The Hillary Emailgate Scandal

It's not really a scandal until "gate" is appended to it, is it?

30,000 ‘Personal’ Emails?

Hillary Clinton’s big press conference Tuesday, where she “addressed” the subject of her official emails, she said this:

We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work- related emails and deliver them to the State Department. At the end,I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.
No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy. . . .
In going through the e-mails, there were over 60,000 in total, sent and received. About half were work-related and went to the State Department and about half were personal that were not in any way related to my work. I had no reason to save them, but that was my decision because the federal guidelines are clear and the State Department request was clear.
For any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related. I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the e-mails that were produced.

Now, this is an issue because (a) Hillary’s emails as Secretary of State have been subpoenaed by a congressional committee, and (b) Hillary has admitted carrying on official correspondence with a non-governmental email account that was hosted on her own private server. Therefore, investigators are being asked to take her word for all this, because there is no verifiable record — no government computer with a hard drive that can be checked with forensic methods — to confirm what she’s claiming.

And here’s my thing: 30,000 “personal” emails in four years?

Do the math: That’s 7,500 emails a year or (divide 7,500 by 365) 20.5 personal emails every day, 7 days a week.

Gosh, Mrs. Clinton, you were the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world, in charge of a federal department with 18,000 employees around the world, and you had time for 20 personal emails — “not in any way related to my work” — every single day? Madame Secretary, I don’t have time for that, and I’m just a damned blogger.

Now, I have no problem with the idea that she got that many "personal" emails. I get about half that without having a personal life. And most of them aren't very personal. But I do have a problem with the Secretary of State having her very own server in her basement and selecting what files to delete before they go to the national archives. Nobody is happy with this, except the Clintons, which pretty much tells you why it happened.

As for the idea that the server was secure because it was guarded by 6 or so well armed, brawny Secret Service Agents, that is so laughable it's almost nauseating, and reveals her real ignorance of the problem of cyber security.  We know that the Romanian hacker "Guccifer" intercepted emails between Hillary and Sid Blumenthal concerning Benghazi.

This should be disqualifying if it were a Republican. But it won't be because most Democrats really don't care about national security, if they aren't overtly antipathetic. Nothing matters as long as the welfare continues to flow.

If we really want to find out what's in those emails, we should offer to buy them back from the Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Anonymous hackers who undoubtedly have them all. If you could easily hack an American Secretary of State, why wouldn't you?

I'm willing to put up $5. Maybe we could start a bidding war