Some of Hillary’s E-Mails Are Probably Destroyed. That’s Good News.

Today on NRO

GEORGE WILL: One congressman is working to ensure Lois Lerner 2.0 will never happen. The House Takes on IRS Lawlessness.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama's morally confused foreign policy is making the world more dangerous by the day. The Audacity of Weakness.

KATHERINE TIMPF: Stop hating Native Americans! Commitment to Eating Three Meals a Day Is 'Racist'.

JOHN O'SULLIVAN: To us in the West, journalist Khadija Ismayilova says: "Choose truth and help us." Letter from an Azerbaijani Prison.

PHOTO ESSAY: Hillary's Got Mail.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty, Conservative Journalist of the Year

March 05, 2015

Breaking this morning:

The White House counsel's office was not aware at the time Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state that she relied solely on personal email and only found out as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person said Clinton's exclusive reliance on personal email as the nation's top diplomat was inconsistent with the guidance given to agencies that official business should be conducted on official email accounts. Once the State Department turned over some of her messages in connection with the Benghazi investigation after she left office, making it apparent she had not followed the guidance, the White House counsel's office asked the department to ensure that her email records were properly archived, according to the person who spoke on a condition of anonymity without authorization to speak on the record.

Hillary, look out for that bus!

Some of Hillary's E-Mails Are Probably Destroyed. That's Good News.

From a supremely cynical political perspective, it's better for conservatives and Republicans if Hillary Clinton's e-mails never come to light. If they're destroyed and impossible to recover, it means she will never be able to dispel everyone's worst suspicions.

The primary feature of Hillary's "home-brewed" system was that it could destroy e-mails completely and permanently -- no backups or third-party records that you get with Yahoo or Gmail. It would be particularly odd to build a special e-mail system with this "permanent destroy" capability and never use it.

On Greta Van Susteren's show last night, ABC News political director Rick Klein said he was at a loss to come up with an innocuous explanation for Hillary's "home-brewed" system. There is no innocuous explanation. The whole point of it was to create an e-mail system that Hillary and her team would control completely, that would be beyond the range of federal record-keeping rules and laws and beyond the range of FOIA requests. If any message seemed embarrassing, politically inconvenient, or incriminating, she could erase it, and rest assured it was gone forever, beyond the reach of any investigator, FOIA request, or subpoena.

Of course, it wasn't particularly secure from hackers and/or foreign spies. And let's face it, if you're the Russians or Chinese -- heck, maybe the Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, or other regimes -- if you're not trying to hack into the e-mail systems of American officials, you're not earning your paycheck.

We don't know if foreign intelligence services ever cracked the (apparently flawed) code and got to read Hillary's private e-mails. We do know that we would be fools to assume they hadn't. This prospect makes a lot of Obama's first-term foreign policy look a little different in retrospect. Was there any particular time when a foreign power seemed one step ahead of our policies? Did Moscow, Beijing, or other foreign capitals seem to know what we were thinking in our negotiations before we began? Any of our spies get burned, or sources of intelligence dry up? Was Hillary Clinton's e-mail effectively a leak all along?

(By the way, in the interim, every imaginable White House official should be brought before Congress and asked why it didn't seem unusual to them that Hillary Clinton never used a state.gov address, ever, at all, in a four-year span. Her use of a private e-mail was not secret within the administration.)

The answers to these questions are above my pay grade and security clearance. But if foreign spies were reading the e-mail of the Secretary of State for four years, it represents nothing less than a catastrophe, and one that is entirely the fault of Hillary Clinton herself.

Greta said she really wanted to see Hillary herself in front of a camera explaining all this. I doubt she'll get it, or if she does, it will be under extraordinarily stage-managed circumstances. She will probably offer some version of "I'm just a confused grandmother, I don't understand all of this technical business, I was assured this system was safest and most secure and for the best." Of course, if she does play that card, we will have a joyful time pointing out that the most prepared, most ready, most experienced choice for president used unsecure e-mails for the entirety of her time at the State Department.

Notice fans of Vice President Joe Biden are chuckling about other shoes dropping.

Speaking of Mishandling Classified Information . . .

Great timing on the Petraeus deal, Huh?

No, this story is not going away:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Wednesday questioned whether Hillary Clinton improperly shared classified information like former CIA Director David Petraeus.

Asked on "Fox and Friends" whether Clinton's exclusive use of a personal e-mail address during her time as secretary of State raised national security concerns, Chaffetz said, "It does beg the question: Were there any sort of classified pieces of information that were flowing through her personal email account?"

"Which is something you can't do and something yesterday Gen. Petraeus had to plead guilty to, or was going out in a deal, dealing with his personal email and interaction with somebody who didn't have a classification," Chaffetz added.

Our Andy McCarthy argues Petraeus got a sweetheart deal:

General Petraeus committed several serious felony violations of federal law. And not in a one-off lapse of judgment; this was a series of offenses committed over an extended period of time. Clearly, Petraeus believed he was a law unto himself. A notorious publicity seeker, he treated journals chronicling his highly classified activities as if they were his own property, to be maintained and exhibited as he saw fit — mainly, for use in burnishing his carefully cultivated image — rather than as federal law dictates.

Even after he was caught, he continued to lie, obstruct justice, and put the government that had so elevated him to additional burdens to recover the records he was illegally hoarding. Had he not negotiated a plea, Petraeus should have been charged in a multi-count indictment. If he wanted to dispose of the case without a trial that would have further disgraced him, he should have been required to plead guilty to at least one felony count and to have admitted his lies to government officials — misrepresentations that, under the sentencing guidelines that apply to people who don't get special treatment, instruct judges to impose a term of incarceration.

Petraeus, instead, will get a slap on the wrist. The New York Times reports that he will be permitted to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information. Moreover, while that charge carries a potential punishment of one year's imprisonment, the Justice Department has agreed to recommend a sentence of just two years' probation plus a $40,000 fine.

Am I crazy for thinking that if you're the guy who saved Iraq in 2007 and 2008, we cut you a little slack?

But the precedent is set that even David Petraeus gets held accountable for how he handles classified information. If Hillary sent anything classified over her unsecure private e-mail, there has to be legal consequences.

Unleash This Man Against the Weed Agency!

Keep an eye on Larry Hogan, governor of Maryland:

On Wednesday, the chief operating officer of the University System of Maryland felt his wrath after trying to defend a $16 million expenditure by telling Hogan (R) that it had already been approved by the General Assembly.

"I'm here to make sure that we're not wasting taxpayers' money," Hogan said, his face turning red.

The heated exchange came at a bimonthly meeting of the Board of Public Works, a three-member panel that approves all major state expenditures. In his first three meetings since taking office, Hogan — who sits on the panel along with Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp (D) and Comptroller Peter Franchot (D) — has berated state employees for, among other things, not getting enough bids before awarding contracts, going over budget and extending contracts for years on end.

A feeling of timid trepidation hung over those who waited to present to the board Wednesday. One health official took the stand and acknowledged that she was now "on the hot seat."

Hogan says his no-nonsense approach is part of his effort to rein in government spending and search for waste that can be eliminated. So far, the contracts that the governor is criticizing mostly originated during the tenure of former governor Martin O'Malley (D). But soon Hogan will have to approve work done under his own hand-picked secretaries and agency leaders.

ADDENDA: Today on the home page, Senator Ben Sasse, former NR cover boy, urges his colleagues to stay focused on a full repeal of Obamacare, and offer those who purchased insurance a temporary tax credit for the transition.

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Some of Hillary’s E-Mails Are Probably Destroyed. That’s Good News.

Some of Hillary's E-Mails Are Probably Destroyed. That's Good News.

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