Hillary Clinton vs. Ashley Madison A Website for Adulterers Faces More Accountability Than a U.S. Secretary of State.By William McGurn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-vs-ashley-madison-1441063289
Only weeks after a hack exposed the names and other confidential information about Ashley Madison’s mostly male clientele, it’s hard to see how the company can recover. By contrast, Hillary Clinton remains the Democratic Party’s likely 2016 nominee for president, even though we’ve known since at least March 2013 (thanks to a Romanian hacker named Guccifer) that she conducted State Department business over her private email, which has in turn helped her evade the normal oversight and accountability for White House appointees.
How can this be?
One big reason is that much of the back-and-forth about Mrs. Clinton’s emails has focused on secondary disputes: the latest batch of emails coughed up by State in response to a federal judge’s order, the classified information that may be on these emails, and whether what she did was akin to the mishandling of classified information that resulted in a deal for Gen. David Petraeus under which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
These are all serious issues, and anyone who has worked in a White House and handled classified information (as this reporter has) understands how flimsy Mrs. Clinton’s excuses are. Not to mention how extraordinary her behavior was.
Even so, in a perverse way the public arguments over the classified content may be helping Mrs. Clinton in her continuing effort to confound and obscure. We now have two fresh examples. The first was a column last Thursday in the Washington Post in which the author concluded there was nothing criminal in how Mrs. Clinton handled classified info; the second was a Monday USA Today op-ed in which the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Gen. Petraeus says there’s no comparison between the two cases.
Neither author addresses the smoking gun: Why Mrs. Clinton set up a private server for all her official email in the first place. Mrs. Clinton herself has avoided the server question, which is no surprise. Because there is no credible explanation that doesn’t implicate her in willful deceit.
It’s true that many officials have at one time sent emails over a personal instead of official account. But a personal email does not require a personal server. Nor does the Colin-Powell-Did-It defense apply here, because while Mr. Powell as secretary of state did send some work emails over his personal email, he never set up his own server.
Only one explanation makes any sense: Mrs. Clinton entered the Obama administration determined to put in place a system to help her avoid accountability. Democratic operative James Carville admitted as much on ABC’s “The Week” in March when he said: “I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert”—a Republican congressman from Texas—“rifling through her emails.”
Remember, a private server has nothing to do with the convenience of having all your email accounts on one smartphone, Mrs. Clinton’s original excuse for mixing personal and official emails. It has nothing to do with whether classified information is marked. And it has nothing to do with whether her emails were about yoga or Chelsea’s wedding—or Benghazi or some looming Clinton Foundation conflict of interest.
Mrs. Clinton’s private server was about one thing: control. She used it to ensure she would be in a position to thwart effective oversight and accountability.
Shannen Coffin, a Bush administration lawyer who worked for both the Justice Department and Vice President Dick Cheney, points to the section of the U.S. Code that deals with officials who deliberately conceal, alter or destroy records belonging to government. It’s hard to see how this isn’t exactly what Mrs. Clinton intended when she set up her server.
“Prosectors at the Justice Department have to be considering that basic question,” Mr. Coffin says. “If Mrs. Clinton is cleared of mishandling classified info, and no one asks about the legality of the email system in general, then this isn’t a real investigation.”
We already know Mrs. Clinton did in fact conceal her emails from legitimate inquiries. To begin with, her emails were concealed from Freedom of Information requests and congressional subpoenas, because State did not have her private server and thus could not search it. We further know that she also edited—i.e., altered—some of the emails before she did turn them over. What we don’t yet know, and may never know, is what was on the 31,000 emails Mrs. Clinton destroyed.
She continues to benefit, moreover, from the way she, the Obama administration and the FBI have dragged their feet, even as a new Quinnipiac poll reveals that the top three words voters associate with her are “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” The point is, even though we know that she used her personal emails accounts to carry out State Deparment business, the most important emails may well remain hidden through the 2016 election—which she could win.
Not so for Ashley Madison, whose CEO has been forced out and whose planned public offering has been killed. Seems the market for adulterers has more exacting standards than the market for a Democratic presidential nominee.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
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