Hillary Clinton’s “extremely careless” handling of top secret information and other classified material ought to be a secondary issue. The root problem is her utter refusal to follow the rules of government transparency, which led to her evasion of public records laws.
A plurality of Americans say they will vote for Clinton to be president. Given the alternatives, this may be understandable. But the shortcomings of her competition shouldn’t blind us to what we’re getting into: We are on the path to elect a president who has consistently acted above the law, and has consistently gotten away with it. She goes out of her way to evade the oversight fitting of her position and to hide from the American people what she is doing.
This is corrupt behavior for a secretary of state, and there is no reason to expect she will change as president.
A quick recap: As secretary of state, Clinton was a public servant. Every single work-related email she sent was, legally, a public record. How she conducted her job was our business — the public had a right to read the records she generated. Because some of her emails would be top secret, federal authorities would have the ability to block or delay the release of some emails to the public. Also, because a secretary of state is allowed to have a private life, federal authorities would allow her to withhold from the public emails of a personal nature.
But Clinton took this power out of the hands of federal authorities by refusing to use a “state.gov” email address and instead setting up her own email servers so that the authorities would not have access to her emails.
When her aide Huma Abedin suggested in 2010 that Clinton get a State Department email address, Clinton responded “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”
She didn’t want the authorities — State Department and National Archives officials — to have access to her personal email accounts, even though she was conducting most of her official business on those email accounts.
“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any federal records she created and received on her personal account,” the State Department’s Inspector General stated. She didn’t.
“Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service,” the IG also explained. She didn’t.
Instead, she hid half of her emails from the relevant authorities, falsely claiming none were work related. The FBI, as director James Comey explained Tuesday, had to compile fragments of emails she hadn’t turned over, and found that hundreds of these emails were work-related and thus public records — records she was required by law to turn over to authorities, but which she just discarded. Some of those discarded public records included top secret material.
After Clinton hid public records from the public authorities and mishandled top secret information, she angrily and repeatedly insisted she had done neither — that all of the emails she retained were about yoga or such matters.
Comey said that “in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity” could face “consequences.” The director pointed out “those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.”
Had an underling at State done this, Clinton would have fired her — any secretary of state would have. Had any ordinary secretary of state done this, he or she might have to resign. But Clinton did this — and now we’re going to put her in charge of the government?
After the way she’s behaved, would Clinton even be able to get a security clearance sufficient to be a top-ranking White House or State appointee?
In any normal year, this would nearly sink Clinton. But Republican voters this year have nominated a man who shows the same level of disdain for transparency (he hasn’t released his tax returns, and his entire operation has been opaque about his much-ballyhooed charitable giving). Donald Trump also shows the same disregard for constitutional constraints on the powerful, and the same preference of the rule of man over the rule of law.
On a political level, Trump’s Trumpiness may offset the cost of Clinton’s Clintonianism. But on a moral level, Trump’s personality doesn’t excuse Clinton’s behavior.
Given what we know about her antipathy to candor, transparency, truth and the rule of law, putting Clinton in charge of kill lists, watch lists, the FBI, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the NSA and the other tentacles of the federal government that have the power to ruin and end lives — that would be gross negligence.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
