To the Editor:

Democrats are insisting we wait for the FBI report before "bashing Hillary," but it is becoming clear the report will not be out before the November elections, if it ever is. It is important that Americans understand what happened, because it says a lot about Clinton. I will try to explain it from the perspective of 40 years of working with classified and unclassified government information.

The indisputable truth is Hillary Clinton set up a private server in her home and used it for all her communications as Secretary of State. She was provided with a State Department email account but never used it. She used a private contractor, Bryan Pagliano, to set up the server, thereby bypassing State Department controls on security, compliance and oversight of usage of the server, as required for any computer containing official government communications. Under questioning on his role in setting up the server, Pagliano has invoked Fifth Amendment protection over 125 times.

Clinton continues to insist she never sent or received any information marked classified over her server and that is an interesting bit of weasel-wording.

Clinton continues to claim she used this set-up for reasons of convenience because government-approved communications were not available. That is patently false. Government-approved and secure communications are available worldwide, and can be temporarily set up even at hotels. Doing it the way Clinton did ensured that the North Koreans, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Romanian hackers and Wikileaks had access to everything she sent or received during her tenure.

That is a skeleton explanation of the facts and the reader can draw his own conclusions of the implications. If I had done what Clinton did, during my 40 years of working for the government, I would have been writing this letter from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan.

Clinton is fond of saying that Donald Trump is unqualified to be president, and he may be, but what do her actions say about her?

Mike Baker

Mitchell