A couple of days ago, here, I criticized Obama for, among his other comments on Hillary’s email, this one:
“I continue to believe she has not jeopardized America’s national security,” Obama defended Clinton. “Now what I also said is that — and she’s acknowledged — that there’s a carelessness in terms of managing e-mails that she has owned.
My criticism: “the Secretary of State did not own those emails! They were, and are, government property, as specified among other places in the Federal Records Act.”
Since then two readers have asked me to listen to Obama’s comment, and consider that what he probably meant was that Hillary had “owned up” to her “mistake” in using a private email server.
On re-reading and then listening I do think it’s possible, even likely, that that’s what Obama meant.
Of course, all Hillary has “owned up” to is that it was a mistake for her to set up her own server (which she continues to refer to only as a “personal account”). What Obama SHOULD have said is that the mistake was for Hillary to act as though she owned all the email traffic she generated or received while Secretary of State. By deciding herself, without the required oversight of records officials, that 30,000 (she claims) of her email were “private” and destroying them, she claimed ownership, violating the Federal Records Act, making the Freedom of Information Act a dead letter regarding her tenure, and in general acting as though she were above and beyond the law.
Her handling of classified information — whether felonious or merely negligent and “unintentional,” i.e., a misdemeanor — is another matter entirely.
