Voters in Colorado, Iowa and Virginia think Hillary Clinton is not honest or trustworthy. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, a mere 34 percent of Colorado voters think she can be trusted; 62 percent do not. In Iowa, those numbers are 33 percent to 59; in Virginia, Clinton is underwater on trust, too, 39 percent to 55 percent.
Clinton’s conduct is catching up with her. In March, Clinton told reporters that as secretary of state, she had “opted for convenience” to use private email because she “thought it would be easier to carry just one device” for her work and for her personal emails. Oh, and she used a private — not a government — server, and the private server already has been scrubbed. She deleted some 30,000 emails — because they were personal — before sending another 30,000 to Foggy Bottom. Voters will have to take her word that half the emails were personal and did not risk national security. An inspector general has asked the Department of Justice to investigate. It seems a sampling of 40 emails Clinton sent as secretary of state found that four contained classified information that should have been labeled “secret.” The only question is: What took so long?
In 1996, The New York Times’ William Safire branded Clinton a “congenital liar” in a column that cited the first lady’s amazing acumen in the commodities market, her role in firing staff in the White House travel office and the mysterious disappearance and appearance of documents from her former law firm. The Clintons have a way of playing the clock until the public loses interest in an overcomplicated story.
The Clinton email/private server story is too technical, as well, but it directs attention to other Clinton vices:
1) Blind ambition. Clinton was her party’s front-runner in 2008, but then Democrats bolted to a first-term senator from Illinois. Yes, they liked Barack Obama, but also, they did not trust Clinton, who had voted for the Iraq War before she turned against it.
2) Greed. Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in $25 million in speaking fees over 16 months. Clinton maintains she wants to fight for income inequality, even as she charged UCLA $300,000 for one speech last year — and that fee, paid by a private fund, was her special “university rate.”
3) Mendacity. Given Clinton’s history in the White House, it is impossible to believe she thought she should use a private server for sensitive national security correspondence, which is part of the public record. If she wanted to keep her personal emails private, Clinton knows she should have kept a separate private account. It shows how little respect Clinton has for the public that she would contend that she simply did not want to carry two phones.
In July, Clinton told CNN’s Brianna Keilar: “Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.” Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gave that statement three Pinocchios for “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”
Clinton treated a top Cabinet post as a personal fiefdom. How do you think she would treat the White House?
Email Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.
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