So no indictment. Thank goodness. Given my earlier comments, I clearly have to reassess the lens by which I look at politics. Maybe my critics are right that I'm too much of a chicken little. I will make an effort from here on out to be more objective and self-critical when examining what biases are affecting my analysis.
While it's a little strange to be celebrating one's own candidate not being indicted, from Mr. Comey's comments it's clear that this wasn't a close call. There was no intent to undermine national security or hide anything from investigators. There was only what you would expect from 30,000 emails - that there would be some mistakes in classifying them made by Clinton. 110 emails out of 30,000+ had some level of classification at the time they were sent or received. That's 0.4%. She's human, we are all human.
Her real mistake was having the private servers in the first place. That was wrong, and she was right to apologize for it. But given that her predecessors or their aides also used private e-mail of varying degrees and neither had government e-mail, it's fair to say that this was only allowed because compliance policies at State were sloppy and ill-defined. It seems clear that all sorts of sloppiness in many different agencies at all levels of government would be uncovered, if they were all subject to the same degree of scrutiny as Clinton. Hillary Clinton has been the most investigated, scrutinized public figures in modern history. Literally dozens of books and tens of thousands of pages of documents exist on her. There's probably more information out there about her than she even remembers about herself. Yet no "smoking gun" has ever been found - just one dead end investigation after another. The only time either of the Clintons were "gotten" was when it involved a blue dress. Go figure.
However, this incident should be a warning to all of our public officials to be scrupulous with classified information, no matter one's rank. If Hillary can be seriously damaged politically by something like this, than any public official who isn't careful to follow procedure strictly can be. And it must be a warning to both the Clintons and the people around them not to make unforced errors in the future - they can learn from the current president, Obama, who has been relatively scandal-free.
Just remember Beet, the sky won't be falling just because Trump leads after the RNC.
Good post though. I agree the private server was a mistake, but not criminal. It's all water under the bridge now, except among the people who still casually chat about the murder of Vince Foster.
