Shortly after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, she had met with some of her campaign donors and told them that a decisive factor in the result was the decision of FBI Director James Comey to resume inquiries on her use of email on a private server while she was Secretary of State, 11 days before the election. This despite the point that Comey had already told the Department of Justice on July 5 that there should be no criminal charges brought on the case. While some pundits have considered Clinton’s statement (and similar opinions from campaign chairman John Podesta) as defensive rationalizing, I think it’s on target. Given the margin of victory and Clinton’s lead in the polls, Clinton had reason to believe that simply bringing up the matter again, even to Clinton’s apparent favor, “stopped our (campaign’s) momentum” and undercut her advantage with white suburban women. Before the election, a Clinton spokesman had even said that by “dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing [Vladimir] Putin’s dirty work to help elect Donald Trump. The FBI is now investigating this crime, the unanswered questions are why Donald Trump strangely won’t condemn it and whether any of his associates are involved.”
It turns out that there is some outside support for the theory. According to a CIA statement on December 9, “Moscow was not only interfering with the election, but that its actions were intended to help Trump, according to a senior U.S. official. The assessment is based in part on evidence that Russian actors had hacked Republicans as well as Democrats but were only releasing information harmful to Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.”
As a result of such information, President Obama has ordered an investigation of the elections, but it wasn’t just the Russians who brought up Clinton’s emails. Obviously Comey did too, and no one believes he is compromised by the Russians. Whether he had motive to bring Clinton down, he had the ability to do so, because what Bernie Sanders called Hillary’s “damn emails” remained a weakness that the Clinton campaign did not minimize and largely did not recognize.
Along with numerous other issues (that I’m sure many books will be written on), Clinton’s campaign was undermined by her persistent use of private email services for her communications as Secretary of State. She never used an official (state.gov) email address. Her email accounts were not disclosed to senior State Department personnel. The State Department’s policy as of 2005 (Clinton joined in 2009) is that employees must “generally” use department systems to conduct official business. Furthermore the Department had issued numerous warnings with regard to cybersecurity owing to known attacks on State Department posts. On March 2011, the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security sent a memorandum directly to Secretary Clinton, saying: “Threat analysis by the DS cyber security team and related incident reports indicate a dramatic increase since January 2011 in attempts by cyber actors to compromise the private home e-mail accounts of senior Department officials.” The State Department confirmed that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had used a private email server, although Washington staff had also confirmed that at the time Powell was in office, other employees did not have Internet connection on their desktop computers and that the Department “was not aware at the time of the magnitude of the security risks associated with information technology. By Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the Department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated.”
Emails sent to Clinton’s private address were first discovered in 2013, when the hacker “Guccifer” hacked the email account of Clinton family associate Sid Blumenthal, including communications about the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Blumenthal did not have a State Department clearance when he received material that has since been classified by the State Department.
By contrast, Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (ne‘ Bradley) Manning has been given a 35-year sentence at Leavenworth for providing information to WikiLeaks (the same site that helped leak some of Clinton’s State Department emails) and former CIA Director David Petraeus has had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for providing his mistress classified information. (Of course, as President-elect, Donald Trump had entertained the possibility of appointing Petraeus HIS Secretary of State, and when he recently went on a victory-lap tour of the heartland, and the crowd yelled ‘Lock Her Up’ in their now stock-chant against Hillary, Trump said flat-out: ‘No, forget it. That plays great before the election. Now we don’t care, right?’)
Only after Clinton left her position at State did the Congress pass the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, specifically forbidding an executive department employee from using personal emails for government business unless submitted for archive.
The best that could be said in this case is the Clinton team was able to operate that loosely with electronic security because the rules were that undefined, which is not exactly a defense of the way things were run, by either party. The worst that can be said is that the Clinton team’s relative nonchalance on the matter of electronic security made it that much easier for the Russian hackers to compromise their communications and make the emails an even bigger politcal issue than they would have been. I mean, I’m glad that Democrats think that a government official’s emails are a security interest now. But do they think that rival powers only spy on us when it’s an election year?
The thing is, if the election turned out to be that close, and the emails were a long-term weakness that Republicans were able to exploit, and the press kept going for them, why didn’t Clinton and her team consider the matter serious enough to decisively address? No, it wasn’t fair that she got taken out largely by a “nothingburger” issue, especially given Trump’s far greater level of corruption, which he has gone out of his way to emphasize since becoming president-elect. No, it isn’t fair that Republicans made her connection to Goldman-Sachs an issue when Trump is making at least two Goldman-Sachs veterans members of his Administration. No it isn’t fair that she lost only because of the Electoral College. But Clinton, like Trump, like Al Gore, and like every other candidate, knew what the terms of getting elected were, and it reflects on the candidate if they can’t meet them.
Hillary Clinton failed as a candidate by the obvious test that she failed to prove to enough people that she was a better president (or at least more ethical than) Donald Trump, which should be the easiest thing in the world. But to look at it another way: As weak a candidate as she was, she was going up against DONALD TRUMP. And were it not for the Electoral College system, she would have won the presidential race with a clear majority of votes. It makes you wonder how well she would have done if she had felt as threatened by Trump as she was by Bernie Sanders. But this is just the most obvious example of how the mainstream Left falls into complacency in its sense of superiority to the Right spectrum of opinion, even if that superiority is akin to the comparison of a 300-pound chainsmoking couch potato to a paraplegic with an IQ of 70 and delusions of being God.
As it stood, the Left based its case on screaming, “We HAVE to elect Hillary Clinton! Hillary is the only way to stop Trump! If we don’t elect Hillary Clinton, the gates of Hell will open up and swallow the Earth!” and a lot of the country went: “…fuck it, let’s see what Hell looks like.”