Note: FBI Director James Comey recommended this week that no criminal charges be pressed against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Attorney General Loretta Lynch has formally closed the Department of Justice’s investigation. But congressional Republicans—who called Comey to testify before the House Oversight committee yesterday—insist that Clinton’s conduct jeopardized U.S. national security.

As I wrote back in February, when it was revealed that 22 of the emails in question were deemed too classified to be made public: “Hillary's emails (even if they were released) could not do anything more than confirm or repudiate what has already been widely investigated.” I called for distinguishing mistakes from crimes and argued that Clinton’s use of a private email server never put America’s security at risk. 

Due to the renewed relevance of that post, it is re-posted below.

What to make of the recent report that 22 emails from Hillary Clinton's private server, written while she was secretary of state during the first Obama term, contain such highly classified material that they cannot be released to the public? Republicans have seized on the latest news to argue that Hillary Clinton was careless or even reckless in her treatment of national secrets. They’ve thereby challenged her credentials and judgment as she pursues the presidency.

Clinton has acknowledged some mistakes in the use of a personal email account and server when she led the State Department, but her campaign has dismissed the latest news as evidence of a U.S. government classification system run amok that often slaps a top secret label on even the most innocuous of information. 

With the emails at issue now classified, it’s hard to understand the basis for this dispute very well. Who are we to believe? Most people are probably falling back on their preconceived views about Hillary, but it would be nice to find a more objective way to assess the latest news—especially as primary voting season begins.

A hypothetical

I can't be sure what's going on here either. But there have been reports that some of the sensitive emails might have involved the use of drones in certain parts of the world where the U.S. government has chosen not to announce or publicize its use of that technology. 

Let's explore that, on the hunch that it may be what's behind the latest brouhaha. For years, there has been a great deal of media coverage of how unmanned aerial systems, including armed ones, have been used in the broader war on terror. If there ever were any real secrets here, they have been very badly kept. Certainly, Hillary's emails (even if they were released) could not do anything more than confirm or repudiate what has already been widely investigated, in this country and around the world. It seems quite unlikely that she was so careless as to describe any technical aspects of those drones or to otherwise risk the leakage of information that was truly still secret (in the sense that word is normally used in the English language, rather than the way the U.S. government employs it when making classification determinations).

Hillary's emails (even if they were released) could not do anything more than confirm or repudiate what has already been widely investigated.

Imagine a situation in which the United States government wished to use force as part of a broader military operation that Congress had already approved in broad contours, going back to the 2001 Authorization on the Use of Military Force that followed the 9/11 attack. But the employment of force in a particular place was seen as politically sensitive—less so in the United States, where Congress had already authorized the conflict, but in a foreign country, where the government at issue was not willing or able to publicly support America's use of military force on its territory. This could be a situation where the foreign government in question actually had few qualms about the U.S. action, but did still not wish to be associated with them—in fact, it may have wanted the license to complain about them publicly, both to its own public and other nations. It wanted, in other words, to have its cake and eat it too.

In this situation, whether the U.S. decision to accept such constraints on its action was wise or not, it would not be allowable for an American public official to discuss the policy. The actual use of armed force would occur through covert elements of the U.S. government, and under domestic laws governing such activities. 

We would have twisted ourselves into knots to avoid displeasing a foreign government that otherwise might make a huge stink about our using American military power on its territory—and might even retaliate against us in some way if the information were publicly confirmed. Everyone in that country, the United States, and other places would have a strong suspicion of what we were actually doing, but there would be no official confirmation. It's not exactly plausible deniability. Call it implausible deniability, in fact.

In such a situation, as a top official in the United States, Hillary Clinton would perhaps have been an architect of the policy (or have inherited it from a previous presidency). Either way, she would be expected to abide by it, and treat the information as highly sensitive. If she did not do so, that was indeed a mistake on her part.

Distinguishing mistakes from crimes

But if this thought experiment bears any resemblance to what actually is behind those 22 emails, one more thing should also be clear—no major national secret was at risk of getting out because of Secretary Clinton's misjudgment. Her email practice was potentially a mistake, but no high crime, and America's security was never put at risk.

Of course, it's still up to voters to decide how to weigh this potential issue in the panoply of so many others that influence their choices for president. Even if I’m right in my guess about what's going on here, I don’t claim to be in a position to answer that question for anyone.

When she gives her speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton will of course be at a crucial point in her campaign for the presidency. Her fellow Democrats—including her running mate Senator Tim Kaine, as well as Michael Bloomberg—have roundly criticized her Republican opponent Donald Trump this week. Vice President Biden and President Obama usefully offered a counterpoint to the dark worldview we saw from Mr. Trump last week in Cleveland. And former President Bill Clinton, as well as first lady Michelle Obama, told us about Clinton’s longstanding dedication to women and children, the less fortunate, and the nation as a whole. As a parent of a child on the autism spectrum, I have seen and deeply appreciated this side of Clinton myself.

Now, it is up to Clinton to sketch out a positive vision for her own presidency. In so doing, she must strike a balanced tone—acknowledging and tapping the energy (and at times anger) of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their wing of the Democratic Party—while also reaching out to independents and moderate Republicans to whom she should appeal (given her past and her politics, and most of all, her opponent), but who at present tend not to think favorably of her.

Against this complex backdrop, I would offer only a few suggestions for her upcoming speech:

• On the state of the world, we need a nuanced view. Yes, there are big problems. Yes, ISIS is a greater threat than President Obama has sometimes acknowledged. On balance, however, things are troubled but not bad. Democracy has taken a hit in recent years, and the world’s economy has struggled in many ways for a decade, and Russia and China have caused considerable problems of late. But taking a larger perspective, the international order still has many strong points. Our alliances are strong. Despite recent setbacks, a higher percentage of people around the world live in democratic countries and above the poverty line this century than ever before. Child mortality globally is way down. U.S.-India relations are better than ever, as are America’s ties to other key rising powers like Indonesia. The U.S. military is indeed very strong (as retired General David Petraeus and I write in a forthcoming Foreign Affairs article), even if there is much to do to make it even better.


• We do need to do better in fighting ISIS. Ideas on how to attack it in Syria and Libya, among other places, will be key, even if details will necessarily need to await 2017. And while I think President Obama has done better in dealing with Russia and China than commonly understood, Obama has not explained his strategies for handling these powers very well to the United States. Clinton can help.


• The fading middle-class economic dream in the United States remains the central issue of this campaign. It explains the rise of Sanders and Trump better than any other single factor or phenomenon. Clinton’s views on economics are good but they come across as a bit piecemeal, borrowing from Sanders on a few key points like the minimum wage and trade but somewhat lacking her own key stamp. Above all other issues, I hope she concentrates on this tonight.


• We have not heard much about Benghazi or about Clinton’s email problems this week. To be sure, many Republicans have inflated these issues beyond all reason. But Clinton should still apologize for her mistakes to the country, without overdoing it. As best I can tell, she put no true national secrets or American personnel at risk in her emails, and while Benghazi was a tragedy that might have been preventable, no one can be perfect in times like these. We don’t typically excoriate our military commanders for mistakes that tragically may cost American lives in a given tactical operation, recognizing that such setbacks happen in war. That is not to excuse the lack of proper attention to Libya and Benghazi by the U.S. government back in 2011 and 2012, only to put it in perspective.


• It would be good to hear some nice words about Republicans too, in an effort to reach across the aisle and defuse some of the anger in American politics today. I don’t mean just to compliment Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, but also to note the importance of people like Pete Domenici and Warren Rudman in fiscal policy and deficit reduction (and more recently, John Boehner and Paul Ryan); George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole in the Americans with Disabilities Act; the Republican Congress of the 1990s in welfare reform; George H.W. Bush again as well as people like Christie Todd Whitman in environmental policy; George W. Bush on PEPFAR/AIDS and also on stressing inclusivity while avoiding anti-Muslim rhetoric after the 9/11 attacks; and good GOP governors or former governors like Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush in fostering economic growth as well as education reform across much of the country. To Democrats angry with the current Republican presidential ticket, as well as much of the current congressional leadership, this may seem like bending over backwards to appease the opposition. But in fact, the above folks are not the opposition that Clinton needs to defeat now; they are responsible, constructive, patriotic members of the other main political party in the United States. They are not the enemy, and by reaching out to them, Clinton can improve her odds of beating the person who is now very much the adversary—not only of the Democratic ticket, but of much of this country’s finest bipartisan traditions and accomplishments.

I’ll be rooting for all the above (and also hoping to get to bed before midnight). Please bring it on, Hillary!

To achieve the desired outcomes of the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the global targets from the Paris COP21 Climate Summit by 2030, governments will have to find ways to meet the top-down objectives with bottom-up approaches. A systematic focus on scaling up successful development interventions could serve to bridge this gap, or what’s been called the “missing middle.” However, the question remains how to actually address the challenge of scaling up.

When Arna Hartmann, adjunct professor of international development, and I first looked at the scaling up agenda in development work in the mid-2000s, we concluded that development agencies were insufficiently focused on supporting the scaling up of successful development interventions. The pervasive focus on one-off projects all too often resulted in what I’ve come to refer to as “pilots to nowhere.” As a first step to fix this, we recommended that each aid organization carry out a review to be sure to focus effectively on scaling up. 

The institutional dimension is critical, given their role in developing and implementing scaling up pathways. Of course, individuals serve as champions, designers, and implementers, but experience illustrates that if individuals lack a strong link to a supportive institution, scaling up is most likely to be short-lived and unsustainable. “Institutions” include many different types of organizations, such as government ministries and departments, private firms and social enterprises, civil society organizations, and both public and private external donors and financiers.

The Brookings book “Getting to Scale: How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People” explores the opportunities and challenges that such organizations face, on their own or, better yet, partnering with each other, in scaling up the development impact of their successful interventions.

Over the past decade I have worked with 10 foreign aid institutions—multilateral and bilateral agencies, as well as big global non-governmental organizations—helping them to focus systematically on scaling up operational work and developing approaches to do so. There are common lessons that apply across the board to these agencies, with one salutary example being the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which has tackled the scaling up agenda systematically and persistently.

Following are eight takeaway lessons I gleaned from my work with IFAD:

1. Look into the “black box” of institutions. It is not enough to decide that an institution should focus on and support scaling up of successful development interventions. You actually need to look at how institutions function in terms of their mission statement and corporate strategy, their policies and processes, their operational instruments, their budgets, management and staff incentives, and their monitoring and evaluation practices. Check out the Brookings working paper that summarizes the results of a scaling up review of the IFAD.
2. Scaling needs to be pursued institution-wide. Tasking one unit in an organization with innovation and scaling up, or creating special outside entities (like the Global Innovation Fund set up jointly by a number of donor agencies) is a good first step. But ultimately, a comprehensive approach must be mainstreamed so that all operational activities are geared toward scaling up.
3. Scaling up must be championed from the top. The governing boards and leadership of the institutions need to commit to scaling up and persistently stay on message, since, like any fundamental institutional change, effectively scaling up takes time, perhaps a decade or more as with IFAD.
4. The scaling up process must be grown within the institution. External analysis and advice from consultants can play an important role in institutional reviews. But for lasting institutional change, the leadership must come from within and involve broad participation from managers and staff in developing operational policies and processes that are tailored to an institution’s specific culture, tasks, and organizational structure.
5. A well-articulated operational approach for scaling up needs to be put in place. For more on this, take a look at a recent paper by Larry Cooley and I that reviews two helpful operational approaches, which are also covered in Cooley’s blog. For the education sector, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings just published its report “Millions Learning,” which provides a useful scaling up approach specifically tailored to the education sector.
6. Operational staffs need to receive practical guidance and training. It is not enough to tell staff that they have to focus on scaling up and then give them a general framework. They also need practical guidance and training, ideally tailored to the specific business lines they are engaged in. IFAD, for example, developed overall operational guidelines for scaling up, as well as guidance notes for specific area of engagement, including livestock development, agricultural value chains, land tenure security, etc.  This guidance and training ideally should also be extended to consultants working with the agency on project preparation, implementation, and evaluation, as well as to the agency’s local counterpart organizations.
7. New approaches to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) have to be crafted. Typically the M&E for development projects is backward looking and focused on accountability, narrow issues of implementation, and short-term results. Scaling up requires continuous learning, structured experimentation, and innovation based on evidence, including whether the enabling conditions for scaling up are being established. And it is important to monitor and evaluate the institutional mainstreaming process of scaling up to ensure that it is effectively pursued. I’d recommend looking at how the German Agency for International Development (GIZ) carried out a corporate-wide evaluation of its scaling up experience.
8. Scaling up helps aid organizations mobilize financial resources. Scaling up leverages limited institutional resources in two ways: First, an organization can multiply the impact of its own financial capacity by linking up with public and private agencies and building multi-stakeholder coalitions in support of scaling up. Second, when an organization demonstrates that it is pursuing not only one-off results but also scaled up impact, funders or shareholders of the organization tend to be more motivated to support the organization. This certainly was one of the drivers of IFAD’s successful financial replenishment consultation rounds over the last decade.

By adopting these lessons, development organizations can actually begin to scale up to the level necessary to bridge the missing middle. The key will be to assure that a focus on scaling up is not the exception but instead becomes ingrained in the institutional DNA. Simply put, in designing and implementing development programs and projects, the question needs to be answered, “What’s next, if this intervention works?”

If you’re reading this article, chances are you know people who are still getting married. But it’s getting rarer, especially among the youngest generation and those who are less educated. We used to assume people would marry before having children. But marriage is no longer the norm. Half of all children born to women under 30 are born out of wedlock. The proportion is even higher among those without a college degree.

What’s going on here? Most of today’s young adults don’t feel ready to marry in their early 20s. Many have not completed their educations; others are trying to get established in a career; and many grew up with parents who divorced and are reluctant to make a commitment or take the risks associated with a legally binding tie.

But these young people are still involved in romantic relationships. And yes, they are having sex. Any stigma associated with premarital sex disappeared a long time ago, and with sex freely available, there’s even less reason to bother with tying the knot. The result: a lot of drifting into unplanned pregnancies and births to unmarried women and their partners with the biggest problems now concentrated among those in their 20s rather than in their teens. (The teen birth rate has actually declined since the early 1990s.)

Does all of this matter? In a word, yes.

These trends are not good for the young people involved and they are especially problematic for the many children being born outside marriage. The parents may be living together at the time of the child’s birth but these cohabiting relationships are highly unstable. Most will have split before the child is age 5.

Social scientists who have studied the resulting growth of single-parent families have shown that the children in these families don’t fare as well as children raised in two-parent families. They are four or five times as likely to be poor; they do less well in school; and they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors as adolescents. Taxpayers end up footing the bill for the social assistance that many of these families need.

Is there any way to restore marriage to its formerly privileged position as the best way to raise children? No one knows. The fact that well-educated young adults are still marrying is a positive sign and a reason for hope. On the other hand, the decline in marriage and rise in single parenthood has been dramatic and the economic and cultural transformations behind these trends may be difficult to reverse.

Women are no longer economically dependent on men, jobs have dried up for working-class men, and unwed parenthood is no longer especially stigmatized. The proportion of children raised in single-parent homes has, as a consequence, risen from 5 percent in 1960 to about 30 percent now.

Conservatives have called for the restoration of marriage as the best way to reduce poverty and other social ills. However, they have not figured out how to do this.

The George W. Bush administration funded a series of marriage education programs that failed to move the needle in any significant way. The Clinton administration reformed welfare to require work and thus reduced any incentive welfare might have had in encouraging unwed childbearing. The retreat from marriage has continued despite these efforts. We are stuck with a problem that has no clear governmental solution, although religious and civic organizations can still play a positive role.

But perhaps the issue isn’t just marriage. What may matter even more than marriage is creating stable and committed relationships between two mature adults who want and are ready to be parents before having children. That means reducing the very large fraction of births to young unmarried adults that occur before these young people say they are ready for parenthood.

Among single women under the age of 30, 73 percent of all pregnancies are, according to the woman herself, either unwanted or badly mistimed. Some of these women will go on to have an abortion but 60 percent of all of the babies born to this group are unplanned.

As I argue in my book, “Generation Unbound,” we need to combine new cultural messages about the importance of committed relationships and purposeful childbearing with new ways of helping young adults avoid accidental pregnancies. The good news here is that new forms of long-acting but fully reversible contraception, such as the IUD and the implant, when made available to young women at no cost and with good counseling on their effectiveness and safety, have led to dramatic declines in unplanned pregnancies. Initiatives in the states of Colorado and Iowa, and in St. Louis have shown what can be accomplished on this front.

Would greater access to the most effective forms of birth control move the needle on marriage? Quite possibly. Unencumbered with children from prior relationships and with greater education and earning ability, young women and men would be in a better position to marry. And even if they fail to marry, they will be better parents.

My conclusion: marriage is in trouble and, however desirable, will be difficult to restore. But we can at least ensure that casual relationships outside of marriage don’t produce children before their biological parents are ready to take on one of the most difficult social tasks any of us ever undertakes: raising a child. Accidents happen; a child shouldn’t be one of them.

At an event this past week, Hillary Clinton announced that, if elected, she planned to put Bill Clinton in charge of creating jobs. If he becomes the “First Gentlemen” -- or as she prefers to call him, the “First Dude,” – he just might have some success in this role. The country’s very strong record of job creation during the first Clinton administration is a hopeful sign. (Full disclosure: I served in his Administration.)

But assuming he's given the role of jobs czar, what would Bill Clinton do? The uncomfortable fact is that no one knows how to create enough jobs. Although about 50 percent of the public, according to Pew, worries that there are not enough jobs available, and virtually every presidential candidate is promising to produce more, economists are not sure how to achieve this goal.

The debate centers around why we think people are jobless. Unless we can agree on the diagnosis, we will not be able to fashion an appropriate policy response.

Some economists think that an unemployment rate hovering around 5 percent constitutes “full employment.” Those still looking for jobs, in this view, are either simply transitioning voluntarily from one job to another or they are “structurally unemployed.” The latter term refers to a mismatch, either between a worker’s skills and the skills that employers are seeking, or between where the workers live and where the jobs are geographically. (The decline in housing values or tighter zoning restrictions, for example, may have made it more difficult for people to move to states or cities where jobs are more available.)

Another view is that despite the recovery from the Great Recession, there is still a residue of “cyclical” unemployment. If the Federal Reserve or Congress were to boost demand by keeping interest rates low, reducing taxes, or increasing spending on, say, infrastructure, this would create more jobs – or so goes the argument. But the Fed can’t reduce interest rates significantly because they are already near rock-bottom levels and tax and spending policies are hamstrung by political disagreements.

In my view, the U.S. currently suffers from both structural and cyclical unemployment. The reason I believe there is still some room to stimulate the economy is because we have not yet seen a significant increase in labor costs and inflation. Political problems aside, we should be adding more fuel to the economy in the form of lower taxes or higher public spending.

High levels of structural unemployment are also a problem. The share of working-age men who are employed has been dropping for decades at least in part because of outsourcing and automation. The share of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than six months is also relatively high for an economy at this stage of the business cycle. One possibility is that the recession caused many workers to drop out of the labor force and that after a long period of joblessness, they have seen their skills atrophy and employers stigmatize them as unemployable.

The depressing fact is that none of these problems is easy to solve. Manufacturing jobs that employ a lot of people are not coming back. Retraining the work force for a high-tech economy will take a long time. Political disagreements won’t disappear unless there is a landslide election that sweeps one party into control of all three branches of government.

So what can Bill Clinton or anyone else do? We may need to debate some more radical solutions such as subsidized jobs or a basic income for the structurally unemployed or a shorter work week to spread the available work around. These may not be politically feasible for some time to come, but former President Clinton is the right person to engage communities and employers in some targeted job creation projects now and to involve the country in a serious debate about what to do about jobs over the longer haul.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Inside Sources.