COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Mistrust and privacy

Hillary Clinton’s trust problem is real, and powerful, but the opposite of what you think.

You can fully trust her … to be smart, competent, committed to the pursuit of sound public policy and devoted to the Wesleyan principle of doing as much in service to others as one can for as long as one can.

You can trust that she, in private, will be genial and at ease among close friends, but a holy terror to others who fail her, probably by letting somebody penetrate her treasured “zone of privacy.”

Her trust problem is of this variety: She doesn’t trust you, not for a second.

As a result, she has spent her adulthood trying to finesse a public life in pursuit of public office without giving up that “zone of privacy” that she has talked about for nearly three decades.

She’s clung to it longer than that, in fact. I remember as far back as 1980 when she was telling her incurably undisciplined, outgoing and people-pleasing husband — the Labrador retriever of political beings —not to trust this person or that lest he find himself used or compromised.

I can’t tell you if she was always this way or if her self-appointed but vital role as disciplinarian for the ever-eager, ever-bounding Bill made her that way.

What I suspect is that she was always inclined that way.

My colleague Ernest Dumas, who covered the Clintons before I did, has written in the Arkansas Times of her recommendation as a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm to the late Arkansas Gazette not to publish a piece he had written because of its privacy invasion — not of the miscreant who was the subject of the piece, but to peripheral parties.

According to Dumas, she said the paper had a moral obligation not to tell of the man’s misdeed.

But I think living with Bill as his protector exacerbated her natural distrust, turning it into a disorder.

And I think their becoming co-presidents and enduring Whitewater and Ken Starr and the Republican politics of personal destruction left her horribly scarred.

My observation from decades ago leads me to a timely assertion: If she’d been in the plane on that tarmac in Phoenix, and if she and Bill had heard that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was idling in a nearby plane, and if Bill had hopped up to pay a personal call, she would have said, “Bill, no. Sit your [you-know-what] down. The last thing we need is for you to bound over there to talk to her. How would that look? And of course it would get out. Everything about us gets out. People hate us, Bill, and they’re watching us. Or haven’t you noticed that yet? What’s the matter with you?”

And I can hear him saying, “Oh, hon, I’m just going to say ‘hi.’”

And I can hear her saying: “Sit down and shut up. Don’t make me put this leash on you.”

And Bill would have sat back down.

The irony, naturally, is that Hillary’s protectiveness against invasions of privacy, partisan exploitation and untoward appearances led to … guess what? … an invasion of her privacy, partisan exploitation against her and untoward appearances about her.

The woman who lives to keep secrets wound up investigated by the FBI for possibly revealing official secrets in the course of trying to keep personal ones.

More of her emails have been seen by others than ever would have been the case if she hadn’t been so worried about others seeing them that she kept them off the government server and insisted on a personal setup.

She believed her emails were no one’s business, even those having to do with government responsibility. Not every phone call of a secretary of state is transcribed for everyone to see, for heaven’s sake. Why, then, should every keyboarded item of telecommunication be served up to the eyes of the world?

Her conceivable crime, either by intention or neglect, was jeopardizing the nation’s security by keeping her emails on a private server perhaps more easily hacked than a government one.

But she did not remotely intend such a thing. And as far as we know, no mortal enemy of United States got wind, by her neglect, of information so sensitive and valuable that it was able to harm the national interest or effect any national calamity.

Predictably, the FBI said Monday that she would not be charged, because no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case, although she had been “extremely careless.”

Thus she is left merely to stew in the juices of her own distrustful essence.

If she makes it to the presidency, I would encourage her to run hard from the creation of any email account, government or personal, and, by the way, to find that leash for her husband. And then to shorten it.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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