Even erstwhile sensible Republicans like Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire are coming across like those useful idiots on Fox News – who propagate Russian propaganda as readily as they do Trumpian lies.
Only that explains Republicans all over TV these days carping about Hillary Clinton setting up a private email server at her home, and sounding like members of a cult chanting a mind-melding mantra.
Hillary’s emails vs Trump’s top-secret document
Hillary infamously set up that server to transmit emails related to her pending 2016 presidential campaign. But Republicans would have you believe Hillary doing that is as incriminating and threatening to national security as Donald Trump stealing boxes of top-secret documents to store at his home.
Of course none of them ever allow questions about Trump’s intent to interrupt their filibustering chants. Reasonable suspicions abound, however, that he has already sold top (nuclear) secrets to his frenemies, notably his bloodthirsty friend MbS of Saudi Arabia and to his lover Kim of North Korea.
And, after the Ukraine phone call, Helsinki summit, and Jan 6 insurrection, nobody should be surprised that Trump is that venal and treasonous.
Why Hillary installed the server
That said, though, Hillary has only herself to blame for Republicans using her private email server as political cannon fodder so … destructively.
For starters, as Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said so presciently at a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) hearing on media access to those emails in August 2015, we wouldn’t be here today if Hillary had simply followed government policy.
To be fair, she and her defenders are keen to cite the precedents her predecessors at State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, set by allegedly using private servers. Except that nobody can reasonably suspect either of them did so to hide official email correspondence from the president they served. The same cannot be said of Hillary.
In fact, anyone who knows anything about the rivalry that defined their contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination knows that Obama had just cause to suspect she might do just that. Mind you, practically everyone goaded him into nominating Hillary as his secretary of state to emulate former President Lincoln’s “team of rivals.”
But I could see that she was bound to run the State Department like her political fiefdom. And so I duly warned Obama in the blog post “Hillary as Secretary of State? Don’t Do It Barack!” November 15, 2008.
What the FBI found
Significantly, after scavenging through 33,000 emails, both FBI agents and congressional investigators found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” That’s why Hillary was never prosecuted, folks. And, for the record, it was none other than the office of MAGA Republican Senator Chuck Grassley that released this finding in October 2019.
In fact, what they found on that private server were emails among Hillary’s staff that were replete with gossipy disdain for other members of the Obama administration. Far more damning, though, they found that Hillary was spending as much time being secretary of state as she was planning to run for president of the United States. Not least because this featured reams of email correspondence with her Svengali Sidney Blumenthal on everything from foreign policy to Iowa politics.
It was an open secret in Washington that Obama had a well-founded distrust of the notorious Blumenthal. This is why he reportedly made Hillary promise to have nothing to do with him during her tenure as secretary of state. She betrayed him.
Frankly, the only incriminating thing about the whole Hillary email-server scandal turned out to be dick pics Anthony Weiner, the husband of her longtime aide Huma Abedin, sent to teenage girls. Remarkably, he wasn’t even using the server to send them – as he was using Snapchat and Skype. It’s just that, when Weiner’s name showed up in emails to Abedin, the FBI felt they had to dig deeper – just in case.
Regrets
The point is that Hillary was hoisted by her own petard in the 2016 presidential campaign for the same reason she’s being used as political cannon fodder now, namely for defying and deceiving the man who graciously positioned her to succeed him as president of the United States.
The irony, of course, is that her personal email server not only proved fatal to her and Bill’s “two-for-one” presidential ambitions, but gave flight to Trump’s black-swan presidency and all the dystopian and illiberal menace it has wrought…
Many in the media are now expressing regret for allowing Trump to entice them into chasing Hillary’s emails like a shiny ball. Because, in hindsight, this enabled him to fly into the White House despite all his crashing faults.