Trust me (but don’t verify).
That’s the Clinton family motto, as we were reminded Tuesday when Hillary Clinton finally found a few minutes to address a story that remains in the headlines. The story, reported earlier this month by the New York Times, is that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account while serving as secretary of state. The data were stored on her own personal server, in apparent violation of federal record-keeping regulations.
Clinton revealed Tuesday that about half the emails on her personal account from those years have been deleted. Why? She deemed them of a personal nature. Truly personal emails deserve privacy, but some emails she might deem personal — say, about foreign donors to her family’s foundation — could be worthy of public scrutiny.
Clinton said she declined to use a government email address alongside her personal address for the “convenience” of using just one device. Convenience is not generally accepted as a justification for ignoring government rules, nor does it appear to be much of a concern for Clinton anymore. Less than a week before the Times’ first story about her emails, Clinton said at a conference in California that she is “two steps short of a hoarder” and keeps “an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a Blackberry” these days.
How … inconvenient.
Talking about all the devices she carries these days would seem to be part of a careful effort to portray Clinton as in-touch and up-to-date. Consider the picture which, as of Tuesday night, remained the avatar on Clinton's Twitter account. In it, she's a jet-setting, shades-wearing, smartphone-wielding power broker — not a grandmother who'd join Reagan as the only presidents to be inaugurated at age 69. (If you don't think that picture was staged for maximum coolness effect, ask yourself: Who wears sunglasses while reading a phone screen, especially indoors?)
On top of all this, we got a perfectly Clintonian effort not just to excuse her behavior, but to portray it as worthy of admiration. See, to Clinton, what's "unprecedented" here isn't her refusal to use a government email address, her storing all her emails on a personal server, her leaving the State Department hamstrung for fulfilling Freedom of Information Act requests, or her deciding alone which documents she'd turn over for public review and which ones she wouldn't.
No, what's "unprecedented" here is how downright dutiful Clinton has been in giving us what she did! "I went above and beyond what I was requested to do," she said Tuesday.
Hey, someone give her a medal!
If you are a card-carrying Democrat, you have to be asking yourself at this point if it’s really worth it. If the possibility of keeping the Obama coalition together and electing the first woman president is really worth returning to the era of hiding, finding, dodging, parsing, circling the wagons, counter-attacking; finding more, dodging more, parsing more …
Once you start with the Clintons, it never ends.
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