Yesterday the Washington Post ran an extended investigative report on the roots of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. The entire piece is worth a read, and while it is obviously written in a way that plays down Clinton’s culpability, her selfishness shines through. For example, she risked exposing national secrets because she loved her BlackBerry so darn much:
Hillary Clinton’s email problems began in her first days as secretary of state. She insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but she wasn’t allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices, a secure space known as Mahogany Row.
For Clinton, this was frustrating. As a political heavyweight and chief of the nation’s diplomatic corps, she needed to manage a torrent of email to stay connected to colleagues, friends and supporters. She hated having to put her BlackBerry into a lockbox before going into her own office.
Her aides and senior officials pushed to find a way to enable her to use the device in the secure area. But their efforts unsettled the diplomatic security bureau, which was worried that foreign intelligence services could hack her BlackBerry and transform it into a listening device.
The very instant that Clinton and her aides learned of the security vulnerability, that should have been the end of the matter, but she pressed forward anyway — flouting security while the State Department scrambled for a solution. The problem, however, was worse than officials knew:
Clinton used her BlackBerry as the group continued looking for a solution. But unknown to diplomatic security and technology officials at the department, there was another looming communications vulnerability: Clinton’s BlackBerry was digitally tethered to a private email server in the basement of her family home, some 260 miles to the north in Chappaqua, N.Y., documents and interviews show.
Those officials took no steps to protect the server against intruders and spies, because they apparently were not told about it.
This is astonishing diva behavior. Because Clinton was a “BlackBerry addict” and wanted to maximize her “personal comfort,” she put national secrets at risk. But there was more to it, of course. She was a diva with a purpose — controlling her communications, including controlling the response to FOIA requests. The Post recounts federal district judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s astonishment at the arrangement:
He noted that Clinton put the State Department in the position of having to ask her to return thousands of government records — her work email.
“Am I missing something?” Sullivan asked during a Feb. 23 hearing. “How in the world could this happen?”
It happened because Hillary continued the long family tradition of acting as if rules are for the little people. It happened because she’s gotten away with rule-breaking for decades. And it happened because she knew — beyond a shadow of a doubt — that a legion of media members and activists would line up to support her, unconditionally and unequivocally. After all, as her husband proved, so long as she keeps abortion legal and keeps the Republicans out of the White House, a Clinton can do no wrong.