UPDATE: More!

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How to explain the fact that Hillary Clinton is still afloat politically? Or not in jail?

This is a handy round-up (my emphasis added) of her accelerating woes over her private email server that she used for much of her work (most of it?) as Secretary of State:

There is no doubt that she, or someone on her State Department staff, violated federal law by putting TOP SECRET//SI information on an unclassified system. That it was Hillary’s private, offsite server makes the case even worse from a security viewpoint. Claims that they “didn’t know” such information was highly classified do not hold water and are irrelevant. It strains belief that anybody with clearances didn’t recognize that NSA information, which is loaded with classification markings, was signals intelligence, or SIGINT. It’s possible that the classified information found in Clinton’s email trove wasn’t marked as such. But if that classification notice was omitted, it wasn’t the U.S. intelligence community that took such markings away. Moreover, anybody holding security clearances has already assumed the responsibility for handling it properly.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had no authority to disseminate IC information on her own, neither could she make it less highly classified (a process termed “downgrading” in the spy trade) without asking IC permission first.

It is a very big deal and less connected people who do this sort of thing ruin their lives, as any IC counterintelligence official can attest. During my NSA time, I saw junior personnel terminated for relatively minor infractions of security regulations. While the U.S. government unquestionably does over-classify items on the policy side, where almost everything in the Defense and State Departments gets some sort of classification stamp, not usually at a high level, intelligence reporting by its very nature is classified. If you don’t want the responsibility of a high-level government position, which inevitably brings with it TOP SECRET//SI access, then don’t accept that burden.

That last point is the key one. When you enter government service you take on responsibilities towards the public. It’s not about you! You are paid by taxpayers to handle with all diligence information and insights that can be highly sensitive.

I recall an afternoon in the FCO when someone appeared in my room armed with a portentous folder of papers, asking me to sign off on a VERY VERY Top Secret military submarine surveillance exercise – the person who usually did this was not there, and I was the only senior person they could find. So, I signed: the papers (headed with code-word acronyms I’d never seen before) made the case fairly, and the exercise was in the UK’s interests as defined by successive democratically elected governments.

All that was before the days of ‘social media’ and the rest. Nowadays people in government need almost superhuman reserves of integrity, loyalty and (yes) responsibility not to leak things, such are the myriad temptations buzzing around.

So for me the very fact that Hillary Clinton set up a parallel substantive private email arrangement for much of her official work right when she started working as Secretary of State – obviously to try to avoid subsequent FOI probings over her record – in itself shows that she is morally unfit for office.

Everyone else in the policy chain was paid to be there to serve the public. They accepted responsibility, and that included accepting the likelihood of punishment if they breached vital security rules.

Hillary Clinton by contrast cheated the public, taking a fat salary but not in turn making her work transparent. She was deliberately distancing herself from the very system she was supposed to be leading, merely for her own restless greedy ambition. She took the top job to serve herself. Her later explicit public lies over the deaths of US diplomatic colleagues in Banghazi, standing with their very coffins, took even that selfishness that to a higher level (or, if you prefer, to new depths of cynicism and dishonour).

The fact that so many people in the State Department have stayed loyal to her through these procedural and policy abuses and not spilled the beans is also instructive. Fear for themselves, or for a Republican President? Maybe a tipping-point will come when the investigations start to threaten their careers, and beans will be spilled in luxuriant profusion.

There is nothing worse in public life than politicians blithely abusing the system while stoutly assuring the public that any public servants who commit abuses will get it in the neck. See eg this:

The bigger picture? Most of us were brought up to understand that ‘public money’ represents money transferred into state coffers on the basis of a principle of consent. Having chosen our government through a rather eccentric but nonetheless accepted voting system on the basis of promises made to us by those seeking re-election, we reasonably can be expected to put up with the government threatening us with force if we do not pay the taxes that the government decides are good for us.

However, we in turn reasonably expect the highest levels of propriety on the part of government officials and the wider state apparatus in spending that money wisely and honestly. In other words, voters ultimately decide how much the government should take of their money, but that money passes to the state on certain clear conditions.

In a mysterious, horrible way all that is shifting. As the role of the state and its insatiable scheming grows and grows — in part because voters themselves are shortsighted and/or greedy — instead of voters deciding what the state should have, the state decides what voters should be allowed to keep. Any clear sense of the moral dividing line between public and private money erodes

Hillary Clinton’s attempts to wriggle her way out of direct responsibility for this scandal and for anything else are just repellant, albeit revealing. For her the voters are there for primarily for her own glory and manipulation. All being well, this growing scandal will doom her election chances as those voters grasp what is at stake here.