Unlikeable by Edward Klein

justice—a serious violation of the criminal law,” wrote Ronald D. Rotunda, who was assistant majority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee. “Mrs. Clinton should know about obstruction [of justice]: Congress enacted section 1519, making the crime easier to prove, in 2002, as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. As senator, she voted for the law.”

    The media’s demand for a full accounting by Hillary opened the floodgates of criticism. But she let days go by and failed to come forward with an explanation.
    â€œLack of speed kills in this case,” warned David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s 2008 White House victory. “However this [e-mail scandal] turns out, this problem is being exacerbated by the lack of answers from the Clinton campaign . . . and it would be good to get out there and answer these questions.”
    But Hillary hadn’t given a political press conference (as opposed to a foreign policy press conference) in more than seven years, and her handlers were afraid she was rusty. They worried she’d say something that would get her into even hotter water. She was stiff from lack of practice, they said, forgetting that Hillary had never mastered the rope-a-dope of a live political press conference.
    So she delayed and delayed.
    Her silence only fed the most alarming suspicions.
    Had Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account jeopardized national security?
    Did [email protected] have the same level of security employed by the government’s e-mail system?
    How did she know that her e-mail server hadn’t been hacked?
    Finally, Hillary caved under the overwhelming pressure and agreed to meet the press.
    Dressed in a gray coat dress that looked a size too big for her, she emerged from a meeting at the United Nations, walked down a long hall past a copy of Guernica , Picasso’s unsparing black, white, and gray masterpiece, and took up a position in front of twenty-five TV cameras. She looked nervous, defensive, and annoyed, as though this was the last place in the world she wanted to be. She had a hard time meeting the eyes of individual reporters, fifty of whom were gathered in a scrum behind a rope.
    Reading stiffly from a prepared text, she explained that she hadn’t followed the rules governing State Department e-mails, because it wasn’t convenient to carry two phones.
    In retrospect, she admitted, she woulda, coulda, shoulda.
    Her explanation was laughable.
    Even the most tech-challenged senior citizen knew you could have two or more e-mail accounts on one phone.
    And anyway, Hillary didn’t have to lug her phone around.
    Huma did that for her.
    But that wasn’t the worst of it.
    At one point during the press conference, Hillary said that she had deleted half of her e-mails—about thirty thousand of them—because they were “personal” and concerned things like her yoga appointments and preparations for Chelsea’s wedding. At another point, she contradicted herself and said that those “personal” e-mails remained on a private server at her home in Chappaqua.
    Trust me , she said, my lawyers have carefully combed through each of the sixty thousand or so e-mails and sent the work-related ones—about thirty thousand—to the State Department.
    But her lawyers never reviewed each e-mail.
    According to Time magazine,the legal “review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those.”
    As the Atlantic put it:“The idea that such a process could produce ‘absolute confidence’ that all public records were identified is as curious as the notion that Bill Clinton never inhaled.”
    By the end of her press conference, Hillary looked guiltier than when she started it. What’s more, in the following days and weeks, the public learned even more disquieting news.