I’m an equal-opportunity pointer-outer-of-stupid-stuff here at WND Watch. And Cheryl Chumley is making a lot of posts … her “About” paragraph says she is a full-time reporter for WND, but I’m guessing she was hired very recently because until this week, I have never seen her posts, and I’m too tired to go back and search. (Okay, fine: She had a few WND posts starting in July 2014, but only around a dozen. Suddenly on March 2, she’s writing around 9 per day.)
Anyway, back to the story: It has emerged over the last few days that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she used a private e-mail address. WND has reported this as: “Hillary-Gate? Email Server Traced to Clinton Home.” (FYI, I’m really sick of people attaching “Gate” to every scandal or pseudo-scandal.)
The news is really that basic headline. The problem is two-fold: (1) The law (Federal Records Act) requires that official e-mails of government workers take place from government accounts such that they are subject to open-records requests (in other words, what Hillary did was probably illegal, in my very un-legal opinion); and (2) security reasons, for government servers tend to be more hardened against hacking attempts as well as being better backed up.
Because of that first reason, I remember early in President Obama’s presidency, headlines were made about him being the first “Email President” because both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton eschewed e-mail because of those open-records laws. Obama was at a point where he was unwilling to give it up.
There is a lot to still be said for this developing story, and I don’t know how it will turn out. Did Mrs. Clinton violate the law? I don’t know, but it would seem like it. Is this a massive scandal? I don’t think so, but “scandals” tend to be scaled by one’s own personal politics.
Will this affect her possible White House run? I doubt it because the people who won’t vote for her because of this weren’t going to vote for her anyway, and those who would vote for her aren’t going to let this get in the way. For the most part.
But, if she actually did break the law here, I think she should be held accountable. That said, it remains to be seen whether the report is accurate and what the specifics were if it was accurate.
WND Watch 