Boy, did Donald Trump set off a wave of hysteria with Wednesday’s offhand remark that the Russians should “find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” referring to the “personal” e-mails that Hillary Clinton deleted before turning her home-brewed server over to the FBI.
First off, it was a joke at Clinton’s expense — followed by another dig, this time at the media, namely that if Russia does reveal them, “you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Which didn’t stop a round of media and political hand-wringing to the effect that Trump had asked Moscow to intervene in the US election. The New York Times, for example, quickly posted a news story that he was “essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power to cyberspy on a secretary of state’s correspondence.” Dozens of headlines put it the same way.
Um, no: He wasn’t urging anyone to hack the Clinton server now. Nobody can: It’s offline and in FBI hands.
The danger is that it was hacked already, during those long years when it sat unprotected, and when she was carrying her also-unsecure phones and tablets along on her global travels.
So Moscow, Beijing and/or other forces could have all the communications that the Democratic nominee was so eager to keep private. As Trump put it (before making his joke), “They probably have those 33,000 e-mails.”
Maybe all 33,000 are indeed just boring chatter about yoga classes and planning her daughter’s wedding, as Clinton said when she announced that she’d deleted them permanently so that (she plainly thought) no one else could ever see them.
On the other hand, Clinton was, to quote FBI chief Jim Comey, “extremely careless” with classified info in her e-mails, so it’s also possible she was as careless with info that’s personally embarrassing or worse — say, the sort of thing that might leave her open to blackmail.
The FBI took that concern seriously: For its investigation, which recovered some deleted messages off the server, it took the unprecedented step of having agents sign a special confidentiality pledge, on top of the oath they all swear when joining the Bureau.
But anyone who did hack Clinton’s server is by definition far less ethical — and able to use their ill-gotten goods to their own ends.
We’ve never been fans of WikiLeaks — and Bernie Sanders shouldn’t be, either. How long did the site sit on those DNC e-mails before dumping them on the eve of the convention?
Too late to help him, too late to do anything but anger Sanders’ fans and embarrass the nominee.
And WikiLeaks claims it has more Hillary-damning dumps ahead — conceivably, some of her 33,000 “deleted” e-mails.
The nation has to worry about that all the way to Election Day — and, if she wins, beyond. A devious enemy might opt to let Clinton take office before crippling her politically, or try to blackmail the new president.
At this point, the least rotten thing for a hacker to do (besides wiping everything they have, of course) is to release it now, and let the voters decide.