The Republican of Springfield (Mass.), May 27:
Hillary Clinton’s decision to set up a private email server – and a private email account – on which she conducted all of her official business as Secretary of State was unwise in the extreme. That, boiled down, was the finding of the State Department’s inspector general.
And now? Cue up the old recordings.
Those who love to hate the Clintons, who’ve been made crazy by both Bill and Hillary Clinton and everything about them from the time that they were first on the national stage a quarter-century ago, will once again ramp up their rhetoric. And at the same time, folks who support the Clintons will do what they’ve long been doing, talking of a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get them.
And no minds will be changed.
Hillary Clinton should not have done what she did in setting up a private email system outside of the federal government. And those who believe that she did it for convenience, so that she could carry just one device?
These are the type of people who’d respond to the claim that the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary by asking: “Really?”
Clinton used the system she did because she wanted control. And privacy. Ironically, those desires may have allowed her emails – and state secrets – to have been vulnerable to outsiders, including foreign hackers.
But none of this is new news. At the end of the day, the new report leaves things pretty much where they’ve been right along.
We’ve argued in this space from the first that the email setup was unwise. And unnecessary.
But now that the State Department’s watchdog has weighed in, there’s every reason to believe that the anti-Clinton forces will again ramp up their efforts to smear the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee for this, for that, for everything under the sun – and all that’s hidden, as well.
And on and on it will go. The report, of course, isn’t what Clinton needed, coming at a point when she’d hope to move past her drawn-out nominating campaign, pivoting toward the general election.
Still, it’s better now than it would be in four months or so, as Clinton and her team can brush aside upcoming criticisms as old news. Which is largely what they’ll be.
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