In his most recent post Michael Ledeen asks “What is Hillary hiding?”:
Like millions of avid news readers, I’ve been trying to sort out the Hillary Clinton scandals. You know, all that stuff about classified material on her “private†server, sensitive national security secrets that have most likely been lifted by hostiles.
I think we’ve lost track of the central question: Why was she so eager to conceal her communications from Congress and the American public? Most of the commentary goes something like “because she wanted to evade discovery.†She dreaded all the FOIAs. But that only leads to the question another time: What did she want to hide, and why?
I think there are only two answers to that question and anything else is a variant of one of those.
The first answer, the one most favorable to Sec. Clinton, is that she wasn’t hiding anything. She is convinced, not without justification, that there are lots of people gunning for her and she’s gun-shy. If you believe that’s the one, true answer, you also necessarily believe that she is very poorly informed, ignorant, arrogant or some of all of the above, and that she was willing to subordinate any better judgment to a single-minded avoidance of scrutiny just to avoid being scrutinized. That’s the view most favorable to her.
The other answer is that the Clinton business plan required her to avoid scrutiny. She knew she was going to be treading a very thin line among doing her job as Secretary of State, evading the law, and dealing in the “pay to play” tactics familiar to any resident of the great state of Illinois. What she planned to do might not have been technically against the law but it was certainly unseemly and many including me would say that it was inescapably corrupt.
To my eye Occam’s Razor demands the second answer but I guess YMMV.
You are an insane woman hating bigot, Hatie McWomanbasher. How DARE you ignore the ‘R’ for Rodham?
I can’t even hardly stand to look at you, you… you… cisgendered heteropatriarchal colonialist beast you!
I would expect that she would have someone else handle the pay to play stuff and all of the questionable legal stuff. Why leave a trail that could lead to her? Email is discoverable. It can always be tracked on the other side of the email. Given that the new(ish) harassment tactic of the day is to solicit every email ever written, I would guess that she figured she could hide her personal stuff by having a personal account. Personally, I doubt very much that she is a tech wiz and wonder who advised her that she should do this.
Steve
That’s exactly the sort of thing I was referring to as ignorant and arrogant. Did she think because she had a private email server it would remain a secret? Why else do it?
I’ve always assumed those were some damned valuable yoga poses and cookie recipes well worth the attendant risks of hiding them.
Drew, maybe those are the things she spoke about in all those Wall Street speeches!
To me it never made much sense. She could have kept her secrets much better if she’d had the private server as well as a government blackberry. It wouldn’t raise as many (or any questions) and would put a wall between her government live and non-government life. That’s certainly what I would want to do if I was in her position.
But… perhaps she couldn’t actually keep the two lives separate – a reasonable conclusion given what we know of her staff and how they operated. So I can actually see some merit in her first excuse – that it was for convenience – not the having to carry two devices nonsense, but the convenience of not having to think about “spillage” from one side to the other and having to think about gray areas. Plus, consider this is a person who emails her staff (on a blackberry!) with all kinds of simple tasks like looking up showtimes for TV shows. (I don’t know about anyone else, but I could do that a lot faster myself than asking my staff (if I had a staff)). She hasn’t driven her own car in at least a decade. She doesn’t cook her own food. Pretty much every aspect of her life is managed for her by her personal staff. For someone so used to that high level of service, it’s not surprising to me that two devices for two purposes would be viewed as a burden.
Also, my experience with people in positions of high authority is that most really do think the regular rules do not apply to them, that they are for the “little people.”
Add to that the apparent fact that she doesn’t know how to use a computer and never uses computers – not at home or in the office. All her business was done on the smart phone.
The sad reality is that makes her much more vulnerable as an intelligence target. Break into that phone and you have everything. Considering that her private server had zero security or encryption for several months after taking office, I would be very surprised if her system wasn’t compromised from the beginning.
“Did she think because she had a private email server it would remain a secret? ”
AS I said, and Andy seems to confirm, she is not a tech wiz. I would expect that she would only think that if someone told her it was the case.
Steve
Really good post, Andy!
Remember HRC is not a young woman. She didn’t grow up with all these neat-o electronic devices. She’s got a law degree rather than a computer science degree. She has been relatively affluent, however, which means that things like computer servers were actually affordable to her well before the hoi polloi. Also, the point at which she started playing with these toys was 2009 or earlier — back in prehistory so to speak.
My general impression is, she thought she was doing something really clever and avant garde in having her own computer server. People tried to explain she was wrong and why this was a bad idea, but it just didn’t register.
I don’t think that makes her an evil person, or someone who deserves jail time for treasonably exposing UIS government secrets. Uhhhh …. it makes me worry quite a lot about whether she’s really on top of a whole lot of technological issues and thus whether she’s a good choice for President.