Clinton, Emails, and What it All Means

The Associated Press has poured through more than 52,000 pages of emails sent or received by Hillary Clinton. In a scandal that daily threatens to derail Clinton’s bid to become the first female U.S. President, the proof in the pudding may exonerate Clinton while simultaneously indicting the entire U.S. diplomatic machine.

Are Clinton’s Emails a Liability?

Some of the news coming out of the report is downright pathetic. There’s the time Clinton asked her communications adviser how to charge her iPad or update an app, or the time she asked how to know if she had WiFi or the time she didn’t realize send receipts exist. Sure, it’s a series of questions that many Boomers face when interacting with newer technology, but it’s the sort of thing you expect from your parents, not from the top diplomat in the world. Shouldn’t she have asked how to use the stuff when it was handed to her? Tools aren’t tools if you don’t know how to use them. They’re liabilities. A top leader in a position of ultimate authority should embrace and practice that ethos.

Clinton Continued the Practices of her Predecessors

Yes, Clinton used her personal server and hardware to conduct state business. Yes, she sent and received what would later be classified as “secret” and even “top secret” emails using her personal systems. Yes, her predecessors did the same. Perhaps not to the same extent, but they did. Does this exonerate Clinton? Not in the slightest. She bears some blame, but that’s not the biggest PR issue to come out of this whole mess.

At the end of the day, as bad as all this makes Clinton look, it makes the State Department look much, much worse. This Keystone Cops picture of the richest nation in the world not being able to provide its top diplomatic wing with decent technology reeks of pathetic bureaucratic ineptitude.
Worse, the report reveals this ineptitude has stretched back through several regimes. An issue that everyone complained about but no one did anything about. If you can’t communicate, and the core essential aspect of your job is communication, where are your priorities?

David Milberg is an investor from NYC.