What to Think about Hillary’s Internet Scandal

The New York Times revealed Hillary Clinton used her personal email when she should have been using a State Department email. I've got five thoughts on this.

1) It’s not going away…
This issue is going to pick up steam because it’s credible. A Hillary problem running on The New York Times front page transcends partisanship and means everybody has to cover it. (If The Wall Street Journal ran the same story, or the Times ran something similar on Jeb Bush, not so much…) Give the Times credit for running with a story that will surely lead to recrimination and backlash from the Clinton camp; this was far from easy, in an environment where The Daily Telegraph decides not to run HSBC coverage because they’re an important advertiser.

2) …but it’s not going to get litigated.
I doubt there’s a clear, cut and dry legal issue here. The Clinton camp clearly put lots of effort into their Internet strategy and surely had legal arguments at the ready to show that what they were doing could be justified. If anybody is going to be thrown under the bus here, it could be a State Department bureaucrat responsible for email oversight who didn’t get it done. This isn’t going to get litigated.

3) The intent matters most.
The issue isn’t the legality. It’s the intent. The Clinton team doesn’t get in trouble by breaking laws; it gets into trouble by bending rules further than other political players. Because they can. Their network and influence matters. Hillary as the “inevitable” candidate – and, for some, the inevitable president – does mean she gets to play by a different rule set than other candidates. That enrages her opponents, yes. And it disappoints her supporters – but not so much that they’re going to vote Republican.

4) An inadequate response from her team.
Thus far, the Clinton team’s response hasn’t been convincing at all. ‘Other political leaders have used private emails.’ True, but to nowhere near the degree. ‘Hillary expected her emails would be kept when sent to other officials.’ Yes, for some official correspondence, but her closest aides also used private emails. ‘We’ve made public 55,000 pages of email already.’ …which were carefully vetted by the Clinton team.

None of this is credible. It doesn’t get to the intention, which is clearly to ensure maximal private control of the then-Secretary of State’s correspondence. Not for purposes of national security, which, indeed, could be more vulnerable to potential cyberattack by having the emails outside of government sources, but for Clinton’s own future campaign.

5) The right response from Hillary.
Hillary, meanwhile, has had no public comment. And that’s surely the right strategy, since she’s not an official candidate yet, there’s plenty of other news going on, and this email flap, like so many others, will diminish over time (at least barring some extraordinary surprise such as, for example, a Hillary Wikileaks from international Clinton Foundation donors).

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So where does this leave us? The American people get it. Hillary was a serious, hardworking, competent Secretary of State, and surely she’d be a serious, hard-working, competent President. Do they trust her? Not particularly. Is she still the inevitable nominee and/or likely president? As much (or as little) as she was before the scandal broke.