The Less Noted and Discussed Aspect of the Clinton E-mail Scandal [View all]

[Time for change]

The bulk of attention in the Clinton e-mail scandal focuses on breaches of national security – which I won’t talk about here. But there’s another aspect to it that some people may find to be more important and darker than her breaches of national security: Her attempt to hide her federal business from the relevant federal agencies and the American people. The relevant part of federal law violated by this attempt is in the IG report:

Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account, by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary. At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service.

In fact, among the “personal” Clinton e-mails discovered by the IG, one contains an apparent admission that a major reason for her decision to set up a private e-mail server for the conduct of government business was to prevent “access” to it by federal officials or anyone else, as noted by the Washington Examiner. The Examiner discusses this aspect of the scandal and sums it up by saying:

But the classified information discussion may be a distraction from a more important issue: Clinton's inappropriate secrecy, keeping her emails outside the reach of federal officials and outside the reach of public-records laws. In America the government's business is the people's business — but Hillary Clinton wanted the American people out of her business.

What might Clinton have wanted to keep away from the federal authorities and the public?

One possibility would be that she was afraid that it might shed light on reports of corruption involving the Clinton Foundation. Another article by the Examiner notes:

Thousands of emails made public by the State Department between May of last year and Friday indicate donors to the Clinton Foundation were often given personal meetings, generous contracts or special consideration that was seemingly not afforded to the same number of private groups that had not written checks to the charity.

Or maybe they involve her central involvement with the disastrous Libyan War, which Clinton played a central role in creating, which helped ISIS and other terrorist groups gain power, and which Clinton has never even acknowledged as a mistake.

Or perhaps it would show something about her $225,000 speeches to Wall Street. There are federal laws against candidates for high federal offices receiving money for personal use from powerful interests, and with good reason. Large sums of money from powerful interest groups that are regulated by the federal government might cause a new U.S. President or other public official to favor those powerful interests over their other constituents. (In my opinion, there should be similar prohibitions against campaign contributions from powerful interest groups, for the same reason, but that’s another issue, since unfortunately those bribes are legal). Clinton claims that her speeches to Wall Street which earned her such huge sums of money were made before she became a candidate for President. But her e-mails could show that she was running long before she announced it publicly, in which case the pay she received for some or many of her Wall Street speeches would be illegal.

The Examiner sums up the problem with Clinton’s lack of transparency:

Transparency is essential to a functional democracy. Congress and various arms of the executive branch have created rules to bring about that transparency. Hillary Clinton broke those rules, in keeping with her career of antipathy for transparency. This antipathy to a core value is disqualifying in a presidential candidate. It's also a trait she shares with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has refused to release his tax returns, as presidential candidates traditionally do….. Democracy needs sunshine in order to flourish. America is in for four years of darkness.

I think it would have been better if the Examiner had changed its last sentence to read: “America is in for four years of darkness IF Trump and Clinton receive their Party’s nomination and are the only viable contenders in the November Presidential Election.” In other words, I think that if the Democratic Party goes through with its long intended coronation it will not only be committing political suicide but worse yet, it will be perpetrating a great disservice upon the American people.

It would be like if Richard Nixon, at the height of the Watergate scandal, rather than resigning the Presidency, had announced his intention to run for another term (He couldn’t have done that because he was in his second term at the time of his resignation, but this is just a hypothetical analogy). At least when Nixon resigned he had the privilege of having a successor who he approved of. If Clinton is the Democratic nominee she won’t have that option – assuming that she disapproves of a Trump Presidency.