Skip links

Share

Hillary Clinton’s Persistent Dilemma

Posted: August 10, 8:07 a.m.
by Katie Vette.

Is Hillary Clinton the best candidate for the United States future presidency? For those of us not well informed on the political realm of the U.S., let’s take a brief moment to recap the political past of Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.

After serving as first lady from 1993 to 2001, Clinton decided to continue her path as a political figure and represented the state of New York in the U.S. Senate for the next eight years. In 2008, Clinton ran in the presidential election, but lost the presumptive nominee position to Barack Obama. In November of that same year, Obama nominated Clinton as his U.S. secretary of state, and in January 2009 she was sworn into office.

Scandalous
Scandal is a word that has been linked with the Clinton name for the past few decades: Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, Travelgate, Rose Law Firm, Vince Foster.

You might not be as familiar with all of these cases, because some were swiftly swept under the carpet.

But let’s focus on the latest allegations brought upon Hillary. While serving as U.S. secretary of state, she decided to use her personal email account instead of a government-issued one. Her reasoning was she didn’t want to keep track of more than one device. But can’t you have more than one email account on a phone? Hmm . . .

If that doesn’t draw a red flag, we should bring to light the fact that the server she used was a private one within her home, which means it was vulnerable to hacking. Some believe that this jeopardized national security, and the 2012 attack on Benghazi could be a related consequence.

In hopes of pleasing the public, Clinton and her team handed over business-related emails to the government. However, while going through more than 60,000 emails, Clinton and her team deleted around 32,000 that were deemed personal emails. Clinton said she didn’t think it was necessary for the government to have her private emails, such as the ones sent between her and her husband. However, Matt McKenna, Bill’s spokesperson, stated that Bill has only ever sent two emails in his life.

The deletion of these emails raises issues for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The NARA oversees all federal record-keeping. Thus, the use of a personal email account makes the steps to preserve records more difficult, if not impossible.

Next steps
The government’s chances of getting its hands on every email sent or received by Clinton are very slim. However, Rep. Trey Gowdy officially requested Clinton’s server be turned over to a neutral third party. Gowdy later went on to say that it was unacceptable for Clinton’s staff to be determining which emails were government-related and which were not.

“Though Secretary Clinton alone is responsible for causing this issue, she alone does not get to determine its outcome,” Gowdy said. “That is why in the interest of transparency for the American people, I am formally requesting she turn the server over to the State Department’s inspector general or a mutually agreeable third party.”

Transparency is a key component in any political figure’s public development. Unfortunately, Clinton has lost credibility because of the many scandals she has been allegedly involved with — scandals compounded by a lack of transparency. This history hurts her as a public figure because people want to be able to look at her and recognize the respectable actions and choices she has made, not the scandals she has been a part of.

Will this latest scandal factor into her presidential campaign? If she hasn’t looked shady enough in the past, it’s time for Americans to open their eyes to her future. She could be the next president of the United States, and if she thinks she can do things not by the book as U.S. secretary of state, then what’s stopping her from doing so in the president’s chair?

Editor’s note: According to an August, 9, 2015, CNN article, Clinton has certified that she turned over all work-related emails, in compliance with a federal judge’s order.

Opinions

  1. Post comment

    People would be naive to think that Hillary would do any better following the law and not whispering behind closed doors as president, a position that’s even more powerful than her current one. Judge a person by their actions, not their words.

    Permalink

Comments are closed.

Return to top of page