Slick Hillary: Too Slippery for Her Own Good?

Hillary Clinton likes to pretend that her use of a private email server as Secretary of State was a matter of “personal convenience” only.

That may or may not be true.

    

But what seems plain to me and irrefutable is that by doing so—and, in so doing, managing to circumvent security protocols built into State Department servers—Secretary Clinton needlessly compromised national security and the conduct of international diplomacy for no good reason, at all.

Since, as she has argued, her personal server was intended only for “convenience” and held no classified or super-secret data (which, as we all now know, it certainly did) we’re left to wonder why she didn’t similarly err on the side of personal convenience when she resigned as Secretary of State, and simply allow her server’s data to be transferred in its entirety (after deleting, of course, her truly personal emails — yoga schedules, birthday wishes, etc.) to the State Department for archival access and permanent storage.

I can only think of two reasons, and only one is incompetence. 

The other is criminal malfeasance, since her action in ordering the server to be wiped clearly violates federal statutes regarding the “destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations,” which may also constitute deliberate obstruction of justice, depending on where the FBI’s investigation ultimately leads.

If you’re like me and find yourself thinking this is an awful lot like a weird, unpleasant dream our nation shuddered through nearly 20 years ago, all I can do is to repeat the classic evasion of the ultimate obfuscator: “It depends upon what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

Kinda does, dudn’t it?