Is the government of the United States "theirs" or "ours" ?

That's it. Pretty simple really. If the government is to truly be "of" the people, "for" the people, and "by" the people, i.e OUR government, run on our behalf and with our consent, then some safeguards have to be put in place to ensure that outcome. Principle among those safeguards are two major guidelines - Transparency and Accountability.

Accountability, as we all know, was built into the foundation of the country with the concept of checks and balances and Congressional oversight over the Executive branch in order to thwart would be monarchists or oligarchs who would seize power and control on their own behalf.

In order to have Accountability, you have to be able to see the things people are doing or there's nothing to be accountable for. So Transparency is the handmaiden that serves Accountability and makes it possible. That's why we have hearings and commissions and why most of them are held in public. That's why your town puts the Town Council meetings on TV and why we have so-called "sunshine laws" and the FOIA.

What Hillary did from the very inception of her time as Secretary of State was to determine that her actions and communications as SOS were literally hers. She put her missives in a dark, unknown and shadowy place, a privately owned server located in the basement of her privately owned home. It is physically impossible to convey her need for proprietorship over her words, historically valuable as predictors or reflectors of her actions, more than that.

Hillary's response to sunshine laws is that of a vampire. She acts as though it will literally kill her to allow the great unwashed to see her interactions with the privileged classes of those who are allowed to electronically speak with The Secretariat, Herself. She fusses continually about her "privacy" being exposed as if those who are interested and concerned about her official actions are rummaging around in her lingerie chest and taking indecent liberties with their inquiries about pipelines, fracking and family foundations and what-not.

She simply doesn't get it. It is not her government. It is OURS. We shouldn't have to beg or negotiate with our officials for what is by statute our property already- their communications while in office done on our behalf while serving as a government proxy. Hillary is the vandal and the misappropriator, not the public. The mixing and confluence and co-mingling of the public vs the private, the official vs. the personal has been the through line of Hillary's entire life in the public eye. There is the mote in her vision which prevents her from distinguishing the difference.

Those who dismiss her actions or call it a "nothing burger" could not be further from the truth. By her actions, Hillary Clinton ridiculed the concepts of Transparency and Accountability as being beneath her dignity to comply with. Like the Maya Angelou adage she likes to quote about others, she has shown us who she is. If we accept her well-known stealth and furtiveness by rewarding her with the highest office in the country, then we will have no one but ourselves to blame when a dark fog settles over the land.