Editorial: Hillary in the bunker

Nice try, Madam Secretary

From the moment news broke that, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton relied upon private email to conduct government business, the American people and potential Democratic presidential primary voters have had serious reason for concern.

The cloud has grown darker each day since.

First, the revelation that the clintonemail.com domain was set up on the day Clinton’s confirmation hearings began, underlining that it was deliberately designed to create a private, parallel communications system for Clinton.

Then came reports that the private email account was apparently operated on a computer server in Clinton’s house. Which would give her and her operatives, not the State Department, control over its contents — and would likely have made the account more vulnerable to hackers.

Then came Clinton’s dodgy ploy of tweeting: “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

Clinton’s desires regarding 55,000 pages of emails turned over to the State Department are irrelevant. Her loyalists had sifted through the data on the server, selected those emails from among who knows how many and declared them to be public business as opposed to, say, emails about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding plans.

In doing so, they exercised a right they do not have. The State Department is obligated to determine which of Clinton’s emails were official and which were private. That’s why the department must take custody of her server.

More damning, reports revealed that the State Department manual for agency employees specifies that routine use of private email is prohibited.

The manual called for using an “authorized” system with “the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of the resident information.”

Amid furious Clinton camp spinning, “three sources with knowledge of her team’s approach” told Bloomberg Politics that the likely Democratic presidential candidate has adopted a strategy: “Take a concrete step to ease the pressure, then wait out the storm.”

In other words, hope that fresh news overwhelms attention to Clinton’s lapse. If that’s what on her mind, she’s dreaming