For the past two years, a small cyclone of political intrigue has been circling over the head of Hillary Clinton, harking back to the period when she served as US secretary of state in the administration of US President Barack Obama during his first term. At the centre of the scandal are accusations that Clinton used a private server located in her suburban New York home for her emails, and that she used her own personal email address along with her official State Department address for correspondence.
If that were the extent of the scandal, that cyclone would have blown itself out months ago — who among us has not responded to business emails on personal accounts and had the discipline to keep both separate? But it’s not the end of it.
Clinton’s server was not appropriately secure. State Department officials were unaware of its existence, and had they been aware, they would have taken measures to shut it down and to move all of their Department’s head electronic correspondence to appropriate and secure official channels and servers.
Four of Clinton’s innermost circle were also aware of the email arrangements, and had varying levels of involvement in keeping it the way Clinton wanted. An official report into the affair criticised them, and found Clinton less than forthcoming in her dealings with the investigators. It found that she breached government protocols, acted in a manner unbecoming of a head of a State Department, and she failed to talk to the officials conducting the probe.
Was her behaviour criminal? Hardly, although Clinton will still have to talk to the FBI as a matter of formality. What this affair has done, however, is give fuel to Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election campaign. He relishes in calling her ‘Crooked Hillary’ and this incident does nothing to detract from that perception.
Clinton’s actions amount to an error in judgement. And who among us are not guilty of an error in judgement? True, we do not all aspire to be President of the United States, but if being free of errors of judgement were a prerequisite, none would be electable. And certainly not Donald Trump. He has secured enough delegates to be the Republican nominee – an error in judgement of every Republican who cast a vote in favour of the loud-mouthed buffoon and his vile demagoguery.
There are still five months left to hope that Americans do not foist their greatest error in judgement upon us all.
