Is the Hillary Clinton email scandal over? That’s the spin we’re getting from mainstream media outlets. To the extent that the liberal media paid much attention to the bizarre story about the former secretary of state using only a private email address based on a home server to conduct official business, their interest seems to be at an end. Even many of those who covered the affair have now moved on to other stories, as Clinton continues the preparations for her expected coronation as the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nominee. While Clinton’s apologists will claim, with some justice, that she has been treated far more roughly than, say, President Obama, last Friday’s revelation that the home server on which all of her emails, both personal and government business, was “wiped,” theoretically making it impossible for any of the State Department records that might not have been already turned over to the federal archives to be retrieved, confirms what her conservative antagonists have long feared: the rules really are different for the Clintons. Though House Republicans still investigating the Benghazi attacks may cry foul, it appears that Hillary is counting on a dearth of genuine outrage to let her get away with a stunt that no Republican could possibly get away with.
Clinton’s apologists continue to tell us that there’s no story here because she has already turned over 55,000 pages of printed out emails to the government. The fact that she got to determine which emails were official and which were personal renders that data dump meaningless. But her deletion of all those messages that she deemed personal, even though all of her records were under subpoena from the House Benghazi Committee, rendered what might have been considered a dubious decision an outrageous act of arrogant defiance.
Defending that inexplicable decision to delete personal emails was a difficult task for the usual suspects who are given the job of defending the Clintons on television talk shows. But that daunting task was made even more absurd by the announcement that the server was wiped.
It was one thing to be asked to believe that Clinton really doesn’t know that you can use two emails on a single device (something that any child knows these days) or that she could be trusted to know which records could not be held back. But for the Congress and the nation to be told that the server on which all of her emails were stored was “wiped” is an act of such arrogant contempt for accountability that it must be termed Nixonian in scale.
Not since President Richard Nixon’s secretary Rosemary Woods “accidentally” deleted a crucial 18 minutes of Watergate tapes have the American people been presented with such an astonishing act. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or be a Clinton-hater obsessed with the death of Vince Foster or Whitewater to know that destroying evidence in this manner is, at the very least, highly suspicious. Perhaps the Clintons’ penchant for secrecy and their paranoia about the press and public scrutiny of their public and private behavior is an explanation in and of itself. Yet just imagine if any Republican, let alone someone of the stature of the Clintons (like George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, for example) had done anything like this: the liberal press would be calling for a special prosecutor.
They wouldn’t be wrong to do so since this sort of misbehavior with official documents—especially since everything on the server was under subpoena—is exactly what has landed a number of public officials, such a former CIA director David Petraeus, in the soup. But as the story about the server fades out of view only a couple of days after it was revealed, one must concede that Clinton looks like she’s going to get away with it.
Like every politician caught engaging in questionable conduct, she and her followers will tell us this isn’t important and constitutes a diversion from the real issues. They will also say Clinton wants the emails she gave to the government published. That does nothing to quell concerns about those she didn’t hand over and which now we may never see.
But none of that changes the fact that Hillary has had a Nixon moment and there appears to be very little chance that she will be made to pay for it either by the same Justice Department that humiliated Petraeus or a liberal media that thinks it has done enough on the story.
When her husband evaded responsibility for both sexual harassment and lying under oath, writers like William Bennett rightly lamented The Death of Outrage. But Mrs. Clinton appears to have gone him one better by proving that even the most outrageous conduct that could land another politician in jail can be survived so long as you are the person who aspires to be our first female president.
Clinton may well achieve that ambition but Democrats, who have once again been dragooned into justifying the indefensible because it has been committed by a member of this indefatigable power couple, may be forgiven if they think that this Nixonian moment renders her a little less inevitable than her admirers think. The email story may have hit a dead end, but the tale of the wiped server will keep the memory of the arrogant sense of entitlement that pervaded her disastrous press conference on the issue alive in 2016. Such scandals may die down, but obstruction of justice has a way of lingering in the public memory even if it isn’t prosecuted.