By Post Editorial Board • Washington Times
Now Hillary Clinton’s being compared to President Richard Nixon by one of the two reporters famous for breaking the scandal that brought Nixon down. How much worse is the email mess going to get?
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward laid it out Monday: “You’ve got a massive amount of data. It, in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.”
Then came ABC News’ report that a backup server likely holds all the emails Clinton said she’d deleted — which could open up a whole new front in the probe.
More bad news: The State Department has flagged another 305 Hillary emails as likely containing classified information. This despite Clinton’s claim that such info never touched the personal account she used for all her government business.
State also confessed it just found nearly 18,000 emails from Hillary aide Phillipe Reines to 34 media outlets that Gawker requested in a Freedom of Information Act filing in 2013. Until now, State had said the emails didn’t exist.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie scored on the bigger picture: “Could you imagine, if after the [Bridgegate] investigation began, I came out and said, ‘Oh by the way, I’ve done all my business as governor on a private email server, and I’ve deleted now 30,000 of those emails, but trust me, none of it had to do with the bridge’?”
And that’s the heart of this mess: the remarkable arrogance with which Clinton puts herself above the law, about the rules that apply to everyone else — from her decision to use a private server in the first place, to her deletions, to the long refusal to turn the server over until the FBI declared a criminal investigation.
Plus, of course, a blasé attitude toward national-security secrets.
It’s easy to see why Clinton campaign insiders are nervous: When will the next shoe drop — and how much worse will it be?