Clinton emails: A political controversy with the lifetime of a Broadway hit

A Federal district judge has ordered the State Department to scrub 15,000 newly surfaced emails of classified or personal material on an accelerated schedule. They'll likely be released just prior to Election Day.

|
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
FBI Director James Comey, shown here at the conclusion of his July 7, 2016, appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to explain his agency's decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her personal email setup, says he does not believe that the Clinton team intentionally deleted the 15,000 emails only now coming to the surface.

Hillary Clinton’s emails have become the never-ending story, a political controversy destined to last as long as the Broadway run of “Cats.”

That’s clearer than ever now that the FBI has confirmed discovery of approximately 15,000 new emails as part of its investigation of Clinton’s electronic communications practices while secretary of State.

Federal District Court Judge James E. Boasberg has ordered the State Department to scrub the emails of possible classified or personal material on an accelerated schedule, and then release them. That’s likely to occur around October, just prior to Election Day, State Department lawyers told Judge Boasberg in a Monday hearing.

Clinton set up her much-criticized private email server while secretary of State at least in part to control her communications and protect her privacy from critics as much as possible. This latest disclosure of more emails only emphasizes the degree to which that mission was not accomplished. At this point it seems obvious she would have been much better off, politically speaking, to rely on a government account.

“In part, that’s because it never seems to end. Each batch of emails released by the State Department has given journalists and conservative activists more to pore over,” notes Andrea Peterson of the Washington Post technology and policy blog The Switch.

The FBI turned up the latest tranche of emails by a forensic examination of Clinton’s personal server, and by combing through the email records of government officials Clinton may have communicated with while secretary of State. None were in the original batch of 55,000 emails turned over by Clinton to the State Department last year.

FBI Director James Comey has said he does not believe that the Clinton team intentionally deleted the newly discovered emails. Judge Boasberg is overseeing the process of making them public pursuant to a federal public-record lawsuit filed by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch.

It’s possible the Clinton team mistakenly threw out some of them while making their initial scrub of her private server. When the State Department requested copies of emails under Clinton’s control, she had a team of lawyers comb through her server to separate business messages from personal ones. Those judged personal were deleted. Work emails were turned over to the government.

But the lawyers did not actually read the full emails, relying on subject lines for their sorting purposes. They could have made errors in their sorting process.

Conservative critics, of course, believe it is possible that Clinton is purposely trying to conceal some of her official State Department activities, perhaps related to Benghazi or favors for Clinton Foundation donors.

“Hillary Clinton seems incapable of telling the truth,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement on the latest email revelations. “Clinton’s pattern of serial dishonesty is completely unacceptable for a candidate seeking the nation’s highest office.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Clinton emails: A political controversy with the lifetime of a Broadway hit
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2016/0823/Clinton-emails-A-political-controversy-with-the-lifetime-of-a-Broadway-hit
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe