Ever since Hillary Clinton first acknowledged in March 2015 that she had concealed her work emails from the public for up to five years, she and her allies have repeatedly claimed that she broke no rules.
They didn’t care that the experts said otherwise. It made no difference to their thinking that Clinton had obviously thwarted the purpose of both State Department rules and the entire purpose of the Freedom of Information Act.
But the task of defending, which is the Pavlovian impulse of her entourage to any suggestion of Clintonian misconduct, became more difficult on Wednesday. The State Department’s Inspector General released a 78-page report to lawmakers that concluded that she broke the law.
“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records,” the report states. “[B]ecause she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”
This also wasn’t a bureaucratic snafu, but a carefully considered choice that Clinton made to shield her communications from public and presidential scrutiny. She did not seek the proper permission, as the report notes, despite having an obligation to do so.
The report contains the transcript of a previously unreleased email exchange between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin, who writes that they should look into getting her an official government email address. Clinton replied, from her private address, that she preferred to do all of her email over private channels in order to protect the privacy of any non-work-related communications. (Note that this contradicts her previous assertion that the arrangement was merely for convenience, so that she could use a single device.)
Clinton was not just a federal employee responsible for making her own communications available for Freedom of Information requests. She was the secretary of state, the boss of her department, the person ultimately responsible under FOIA for making sure all work communications of the department were available. For herself, she carved out a very big exception.
Clinton’s campaign points to a note about former State Department staff’s “periodic” use of private email for State Department business. But Clinton is the only secretary to conduct all business this way. There is a reason this arrangement is unique, which is that it left many of her classified communications vulnerable to hacking. According to the Inspector General’s report, there were attempts to hack her server. It isn’t known whether the hackers got the information they sought.
But Clinton’s scandal is not really about emails. They are important details, but they are not the big picture. Her scandal — actually, the latest of a lifetime of scandals — is about the contempt she has shown for all the rules that little people have to live by. Like Leona Helmsley, the New York millionairess who notoriously suggested that “only the little people pay taxes,” Clinton appears to believe that there is one set of rules for her and another for everyone else.
The scandal is also about the lies she told after she was found out, about not having sent classified information, about her arrangement being “allowed by the State Department,” and even about her having turned over all work-related emails, which she hadn’t.
So as much as Clinton’s allies try to dismiss this as some kind of minor technical violation, it isn’t. It’s one that exposes her character once again as dishonest, self-serving and arrogant.
