The Clinton Emails: What Is and Is Not Damaging

Paul R. Pillar

Politics, United States

"That's not the way things are supposed to work with documents that involve government business."

The kerfuffle over Hillary Clinton's emails has confused and conflated several distinct and important issues about classified information and government documents. Well-informed comment about Mrs. Clinton's case is handicapped, of course, by the rest of us in the public not having access to still-unreleased emails in question. The same goes for more recently mentioned and also unreleased emails associated with previous secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. But some useful distinctions nonetheless can be made, while steering clear of the blatantly partisan attempts to exploit this matter.

The usage of a privately owned server for messages that include communications that are part of the official business of a cabinet secretary is a different issue from the handling of classified information. Questions of whether classified information had been handled properly would be the same whether Mrs. Clinton had been using the server in her home or the State Department's unclassified email capabilities. Neither of those systems have the same protections against hostile penetration or interception that the government's classified systems do.

The issue that use of the private server raises is instead one of preservation and management of records and of who does the managing. It is unlikely that Mrs. Clinton relied on her own server because she is a technophile who gets a rise out of having that sort of equipment in her house. Far more likely is that she wanted to maintain exclusive control over any future release of, and public access to, the documents involved. That's not the way things are supposed to work with documents that involve government business. The private server ploy also betokens the all-too-prevalent attitude among many in-and-outers that their time in government is merely one chapter in a personal story rather than their being fully a part of a department or agency that is in turn part of the people's government. Of course, control of her emails hasn't worked out quite the way Mrs. Clinton evidently intended, once her political opponents pounced on the matter. But she still deserves criticism for attempting what amounted to an end run around the spirit, if not the letter, of how documents related to official business are supposed to be managed.