The Hillary Clinton email story reached its high water mark Tuesday afternoon. We hope. Best case scenario: the so-called "Emailgate" will recede into the darker corners of the debate, becoming just another in a long line of Fox News and AM talk radio scare-words to rattle off when smearing Clinton. No matter what she had said in her press conference, the drama would've continued to play out according to a preordained script. Even if she had taken my advice and delivered her server to the State Department, the script would've continue to roll along.
Without question, the congressional Republicans and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) will subpoena both the emails and the server itself, which could turn into a thing because based on what Clinton said on Tuesday, she has no intention of allowing anyone, much less the GOP sift through her email server. There will also be a State Department document dump of as many emails it can redact.
Meanwhile, there are some lingering questions.
Why didn't she use two Blackberries: one for her personal email and other for her official government email? She said on Tuesday that it was a matter of convenience, and I suppose that's a solid enough excuse given how, while jetting around the world, it's more likely to misplace a Blackberry if you have two. You're literally twice as likely to lose one. Then again, if some members of the press and the GOP are correct, it was part of an elaborate plot. We'll circle back to the plot.
Why didn't Clinton just use one device with two email accounts? Eric Bolling from Fox News Channel said, "Are you kidding me? Any tenth grader could set up multiple email accounts on a single handheld device. Does she think the American people are that stupid?" No, but she probably thinks Eric Bolling is stupid.
And to be fair The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza was similarly skeptical. But shortly after, we learned that there was no real way to handle two email accounts on one Blackberry at that time. Mashable's Pete Pachal reported:
Prior to 2013, though, there was no standard way to secure a BlackBerry like Clinton’s with two email accounts, at least not without giving the IT person in charge complete dominion over all the data on the phone. To fulfill the criteria that Clinton demanded — secure email that’s not sitting on a cloud service, plus a single-BlackBerry solution — she had just one option: Set up her own email server.
Politically, it was probably not... CONTINUE READING