Would you rather have a dishonest president or a clueless president? Electing Hillary Clinton will give us at least one of those.
The latest piece of this awful jigsaw puzzle comes from the FBI’s (mostly) declassified summaries of its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state. The documents were released last Friday afternoon, a pre-holiday news dump egregiously timed even by Washington’s cynical standards.
In short, the summaries undermine — again — many excuses Clinton has offered for an arrangement that jeopardized the U.S. government’s secrets. They also reveal new excuses so ridiculous they require us to believe she is not deceitful, just incompetent.
For starters, there’s a sequence of events that’s extremely suspicious. In December 2014, Clinton told aides she no longer needed any emails older than 60 days. However, the company managing her server did not delete any of those older emails.
Fast forward to March 2, 2015, when The New York Times broke the story that Clinton had exclusively used private email on a private server. Two days later, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena for records related to the two private email addresses she had used. But after a March 25 conference call with Clinton’s lawyers, an employee for the company had what he called an “‘oh s—’ moment,” realizing he hadn’t carried out the instructions from three months earlier to delete the older email records. In the week following the call, he deleted the files.
A recurring theme in the FBI documents is that Clinton and her aides claimed to have tried often to do the right thing but — gosh darn it! — things never quite worked out. Once, when her personal Blackberry was acting up, Clinton asked for a government-issued replacement. After two officials advised that emails she sent would be subject to open-records laws, a Clinton aide dropped the request, citing a bogus concern about migrating data.
When State began rolling out a new email archival system, Clinton’s team blocked implementation for themselves. Once, Clinton said she “requested a secure Blackberry … but she could not recall the reasons why State was unable to fulfill this request.”
When it comes to Clinton’s handling of classified information, still more excuses crop up. First, there’s her claim she didn’t differentiate among various levels of classification — even though the government explicitly protects more-sensitive information far more jealously.
But one story really takes the cake. FBI agents asked Clinton about email chains marked “(C),” which “ostensibly indicat(ed) the presence of information classified at the confidential level.” Her response? “Clinton stated she did not know what the ‘(C)’ meant … and speculated it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.”
While I’m no fan of Donald Trump, I think a comparison between the two candidates’ aversion to the truth is useful.
Trump says things that are false because, by many accounts, he won’t spend the time to learn what’s true. Clinton says things that are false because, as this episode and many others demonstrate, she spends a lot of time trying to obscure what’s true.
Neither is a good look for a potential president. But the latter is the more deeply rooted character flaw.
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