A few of us grind our teeth every time Hillary Clinton says “it was allowed” in reference to her stealth server. And since she’s been saying it so much, I’ve ground my teeth down to nubs. For instance, a few weeks ago, I wrote in the G-File: “She constantly says her system was allowed but never says who allowed it . . . because the person who allowed it was Hillary Clinton. She might as well have hung a banner over her desk that read, ‘Le département d’État, c’est moi!’”
And whenever she says “it was allowed” I shout at the TV, “Ask her who allowed it!” Well, CNN’s Jake Tapper finally did.
TAPPER: Right. And you said it was allowed too.
CLINTON: Yes, it was.
TAPPER: Who allowed it?
CLINTON: It was allowed under the rules of State Department. Again –
TAPPER: So nobody signed off on it?
CLINTON: No, no, it was allowed. You know, one of my predecessors did the same thing. Others in our government have done the same thing at very high levels, because the rules did change after I left State Department. But at the time and in prior years, the rules allowed it.
TAPPER: But it never occurred to you when any of these e-mails coming in from Sid Blumenthal with very sensitive information –
CLINTON: Sid Blumenthal was not a government employee or official. It would be like you sending me something, Jake. If I thought it had some interest to it, I might forward it onto somebody.
But I would not expect you to be in a position to classify anything because you were not in that classification process. Neither was he. So, he sent me stuff that he heard from people. You know, he’s an old journalist and thought it was of interest. Some of it I sent on, some I didn’t. I kind of made the judgment at the time.
It was not in the category of anything that could be classified because it came from an outside nongovernment person passing on what somebody told somebody told him.
This is progress, but still maddening. None of her predecessors had a home-brewed private server on which they conducted all of their correspondence and Sid Blumenthal was not in any way like Jake Tapper (given Blumenthal’s odiousness, Tapper would have been in his rights to rip off his mic and say, “How dare you madam! This interview is over.”). Blumenthal was and is a de facto compensated operative of the Clinton empire — who was being paid by her foundation and by Media Matters. But prior to this admission, she was happy to insinuate that her system had been approved by some official. The reality is, she was the official. She wanted to do this and she did it. There was nothing routine, customary or in any way passive about the decision. It’s amazing that it took months for a journalist to ask her about this on the record. In the meantime, she’s been able to prattle on about how “it was allowed” when she got there. No it wasn’t. If she’d consulted with security experts or White House lawyers, they would have said “No effing way.” And that’s precisely why she never asked anyone of consequence whether it was “allowed.”