Despite the fact that newspapers around the country were focusing on the the real threat to our national security caused by 47 idiotic Republican senators (link), much of the rest of the media is still breathlessly focused on Hillary Clinton's e-mails. With so much potential distraction, you would think that an experienced politician like Hillary could find a way to get the e-mail story to end. But there is an important lesson that Hillary needs to learn: IOOKTDEIYANHC (It's only ok to delete e-mails if you are not Hillary Clinton).
If Hillary was a Republican, she could delete emails or destroy hard drives and still be free of media attention. Dick Cheney deleted e-mails about all sorts of criminal activity (like starting a war over oil and revealing the identity of a CIA agent) and got away scott free. (link) Incidentally, although Cheney was the focus of investigations, the missing e-mails included other White House offices:
The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.
Mitt Romney went so far as to destroy hard drives. Follow me over the orange squiggle to find out what happened there.
Here is a link. First a synopsis of what happened:
The facts so far
Here's what's known about the case of the purged emails and missing boxes:
On Nov. 17, The Boston Globe reported that 11 members of Romney's staff bought 17 computer hard drives five years earlier. Of course, the staff were buying more than a used hard drive — they were buying the government records on those hard drives. What about the backup copies on state servers? Other computers in the governor's office were replaced as part of "routine maintenance."
Reuters moved the story forward on Dec. 6, documenting that the Romney administration spent $97,000 to replace computers, causing other emails to be lost. On its way out the door, the Romney team spent $205,000 for a three-year lease on computers for the governor's office, replacing a lease that had provided the same number of computers for $108,000.
Aides to Romney's successor, Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, said they can't fulfill public records requests for the Romney administration's emails because the emails are gone. A spokesman for Romney's campaign blamed Patrick, a supporter of President Obama, for encouraging requests for public records, but didn't answer the question why the state computers were replaced, making the records unavailable to the public.
Of course, his political opponents found this to be horrible, right? And the media went after this for weeks, right? No not really.
Romney's opponents haven't made much of the document purge. Newt Gingrich did make a comment, "in non-candidate mode," asking, "They did what?" And he added in another of his roles that it would make a good twist in a political thriller, "As a novelist, by the way, it's a lot of fun."
After Romney's non-explanatory explanations, the Erasergate story has dropped from Washington political media reports on the campaign.
Rick Perry and Nikki Haley and Democrat Christine Gregoire are also mentioned in the article as withholding emails or deleting them:
But other elements of this story are more common from state to state. Republican and Democratic governors have fought to keep public records out of the reach of the public. In Washington state, for example, Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, has exerted executive privilege to block access to records, in a case about to go to the state Supreme Court. And in Texas, presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry's staff has argued that it must keep emails for only seven days before purging them, because of a supposed lack of disk space for storage. Perry's office said the policy was the same one followed by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
The value of such records was demonstrated again this month in South Carolina, where Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, sought the office on a platform of transparency in government. The State newspaper reported that her office had deleted most of its emails. Then emails did emerge showing that Haley tried to steer a state health care panel to a conclusion that she preordained.
Anyone that is not Hillary Clinton can get away with deleting e-mails, especially if they are a Republican.