13 July 2016
Best description yet of Hillary’s email predicament
Recent polls suggest the presidential election will be close, and that Donald Trump is closing the gap with Hillary Clinton. It’s possible That Trump is getting a boost from the approach of the Republican convention (if the convention is a fiasco, the boost will be inverted), and that Clinton’s email troubles have cost her some support.
Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New Yorker, has the best description yet of how and why Hillary shot herself in the foot with her private email system:
That Clinton would even install such a rattletrap system suggests the influence of the Starr legacy. Clinton wanted a way to shield her personal business (which was her right) while also conducting State Department business on the same e-mail account. As a Washington veteran, she should have known that such a system was fraught with peril. Most government officials avoid the problem by keeping a separate account, like one on Gmail, for private e-mail. Clinton could have done that and avoided the problems, but instead she jerry-rigged a system that supposedly could handle both personal and professional work. It was a terrible idea.
When first confronted by reports about the e-mails, Clinton reacted like a cornered perp, denying everything. She had to know (as most everyone in Washington does) that the government vastly overclassifies information, so her flat denial that there had been any classified information on her server was destined to be disproved, as it was. Retreating from that line, she said that nothing “marked” classified was on her server, and that, too, turned out to be wrong. (Not very wrong; there were just a few classification marks among her thousands of e-mails, and even those may have been mistakenly applied.) But Clinton’s visceral distaste for being the target of partisan smears led her to overreact, overdeny, and make a bad situation worse. As a victim of partisan vendettas, she couldn’t recognize a good-faith F.B.I. investigation when she saw one. But that’s what the F.B.I. delivered, in the form of a public scolding from Director James Comey (which she deserved), as well as a demurral of criminal prosecution (which was also correct).
This goes to judgment and temperament. Compared to Trump, Hillary scores well on these qualities. But on an absolute scale, she does not. I still believe that her natural position is deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs.