It’s quite possible that Hillary Clinton is 100 percent accurate when she contends that no potential voters are demanding answers about her email issues. Of course, that could say more about the controlled nature of her campaign or the inquisitiveness
It’s quite possible that Hillary Clinton is 100 percent accurate when she contends that no potential voters are demanding answers about her email issues. Of course, that could say more about the controlled nature of her campaign or the inquisitiveness of her supporters.
As much as the Democrats’ front-runner says she wants the whole truth and nothing but the truth to come out, that becomes harder to accept when so much of what she says about the emails proves inaccurate.
Perhaps she was just mistaken about how much classified material passed through her unsecured, home-brew email server.
Yet that amount grows with each passing day.
First, the inspector generals for the intelligence agencies and State Department, I. Charles McCullough and Steve Linick, said their review of 40 emails revealed four with classified material.
Now, as of court filings Monday, the number of questionable documents has grown to more than 300, about 5 percent of those studied.
Whether or not that exceeds your expectations, it’s far more than the unqualified zero Clinton promised last spring.
The secret information culled so far is from a subset of 30,000 emails Clinton surrendered to the State Department as the entire work product from her home server.
She and her aides, on their own, deleted another 31,000 emails they deemed personal and none of the public’s business. For now, you’ll just have to trust her on that.
Last week, Clinton did what she said in March that she would not do: turn over custody of her email server to an independent third party.
In this case, that’s the FBI, which is charged with sorting out whether national secrets are floating about unsecured.
Clinton also belatedly authorized her personal attorney, David Kendall, to hand over a thumb drive holding copies of those 30,000 work emails.
Clinton insists there’s nothing to see here.
Still, critics and allies alike are starting to notice that her team’s cavalier handling of top-secret material is strikingly similar to allegations that put other officials in criminal court.
Blaming her political enemies — and they are legion — could work for now, but it puts her campaign in a tough spot when asked to respond to nervous Democrats or mainstream media. ABC News, for example, reports that a Denver IT company that Clinton hired to maintain her server may have backed up everything onto a different server.
And even her supporters have to concede that this entire email mess is a self-inflicted wound that only worsens with the drip-drip-drip of ill tidings. With polls already showing her facing deficits in trust and honesty, Clinton doesn’t need to give upstart Bernie Sanders any wider an opening. That’s the political equation.
Still to be considered are the national security implications of a major-party presidential nominee facing metastasizing questions that include “classified” and “top secret.”
— The Dallas Morning News
