Hillary Clinton's 'convenient' choice

By Clinton's account Tuesday, the sorting of more than 60,000 e-mail messages from her time at the U.S. State Department — to separate the personal and the work-related — was carried out entirely by her and her lawyer. She claims that all the work messages have been turned over to the department, but there is no way to check. She disclosed Tuesday that the remainder, the personal e-mails, were deleted. Why did she not provide the work-related e-mails when she left the department? Had she used government e-mail in the first place, it is possible that the messages would have been preserved there, and there might have been fewer doubts today.

Clinton also confirmed that she used a mail server at her home in New York, which was also for former president Bill Clinton, "on property guarded by the Secret Service" — as if the primary risk was not cyber theft but rather burglars sneaking in to steal floppy disks. She said she did not discuss classified material in e-mail, but surely her days and messages were taken up with "sensitive but unclassified" matters that would be of interest to snoopers. She didn't address that security issue, nor did she say anything about whether the State Department had security concerns about her private arrangement.

In the end, it is clear Clinton was acting in a gray zone, one created in part by the rapid pace of technological change. But it is also apparent that her decisions on her e-mail were based on what was best for her — what was "convenient"— and not so much for the public trust.