The latest controversy involving Hillary Clinton’s decision to run her State Department e-mail through private servers contains a hard-to-believe shocker that ought to give reasonable people pause.
Her supporters will join her campaign in decrying a “conspiracy” to spoil her presidential aspirations. But really, how can an objective observer not find problems with this latest story, which suggests a dark conspiracy indeed: An errant engineer decides on his own volition to delete e-mails from her private account after a congressional committee orders them preserved?
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used Denver-based Platte River Networks to host private her e-mail when she was secretary of state.[/caption]
According to documents the FBI released recently to summarize its investigation into Clinton’s e-mail arrangement, that’s the official story.
The FBI said that in December 2014 a top Clinton aide told Denver-based Platte River Networks to destroy an archive of e-mails from her private server, but the company failed to do so. Then, after The New York Times reported in early March 2015 details of then-Secretary Clinton’s use of a private server, the House committee investigating the deadly attacks on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, ordered that her e-mails be preserved, and subpoenaed those related to the attack. Three weeks later, the story goes, the engineer responsible for deleting Clinton’s archive suddenly remembered the failed duty, and acted on it by deleting the e-mails with a program (wonderfully named BleachBit) that apparently rendered most of them unreadable.
Around the time of the engineer’s sudden remembrance, the FBI said, Platte River officials joined a conference call with a longtime Clinton aide and personal lawyer. But when the FBI tried to look into this call, they met with frustration. Platte River’s attorney told the engineer who did the deed to claim attorney-client privilege.
That just looks awful. So little wonder the Republican chairman of the House committee investigating Clinton’s e-mail arrangement — Utah’s Jason Chaffetz — has asked federal prosecutors to investigate whether she or others were involved in the decision to destroy those e-mails following the preservation order.
Given that FBI director James Comey’s decision to clear Clinton of wrongdoing in the e-mail scandal came with his unusual denunciation of her actions as “extremely careless,” the information from the bureau’s summary of its investigation doesn’t sit well. It’s reasonable to ask why the FBI didn’t look deeper. It’s reasonable to ask why the engineer would act if, as the logic of the cover story must argue, the e-mails were simply personal notes about yoga appointments and being a grandmother.
No wonder Chaffetz would seek to dig in. He’s asking the Justice Department “to investigate and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records, obstruction of congressional inquiries and concealment of cover-up of evidence material to a congressional committee.”
Whether that’s just smart opposition-party politics or genuine truth-seeking, the fact of the new probe illustrates once again how the Clintons’ loose regard for following the rules — at the very least — creates troubling distraction where it shouldn’t exist.
We worry that Chaffetz is right on this one. Something about this story feels whitewashed — or maybe bleached out is the better term for it now.
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