Hillary Clinton’s Use of Private Email at State Department Raises Flags

[karynnj]

80. Manning did almost the opposite of what Berger did.

Manning leaked State Department cables indiscriminately (his release of the Iraq video was another thing, but that could have been defended in the court of public opinion.)

Berger was accused of removing documents from the archive (which he claimed were just copies that would be destroyed.) In a sense, where Manning was giving the world access to everything he could, Berger and Clinton POTENTIALLY could be removing things from the historical record.

I agree that the rules shouldn't differ from one person to another, but the three cases are all different - even if described in the worst way:
- Manning leaked secret material
- Berger removed material that was at an archive
- Clinton created a situation where AFTER EVENTS PLAYED OUT she was able to determine what emails sent to foreign leaders and others not in the State Department she would send in to the SD.

Note that it almost takes a conspiracy theory mindset to get what Clinton did to raise anywhere near to where Berger was. However, what this does is to open the possibility that she hid something (unspecified) and the SD really can't defend her on that.

The worst way to look at this is that from the moment she became SoS, she wanted to retain control of her email. At that point, there was nothing to hide as she was starting new. It does seem that the then law did not preclude using private email, but it did include the provision to retain all work emails and that was not done until the State Department privately requested that she give them the emails. This allowed the Clinton people to sift through the emails to separate the work from the private. Even if she would have created a private just for work email -- it would be easier to defend.

I am not a lawyer, but I doubt there are any legal problems. Politically I do think this creates some problems and only time will tell how significant they are. Two observations neither clear in impact-

1) This could give undeserved credence to the Benghazi nonsense or any other foreign policy issue where they could say damning emails are missing.

2) It reopens the Hillary lack of transparency meme that stretches back to her being the one angriest about Whitewater questions, her lack of responsiveness in producing her Rose Law firm records etc. In both those situations, the unwillingness to at least appear open led to a huge amount of bad PR --- not completely corrected when she was not shown to have done anything wrong when the records ultimately were produced.

3) The Republicans might use this to suggest that she was not prudent on national security as the government server would have been less subject to hacking. Here, the fact that she headed the State Department makes this unlike most other positions.


The argument could be made that as the SD said, Kerry is the first SoS to have immediately set up a government id and used it for his work. Hillary is also likely not the only cabinet head to have used her own email rather than the government one. This would have been more acceptable had she put a process in place - like at the end of every year, the emails were archived.