opinion

Hillary's secret emails: The joke of transparency

You remember Richard Windsor, don't you?

"Richard Windsor" was, actually, Lisa Jackson, who at the time headed up the Environmental Protection Agency for the world's most transparent presidential administration, that of President Obama.

Jackson created Mr. Windsor as her alias for avoiding transparency in her email communications. The emails of federal officials are considered public property, and, so, subject to public scrutiny. As an official in the world's most transparent-ever administration, Jackson felt she needed her private space, too. Even if that was illegal. So, enter Mr. Windsor.

Jackson once got an email on her public account -- the one with her real name attached to it -- from a lobbyist. She emailed him back to contact her on her private account. That's transparency for you in the world's most transparent administration.

And then there was Jonathan Silver, former director of the loan program at the Department of Energy -- the one that helped get Solyndra all that money -- instructing his people on how to send emails that could get subpoenaed.

Now, we learn that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, didn't bother with an official email account at all. It was all private communication, all the time.

I don't want to be cynical about this email thing. I understand how famous people must crave privacy sometimes. But this is Hillary Clinton, after all. So I have no choice but to be cynical. Hillary does not operate by the rules of others. She can scour the earth for cash for the Clinton Foundation, as she likes, even if is the American Secretary of State at the time, and even if hitting up foreign countries for cash while you are Secretary of State kinda, sorta -- you know -- looks bad.

I know Hillary defenders are going to come out of the woodwork on this one. They'll hate on the now-imprisoned Romanian hacker who revealed her secret email. They'll turn it all around, somehow. Perhaps they'll make it seem as though Hillary is doing us a favor by hiding her emails. They may be right, for all I know.

But at the end of the day, she's another member of the world's most transparent-ever administration. Which doesn't really mean they're transparent. It just means they get to write their own definition of transparency.