Obama still doesn’t get it. In his interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Obama acknowledged that Hillary’s use of a private server, and what she passed through that server, was “careless” but that she “would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.”
Leave aside for now whether she “intentionally” violated laws and regulations regarding the handling of classified information or was perhaps merely incompetent in not recognizing what was classified. Presumably the FBI will have something to say about that.
But now listen to this:
“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.
Here’s what Obama, and apparently many others who focus exclusively on Hillary’s mishandling of classified information, fail to understand: 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.
People have gone to jail for theft of government documents. See, for example, the case of David Truong, the son of an imprisoned anti-war South Vietnamese presidential candidate and respected student anti-war activist (two years behind me at Stanford), who was sentenced to 15 years for “theft of government documents” for passing on low-level diplomatic cables to Vietnamese negotiators in Paris after the end of the war.
In treating the electronic record of her tenure as Secretary of State as though it were her own private property, Hillary and her State Department and White House enablers clearly violated the Federal Records Act and eviscerated the Freedom of Information Act, making it impossible for journalists and historians to provide informed analysis of her performance. But then, that was no doubt her intention.
Perhaps even more disappointing than Clinton’s behavior — who, after all, would have expected better? — is “The Silence of the Historians,” which I discussed here and here.
