On my weekly appearance with Hugh Hewitt, we discussed the latest revelations re 45th President presumptive:
HUGH HEWITT: Mark, I have a proposition. No other politician in the western world in any democracy – whether ours, Canada, Great Britain, Australia – could survive the conduct that Hilary Clinton has engaged in whose last name was not Clinton. Agree or disagree?
MARK STEYN: Yeah, I think that's true - and it's one of these situations where people think "Oh well, that's just Bill and Hilary. That's just what they do." And usually it's just something that is a personal benefit to them that they – going back to when they used to claim Bill's used underwear as tax-deductible charitable donations back in the early '90s in Arkansas. But the idea that the chief foreign policy official of the United States can keep the most confidential business of the United States and its relations with the world powers on a server in some guy's bathroom in an apartment in Colorado and you can only read about that because a British newspaper – the Daily Mail – thought it was kind of newsworthy, but the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times didn't – that tells you that this woman thinks none of it matters and she's got a couple of speed bumps on the path to her coronation, but her carriage is still going to make it.
HH: Now Mark, you were the first to hint at this, and I think you've been very cautious, but I think the question has to be raised – you hinted at what would be the consequences of the opponents of the United States reading in real-time the Secretary of State's internet traffic, and you hinted that would have been very bad. Increasingly people realize that was in fact happening. We don't know which enemies at what time, but increasingly – whether it's Mike Morell on this show or other NSA folks or Bob Baer on CNN this week. They had it because it is not even a grade school exercise for cyber-espionage experts to break into a private server like this.
MS: No, and as I said when I first mentioned that, I don't like to seem like a conspiracy guy, but I think it's clear that once it was known that this was the Secretary of State's email address, that the Russians, the Chinese, and other major sophisticated nations would've no problem getting into it. The question then is, who do they share it with? But it was interesting to me all around that period around Benghazi how well-informed America's enemies were. I mean, for example, just those guys in Benghazi knew the ambassador was not going to be in Tripoli but was going to be in Benghazi, where he was going to be in Benghazi that very night.
Hugh wondered, once the bad guys have a gateway into the system, how deep down into all the "classified" and "encrypted" stuff they can go:
MS: Well, I think when you use these words like "encrypted" and "classified," everyone thinks that they mean more than they do. They mean as much as the person who is privy to that information wants them to mean... And if you look at any American embassy around the world, they all have these little top secret bunkers somewhere in the heart of the thing with concrete walls so nobody can hear what they're talking about, the communication is super-encoded. But none of it means anything if the head of the entire apparatus is just keeping it in some guy's toilet in Colorado.
When he's not interviewing me and the six dozen presidential candidates, Hugh likes to interview authors of espionage thrillers. And I pointed out that none of his favorite spy novelists could get away with that plot twist:
MS: You have Daniel Silva and people on and they go to immense lengths to concoct a plausible scenario as to how the security's breached. None of the other writers you interview –
HH: (laughs)
MS: . . . Brad Thor, Daniel Silva — none of them would think of anything so obvious as the Secretary of State of a major global power keeping the important business of that nation on a server in some guy's toilet in Colorado.
HH: Yeah, Alex Berenson, Chuck Box, the late Vince Flynn – they'd all have that sent back from the editor saying "No one's going to buy that. That's not going to work."
We concluded with a quick word on Donald Trump:
MS: I think the way to look on it, Hugh, is like this – you've been quite critical of him. You can say "Oh, this guy is an out-of-control lunatic buffoon" but actually–
HH: I never said that. Let the record be clear.
MS: No, no, no. I know you've never said that, but a lot of people have. But what he's saying is actually quite sane - whereas if you think of the so-called sane candidates like Jeb Bush, when he talks about illegal immigration as an "act of love", he may be a sane man, but what he's saying is far loonier than what Donald Trump is saying. If you got a loony with the sane position versus a sane man with a loony position bet on the loony with a sane position.
You can find the full conversation between me and Hugh here.
