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Server Farm
Mrs. Clinton’s emails are concealed in a bureaucratic silo.
By
James Taranto
Sept. 22, 2015 2:34 p.m. ET
Server Farm
You may recall that last month, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign said that the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee had agreed to turn over her illicit private email server to the federal government. Earlier this month came the news, reported by the Washington Post Sept. 12, that Platte River Networks, the company that managed the server, “said it has ‘no knowledge of the server being wiped,’ the strongest indication to date that tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton has said were deleted could be recovered”:
[Mrs.] Clinton and her advisers have said for months that she deleted her personal correspondence from her time as secretary of state, creating the impression that 31,000 e-mails were gone forever. . . .
“Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped,” company spokesman Andy Boian told The Washington Post. “All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped.”
[Mrs.] Clinton and her staff have avoided directly answering whether the server was ever wiped.
In a memorable exchange at a campaign event in Las Vegas last month, Clinton turned aside a question about whether the server had been wiped with a joke: “Like what, with a cloth?” she said, adding, “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out they did use a cloth? Or with a paper product, given DailyMail.com’s August report that the server was housed in what Mrs. Clinton might call a “convenience.”
Anyway, you might think this is all good news for the public’s right to know—that now, any official emails her lawyers deleted will be recovered for the public record.
Alas, you’d be wrong. At least for now, Mrs. Clinton’s emails are being held in a bureaucratic silo, concealed from public view and even from the State Department. That’s the upshot of this report from the Washington Times:
The FBI refused to cooperate Monday with a court-ordered inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server, telling the State Department that they won’t even confirm they are investigating the matter themselves, much less [be] willing to tell the rest of the government what’s going on.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had ordered the State Department to talk with the FBI and see what sort of information could be recovered from Mrs. Clinton’s email server, which her lawyer has said she turned over to the Justice Department over the summer.
The FBI general counsel described the refusal to cooperate as “consistent with long-standing Department of Justice and FBI policy,” and no doubt that is true—although it has been widely reported, based on information that unnamed officials unofficially provided, that the FBI is conducting a national-security investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton or others mishandled classified information and possibly whether the server was vulnerable to foreign hackers or actually hacked.
Judge Sullivan is overseeing a lawsuit against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, and the plaintiff is understandably unhappy:
“We still do not know whether the FBI—or any other government agency for that matter—has possession of the email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and [top aide Huma] Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department,” Judicial Watch said.
“We also do not know whether the server purportedly in the possession of the FBI—an assumption based on unsworn statements by third parties—is the actual email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department or whether it is a copy of such an email server. Nor do we know whether any copies of the email server or copies of the records from the email server exist,” the group said in its own court filing Monday afternoon.
And we probably won’t know for some time. The national-security questions the FBI is investigating are separate from the public-records issue the Judicial Watch lawsuit and others raise. The FBI is not a party to the FOIA lawsuit, and even if it were, it’s unlikely the bureau would release information collected as part of an investigation still under way.
Thus by giving her server to the FBI, Mrs. Clinton appears to have ensured that the public, the State Department and congressional investigators won’t see what’s on it anytime soon. No wonder she’s laughing.
Some will no doubt see this all as (to coin a phrase) a vast conspiracy. This Sept. 12 Washington Examiner report—which also concerns the Judicial Watch lawsuit—will fuel such thinking:
Hillary Clinton’s defense in the email scandal received a boost this week when the Justice Department—the same Justice Department that is investigating the email affair—told a court it has no reason to suspect [Mrs.] Clinton either deleted or failed to produce any emails under request by congressional or public-interest investigators. “The evidence, if anything, demonstrates that the former secretary’s production was over-inclusive, not under-inclusive,” top Justice Department lawyers Benjamin Mizer and Elizabeth Shapiro wrote in papers filed in federal court last Wednesday.
Taken as a whole, Mizer and Shapiro’s brief was so pro-Clinton, so without even a hint of suspicion that she has been anything less than totally forthcoming, that it might as well have come from the Clinton campaign media team.
Clinton has produced everything, Mizer and Shapiro wrote, including some personal emails she was not obligated to produce. In addition, Mizer and Shapiro argued that State Department officials like Clinton “are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record” and “may delete messages they deem in their own discretion to be personal.” That judgment is beyond question, the lawyers argue, unless there is some evidence to suggest the official acted in bad faith. And in Clinton’s case, they declared flatly, there is no such evidence.
Our own inclination is to apply Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Even Mrs. Clinton now acknowledges it was foolish to set up her own email server. If it is true that the server wasn’t wiped, it would mean her legal team attempted a coverup that it lacked the basic technical knowledge to execute.
And various parts of the bureaucracy—the State Department, the FBI, the Justice Department lawyers who represent the State Department in Judge Sullivan’s courtroom—are each behaving according to their own bureaucratic imperatives. One wishes they were coordinated, so that (say) the attorney general would order the FBI to copy the server for the State Department. But what’s maddening is the lack of such cooperation—the inability to mount a “conspiracy” in the service of governmental transparency.
Luck sometimes compensates for stupidity; to some extent, all this is having the effect of protecting Mrs. Clinton. But only to some extent. Last week, as Townhall’s Cortney O’Brien noted, a Rasmussen Reports survey found that 59% of likely voters “think it’s likely [Mrs.] Clinton broke the law by sending and receiving e-mails containing classified information through a private e-mail server,” while just 34% think it unlikely. “Even among her fellow Democrats, 37% think it’s likely Clinton broke the law.”
Meanwhile, USA Today’s Dave Mastio reports that the Clinton family business is suffering:
Six giants of the corporate world are bailing out on the Clinton Global Initiative. . . . USA Today has confirmed that sponsors from 2014 that have backed out for this year include electronics company Samsung, oil giant ExxonMobil, global financial firms Deutsche Bank and HSBC, and accounting firm PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers). Hewlett-Packard, which just announced major layoffs, will be an in-kind donor instead of a cash contributor, and the agri-chem firm Monsanto has cut back its donation. Dow’s name is missing from the donor list as well, but the chemical company’s exit is not confirmed.
Government officials, both American and foreign, are staying away too. Last year eight heads of state or government appeared, including the president of the U.S. and the prime minister of Japan. “This year, only leaders from Colombia and Liberia are currently on the program.” Last year’s conference featured three other top Obama administration officials; this year’s not a one.
“Unless there is a sudden surge in high-profile corporate support in the coming days, the exodus of well-recognized brands could represent a setback for the Clinton campaign’s effort to maintain an aura of inevitability,” Mastio observes. Possibly he’s reversing cause and effect and the aura’s dimming is reducing the value of the entire Clinton enterprise.
