The Clinton Mail Baggage Are Hillary’s ethics behind the Bernie Sanders surge?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-clinton-mail-baggage-1452730477
Hillary Clinton has taken to attacking Bernie Sanders in the wake of polls showing the Vermont socialist is beating her in Iowa and New Hampshire. The fascinating question is how much Bernie’s comeback is related to his message, and how much to the continuing doubts about Mrs. Clinton’s honesty and thus her ability to win in November.
The former Secretary of State wants voters to believe that her private email server scandal is old news, but every month brings new evidence that she put state secrets at risk in order to hide her emails from the public. The slow public release of new emails commanded by a judge, combined with an expanding FBI probe, may be making Democratic voters wonder if they should nominate such an ethically challenged nominee.
The latest cache hit Friday when the State Department released 1,262 more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. That dump contained another 66 emails deemed classified, which means State has now discovered some 1,340 instances of the nation’s top diplomat handling sensitive material on an unsecure server—including spy satellite information and the name of at least one confidential CIA source. Given that we know Mrs. Clinton’s server was the target of attempted hacks, this is grossly negligent behavior.
Mrs. Clinton’s assurance that none of these emails were classified “at the time,” and that she always handled such material properly, also looks to be undercut by one recently released message. In a June 17, 2011 email thread, aide Jake Sullivan tells Mrs. Clinton that he can’t get her certain documents she wants because “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax.” Mrs. Clinton appears to direct Mr. Sullivan to ignore protocol and send the information by insecure methods. “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” she wrote.
The State Department says it can find no proof the information was sent. On CBS ’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Mrs. Clinton said she was only requesting the transmittal of information that was “unclassified.” You can believe this if you choose, but there is no documentary evidence that she made this classified versus unclassified distinction to Mr. Sullivan. There is evidence of the former Secretary of State instructing an aide to ignore security procedures that State presumably had in place for a reason.
The State Department’s inability to find a record of transmittal counts for little, given that State has proven incapable of tracking the private email accounts of employees, or even locating and producing documents requested in Freedom of Information Act requests. Last week the State Department Inspector General skewered the department for giving “inaccurate and incomplete” answers to groups seeking Mrs. Clinton’s records.
IG Steve Linick included the example of State in 2013 telling an outside group that it had no information about Mrs. Clinton’s use of private email for public business, though “dozens of senior officials throughout the Department” knew about it. State has its own interest in hoping the email issue goes away.
Meanwhile, Fox News reported Monday that three intelligence sources say the FBI has expanded its email probe and is now looking at the “intersection” between Mrs. Clinton’s State Department business and her Clinton Foundation work. Mrs. Clinton told the Des Moines Register that “there is nothing like that that is happening” at the FBI, but the question is how Mrs. Clinton would know. The FBI rarely alerts subjects on the details of its probes.
Voters may get more insight into this “intersection” this spring now that State has belatedly and begrudgingly agreed to process and release the personal emails of Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, who appears to have been the nexus between Mrs. Clinton’s official and nonofficial duties.
The Clintons are banking that most of the media will continue to ignore the email scandal. Democratic elites and their media allies have invested their hopes for 2016 on Mrs. Clinton’s electoral inevitability. Mr. Sanders’s latest polling boomlet is a message that many rank-and-file Democrats are having second thoughts.
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