By RYAN SENECAL
Staff Writer
The last couple of weeks have not been good for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Questions have been raised over whether she was involved in pay-for-play involving the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was Secretary of State. Most notably, the Crown Prince of Bahrain had a one-on-one meeting with Clinton in early 2009. The Bahrainian government has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.
The New York Times Editorial Board has now famously written that they didn’t know where the Clinton Foundation ended and the State Department began. With all the new Clinton controversy, the Clintons said that they would step down from the board of directors of the family foundation if Clinton is elected president. However, Chelsea Clinton announced that she would remain on the board of directors, which caused many on both sides of the aisle to criticize that decision.
In other Clinton news, there is more controversy over the never-ending email scandal. The FBI had recently released the notes from the interview they conducted with Clinton on July 2, and notes from other interviews regarding the same matter. They were released because of the conservative group Judicial Watch, which made a Freedom of Information Act request regarding these notes.
Clinton told the FBI that she wasn’t properly trained on how to handle classified information. She also explained that she didn’t understand the marking “(c)” which is used to mark a form of classified information. She told the FBI that she believed that it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order. Really? She also couldn’t recall how a document gets marked classified.
What Clinton is saying is ridiculous. While she was a senator from New York, she was a member of the armed services committee, which means that she had to come across classified information at some point. But when she gets to the State Department, she all of a sudden doesn’t know how to handle classified information? Maybe she should have asked her husband, who handled classified information while he was President.
It gets better. Clinton told the public on several occasions that she used two personal devices that she read email on. This is false and it turns out that she had 13 mobile devices. An aide to Clinton recalled that Clinton would replace her Blackberries frequently and the aide would dispose of the other device by breaking it in half or by smashing it with a hammer.
While Clinton was in the process of turning over her emails to the State Department, she had her lawyers read them. This is a violation of the law since her lawyers did not have proper security clearances to do so. She also told the FBI that she did not pay attention to the level of classification but says she took classified information seriously.
I don’t understand why she is still walking around a free woman. After the New York Times broke this news story in March of 2015, it is noted in the FBI notes that she and her staff deleted emails that were in her archived mailbox. These too are believed to be work-related emails. Clinton and her staff also used a software product called BleachBit. BleachBit is described as an electronic shredder and it’s almost impossible to put the emails back together once they are deleted.
So it’s clear that Clinton was grossly negligent with her handling of classified information. This has put the nation’s security at risk. We can not have this kind of unscrupulous behavior in the Oval Office. It seems like there is a separate set of rules if you are a Clinton.
It seems as though the Democrats would be better off at recalling Clinton from the nomination and put the vice presidential nominee, Senator Tim Kane, at the top of the ticket. He was a mayor, governor of Virginia and now a senator from that state. He is certainly more likeable than she is.
Clinton is not stupid. She is college educated and has her law degree. She certainly knows how to handle classified information but chose to handle it the wrong way. This isn’t a “vast right-wing conspiracy” anymore. Do we really want her handling the nations most secure secrets for four or possibly eight years?
The only thing going for her is that her challenger is Donald Trump.
