The Main Thing, It Was Convenient

Hillary Clinton did not want an official email account during her tenure as secretary of state. She did not want to allow anyone insight into her private life. This attitude is now fueling reservations against her – and could even topple her candidacy.

Hillary Clinton was in the second year of her term when a high-ranking staffer suggested that she should obtain an email account on the State Department’s server after all. Apparently, the deputy chief of staff was not concerned with safeguarding the secretary’s communications against cyber spies. He also was not worried about government rules on transparency. Rather, he was concerned about the banal fear that Clinton would receive too much spam with a private address. But the secretary did not want to hear anything about an official government email address: “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.” The inspector general of the State Department quoted this phrase in a November 2010 investigation report.

The Democratic candidate inadvertently characterized herself aptly in saying that. After decades of scandals and attacks, she is protecting her privacy so rigorously that she appears cold even to politically like-minded voters. At the same time, Donald Trump and the other Republicans can reaffirm their positions with the statement that “the Clintons” take their private interests more seriously than the law. For more than a year, the candidate has asserted that she rejected a separate service email address out of purely practical reasons of convenience. But in fact she seems to be driven by the fear that the public might gain insight into her correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act. Thus, her political opponents, those who accuse the Clintons of constant secrecy, have new fodder because the Clintons apparently have much to hide.

In a survey, two-thirds of all registered voters recently responded negatively to the question as to whether Hillary Clinton is trustworthy. It can be gleaned from the Inspector General’s report that the candidate refused to answer questions. At its core, the report states that Clinton is wrong to claim that the state department “allowed” her the use of a private server. It claims that she never discussed her behavior with lawyers. When two employees of the department archives sounded the alarm in 2010, their supervisor instructed them to “never again speak” of the subject.

Email with “Top Secret” Information

It is true that Clinton’s Republican predecessor Colin Powell used his private email address for official communication, the inspector general determined. But there were clear rules in 2009 when Clinton took office according to which this way of operating was not allowed due to “significant security risks.” Investigators from the FBI have been occupied with the question of whether Clinton compromised national security through the use of the private email server for months. She surrendered the server from her private residence in New York to federal authorities. It is uncertain whether the FBI can recover the deleted, allegedly private, emails.

According to the opinion of the inspector general, Clinton broke the rules by delivering too few emails to the department’s archives too late. According to the guidelines, she was required to hand over any and all correspondence to the department prior to the end of her term in 2013. The State Department, however, only demanded that Clinton deliver her correspondence to the house archivists at the end of 2014, under pressure from the Republicans. Subsequently, Clinton had personal staff comb through more than 60,000 saved emails and gave the State Department about half of them for publication. The others, according to Clinton, were about purely private matters, such as yoga classes or the wedding of her daughter Chelsea. But in the meantime, official emails have been disclosed especially from Clinton’s first months in office that she did not forward to the archivists. And the FBI has found “top secret” information in at least 22 of the emails handed over to the department.

The Clinton campaign emphasized that the inspector general was accusing the entire department of inappropriate laxness when archiving correspondence. In fact, the report does not take only Clinton to task. Trump, as expected, did not refrain from citing the report as evidence that Clinton “is an evil crook, as evil as it gets.”* In the short term, though, Trump is not even Clinton’s main opponent. Her most important battleground is currently in California. In California, where the state primary will be held on June 7, Bernie Sanders has caught up to Clinton according to the polls. But he will not be able to use the inspector general’s report as ammunition. As early as last October, Sanders announced that he did not want to hear any more about Clinton’s “damn emails.”

*Editor’s note: This quote, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.