Note the gosh, golly, isn’t this all good geeky fun! tone of this CBS/AP report, which notes, “She’s come a long way since 1997, when Clinton’s staff bought the then-first lady a copy of the book ‘E-Mail for Dummies:'”
This is what makes what Clinton did both sneaky and, some might say, genius: [Glenn Thrush, is that you?–Ed] Instead of setting up an email account with the government — for example, [email protected] — she operated a computer email server on an Internet connection that has been traced back to her family’s hometown in New York. (The email, [email protected], appears to be a nod to her middle name, Diane.)
No Yahoo employee with ambitions to become the next Edward Snowden could ever quietly search its server and leak her emails to the public. Google couldn’t be compelled by congressional investigators to hand them over. If reporters were to ask the government for email records during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, none would be found.
In other words, if you want a complete record of Clinton’s electronic correspondence while she was helping to decide matters of war and peace, you’d have to knock on her door and ask politely. Or take her to court.
For Clinton, who is eyeing a presidential bid and is the wife of a former president, the hassle and expense of hiring consultants to manage the server might be worth it.
Because, she’d rather have foreign nations reading her unsecured email than have it in the public record, of course. And she made a calculated risk that whatever hit she takes now, the moment will pass and then Democrat operatives with bylines can dismiss the story as old news in the classic Stephanopoulos style. In the meantime, the above article is an attempt to tamp down the scandal, but its headline means that some enterprising Republican has to make a repeat of this classic November 2013 moment happen again:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member