Why the new report on Hillary Clinton’s email is so damning
Why the new report on Hillary Clinton’s email
is so damning
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Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer May 27 at 11:09 AM
The report on Hillary Clinton’s email by the State Department’s inspector general this week was devastating — not because of how she handled email but because of how she handled investigators.
The report’s revelations weren’t particularly revelatory: Clinton violated department policies and went further than predecessors in her use of private email, but she wasn’t the first to take this path. Beyond that, as my colleagues Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported, officials say the FBI has “found little evidence that Clinton maliciously flouted classification rules.”
But what’s damning in the new report is her obsessive and counterproductive secrecy:
The Office of the Inspector General said it “interviewed Secretary Kerry and former Secretaries Albright, Powell, and Rice. Through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview.”
“In addition to Secretary Clinton, eight former Department employees [most of them Clinton aides] declined OIG requests for interviews.”
“Two additional individuals did not respond to OIG interview requests.”
“OIG sent 26 questionnaires to Secretary Clinton’s staff and received 5 responses.”
The stonewalling creates a firm impression, well captured by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this week when he interviewed Clinton’s spokesman, Brian Fallon: “If she didn’t do anything wrong and she had nothing to hide, why didn’t she cooperate with the inspector general?”
There is no good answer to this. And that’s why the IG report was just another of Clinton’s self-inflicted wounds, stretching back a quarter century, caused by her tendency toward secrecy and debilitating caution.
Donald Trump has decided to dub her “Crooked Hillary.” This isn’t quite true: Though investigations into her activities have occupied much of the past 25 years, her accusers, from Whitewater to Benghazi, never really get the goods. But what Clinton has been is nearly as problematic as being crooked: Hunkered Hillary.
At the first sign of conflict or accusation, Clinton circles the wagons, shuts her mouth and instructs those around her to do the same. This generates a whole lot of smoke, even if there’s no fire. Her secrecy elevates the accusations — whatever the accusations are.
Fifteen months ago, when the email scandal broke, I viewed her use of a private server as an extension of the “same flaws that have caused Clinton trouble in the past — terminal caution and its cousin, obsessive secrecy. In trying so hard to avoid mistakes — in this case, trying to make sure an embarrassing e-mail or two didn’t become public — Clinton made a whopper of an error.”
She resisted releasing records on the Whitewater land deal (causing the scandal to drag on, leading to the independent-counsel investigation that exposed the Monica Lewinsky scandal) and about her 1993 health-care task force (giving her opponents ammunition to defeat the plan). This time, she again hunkered down.
Clinton’s response is emblematic of her caution.
While Trump and Bernie Sanders drive the narrative of the 2016 campaign with their freewheeling styles, Clinton is missing: She puts herself into the debate less often than the others, and, when she does, she says little to merit headlines.
Her hiring of a full slate of advisers to Obama — himself a cautious leader — reinforces the risk aversion. But caution won’t win this year, and it’s unclear whether Hunkered Hillary will, or even can, liberate herself from the bunker.
The inspector general’s bottom line wasn’t good: “She did not comply with the department’s policies.” But the description of Clinton’s secrecy was worse. When one State staffer raised concern about Clinton’s private email, this person was told “that the secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further.” Investigators found no evidence of such a review.
What they found was stonewalling by Clinton and her aides — and this, not mishandled email, is what tripped up Fallon as he tried to defend the candidate to Blitzer this week.
“It looks as if she’s got something to hide which she doesn’t even want to answer questions from the inspector general of the State Department,” the veteran anchor argued.
Fallon, a skilled flack, tried to argue that Clinton and her aides prioritized the similar Justice Department investigation and were cooperating with that one. Then he insinuated that “there were hints of an anti-Clinton bias” in the IG’s office.
The vast right-wing conspiracy had infiltrated the State Department! Asked Blitzer: “Are you accusing the inspector general of the State Department” — a Democratic appointee — “of having an anti-Clinton bias?”
The spokesman retreated, noting that the report documented “that the use of personal e-mail was widespread and done by her predecessors, including Secretary Powell.”
And that might have been the take-away — if Hunkered Hillary hadn’t let her instinctive caution again get the best of her.
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The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton's Emails
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The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton's Emails
It’s not what she wrote—it’s her tendency to wall herself off from alternative points of view.
Peter Beinart
May 27, 2016 10:24 AM ET
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.”
The second thing that becomes clear is that these security experts ran into a brick wall of longtime Clinton aides whose priority was not security, but rather her desire for privacy and convenience.
“From the earliest days,” writes O’Harrow Jr., “Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretary’s desire to use her private email account” and in so doing “neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry.”
In August 2011, when the State Department’s executive secretary Stephen Mull broached the idea of replacing Clinton’s personal Blackberry with a “Department issued” one, Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff and close personal aide, Huma Abedin, replied that the “state blackberry…doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
To longtime Hillary Clinton observers, all this sounds distressingly familiar. In the literature about Clinton’s career, the insularity of her staff is a recurring theme.
In his biography, A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein quotes Mark Fabiani, a lawyer in the Clinton White House, as observing that, “the kind of people that were around her were yes people. She had never surrounded herself with people who could stand up to her, who were of a different mind.”
In their biography, Her Way, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. quote Clinton administration Trade Representative Mickey Kantor as noting that in her work on health-care reform, Hillary Clinton “got isolated” and worked with “a group of people, all of whom were off in the same direction.”
In their book on the health care fight, The System, Haynes Johnson and David Broder quote a senior White House as accusing Hillary Clinton’s aides of having “adopted this bunker mentality … They’ve managed to build wall after wall around the First Lady.”
In her book about the Clinton marriage, For Love of Politics, Sally Bedell Smith notes that, “Her subordinates were all true believers, so she seldom heard a dissenting view.”
In their book about the 2008 campaign, Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin note that Clinton’s aides were “loyal to a fault.”
In their book on Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, HRC, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes note that, “Loyalty, for better and worse, has been the defining trait of Hillary and her tightly woven inner circle…She values it in herself, demands it in her aides, and often gives it too much weight in judging the people around her.”
“Commenting on Clinton’s current top campaign staff, the former Politico executive editor Jim Van de Hei observed on Friday that, “They are in a bubble where they all have the bunker mentality.”
When she led the health task force in the 1990s, Hillary’s insularity kept her from recognizing that, because Congress would not support universal coverage, the White House needed to embrace more modest reforms.
In the State Department, it kept her from recognizing the dangers of using her own email server. Let’s hope she learns from these mistakes. Because if she creates a bubble around herself yet again, she’ll imperil her chances of winning the White House, or of being a successful president once she gets there.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...linton/484634/
