EDITORIAL: State Department should be denied extension on Clinton emails

According to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign website, cyber attacks have "profound consequences for our economy and our national security." It goes on to say that, if Mrs. Clinton is elected, she will "leverage the work of the public and private sectors" in order to "strengthen security and build resiliency for economy and infrastructure." That partnership, we are supposed to believe, will go a long way toward "overcoming the mistrust that impedes cooperation today."

If Mrs. Clinton was actually concerned about restoring our trust in her ability to handle cybersecurity issues, however, she'd start by being honest about the classified emails found on her private email server.

In the past week, two new developments have come to light in her ongoing email scandal.

First, as Fox News reported, several messages on Mrs. Clinton's personal server exceeded Top Secret classification, with some even including extremely sensitive (read: life-threatening in the wrong hands) information about secret agents in the field. Mrs. Clinton continues to place the blame for the scandal at the feet of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, declaring during a town hall in Iowa on Monday that she was "not willing to say it was error in judgment" and that "nothing I did was wrong." But even President Barack Obama's former defense secretary, Robert Gates, conceded that "the odds are pretty high" that one or more hostile foreign governments accessed her private server. As ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey opined in The Wall Street Journal, it's pretty much "impossible to draw any conclusion other than that she knew enough to support a [criminal] conviction at the least for mishandling classified information."

Also coming to light was a State Department request for an extra month to produce the final full batch of Mrs. Clinton's emails — which were supposed to be released today — with the snowstorm given as one of the main reasons for the request. Some of those emails may still be released, but not the full batch as planned, and if the 30-day extension is granted, the emails won't be released until after the Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina dates on the primary/caucus schedule.

The State Department request is utterly ridiculous and reeks of politics, with Mrs. Clinton embroiled in a far tougher race with Sen. Bernie Sanders than she or her party expected.

What both these developments show is that neither State nor Mrs. Clinton can be trusted. State doesn't need a 30-day delay over a couple days of snow, and Iowa and New Hampshire voters — in fact, all voters nationwide — deserve to be able to cast as informed a ballot as possible, based on the contents of the latest dump. The delay should be denied, and all of Mrs. Clinton's emails should be released as expeditiously as possible.

National security should take precedence over any candidate's quest for power. Please vote accordingly.