No one should downplay the revelations about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s misuse of her private e-mail account to transmit and receive sensitive government-related messages. The matter is important, of course, because whatever she sends and receives via an unsecured private computer can easily be hacked by enemies of our nation.
Over recent weeks, as her reckless delinquency with e-mail emerged, Mrs. Clinton tried to treat the matter as an unimportant media-created non-issue. She even joked about it when she told a group of Democrats in Iowa, “By the way, you may have seen that I have recently launched a Snapchat account. I love it — those messages disappear all by themselves.” And when a reporter asked her whether she had indeed wiped her server clean of information, she tried to laugh it off by quipping, “What, like with a cloth or something?”
Press reports have recently confirmed that Mrs. Clinton’s technician has cited his right under the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. More questions came to her during an Associated Press interview where she insisted, “What I did was allowed.” Then, she took questions from NBC News veteran Andrea Mitchell and responded that she was “sorry that this has been confusing to the people and has raised a lot of questions.” The people were wrong, she implied, not herself and her misuse of computers.
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For several months, her responses have included no apology and no admitting of guilt on her part. But she abandoned that tactic on September 8 when she took questions from ABC newsman David Muir. About using her unsecured e-mail account for government business, she stated: “That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility. And I’m trying to be as transparent as I possibly can.” So she has obviously decided to cease sidestepping and joking, now openly admitting a serious breach of confidentiality that any truly competent secretary of state wouldn’t think of doing. The American people are supposed to forget all the previous dodging and now applaud her frankness and her attempt to be “transparent.” Many won’t comply, and some have even called her a “liar” and an “untrustworthy person.”
But there’s a far more important matter no media star seems willing to raise. Early in 2015, Mrs. Clinton moseyed down to United Nations headquarters in New York where she spoke to an adoring crowd at the Sixth Annual Women in the World Summit. She pandered to the assemblage of gay, transgender, and abortion advocates, and then while referring to the American people, she forcefully insisted, “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” She obviously wants to abolish the fundamental moral and religious foundation that contributed mightily to the building of our nation. Her intentions in this area are enormously more important than her misuse of computers.
America has always been known as a nation whose admirable reliance on “cultural codes” and “religious beliefs” enabled the people to govern themselves. But all of this must go, claims Mrs. Clinton. By ignoring her extremely revolutionary attitude, self-important media stars indict themselves. Yes, they should press her about her casual and potentially dangerous handling of e-mail. But let the American people know how truly un-American she really is.
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
