Clinton’s False Email Equivalence Hillary tries to wrap Powell and Rice into her email security breach.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-false-email-equivalence-1454716185
A week ago Hillary Clinton’s allies accused the State Department Inspector General’s office of belonging to the vast right-wing conspiracy. So you have to admire her chutzpah this week in trying to spin a memo from that same office to exonerate her use of a renegade private email server. All the more so because the new memo strengthens the case that she mishandled national secrets.
In Thursday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton hailed a new document from State IG Steve Linick that summarizes his view of the email practices of five prior Secretaries of State. The memo says he found a few instances of “sensitive material” sent to the private email accounts of Republicans Colin Powell and staffers to Condoleezza Rice.
“Now you have these people in the government who are doing the same thing [to Powell and Rice’s aides] they’ve been doing to me,” claimed Mrs. Clinton—that is, “retroactively classifying” documents. “I agree with Secretary Powell, who said today this is an absurdity.”
Start with the fact that neither Mr. Powell nor Ms. Rice set up a private email server to conduct government business. Mr. Powell did have a personal email account, but he purposely used a State-maintained classified computer system on his desk for classified communications. This may not have been “convenient” for him, to borrow an earlier Clinton explanation for her private server, but Mr. Powell understood the rules. And he understood them even prior to 2005 when State instituted clear rules warning against private email for official business. Mrs. Rice’s aides say she never used any email while at State.
While a few sensitive details may have leeched into a Powell or Rice-aide email account, these would have been accidental. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton intentionally created a private email account, on her own private server, precisely so she could keep those emails away from government public-disclosure rules.
Mr. Linik’s review turned up two messages sent to Mr. Powell’s account that State now deems sensitive (though Mr. Powell disputes that they should be classified). Mr. Linik found 10 that were sent to Ms. Rice’s State Department entourage over her entire tenure. By contrast, State has now deemed that more than 1,600 emails on Mrs. Clinton’s server are confidential—and there is another batch still to be released.
The federal government maintains several levels of classification, ranging from the lowest designations of “sensitive but unclassified” and “confidential” to code-word classifications for the most important secrets. While all such information must be safeguarded, lower-level “sensitive but unclassified” and “confidential” information is sometimes circulated on unclassified government systems. Mr. Powell points out that the two emails sent to him were first circulated on unclassified State Department systems and forwarded to his account by an assistant.
Many of Mrs. Clinton’s 1,600 classified emails also fall into these “sensitive” and “confidential” categories. But at least 22 emails have been identified as highly classified from their creation. This means that their information would have resided at all times on classified government systems until they were sent to Mrs. Clinton and her unclassified, unguarded private server. There is no evidence that anything remotely like that happened under Secretaries Powell or Rice.
This transfer question gets to the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s email negligence. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is defending Mrs. Clinton by claiming there is no evidence that any of these top secrets emails originated with Secretary Clinton. “It has never made sense to me that Secretary Clinton can be held responsible for email exchanges that originated with someone else,” the California Democrat says.
But Mrs. Clinton is responsible because she is the one who created the classification problem by doing official business on her private server. This would never have become an issue if she had followed the rules and used State Department email. That she set up her private email out of a self-serving desire to shield her communications from public disclosure makes her disregard for security a willful act that opens her to criminal liability.
Readers of a certain age will recall that another Clinton tried the everybody-does-it defense when he was found to have broken the law. Are Democrats really going to lash themselves one more time to the Clinton standard of ethics?
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