"Hillary Clinton’s Emails Now Might Finally Take Her Down"

Law News: This past week has been a milestone of sorts for those who closely follow the continuing saga of Hillary Clinton’s wrongful use of email systems during her tenure as Secretary of State. But the kind of milestone it was depends on where you stood when the week began.

For those of us who recognized from the outset that Ms. Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email system for all her official business (not to mention her unprecedented use of a private server atop that) was a clear violation of the Federal Records Act (“FRA”), the finding of the State Department’s Inspector General (“IG”) to that effect in his May 25 report were no surprise. In fact, on the admitted facts of the case, no other conclusion was possible, and it was simply another “shoe waiting to be dropped.”

To us, knowing that there are no applicable penalties within the FRA (or in the FOIA, for that matter, which Ms. Clinton also blatantly circumvented), the primary significance of the IG report is that it so flatly and persuasively belies nearly every public “defense” that she has uttered on the matter, from her extraordinary news conference at the United Nations on March 10 of last year to even her initial stunned reactions to the IG report itself this past week.

No, her self-serving email set-up was not “allowed” under the State Department’s rules. No, she was not “permitted” to use a personal email system exclusively as she did. No, what she did was hardly just a matter of her “personal convenience.” No, there is no evidence that any State Department attorney (other than perhaps Secretary Clinton herself) ever gave “legal approval” to any part of her special email system. No, everything she did was not “fully above board” or in compliance with the “letter and spirit of the rules,” far from it. Yes, she was indeed required by the FRA to maintain all official e-mails in an official system for proper review, delineation, and retention upon her departure. Yes, her private server equipment was in fact the subject of multiple attempted intrusion attempts (i.e., hacks), including by foreign nations. The list goes on and on. (Note that this does not even include Ms. Clinton’s many serious “misstatements” about her handling of classified or potentially classified information.)

Now, even the general public is left with the unavoidable conclusion that Ms. Clinton either is ignorant of the law (which too many people know is not so) or else feels blithely untethered to reality in a way that necessarily serves her secretive interests regardless of any truth — the technical legal term for which is “pathological lying,” or perhaps merely “psychosis.” Not a pretty picture for a voter of any stripe at any stage of the electoral process.