In a February 23 hearing on a Freedom of Information Act request for Hillary Clinton’s official State Department emails—emails that don’t exist because Hillary Clinton secretly conducted email on a private Blackberrry connected to a private server—District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan exclaimed, “How in the world could this happen?”
That’s the key question. What matters about the Clinton email scandal is not the nefarious conduct that she sought to hide by using her own server. There’s no evidence of any such nefarious conduct. What matters is that she made an extremely poor decision: poor because it violated State Department rules, poor because it could have endangered cyber-security, and poor because it now constitutes a serious self-inflicted political wound. Why did such a smart, seasoned public servant exercise such bad judgment? For the same reason she has in the past: Because she walls herself off from alternative points of view.
In the journalistic reconstructions of Clinton’s decision, two things become clear. First, State Department security experts strongly opposed it. As the Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. reported in a terrific piece in March, “State Department security officials were distressed about the possibility that Clinton’s BlackBerry could be compromised and used for eavesdropping.” Soon after Clinton became Secretary of State, they expressed that distress in a February 2009 meeting with Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton loyalist. In a March memo to Clinton herself, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell wrote that, “I cannot stress too strongly … that any unclassified Blackberry is highly vulnerable.”
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