Muddy Waters

No, not the singer, Hillary Clinton's e-mails while she was Secretary of State. The State Departments Inspector General has released it's report on this never fading issue.

The report says Clinton violated State Department regulations regarding federal records preservation for historical purposes by not turning over all of her e-mails prior to leaving office. The report also says Colin Powell did the same thing. The use of a private e-mail account for official business is not as clear, though the suggestion is she wasn't supposed to do that either even though John Kerry is the first Secretary of State to use a dot gov e-mail and it was after Clinton left office that it became a legal requirement.

Clinton should never have used a private server, that's my opinion, it is not what the law stated at the time. What's not in the report, which is certainly not written as a pro Clinton document or is in any way kind to her, is exactly who informed Secretary Clinton of all of these problems associated with how she was dealing with this matter. The answer appears to be no one even though a significant number of people knew it, including senior members of the administration. If it was such a problem why was action not taken then?

Approximately 2,000 e-mails have been retroactively classified. They were not classified during her tenure at the State Department which goes to the heart of what many government officials complain about, which is that the Federal Government is ridiculous in how often it classifies documents.

The F.B.I. has also been conducting an investigation on all of this and we do not yet know the results of it. We do know that at this time there is no evidence that Clinton's private server was ever hacked. It is a proven fact that both the Chinese and the Russians did hack into the State Department's servers during the time in question, how about a little outrage over that and exactly why isn't that a more compelling story?

I certainly won't defend Clinton's use of a private server, it was a bad move on her part, simply from a perception point of view. The question we should all be asking is why has it ever been permissable to use personal e-mails and equipment to conduct official government business? The muddy waters which surrounded all of this should never have existed.