There are many deplorable assertions in the Washington Post’s editorial Friday excusing Hillary Clinton’s criminal conduct, but let’s just start with this:
Is the Washington Post editorial this dense? Or are they willfully misinterpreting Kaepernick’s point? The idea that because Clinton has “endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person” she should be exonerated gets things exactly backwards. An ordinary person can run a private email server and not be subject to criminal scrutiny because they aren’t responsible for receiving and responding to classified information vital to national security. Just imagine the Post defending a surgeon charged with malpractice because, well, he kept his operating room at least as clean as the typical kitchen. The same person is held to different standards, depending on their responsibilities to others.
Second, Kaepernick’s point is that someone who wasn’t as politically connected as Hillary Clinton would have been charged with a crime here. Is the Post seriously arguing that’s not the case? Because I don’t recall the Post writing an editorial about the injustice of Navy machinist Kristian Saucier who just got sentenced to a year in prison for taking six photos of the interior of a nuclear submarine. Such information is the lowest level of classified information, whereas Clinton had “top secret” information in her email server—which the FBI has basically confirmed was hacked by foreign governments.
Further, is it so shocking that people are accusing the FBI of “corruption or flagrant incompetence” here? The law is pretty clear, and the FBI and the Justice Department are not enforcing it. Comey excoriated Clinton publicly before bizarrely absolving her without explaining why she wasn’t being prosecuted for crimes that military personnel and federal workers a trip to the slammer. And since the investigation was wrapped up, we’ve learned from the FBI itself that she was still destroying emails during the FBI’s investigation. There was also a giant conflict of interest hanging over the investigation, as President Obama—Comey’s boss—endorsed Clinton for president weeks before the investigation wrapped up. And perhaps the Washington Post can remind us all of the punishments the White House handed down by the Obama administration after the IRS voluntarily held a press conference admitting they had unfairly scrutinized thousands of conservative political groups?
Finally, I can’t let this go: “A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed.” It is emphatically untrue that the classified information in her emails was “not obviously marked as such.” Hillary Clinton specifically instructed aides to remove the headers denoting classified information off of emails and “send nonsecure.” As for the last part of that sentence, can the Post please point to the law that says it’s OK to share classified information provided there’s “no evidence that national security was harmed”?
The Post’s liberal editorial board is terrified of the thought of a Trump presidency, but that does not excuse this assault on logic and twisting of the facts.
