Thread: Hillary Clinton and the FBI primary

Editorial: Hillary Clinton and the FBI primary


Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a get-out-the-vote event Feb. 2, 2016, at Nashua
Community College in Nashua, N.H. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

By Editorial Board

FEBRUARY 2, 2016, 5:08 PM

Hillary Clinton arrived in New Hampshire a winner, although her Iowa margin of victory in delegate strength — 49.86 percent to Bernie Sanders' 49.57 —
fell short of landslide. Now she'll try to win the state that saved Bill Clinton's candidacy in 1992, and that threw her a lifeline in 2008 after Barack Obama
humiliated her in Iowa. After next Tuesday she's off to South Carolina, Nevada and beyond.

But she doesn't know the date of the most important primary that confronts her candidacy. In that election the FBI gets the only vote: whether it thinks
she should be prosecuted, or cleared, for her handling of government email outside of State Department protocols. Her foes see indictable offenses. Her
partisans see yet another smear built of meager mistakes that haven't harmed national security.

Should voters care about this email fiasco? If their primary care is seeing her win the presidency to extend Democratic reign in the White House, this will be
easy to overlook unless someone in law enforcement — the FBI or U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch — says otherwise. But for voters whose primary care
is the character and content of their prospective president, the email saga evokes an old question: Is Hillary Clinton's chief concern the career advancement
of Hillary Clinton? Start down this path and questions abound — about the trustworthiness of Clinton, about her personal judgment in handling national
secrets, even about who'll choose the next attorney general, an official with awesome power to pursue, or ignore, suspect conduct.

Clinton's own conduct would be less perplexing if the federal rules on handling sensitive information weren't so explicit, and if she wasn't so familiar with them.
The government wants to protect this nation's secrets. And freedom of information laws want official communications to be accessible so that, if the details
don't compromise national security, lawmakers and other citizens can inspect them. Among established and well-known protocols: Officials can't send classified
data on unclassified networks.

On Friday, though, the State Department disclosed that "top secret" communications had moved through Clinton's private computer server — information so
highly classified that State couldn't make 37 pages of the emails public. That included classified material that the inspector general of the nation's intelligence
agencies says were "top secret / S.A.P." That acronym identifies "special access programs," some of America's most sensitive secrets.

All of that despite Clinton's explanation in her 2014 book "Hard Choices" of how lavishly government regs protected the ultra-secret information she handled.
She wrote of warnings from State to leave computers and other devices on her airplane, with their batteries removed, so rival intel operatives couldn't hack
them. She told how she read some information "inside an opaque tent in a hotel room. In less well-equipped settings, we were told to improvise by reading
sensitive material with a blanket over our head."






Yet Clinton asserts, as she did at a Jan. 25 Democratic town hall in Des Moines, that she isolated her communications from State's secure computer system
because, "You know I had no intention of doing anything other than having a convenient way of communicating, and it turned out not to be so convenient. ...
I'm not willing to say it was an error in judgment because what — nothing that I did was wrong. It was not — it was not in any way prohibited. …

"I'm happy people are looking at the emails," she added. "Some of them are you know, frankly, a little embarrassing. ... You find out that sometimes I'm not
the best on technology and things like that."

Her professed naivete collides with a set of now-disclosed 2011 emails. Aide Jake Sullivan, who's trying to send her a message — we don't know its sensitivity —
tells her that staffers "say they've had issues sending secure fax. They're working on it." Clinton's reply: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying
heading and send nonsecure." Hmm.

And her shifting explanations have suggested that Clinton has adjusted her story to accommodate emerging details. Initially she said "no classified material"
landed on her server. Then that none of the material was "classified at the time." In late January she told NPR no information had been "marked classified."

Whatever her technical expertise or the sensitivity of her communiques, Clinton surely knew that foreign operatives try to hack U.S. government networks
thousands of times every day. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey says "intelligence community investigators
believe it is nearly certain that Mrs. Clinton's server was hacked, possibly by the Chinese or the Russians."

We hope FBI investigators will determine whether that's true or false.

We do know that the Clinton campaign would like voters to ignore an inconvenient story that, rather than fading into oblivion, has only intensified.

So we have Clinton's foes saying she flouted federal law to protect her presidential ambitions. And we have her defenders saying this is all about GOP attempts
to sabotage her campaign.

Glad as we are to have those votes already counted, we expect the looming FBI primary to provide the tie-breaker.

Follow the Editorial Board on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.

Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-hillary-clinton-emails-fbi-edit-0203-20160202-story.html