Even as more information points to Hillary breaking rules and putting classified information at risk she continues to insist that she did nothing wrong; using the lame excuse that everybody does it.
The truth is that "nobody" else has broken the rules the way Hillary has. Hillary is the first, and one and only, government official who used a "personal server" to manage and control her government email account. Not only does that violate the rules of her office by making what is government information private and in her total control, but it also creates a much greater risk that someone could access (hack) her server and expose classified information.
News is moving quickly on Hillary Clinton and her emails, and as in all evolving controversies, some of it has more impact than others. In a sentence, Wednesday's news was not great for Clinton, but not earth-shattering either. Let's walk you through it and its political implications.
What happened: The State Department's inspector general — who is supposed to be the agency's impartial observer — issued a report declaring that Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state was "not an appropriate method of preserving documents."
In exclusively using a private email server — and then keeping the documents to herself for nearly two years after leaving the job — the inspector general's report said Clinton did not comply with the federal government's policy of keeping federal records. (Since they technically belong to all of us, the people she worked for.)
But it's just as important to highlight what the inspector general's report did not say: The report did not say that Clinton broke the law. It's true the FBI is also looking into her emails, but as we've written in this space before, it's very unlikely they'll indict her, given most other criminal cases that could be compared to hers involved some added level of espionage or wrongdoing. We just haven't seen evidence that's the case with Clinton.
Still, the IG report is the latest blow for the Clinton campaign, says Fix Boss Chris Cillizza: "For a candidate already struggling to overcome a perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, the IG report makes that task significantly harder. … [Donald] Trump's task of casting her as 'Crooked Hillary' just got easier."
If you want to delve into the email news more — and lots of people on both sides of the aisle are really, really interested in this! — you should definitely check out these stories from The Post helping contextualize it:
The most revealing findings of the report: Like the fact that there were two hacking attempts on her server, and also that record-keeping by secretaries of state has been spotty for years.
The report highlights just how sloooow government is to adapt to new technologies, writes The Fix's Philip Bump, who says the government just doesn't have rules yet to regulate use of smartphones and the new ways we share information.
A Romanian hacker actually helped reveal Clinton's use of a private email when he hacked into one of her top adviser's emails. The hacker pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges related to all sorts of high-profile hacks.
And here's the entire 83-page report!
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