For the moment it's all a jumble and may remain so if Hillary Rodham Clinton manages to cover her tracks as well as she usually does.
It seems some material in her personal email account shoulda, woulda, coulda have been classified information. Or maybe not. The FBI has been asked to investigate, which is said to be routine in such cloudy cases. Those first reports in the New York Times about a criminal referral to the Justice Department turned out to be as accurate as much else in the Times--that is, not very.
A couple of inspectors general, one each for the overall American intelligence network and the State Department, now have "explained" that this was not a criminal referral, it was a "security referral made for counter-intelligence purposes." Got that? Call it a distinction without a difference, an old specialty in Washington.
As usual, the bureaucratic lingo does more to conceal than explain what is going on here, if anything is, than to reveal it. By now the daily "news" stories about this case sound more like rewrites piled atop rewrites instead of what the news should be: a clear narrative of even complicated events.
Ms. Clinton isn't the only one confusing this matter. By the time it's resolved, if it ever is, Americans will be so bored by all the daily details we'll probably have lost all interest. Which is how the Clintons have handled one scandal after another, and if the past is prologue, there's every reason to believe Ms. Clinton will emerge from this one unscathed, too. After all, both Clintons have made a career of beating the rap.
You won't find the best summary of how the Clintons operate in the New York Times, but in F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, our nomination for The Great American Novel: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
Editorial on 07/28/2015