Hillary Clinton Becomes the Unsafe Hand In the last few days, she’s traded places with Donald Trump as the high-risk candidate. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-becomes-the-unsafe-hand-1478042102
It’s hard to generalize about Hillary Clinton’s email situation except that she tried to afford herself an extraordinary privilege as a high-ranking official, and then caused for herself exactly the problems (and worse) that she presumably was trying to avoid.
It’s the White House Travel Office, the Rose Law Firm billing records, the Seth Ward option (don’t ask), the health-care task force, etc., all over again.
Mrs. Clinton is a screw-up. And when a trait takes such trouble to announce itself, note must be taken.
Complicating the legal question, of course, is the fact that she didn’t exactly hide her behavior. The State Department knew she was conducting business on a private server. Her boss, the president, exchanged emails with her via what was self-evidently a private email account.
All this being so, many Americans probably would have been happy to see the difficulties bypassed by Mrs. Clinton simply returning all her emails and devices intact to the State Department. This she did not do. In response to reasonable and unavoidable questions about whether her arrangement and subsequent actions violated the law, the Obama administration had no choice but to launch a criminal investigation.
Now a simple home truth is that Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, from day one, were hardly indifferent, objective observers of the process. They did not want Mrs. Clinton charged.
In our imperfect world, most will understand the dilemma before FBI Director James Comey: Would it be more damaging for the country, FBI and personal reputation to actively intervene in the election by indicting Mrs. Clinton or to passively intervene in the election by giving her a pass?
A non-act is somehow easier to pass off than an act. Yet events of the last few days point to the absurdity of him clearing Mrs. Clinton when he still hadn’t seen 33,000 pieces of evidence. By definition, unless the FBI is full of remarkably unsuspicious cops, the emails that Mrs. Clinton and her aides deleted would seem the ones most likely to contain evidence of improper activity.
Mr. Comey perhaps failed also to foresee how the server issue would become entangled with the WikiLeaks theft of Clinton Foundation emails, contributing to a rather more multidimensional view of the back-scratching and buck-raking world the Clinton entourage inhabited. CONTINUE AT SITE
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