Leave it to the FBI to wait until the Friday before Labor Day to release a report that makes it look so bad. What other impression can one take away from the bureau’s new report on its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, which will fuel doubts about FBI director James Comey’s recommendation that she not be prosecuted for mishandling classified information?
Perhaps the most important detail it spells out is the timeline of Clinton’s email deletions. The information strongly suggests that team Clinton deliberately destroyed evidence and committed obstruction of justice.
In March 2015, three weeks after the New York Times reported the existence of Clinton’s private server and the House Benghazi Committee sent a letter demanding that her records be preserved, someone on Clinton’s staff (the name seems to elude everyone) began furiously deleting emails using an anonymously downloaded program that “shreds” files so they are unrecoverable.
Equally damning is the picture that the FBI’s report paints of Clinton’s confessedly oblivious service as secretary of state. The charitable way to interpret the answers she gave the FBI in July is to say she went through her time at State without understanding the most basic aspects of her job. Her answers about securing classified information are so befuddled that they read like the moment one decides granny shouldn’t have the car keys anymore.
The less charitable interpretation is that she lied to the FBI, just like she has lied to the public so often.
It’s not just that Clinton answered 26 of the FBI’s questions by saying she couldn’t recall such basic items as when she received her security clearance, her reason for not getting a secure Blackberry, and whether she had ever used an iPad mini. (In fact, she used 13 different devices to access the private email server she used for all her government work, and those devices seem to be missing.) It’s also that she seemed to have no idea what classified information is, how it is marked or what significance classification carries.
“Clinton could not give an example of how classification of a document was determined,” FBI investigators wrote in their notes on the interview. “Clinton did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system.”
When asked about a specific email about planning for a drone strike in Pakistan, obviously a very sensitive matter, Clinton reacted by telling investigators that she didn’t see why there should be a problem with such information being sent over non-secure email channels. “Clinton stated deliberation over a future drone strike did not give her cause for concern regarding classification,” the FBI memo states.
Clinton acted as though she didn’t know that the marking “(C)” on certain documents was in indication that they were classified. “When asked what the parenthetical ‘C’ meant before a paragraph … [she] stated she did not know and could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.”
This is the woman who served as America’s top diplomat for three years, and before that served on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It is inconceivable that she could be so ignorant about classifications. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York lightheartedly put it on Twitter, “If you told me Hillary Clinton told FBI she does not recall being Secretary of State, I would not be surprised.”
It’s pertinent to ask whether Clinton was just playing dumb during her FBI interview, given that she was potentially facing criminal charges. But maybe she really was that badly out of her league in the job to which President Obama appointed her. And now she is asking voters for promotion even higher?
Explaining Clinton’s interview with the FBI as being the result of grotesque incompetence is no more reassuring than explaining it as the result of fathomless dishonesty. Maybe the distinction between the two is not the important issue. Maybe the real question is why Democrats nominated someone for president who is so manifestly unfit for the job.
