But Her E-Mails

Look, I know I promised not to do anymore disaster pictures with the label "But her emails," at least until something disastrous actually happened (not counting Puerto Rico).  I believed  that constant threats of disaster that did not come true would just make Trump opponents look like Chicken Little saying the sky was falling.  But when you build a whole campaign centered around making the e-mails look like the most heinous offense ever committed in this history of our Republic and then go doing the same thing, there really ought to be a reckoning.

The scandal over Hillary Clinton sending State Department e-mails over a private server was two-fold.*  First, her server was not properly secured and therefore posed a risk of being hacked.  Second, she deleted approximately half her e-mails on the grounds that they were private.   She even smashed two phones with a hammer.  (Actually, a security measure)

Trump and supporters convinced themselves, in the absence of any actual evidence, that those e-mails must contain something terribly incriminating. They built an entire campaign around it, turning absolutely every conversation about anything back to that damn e-mail server.  The FBI investigated.  Voters wondered why someone under FBI investigation was even allowed to run for President -- little suspecting that both  candidates were actually under investigation.

Of course, not everyone was convinced that Hillary's e-mail server was quite so bad as any number of things Trump had done.  Conor Friedersdorf warned:

Absurdly, many seem to have convinced themselves that Trump, who won’t release his tax returns, as every presidential candidate has for decades, will be better on transparency; that a man whose finances we don’t even know, who used his charitable foundation to illegally funnel money to an attorney general investigating him for fraud, will be better on conflicts of interest; that an erratic man who blurts all manner of things out on Twitter and has shady ties to Vladimir Putin will somehow be a more trustworthy guardian of classified information. 

Trump is likely to be worse across all those metrics!

And so it proved to be.  It has been known for some time that he blurted out extremely classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador.  Next it turned out that Trump regularly chats on an unsecured phone.  And that, while no proof was ever found that Hillary's server was hacked, the evidence of hacking Trump's phone is quite strong.

Granted, this is one of those cases when the rule really is that if the President does it, that means it is not against the law.  The President has unlimited discretion to decide what information is and is not classified.  If the President wants to blurt out critical information about Israeli operations in Syria to the Russians, or to talk to his advisers on an unsecured line, he has that privilege.  Still, it is not too difficult to imagine the outrage that would ensue if Hillary had been elected President and claimed that the office gave her the privilege of using an unsecured private server to send official e-mails.

And now we find out that Trump tears up every paper that crosses his desk as soon as he finishes reading it.  This time, his action really is illegal; the Presidential Records Act requires all such papers to be preserved, but Trump continued tearing them up.  So two career officials, with many years of experience and salaries over $60,000, were tasked with taping the documents back together.  Nothing in the article suggests that they found anything in any way incriminating in the records.  But for some reason they were abruptly fired this spring, stripped of their badges, and escorted off the premises with no explanation.  The article did not address whether anyone was preserving Trump's papers now.  Hm.

Oh, yes, and Sean Hannity has urged targets of investigation to smash their cell phones.

Needless to say, none of this has made even a dent in Trump's support with his followers, nor have the mainstream news media deemed any of this worthy of the endless saturation coverage that Hillary's e-mails got.  During the campaign, I have little doubt that if Trump had shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he and his followers would have dismissed it as trivial compared to Hillary's e-mails.  Out of a country of 300 million, he killed just one, they would say, while Hillary's private server endangered all of us.  The hypocrisy now is extraordinary.

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*It should also be noted that the scandal grew out of the Benghazi investigation.  Congress spend four years investigating the Libyan attack on our consulate in Benghazi in hopes of finding something scandalous on Hillary.  They failed to find any evidence of wrong-doing on Benghazi, but did discovery that Hillary had improperly sent State Department e-mails on a private server and proceeded to run with it.