"Careless" Clinton

Now that the investigations into the alleged crimes and misdemeanors of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State have been concluded, I still have two questions. It would appear that both the exhaustive FBI report of her emails, and the 800 page House committee report into the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi contain all the who, what, when, where, and how.

But for me the most important question is still unanswered. Why? Why did she do what she did? Why did she create a separate server for her own use while Secretary of State, or why did she or her advisors think she needed it?  Secondly, why after the attack on the Benghazi embassy did she and others in the Obama administration see the need to mislead the American people about the real nature of the attack? Maybe it does make no difference in that it will not bring the dead back to life, but why did the Secretary of State insist publicly that the attack was an impromptu demonstration caused by an Internet video, when she knew that it was a planned terrorist attack?

I doubt if we will ever know the answers to these questions. I will offer my own conspiracy theory. In the case of the emails I suspect that Secretary Clinton wanted a site that would only be available to her closest advisers. Despite lip service to transparency I think that she wanted her correspondence off the record. It is clear now that her advisers, although on the government payroll, worked for her and not for the State Department, or the Obama administration.

Indeed, I suspect that she wanted communications that would not be available to the State Department’s own Inspector General, or people from the CIA or NSA. Indeed, I wonder if she also was afraid that enemies within the Obama administration would be listening in. After all, how could it have been a big happy family? Her defeat in 2008 at the hands of a young Senator from Illinois guided by the likes of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel must have made her feel much like Lady Macbeth.

After years of serving in the shadows of her philandering husband, she would easily have beaten, especially in light of the financial crisis, the inept John McCain in 2008 and become the first woman President. But it was not to be. Instead she was offered the position of Secretary of State where once again she would serve under another charismatic man. It is hard for me not to believe that Obama and his advisers were not totally in charge of foreign policy and that Secretary Clinton was little more than a figurehead.

After all, who was really in charge after the Benghazi attack? Who concocted the story about the inflammatory video and made it the official administration position for days? Although she knew better, Secretary Clinton was forced to play ball and go along with the fiction. The 2012 election was only a couple of months away and President Obama was being run hard by Mitt Romney.  

After FBI Director James Comey declined to recommend that Hillary Clinton be prosecuted for the damning evidence discovered in the agency’s exhaustive investigation of her emails while she served as Secretary of State, his boss at the Justice Department quickly agreed with his recommendation and dropped the case like the proverbial lead balloon. At the same time, very few people will take the time to read the 800-page Benghazi report. Democrats immediately threw it in the trash bin of history claiming that it was a total waste of time and money.

I believe that the failure to prosecute Clinton will do her election prospects more harm than good. It is now evident to even her true believers that she was careless, even reckless in setting up and using her own personal server for her emails. It is also evident that anyone who advised her to do so was equally careless and reckless.

Secretary Clinton has claimed that Donald Trump is totally unqualified for the position of President of the United States. She has argued that she is the responsible candidate with the knowledge and experience that the job demands. Yet, the only executive position she has ever held in government was Secretary of State during the first Obama administration. The foreign policy mistakes of that Administration should rightly be blamed on the President but the evidence of a poorly run State Department that was incompetent in handling highly classified information belies her claims to competence in government.

She was the CEO in charge of the State Department and FBI director called her “careless” in handling top-secret information, and her agency “incompetent.” If she had been a CEO in the private sector, she would have been fired for her performance, and not given a chance to run for the highest office in the land.

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