The FBI set the record straight for Hillary Clinton and the vast majority of her fellow government officials: Stupidity is not a crime.
Thanks for that, FBI Director James Comey, less American prisons runneth over with stupid government types. Comey made the announcement Tuesday that the FBI would not seek criminal charges against Clinton for her mishandling of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Common sense made it clear early on that Clinton’s crimes were arrogance and carelessness — not treason.
The email scandal amazed the world that someone as clearly intelligent and beneficent as Hillary Clinton could regularly do so many self-centered and stupid things.
Perhaps she gets the “set-myself-on-fire” skills from her husband. Just recently, Bill Clinton — in what is certain to be among the stupidest self-inflicted wounds he maimed himself and Hillary with — got off his plane in Arizona and had an impromptu social chat on the tarmac with Department of Justice director Loretta Lynch. He nearly self-immolated himself and took Hillary’s presidential campaign with him.
How could someone as savvy and intelligent as Bill Clinton do something so world-class stupid? Easy: arrogance. I have no doubt that Bill Clinton and Lynch did not talk about Hillary’s email investigation. And Bill Clinton thinks we should all believe that because he knows better. We should trust him.
Both Clintons have absolutely no sense of minding any appearance of impropriety, because they see that kind of behavior as unneeded and inconvenient.
It’s disturbing that almost eight years ago, as she was becoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton didn’t dismiss the idea of a private email server simply because it looked bad on several levels. When the server was revealed by the Associated Press during investigations into the Benghazi attack, Clinton said she created it because it would be too difficult to maintain multiple email accounts and feared her personal emails could be made public under open records laws.
The decision was so bad, that I’m shocked somewhere in the room she was discussing it someone didn’t break out a keyboard and hit a long, ominous soap-opera chord, foreshadowing the self-inflicted doom she was begging for.
First, it makes her look stupid. She can’t run two email accounts but she’s supposed to be able to run the State Department, foreign affairs and foreign policy for the United States? And it made her look like she must have something to hide in her emails that she would go to so much trouble to try and prevent them from being made public. This is where the crime of arrogance comes in, of which she has repeatedly been felonious. There’s no doubt she either planned on running again for president or seriously wanted to keep that option open. She feared that everything she wrote would become open for inspection and scrutiny by her ruthless and relentless political enemies. She saw a private email server as an answer to that problem. She felt entitled to a degree of privacy that people in public office must give up to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, because that’s critical to ensuring trust and accountability. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, sees herself as above such mundane considerations.
She’s not. No one is, nor should they be.
Not only was her decision to start the private email server stupid, her handling of it afterward — waiting far too long for some kind of mea culpa — compounded the damage. And then for her husband, the wily Bill Clinton, to have a private talk on a runway with Lynch at a critical moment in this investigation and her presidential campaign? Wow. Bill and Hillary Clinton are truly the first couple of well-intended arrogance.
Bill Clinton, who is famously intelligent and politically astute, could not have overlooked what a stink he would create by such a meeting with Lynch, but he didn’t care. And days later Hillary Clinton meets with the FBI, just before the long holiday weekend. And then here comes news that the FBI would not bring criminal charges against Hillary. They could not have tried harder to create a Democrat-contrived appearance of impropriety.
It’s got to stop if she wants to be president. She needs to say plainly that the email server was a terrible mistake because it was a clear end-run around federal open records laws, and because it makes her appear entitled and above those in government who have to play be some very inconvenient and very necessary rules and laws.
Hillary Clinton must confess and apologize for being criminally insensitive to the reality she must live by as an American politician, and especially as U.S. president.
It doesn’t matter what her political enemies think of such a move, because their shrill, ceaseless and mostly baseless attacks make them irrelevant. It matters greatly, however, to her supporters and the bulk of American voters who need to be persuaded that she has more integrity than how all this makes her appear.
And she can’t wait. She doesn’t even get the luxury of coming at this carefully thought out, because any delay would be seen as a continuation of her arrogance, testing the political winds to see if the controversy will just fade away by itself.
No. Hillary Clinton needs to do the right thing for right reasons. Right now.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.