Hillary Bubbles Over

Our readers are an observant bunch and occasionally point out things we wish we'd noticed first.  We were told:

I've been watching Hillary's face as New Hampshire voters keep asking her about her email server.  Her face shows bewilderment and total bafflement about why anyone thinks this is such a big deal.

Could it be that Hillary really has no idea how her private email server exposed America's secrets to the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and possibly even ISIS?  We remember Brietbart quoting her

She was asked again if she tried to wipe the whole server, to which Clinton said, "I have no idea, that's why we turned it over ..." Asked again, she answered, "What, like with a cloth or something?" She further maintained that she doesn't know how the server "works digitally at all."

Hillary turned over her first 30,000 emails to the State Department in printed form.  She was criticized for making it hard to index and search the emails.  Could she not know how much easier it would have been to turn them over electronically?  Our  friend believes her claim of total ignorance of how her server works, and points to this silly dead-tree deposition as evidence.

This has a certain ring of truth.  Hillary Clinton is infamous for being hard on underlings.  If she said, "Print them and send them," would any of her subordinates have suggested a different course of action?  We don't want to be like the media who falsely reported that George Bush had never seen a grocery scanner, but still...

The Hillary Bubble

Hillary has lived in an expensive, taxpayer-funded bubble ever since the Clintons entered the White House.  She hasn't driven a car since 1996, for example, because she always has some minion do the driving for her.  She's probably unaware of oil changes since they happen magically without her having to think about them.  Even as the Arkansas governor's wife, when presumably she had to drive herself around at least occasionally, she probably didn't spend much personal time in line at Jiffy Lube.

She knows how to use email, obviously - you sit in front of a screen and keyboard and type, right?  We know a lot of people who use email without the slightest idea of what actually happens when they hit "Send."

Could she really be unaware that putting classified email on an insecure server would be like including Mr. Putin in her CC list?  It's not impossible for her to be that ignorant.  When you send a regular letter (remember those?) via snail mail, you don't seriously imagine that all the postmen along the way are reading it, but in effect, that's exactly how email works.

We've read that a moonlighting State Department IT techie who later pled the 5th installed and configured her server.  What's the likelihood that he talked to Hillary at all?  Isn't it more likely that he was simply told he'd be paid to install a server in her house without actually meeting her?  The IT techie was probably no more interesting to Hillary than whomever changes the oil in her van.

The Burdens of Wealth and Power

One problem with being rich is that you can't really make new friends.  Once you're powerful, anybody who seems to be wanting to get to know you may be seeking to profit from you to your hurt.

Hillary's inner circle goes back to her earliest Arkansas days or back to college.  How many of her friends are high-level technologists?  None - the technology didn't exist back when she was able to make friends.  Any of her friends who might have been technologically inclined most likely moved to Silicon Valley or, back then, Rt. 128 in Massachusetts so they wouldn't have been close enough to Arkansas to maintain a solid, trustful connection with Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Anyway, how often do you chat with your friends about server configuration, viruses, and whatnot?  When your PC at work has a problem, do you get down and dirty with Bill Gates' latest?  Probably not - you call the IT department and let them fight with it.  And (we're going out on a limb here) you're nothing like as big a wheel as Hillary.  The higher you are in the hierarchy, the less you have to know about how things actually work.

Classified Data in the Real World

It's easy to get confused about just how serious Hillary's server crimes really are.  Normally, as Americans, we pretty much figure that we have a right to say whatever we please to whoever we feel like saying it.

The world of classified documents is completely alien to the First Amendment.  If you're in this world as Hillary was and is, the law says that if you receive classified material - and some material is inherently classified whether it's marked classified or not - you have a duty to safeguard it by not transmitting it to an insecure location or by sending it to any one who has no need to know regardless of their classification level.

Mistakes are made, of course.  When you make a mistake, you're supposed to notify your designated security officer immediately, and that person will take whatever corrective action is appropriate.  Sometimes it's a slap on the wrist.  You could lose your job or even your clearance, but if you 'fess up of your own accord to an honest mistake it's unlikely that you'll go to prison unless some of our spies die as a result of your gross negligence.

If you don't confess, though, and they catch you, you're in for a world of hurt. As the saying goes, it's not the crime that gets you, it's the coverup.

There are in fact three separate types of violation here:

1. Hillary may have used her insecure server to compose reports of talks with foreign leaders which were inherently classified because of the nature of the information.  Writing such emails on an insecure server is a violation of the law whether the email was marked classified or not.  It doesn't whether it was even sent or not because hackers can read the drafts folder as easily as any other.
2. Hillary probably received classified information from subordinates or colleagues.  She's in violation of the law for storing it on her insecure server and whomever sent it to her is in violation for sending data to an insecure device.  You might think that senders who weren't in the know might arguably be forgiven for not realizing that she'd set up such an easily hackable private server, but you'd be wrong: a classified email account cannot send to an account that isn't classified.  They're not even connected: classified email systems don't run on the Internet, because if they did, the Chinese could hack them.
3. For many decades now, Bill and Hillary have maintained a wide network of people throughout government who tell them things they might want to know.  Some of them take great risks on her behalf.  For example, President Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stole classified documents relating to the time the government of Sudan offered to turn over Osama bin Laden to American justice and ol' Slick Willie turned them down.  We'll never know exactly how this spectacularly stupid decision was made because Mr. Burger swiped the records from the National Archives and destroyed them.  He got a light slap on the wrist which was delayed for years because the Clintons protected him.
   Anyone who sent classified tid-bits to Hillary may be vulnerable to two charges: a) sending classified email to an insecure server and b) sending classified material to a recipient who, even though having a security clearance, had no need to know... and it remains to be seen just how powerful Hillary's aura of protection remains.  Perhaps there are some worried spooks out there who are thinking of turning state's evidence?

Ignorance Is No Excuse - But...

If we assume that Hillary didn't know how easily her server could be hacked, she may actually be telling the truth as she sees it when she says she never mishandled classified information.

She may never have printed out documents to give to the Iranians, but putting thousands of pages on her server was much more convenient for the Chinese and everybody else than if she'd printed out selected secrets and handed them along as she did to our own FBI.  We know that her emails included literally hundreds of requests from our Ambassador for better security in Benghazi.  Might knowing about our vulnerabilities there have given someone the notion of attacking?

If she's truly as bewildered by the email flap as our friend suggests she might be, can we trust her to fix our government's problems in securing vital national data?  Maybe she's been in the bubble so long she has no more idea of what the real world is like than Marie Antoinette, who learned too late that, as comfortable as a royal bubble might be, it can lead to the guillotine.

If she isn't that ignorant, on the other hand, she's carrying on a long tradition of Democrat unconcern for national security.  Bill Clinton told the New York Times that we were tracking terrorists by their satellite phones; not being complete morons, they immediately stopped using them and our job of hunting them down suddenly got a lot harder.

President Obama, our Leaker in Chief, gave away or hid a great deal of very sensitive information.  Do we really want yet another president who, regardless of gender, whether by accident or by design, thinks so little of sensitive data?

On the other hand, Mr. Obama promised to have the most transparent administration in history.  We aren't sure that this is exactly what he had in mind, but should we regard Hillary's carelessness as fulfilling his promise?