On Hillary’s Emails, Marie Harf Struggles But Hillary Explains

Hillary Clinton’s personal email system is the big story of the day. We have belatedly learned that Hillary had no official State Department email account during her tenure as Secretary. Instead of using the government’s email system, she had a server installed in her home and administered her own private email account. Some of her aides also had accounts on Hillary’s private system, which used the domain name clintonemail.com.

At the State Department, spokeswoman Marie Harf struggles to explain to reporters why this was all kosher. To be fair, the reporters are not exactly incisive, either. The point that Harf finally brings out is that State Department employees have two separate email systems, one classified and one unclassified. But Hillary didn’t use either of them, which means that either 1) in four years, the Secretary of State never sent or received any emails that were or should have been classified, which is preposterous, or 2) Hillary has (or had) an unknown number of classified emails on her personal home server, which presumably violates various laws and regulations. Here is the ineffable Ms.Harf:

Actually, though, there isn’t much of a mystery. At a private party that happened to be caught on tape, Hillary explained–back in 2000!–that she had stopped using email because of “all the investigations.” Start at around the 3:30 mark:

As Secretary of State, Hillary came up with an even better alternative: use email, but keep it off the government servers so you can destroy anything that might be inconvenient, and control what gets produced if those troublesome investigations should resume.

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