Democrats’ Selective Outrage

Jim Geraghty:

“There is a confidence from these [FBI] sources that her server had been hacked. And that it was a 99% accuracy that it had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that things had been taken from that.” — Brett Baier reporting on Fox News, November 2, 2016

The above statement should concern every American, but it doesn’t. The likely possibility of foreign spies hacking Hillary Clinton’s server — long suspected, now apparently confirmed — outrages most Republicans and a certain portion of independents, but very few Democrats.

Why isn’t the average Democratic member of Congress bothered, much less outraged, by the possibility that Clinton used an insecure server, allowing her e-mails and the classified information in them to be hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies? Why isn’t President Obama bothered by it?

At the same time most Democrats are finding ways to excuse or hand-wave away Clinton’s actions, they are genuinely outraged by another act of hacking: Someone — presumably hackers directed by or affiliated with the Russian government — found thousands of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s campaign. As Clinton herself put it in the final debate:

We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 — intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

It is indeed disturbing — but if the Kremlin’s hacking the e-mails of private individuals and private institutions to influence an election is disturbing, then the hacking of Hillary’s private server should be doubly so. But not only do no Democrats express any anger over the latter likelihood, they bend over backwards to insist it is no big deal.

Clinton’s next-to-last last sentence  — “they are designed to influence our election” — gives away her true concern. She’s never otherwise been outraged about insufficient cyber-security. She never said much about the two major breaches of U.S. Office of Personnel Management databases that exposed sensitive information about at least 22.1 million people. In her campaign book, Stronger Together, cyber-security gets five paragraphs, in which Russia is mentioned just once.

Hillary Clinton and other Democrats don’t get that upset when Russia or other hostile states do things that threaten the country as a whole. But when they threaten the party or her odds of winning the election, it’s an outrage.

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