Where's the Outrage?

Hillary Clinton got her start in Washington D.C. 40 years ago as a very junior member of the apparatus that drove Richard Nixon from the presidency for committing the worst of all political crimes:  getting caught doing what your predecessors did without getting caught. 

Hillary, on the other hand, did not get caught committing old and common political crimes; she got caught inventing her own, brand new political crimes.  And not only will she not be driven from the presidency for her crimes; odds are that she will in fact be driven to the presidency in spite of them.

Hillary's email scandal is difficult to deconstruct for a few reasons; one is that the mainstream media is covering it, but not really explaining it.  Another is that it involves computers which, even for people who have lived in a computerized world for years, can quickly descend into incomprehesible techno-babble.

Yet another reason is that this scandal doesn't involve sex.  It is thanks in part to Hillary's husband the scandal and sex are often so synonymous that a scandal involving people with all their clothes on seems somehow not very scandalous at all, even if it is far more relevant to one's fitness to be president than one's private sexual behavior.

If Hillary had been sending pornography from her phone, she would have to drop out.  But she was only sending national security secrets, so......whatever.

I will attempt here to explain this issue in a more comprehensible way, while acknowledging that I myself still do not, and never will, fully grasp all of its dimensions and implications.  I will attempt to focus on a couple of big-picture concepts rather than to dissect all the technological and stautory minutiae.

When someone works at the level of Hillary Clinton in the federal government, their communications are public property.  Almost none of these communications can be made public in the here and now and much of it never will due to national security concerns, but it is, in theory if not in practice, the public's information.

A brief aside: some things must be classified.  The names of individuals in other nations who are risking their lives in the enterprise of passing us information should obviously not be made public.  But in the national secuirty state we now inhabit, the government has a motive and a habit of classifying nearly everything it does.

That is a huge problem.  We are paying for these actions, they are being done in our name, and we will reap the results, whether positive or negative.  Much more of what our "leaders" do should be made public in a much more timely manner.

That very important caveat aside, all of Hillary Clinton's communications as Secretary of State were the property of the government and, eventually, hopefully, of the public at large.  What they most decidedly were not was the personal property of Hillary Clinton.

When Clinton was sworn in, she was advised that personal email accounts cannot be linked to government devices.  In other words, if Hillary had a gmail account, she was forbidden from accessing that acount from a government-issued phone or laptop.

This is because government-issued devices are used to conduct government business, much of which is secret.  These devices, therefore, have all sorts of high-tech and high-cost protections against hacking.  Allowing personal emails to flow into a government-issued computer would expose that computer to possible hacking via spam mail, viruses, etc.

So, Hillary was forbidden from getting her personal email on her government devices.  So what did she do?  She got her own devices, without all the protective bells and whistles, and used those personal devices for both personal and government communications.

Imagine if Hillary Clinton were the principal of an elementary school.  She is informed by the powers-that-be that peanuts must never be allowed in the kitchens or cafeteria of her school because several of her students have life-threatening peanut allergies and the possibility of a mistake or a cross-contamination could literally be a life or death issue.

What would Hillary do in that situation?  She would not bring peanuts into the school; she would bring the entire student body on a field trip to a peanut farm and then tell the mayor and the school board that she didn't break any rules.

Another way to look at this issue is to go old-school.  Forget emails and servers and encryption software.  Think about paper.  Everyone understands paper.  Think of the emails as paper documents.

The State Department is full of top-secret documents.  The State Department is a very secure building and there is a rule, indeed a law, against any person taking any document out of the building for any reason.

Hillary decides, in this analogy (and maybe in real life, who knows?), to take top-secret paper documents home with her every night.  When the State Department finds out and asks her to return those documents, Hillary says, "Sure, but I've mixed them all in with my bills, personal letters, poetry, and doodles.  Give me a few weeks take out the personal, irrelevant stuff and then I'll give you all the government stuff back."

What does she do in those few weeks?  She goes through all the government stuff, our property, and decides which of those stolen documents she will return.  Whatever stolen documents make her look bad, she will destroy.

We know now that Hillary's staff took her personal devices, which were full of stolen government property, and literally smashed them with hammers.  Presumably the vibe was something like this:

So, in summation:  Hillary stole government property, decided which of that property to return, decided which of that property to destroy, and we have no way of knowing what property was either destroyed or pilfered by hostile foreign governments or terrorist organizations or drug cartels.

There's so much more to this, but what's been outlined here is enough to disqualify this woman from office.  She will, in all likelihood, still win, and if she does I have no intellectual option other than to wish her well.  But in either case, just like her husband, we know exactly what we will be getting.