Many people find it hard to believe that Hillary Clinton's home-brew email server hosted zero emails containing classified or foreign government information. She was America's top diplomat, and nothing she sent or received was classified?
Mrs. Clinton insisted that she kept classified information out of her email, as the law required. Storing classified information in a personal, nongovernment email account on a private computer server, like the one at Mrs. Clinton's home, would be a violation of secrecy laws.And relations with other countries are particularly subject to secrecy claims. "Foreign government information" -- information received from another government with the expectation that it will be held in confidence -- is an official category of classified information in secrecy regulations.
A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that while it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton's staff identified as involving government business.
"I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified," said the former official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton. "Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine."
She also deleted tens of thousands of emails, at her own discretion.
Mrs. Clinton said she turned over some 30,490 emails to the State Department in December, nearly two years after leaving office. But she said she had deleted nearly 32,000 others
Mrs. Clinton claims that her decision to use a private email server located in her own residence was purely for convenience. In what world can you not check two email accounts from the same device? Couldn't she have used a government mobile device to check her personal email?
"I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two," she explained. She asked, in effect, that voters trust that she was disclosing more of them than she needed to -- and even to credit her with an unusual degree of transparency.
Paul Mirengoff derides Mrs. Clinton for putting her convenience ahead of national security.
Even if one takes Clinton's explanation at face value, we must conclude that she placed her desire not to carry two devices ahead of Obama administration policy and the security interests of the United States. Whether or not Clinton's email system was breached, Clinton's use of her own server increased the likelihood of such a breach.It's characteristic of Clinton that she would ignore rules and best practices for her own convenience. Simply put, she thinks she's better than everyone else and thus above the rules.
Dan McLaughlin has the tweet of the day.
(HT: Glenn Reynolds.)
