From Sean Davis at the Federalist:
Although Hillary Clinton and her allies may be claiming that her private e-mail system is no big deal, Hillary’s State Department actually forced the 2012 resignation of the U.S. ambassador to Kenya in part for setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail system. According to a 2012 report from the State Department’s inspector general, former U.S. ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration set up a private e-mail system for his office in 2011.
The inspector general’s report offered a scathing assessment of Gration’s information security practices — practices that are eerily similar to those undertaken by Clinton while she served as Secretary of State:
Davis links to State Department document that notes:
During the inspection, the Ambassador continued to use commercial email for official government business. The Department email system provides automatic security, record-keeping, and backup functions as required. The Ambassador’s requirements for use of commercial email in the office and his flouting of direct instructions to adhere to Department policy have placed the information management staff in a conundrum…
And Davis adds, “Liberal commentators took him to task for jeopardizing American security by insisting on the use of a private e-mail system. A 2012 dispatch from The New Republic about Gration’s resignation specifically noted that Gration’s e-mail gambit “put classified information about the U.S.’s operations in East Africa at a higher risk for exposure…”
“In other words,” Mark Hemingway writes at the Weekly Standard, “State Department policy was very clear. Using a private email outside the State Department’s secure system was completely unacceptable. If this applied to ambassadors, one would think it was sensible policy for the Secretary of State as well.”
Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty twists the knife a bit in his emailed Campaign Spot update today: “Some of Hillary’s E-Mails Are Probably Destroyed. That’s Good News: From a supremely cynical political perspective, it’s better for conservatives and Republicans if Hillary Clinton’s e-mails never come to light. If they’re destroyed and impossible to recover, it means she will never be able to dispel everyone’s worst suspicions:”
We don’t know if foreign intelligence services ever cracked the (apparently flawed) code and got to read Hillary’s private e-mails. We do know that we would be fools to assume they hadn’t. This prospect makes a lot of Obama’s first-term foreign policy look a little different in retrospect. Was there any particular time when a foreign power seemed one step ahead of our policies? Did Moscow, Beijing, or other foreign capitals seem to know what we were thinking in our negotiations before we began? Any of our spies get burned, or sources of intelligence dry up? Was Hillary Clinton’s e-mail effectively a leak all along?
(By the way, in the interim, every imaginable White House official should be brought before Congress and asked why it didn’t seem unusual to them that Hillary Clinton never used a state.gov address, ever, at all, in a four-year span. Her use of a private e-mail was not secret within the administration.)
The answers to these questions are above my pay grade and security clearance. But if foreign spies were reading the e-mail of the Secretary of State for four years, it represents nothing less than a catastrophe, and one that is entirely the fault of Hillary Clinton herself.
It all seems so Orwellian. Like something out of the Ministry of Truth. Like something out of 1984. Don’t you agree, Mr. Obama?
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So how will the MSM Play this? Probably something along these lines:
If Nixon hadn’t been a Republican, @TheDemocrats would’ve yawned about those 18 and a half minutes. “LOTS of people own tape recorders!”
— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) March 5, 2015
And right on cue, Hillary’s allies at the Politico are already blaming their fellow media mavens in their efforts to defend the Queen Bee.
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