No Satisfaction (Multiple Updates)

Following up on my last post, the editors of the Wall Street Journal aren’t satisifed by the statement Sec. Clinton made yesterday, either:

The more likely truth is that she and her husband wanted to control how much of her communications at State would eventually become public—in case, say, she ran for President some day. And sure enough Mrs. Clinton violated State Department policy at the time by not turning over the emails in that private account to the government for its archives. She gave some of them to State only after Congress had requested them as part of the Benghazi probe, and State had none in its possession.

Asked on Tuesday why she didn’t turn over the emails from the start, Mrs. Clinton ducked the question and claimed “I’d be happy to have somebody talk to you about the rules.” She then added a new entry for the Clinton Ethics Pantheon: “I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.” Just not the policy she was supposed to abide by.

I have a recurring nightmare. And this is it. It’s going to be a long ten years.

Update

Frank Bruni:

She made a choice when she stepped into the secretary of state’s job that was bound to be second-guessed if it ever came to light, as everything eventually does. And when it did, she was silent about it for a week, letting suspicions fester.

She was on the spit Tuesday because she placed herself there.

Josh Marshall:

But Hillary Clinton seems to have taken it a bit further than all the others combined – or perhaps combined together all the things that others individually had done. In any case, at the end of the day – like with every other Clinton scandal – I doubt very much that there’s any there there. Did they actually do anything wrong or terribly embarrassing that they’re covering up? I doubt it. And I say this because I’ve been to this rodeo before. Many times. I’ve seen how it eventually plays out.

And yet here we are again – with an almost infinite, process-driven scandal that can easily continue on into a Clinton presidency, if there is one. Consider it. Clinton and her lawyers have separated her work emails from personal ones and then sent the work ones to the State Department. But Republicans will never believe that the filtering was on the level. And by apparently destroying the personal ones, that means that Republican questions and press questions will meet a permanent question mark. Presumably even if she wanted to let a third party review all the emails now she can’t. So the deleted emails will remain the permanent fantastical repository for the decision not to prevent a rescue of Chris Stevens, give orders to erase warnings about safety at the Benghazi consulate and more.

So why do you delete personal emails? I think because you’re very focused on your personal privacy and want to avoid scrutiny and you want to permanently foreclose the possibility. Lawyers and businesses frequently do this. Clinton for these purposes is not a lawyer or a business.

Sean Trende:

To be clear, I don’t think the scandals matter much, in and of themselves. In this respect, I agree with George Washington University political scientist John Sides, who sees almost zero chance that anyone’s mind will be changed by this directly.

To see how I think it might matter, it’s worth thinking back to 2008, and why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to a relatively inexperienced challenger. Barack Obama running a pitch-perfect campaign mattered a lot, as did Hillary Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War.

Her problems, however, went deeper. To start, she’s not a natural politician. Remember, the wheels started to come off the campaign bus for her in 2008 after her answer to this question on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. It’s still hard to watch the exchange without cringing. Her speeches tended to be wooden and forced. She didn’t exude warmth.

Even more importantly — if you read any of the three synoptic gospels of the 2008 election – “Renegade,” “Game Change,” or “The Battle for America” – they all agree that her campaign was beset by infighting, poor judgment, and hubris. Clinton campaign strategists supposedly didn’t realize that the delegates were proportionally allocated. No one took Obama seriously (except for Bill). Her campaign overspent and then struggled for cash once the race became competitive. She had a bad relationship with the press. Crucially, the campaign failed to organize the caucus states, where Obama swept delegates in races where only a few hundred votes were cast. Yet in the fall of 2007, she was drawing up lists of vice presidential candidates.

Surely, many thought to themselves, this time will be different. There were signals that she was putting together the sort of larger-than-life, untouchable campaign that Obama put together in 2008 (and, to a lesser extent, 2012). Her Twitter account was set up deftly, she played coy with the press and her base regarding her campaign, and some tweets, such as the “grandmother knows best” one tweaking Republicans on vaccinations, seemed to suggest a very competent, sharp campaign. I had begun to muse privately whether she might not be able to re-create the Clinton coalition, which would lead to a truly astonishing win.

It is still extremely early, and Clinton isn’t even an announced candidate yet. For now, I actually view that as the overall “rule,” if you will, of how to evaluate the campaign. The problem is that these scandals introduce a caveat to that rule that wasn’t present before: That this scandal occurred, that it was handled the way it has been, and that the press is reacting how it has been reacting should concern Democrats.

It’s not “Republicans” and it’s not Fox News.

Another Update

The best commentary on the whole affair that I’ve read to date comes from political science professor Charles Lipson at RealClearPolitics:

If the former secretary of state actually wanted to come clean without disclosing truly private, personal documents, she has a simple solution – just hand over everything to the chief of the US National Archives. Their specialists are trained to deal with these records. They have independent IT specialists who can examine the drives, restore deleted documents, and then return to Hillary all of her personal emails—and only those. That’s all she is entitled to. The rest belong by law to the U.S. public. Is there any reason to resist this simple, obvious solution? There must be a very good one since she’s clearly not taking it.

In any event, Hillary’s resistance will fail—politically and probably legally. Federal judges will become involved since FOIA requests have been made. Second, the House committee investigating the Benghazi debacle that occurred under Clinton’s tenure at State has issued subpoenas for all these documents, and they will not accept Mrs. Clinton’s personal assurance that she has complied.

He goes on to explain why the strategy of painting the story as a political witch-hunt mounted by Sec. Clinton’s enemies isn’t going to work and how the story undercuts her campaign’s primary political strategy. Read the whole thing.

Yet Another Update

The editors of USA Today:

But over the years, including recently, her résumé has been hard to square with some mystifying decision-making. At times, she has appeared obsessed with secrecy, dating to the health care task force she led during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House and the mysterious discovery of missing law firm records. And, along with her husband, she has shown a habit of playing by her own rules and surrounding herself with some aides of questionable judgment.