Hillary’s Emails Don’t Matter To Most Democrats, But They Should
For more than a year now we have had to endure nearly daily coverage from conservative media about what they believe will be final demise of Hillary Clinton’s political career. They were banking on Benghazi to do that, but everyone is pretty damn sure that has been a partisan hit job from the start. Unfortunately, there is an investigation going on by the FBI into Hillary’s private email server and whether or not classified material was mishandled. Thankfully, that is nearing it’s end.
Conservatives are foaming at the mouth and dead certain that Hillary is going to be indicted for something, while liberals are just waving it off as “nothing to be seen here” garbage. Both sides are going to be shocked and angry if they are proven wrong, but that really doesn’t matter to me. In fact, even if she is found guilty of anything I doubt anything substantial would happen to Mrs. Clinton. The worst that would probably happen is that the FBI would waggle their finger at her, call her a naughty girl, and tell her not to do it again. I would use General Petraeus as the perfect example of how members of elite society go relatively unpunished for something someone of lower station would spend many years in jail for.
However, personally, that isn’t the problem I have with this. She may or may not have been hacked; it doesn’t matter. Any computer system anywhere can be hacked given enough time, patience, and skill of the person doing the job. In my mind the only crime she has committed is one of bad judgment which I already know full well she has. Clinton’s private server bothers me because she is conducting public business in an unaccountable way, and can therefore hide anything she’s done if she or her aides didn’t want the public to know about it.
Ever consider that’s why the hard drives of so many servers are destroyed when law enforcement wants to investigate someone? Emails are hard to recover, but it can be done with some outside cooperation. Other things stored just on a hard drive are a lot harder to get back if you physically destroy it.
Why does this bother me? Think about all the classified things from fifty to one hundred years ago that you are just learning about now. Those were notes that people kept in files from public workers in the army, the government, or elsewhere. Some of them had private notes as well, but they kept them good or bad. Politicians who keep private emails and servers are doing so with the purpose to hide what they are doing from the public, that’s why they often try to mass purge those things when they get hacked and caught.
My point is simple enough. A public worker should never be allowed to delete their public work especially if they are an important member of the government. These documents are important to our nation’s history. It may not tell a good tale, such as revealing a new Tuskegee, but then again it could reveal insights into the thinking process of all the people involved in a momentous decision of the time. These are things that our countrymen should know about our time to get a fuller picture of who we are.
We already know Hillary and her aides deleted 30,000 supposed personal emails. We don’t really know if they were personal because there were no government officials there to oversee this deletion, we just have to take their word that it was so. No offense but if we were asked to accept that excuse from someone like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump most Democrats would be up in arms. I think you can understand the frustration and disbelief from those on the right when they hear that said by Hillary. How many of those emails were truly personal, and how many were about things that Americans should know now or sometime in the future?
