Why is Hillary Clinton so unhappy? According to her, when she and her husband left the White House, they were dead broke. Yet they left with a truckload of valuable furniture, dinnerware and flatware that was the property of the federal government, for which they were never prosecuted.
They also left with contracts for lectures and speeches worth between $20 million and $30 million in the ensuing years. And they have done quite well financially. According to The Washington Post, between the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001 and January 2013, when Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, Bill alone made $104.9 million for speeches, and Hillary's standard speaking fee is $200,000 a pop.
Why is Hillary so unhappy? We can start with the fact that she is her own worst enemy. No Republican dirty trickster could have put her into the legal and political mess into which she has put herself. Her surreptitious refusal to follow federal law and her congenital lying about it have caught up with her.
By using her own computer server instead of the government's in the four years of her tenure as secretary of state, she knowingly compromised the national security of the United States. She did this by receiving and sending at least 400 emails that contained information that under federal law was confidential, secret or top-secret, which is a felony.
The failure to preserve data of that nature is a federal crime, whether it is stamped with an official secret denomination, whether one has read it and perceived its secret nature, and whether it has fallen into enemy hands or not. Gen. David Petraeus was convicted of retaining the printed versions of secret and top-secret data in a desk drawer in his guarded home. It was alleged -- but not proved -- that he shared this data with one of his subordinates. Even though the subordinate had a security clearance, Petraeus was prosecuted.
In Hillary's case, the data have fallen into enemy hands, as one of the folks to whom she regularly sent her emails -- in utter and reckless disregard for the secrets they contained -- was her political adviser Sid Blumenthal, an employee of the Clinton Foundation at the time. Blumenthal's insecure server was hacked by Romanian intelligence agents, who were convicted and sentenced to prison.
Why is Hillary so unhappy? When the State Department was sued by public interest groups seeking copies of Hillary's emails -- lawsuits permitted and even encouraged by the Freedom of Information Act, a federal statute that presumes that documents and emails in federal custody are available for the public to see -- the State Department answered the litigation truthfully by telling a federal judge that it had none of Hillary's emails.
