’s apparent they are anything but. So, it naturally came as a bit of a shock when I stumbled upon an article that was nearly a week old already titled “Time to care about the damn emails: Hillary Clinton has a serious legal problem.”
“Through his lips cut the cold barbed steel” – Les Claypool, “The ‘Ol Diamondback Sturgeon”
Only, it wasn’t clickbait. Salon’s H.A. Goodman excoriated the presumptive Democrat nominee over revelations coming from the State Department Inspector General’s report that CNN obtained last Wednesday and reported on.
The report effectively annihilates every excuse Clinton has ever offered for her decision to use a private email server instead of following government record-keeping rules.
“At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.
…the report notes that interviews with officials from the Under Secretary for Management and the Office of the Legal Adviser found ‘no knowledge of approval or review by other Department staff’ of the server.
…the report says that the Inspector General’s office ‘found no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server,’” Goodman quoted the CNN report.
All along, Clinton has shifted her rationale, at least publicly, for her decision to use the server. First, it was a matter of convenience “I didn’t want to carry two phones,” she said last year in an attempt to explain her decision. Never mind that all smartphones can keep track of multiple email accounts at once. Even my crummy iPhone 6 can handle it and only crash three or four times when I switch between accounts. This excuse was predicated on her assertion that she had requested, and received permission from the State Department to do so, an assertion that has now been revealed to be a bald-faced lie.
As Goodman wrote, and thereby placing me in the odd position of agreeing with someone drawing a paycheck from Salon-dot-com, if Hillary’s real reason for the email server wasn’t convenience, that really only leaves ignorance of the State Department and federal government’s rules for handling secret information, or an intentional effort to break protocol as the reasons behind her use of the server. Neither of those “explanations” paints a particularly rosy picture of the candidate. Either she’s too dumb to be trusted with top secret information, or she intentionally mishandles it.
Why this is all actually quite important is broken out by Goodman in a separate paragraph, probably to make sure the state-worshipping readership actually sees it and maybe takes note of its importance. I gotta give him credit for trying.
“Nobody before Clinton, Republican or Democrat, has ever connected a private server to government networks used to store top secret information,” Goodman wrote.
He goes on to point out that the simple fact Clinton had those 22 Top Secret emails on her server is itself a violation of the Espionage Act, which states that anyone entrusted with state secrets must make sure such data “isn’t removed from its proper place.”
As with all things regarding the Clintons, and particularly Hillary and her bunker mentality, getting to the actual truth of this matter may prove impossible. She was already on the defensive, throwing up walls and smokescreens any time the “email scandal” came up – with these revelations finding their way off CNN and Salon and into the general public’s consciousness this week, she’s likely to double-down on the stonewalling and denials.
What other choice does she have? I think it’s too late and far too out-of-character for her to hold a presser and issue a big, tearful “mia culpa” for the gross mishandling of state secrets during her tenure as Secretary of State. At this point, such would be hard to accept coming from anyone. Hillary doesn’t have the acting chops needed to convince anyone she’s even capable of contrition, let alone over a matter she’s so vehemently dismissed for more than a year. Hell, I don’t think Dame Judy Dench, cast in the role of Hillary would have the acting skills needed to pull that off and make it believable.
The good news for Hillary is that the only person less likable than her in the USA right now is her Republican opponent in the general election, Donald Trump. Add to that the fact the mainstream media is basically just the communications wing of the Democratic Party, and we shouldn’t expect too much additional, in-depth coverage of the email scandal to come from anywhere but Fox News and the like.
Looking at this mess, I just can’t help but wonder how the hell we got to a point where of the two approved candidates we get to choose from, one is facing a lawsuit for running a scam of a “university” and the other was willfully and knowingly negligent in her handling of some of the most sensitive secret data the government had.
As is so often the case, H.L. Mencken said it best: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
Leave a Reply