Hillary Clinton’s email trouble, explained

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s effort to quash the rising scandal over her misuse of email when she was secretary of state has so far backfired spectacularly. Instead of cutting the story short, she has fanned the flames, and now even some of her backers in the Democratic Party are worried about the trajectory of this drama, which threatens to derail her presidential candidacy.

For readers who’ve mostly ignored emailgate — assuming it would disappear — and now feel the need to catch up, here’s a primer on why it matters.

It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that Clinton, after the scandals that rocked her husband’s presidency during the 1990s, simply did not want to leave behind a paper trail (or e-trail). And so, as secretary of state, she tried to skirt federal records law by employing her own IT systems and servers, and by exclusively using a personal email address.

This maneuver, however, created a far bigger problem than the one she intended to avoid, because a large portion of what any secretary of state does is classified to some degree. High-level diplomacy is inherently a secret matter and always has been.

Clinton partisans, betting on the public’s ignorance in these matters, have argued that the federal government over-classifies intelligence, and that this is therefore no big deal. Allow me to shed some light.

It is true that deciding what is unclassified versus confidential, the lowest level of government classification, can be subjective. Similarly, the line between what’s considered confidential versus secret, the next highest classification level, can get blurry. But top secret information, the highest classification level, is an entirely different matter.