The ongoing e-mail controversy surrounding former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton just took a huge turn. To this point, the differing narratives have been fairly partisan. Republicans claim that the email scandal displays Clinton’s careless judgment – some even going so far as to suggest corruption. Democrats, on the other hand, say this is a partisan attack about a non-issue.
When the e-mails were first turned over to the government for review, Clinton indicated she turned over all e-mails except ones deemed personal. Specifically, things relating to yoga scheduling, and her daughter Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, were removed. These allegedly personal e-mails were wiped without review.
Why would Hillary Clinton remove personal e-mails before turning them over to the government?
Ideally, most people don’t want their personal details known by the government. Why does the government need to know what is going on in our personal lives? What makes this ironic is that Clinton has been a regular defender of the surveillance state, championing the idea that the government should know the personal details of innocent Americans, whether by monitoring phone use or intercepting data.
Clinton has even suggested that Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who exposed many surveillance programs, should be prosecuted for what he did.
So if Hillary Clinton doesn’t really believe in keeping the federal government out of our personal business, what were the contents of these deleted e-mails, and why were they removed? This is a critical question to which we may already have the answer to.
Of the 14,900 e-mails deleted by Clinton from her personal e-mail server, a few dozen of those have been connected to Benghazi. Was Clinton doing yoga the night the Benghazi attack happened? Was she busy talking about wedding plans with her daughter? These were the excuses used to justify wiping the e-mails from the server before turning them over to the federal government.
Since Benghazi-related e-mails were among the contents wiped from Clinton’s personal e-mail server, new implications have been raised regarding the ongoing controversy. The narrative advanced by her camp suggests that these were just innocent e-mails about her personal life, but this is now known to be at least partially false.
The defeat of the Hillary Clinton narrative should lead Americans to question the character of the Democratic nominee. Not only did she act “extremely careless” in handling classified information, she blatantly lied to the American people about why she deleted certain e-mails from her personal e-mail server.
What more could have been contained in those deleted e-mails? These are relevant questions that are no longer just a right wing conspiracy or false Republican narrative. They are legitimate issues in regards to the integrity and honesty of a character running to become President of the United States. Something is wrong and doesn’t add up.
If Edward Snowden sits in exile because he exposed big government surveillance programs, Hillary Clinton should be in prison for being a hypocritical politician who violated the law and lied about the issue.
