Bill Clinton’s SecState Admits She Would Not Have Allowed Hillary’s Secret Email Server

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, grudgingly admitted that she would not have allowed a private email server like the one Secretary of State Hillary Clinton created for herself:

This is a remarkable interview for several reasons. It ought to be a bombshell moment for Albright, a figure of considerable reverence in the Democrat pantheon as a trailblazing woman, to pronounce Hillary Clinton’s email arrangement unacceptable. Are Clinton dead-enders going to start insisting Madeline Albright doesn’t know what she’s talking about?

Albright herself knows this is a watershed moment, because she spins like mad and tries to avoid making this concession, until she runs out of wiggle room. Before that, everything Albright said lines up with the idiotic spin pumped out by Clinton’s campaign apparatus.

She claims that Clinton has “explained what she’s done” and “turned things over,” but that is not remotely true. This point must be repeated over and over again, because Democrat spinners keep trying to obscure the fundamental reality: Hillary Clinton turned over absolutely nothing until she was forced to do so.

She hid her emails for years until Congressional pressure and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits forced her to cough them up. The State Department recently admitted for the record what was obvious all along: they had no institutional knowledge of Clinton’s secret server until they found themselves unable to comply with certain document requests.

We’re still discovering undisclosed Clinton emails weeks after she signed a statement to federal court affirming she had turned over every single work-related email. She took it upon herself to decide fully half her emails were not work-related, and deleted them.

Clinton hasn’t actually explained anything at all. Her first “explanation” was a press conference in which nearly every statement she made was demonstrably untrue. Lately her “explanations” have involved risible claims that she doesn’t know how email, intelligence classifications, or computers work. (“Wipe?  You mean like, with a cloth?” she famously responded when asked if her system had been wiped clean of data.)

Just this past weekend, Clinton tried retailing her absurd excuse that she included someone with a proper .gov email address on all of her correspondence, so she thought it was all getting archived somewhere, and that’s good enough. Not only is that a shocking admission of recklessness and incompetence from the Secretary of State – no such automatic archiving system existed, and it was Hillary Clinton’s responsibility to confirm it’s existence before supposedly relying on it as the sole means of archiving her emails – but Albright is reluctantly forced to admit she would never have accepted such a claim from any of her subordinates.

Neither would Hillary Clinton, really.

Try to imagine anyone who wasn’t a tight member of her inner circle at State ignoring his or her record-keeping duties, using an unsecured email account for every single scrap of correspondence, and responding to investigators by saying, “Hey, I thought some computer somewhere was copying all this stuff down, because all my email chains included someone who was following the rules. I didn’t check to see if that was actually true, though. My bad, dude.”

Albright also falsely claimed “others had” arrangements comparable to Hillary Clinton’s. That is not true, and she knows it. No one ever cooked up a insecure homebrew server and routed 100% of their correspondence, including classified and Top Secret material, through it.

Albright’s claims about how the government is stupid and doesn’t understand how email works are laughable, and she demeans herself by making them, but such talking points have been on Clinton campaign memos since the beginning of this scandal, so apparently she felt obliged to tick that box off.  Is anyone else troubled by the fact that these Democrat voluptuaries of Big Government, these statists who think their sacred bureaucracy is better able to manage every business in America than the people who own them, so readily fall back to the “we’re idiots who don’t understand technology” excuse? They act like email was reverse-engineered from a crashed flying saucer sometime during Bill Clinton’s second term.

In truth, the nature of electronic mail was understood well enough by both private and government experts in the Nineties, and it most certainly is understood by them now. This is a talking point Clinton and her defenders cannot have both ways. She likes to claim she had top people working on her server to keep it safe from hackers… but also claim the government and its employees are institutionally incapable of understanding how email really works. The technicians in the State Department’s computer shop must be getting really tired of getting implicitly blamed for not preventing Hillary from setting up her homebrew server.

In the end, Albright had too much self-respect to stick with Clinton’s talking points, and had to admit she never would have allowed her own Deputy Secretary of State to set up a system like the one Clinton used. It sounds like there was just a dash of exasperation in the way she said it, as if she previously made it clear to a certain someone that she was only willing to carry so much water. As the set-up to the question by her MSNBC hosts made clear, Albright had a reputation for being tough on security during her tenure, and she’s evidently unwilling to throw that away to make excuses for Hillary Clinton. Who knows how much play this will get in the mainstream media, but it’s a remarkable moment.