There’s an interesting NY Slimes apologium for Clinton’s email disaster that claims that it is not actually worse that Watergate as certain people, e.g. A Mr D. Trump, have claimed. The piece is written by one of the watergate lawyers so there’s a certain amount of credibility to the claim but it has to be said that this is not, IMHO, a very strong reed for the Clinton campaign and it’s MSM supporters to cling to.
First let us consider that mentioning Emailgate and Watergate in the same breath is pretty bad. It’s kind of like a heart attack is not as bad as Ebola. It is indeed arguably true, but one is immediately drawn to wondering whether Emailgate is worse than, say, Iran-Contra or Monica Lewinsky or 1001 other governmental scandals in recent decades.
Second, perhaps we could go with the Herat Attack vs Ebola thing and agree that Watergate is an entirely different scandal to Emailgate. But that doesn’t make either of them good; both are very bad in different ways.
Thirdly there’s the admission that yes actually this was in fact a bad thing. Buried in the middle of that apologia is this line: “Only slowly did she come to appreciate the security risk of not using the antiquated State Department system.”
That right there is the problem. It was “only slowly” because she either ignored technical advice in the area or deliberately failed to seek such advice. Any (every?) competent computer tech who understood the federal classification system could have told her that what she proposed was dangerously insecure and potentially in violation of any number of federal statutes about confidential document handling. She even signed documents stating that she would handle those documents securely. She didn’t do it.
Finally, the article also claims that she caused it merely because she couldn’t cope with being deprived from her Blackberry. That does appear to be partly the case – she was unwilling (unable?) to learn how to use even newer models of blackberry as we learned from the original FBI documents. However there is strong evidence that she didn’t just do it for that reason. She did it because it gave her control over who else would see her emails and that meant she could hide the ones that might have been showed corruption.
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