The Emails

I have done my research, and the verdict is in: Comey got it exactly right when he said that Clinton and her staff "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."  And he was also right when he said "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."

So if you want to condemn Clinton for being careless with sensitive/classified information, that's perfectly fair.  If you decide that you can't vote for her because of this carelessness, that's fair too --- although I personally think Trump as president poses a much greater threat, in terms of both preserving our national security and carelessness generally.

Disagree?  Before making your final decision, you should at least familiarize yourself with all of the relevant documents, as I have done:

• Clinton's statement regarding her email server.
• The OIG report regarding the use of personal email accounts by all Secretaries of State over the past 20 years.
• FBI Director James Comey's statement regarding his recommendation not to prosecute Clinton.
• Comey's testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Before getting into the details about what Clinton did wrong, let's first explain why it's pretty clear that Comey made the right decision to recommend against prosecution.

Comey Got it Right

First of all, the notion that Comey is somehow corrupt and beholden to Clinton is laughable.  He's a lifelong Republican, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, and who contributed to both John McCain and Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns.  If he were going to let politics influence his investigation, he most likely would have been looking for an excuse to prosecute Clinton.

Next, there is Comey's testimony that there has only been one prosecution in the last 99 years for the same type of 'gross negligence' Clinton showed.  All of Comey's critics are insisting that Clinton should be treated just like everyone else --- and with one exception, 'everyone else' in similar circumstances wasn't prosecuted.

More telling, however, is the complete lack of discussion of Colin Powell's use of personal email when he was W's first Secretary of State.

State Department regulations require all employees to surrender "all documentation related to the official business of the Government" when they leave their position; however, this requirement has never been applied to any Secretary of State, including Albright, Powell, Rice and Clinton.  So Clinton was under no legal obligation to provide any of the emails on her personal server, but neverhteless turned over more than 55,000 printed pages containing more than 30,000 email threads in December 2014, and later gave the FBI access to her decommissioned server.  Many Republicans are accusing Clinton of failing to make a full disclosure, possibly deleting some incriminating emails.  Conveniently for them, these accusations are impossible to disprove.

The telling thing, however, is that no one --- certainly not the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee --- are making the same accusations about Colin Powell, who also used a personal email account for official business, and who has, to date, turned over ZERO of those emails.  Indeed, the OIG report states the following:

At a minimum, Secretary Powell should have surrendered all emails sent from or received in his personal account that related to Department business.  Because he did not do so at the time that he departed government service or at any time thereafter, Secretary Powell did not comply with Department policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act. In an attempt to address this deficiency, NARA requested that the Department inquire with Secretary Powell’s 'internet service or email provider' to determine whether it is still possible to retrieve the email records that might remain on its servers. The Under Secretary for Management subsequently informed NARA that the Department sent a letter to Secretary Powell’s representative conveying this request. As of May 2016, the Department had not received a response from Secretary Powell or his representative.

Powell used his personal email account for business reasons on a daily basis, likely generating thousands of emails.  But we'll never see them, because when the OIG asked for them, Powell ignored the request.  Again, conveniently for Republicans, we'll never know what classified information Powell may have sent out in his personal account.

Furthermore, the OIG states that "While the limited number of respondents also asserted they did not use personal email accounts for official business, OIG discovered some personal email usage for official business by Secretary Powell’s staff through its own review of  selected records."

Are congressional Republicans demanding an FBI investigation into Powell's use of a personal email account?  Are they demanding perjury charges be filed against Powell's staff who lied about using personal email accounts?  They are not, because they're not truly interested in national security.  They're interested in attacking Hillary Clinton.


What Clinton Did Wrong
So it's true that Clinton shouldn't be prosecuted.  But it's also true that using her own personal email server was a serious breach of security, and she should have known better.  Simply put, computer systems get hacked, and the computer systems of government officials are enticing targets.  The State Department published numerous warnings while Clinton was SoS, including at least one such warning issued directly to Clinton.  And while it's possible that Clinton's server was not compromised --- Comey stated that ". . .  we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked," that doesn't mean it wasn't.  A good hacker gets in and out undetected.

The redemption for Clinton, if there is any, is that she clearly made a concerted effort only to transmit non-sensitive, or 'sensitive but unclassified' information  via this server, showing a clear understanding that use of the server carried risk, and an effort to minimize that risk.

Seriously.  Out of 30,000+ emails reviewed by the FBI, only 110 of them were found to have contained classified information at the time they were sent or received (~2000 more of them contained information that later became classified, but you can't blame Clinton for that).  That's less than 0.3%.  And to those who correctly say that even one classified email sent out over such a system is too many, it's important to point out that of those 110 emails, only three actually carried markings indicating that they were classified.  So at worst, one could argue that Clinton knowingly transmitted 3 classified emails over her personal email server, or less than 0.01%.

Sure, Clinton said she didn't send any classified emails out, and you can call her a liar if you want to.  But only if you remember every detail of every email YOU sent between 2009 and 2013.  And yes, Clinton should have considered the possibility that some emails might not be properly marked as classified.  That once again falls into the 'gross negligence' category.

There's no question this was a mistake, and as I said before, perhaps this lapse in judgment leads you to believe Clinton is unfit to be president.  Just consider the judgment of her opponent before you vote.

Also, should Clinton win, I think it's quite unlikely she's going to make this mistake again.