HRC: As Unacceptable As She Is Inevitable

There is really no need to feel sorry for Hillary. She'll handle this e-mail flap in her customary manner:

The former secretary of state and her advisers have decided to adopt a time-tested Clintonian approach: take a concrete step to ease the pressure, then wait out the storm, according to three sources with knowledge of her team’s approach.

The Atlantic had a good example of why Hillary's obsession with secrecy ought to matter to the voters:

At the time, Gawker noted that Clinton’s apparent use of the non-official account likely violated federal regulations governing records retention, and sent inquiries directly to Clinton and to the White House asking if messages to the clintonemail.com address were being retained."

Gawker also "filed a FOIA request with the agency for all correspondence to date between Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal," Trotter continues, "specifically including any messages to or from the hdr22@clintonemail.com account" [see this for the Gawker story]. We now know that email address did, in fact, belong to former Secretary of State Clinton. Had she been following the rules and forwarding all email about official business to government servers, the State Department would've found the Blumenthal email. They found nothing.

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This is exactly why Clinton's behavior was unacceptable: It enabled her to conceal at least some official correspondence that the press and the public had a right to see, or at least to have acknowledged with an explanation, challengeable in court, of why the correspondence was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

Unacceptable it may be, but nonetheless, Hillary has stonewalled her way out of worse than this before. It does seems to me the mainstream news media just might be enjoying this particular snowballing scandal in a way they haven't with others, and even the left-wing media is calling it an unforced error on the part of the Clinton Machine.

Still, my money's on Hillary being able to ride this out with minimal damage to her campaign. Unless she's in prison or physically incapacitated, she'll be the Democrats' only candidate in 2016.