No surprise that conservatives are brazen with the law.
If there are no consequences when they break the law, the message sent is that no one is going to go after them if they proceed with their objectives. So, I'm saying it now, giving the Secret Service a pass for not protecting those texts is a huge mistake. I heard someone on MSNBC say that they may have understood it was a law, but no one ever really made an issue about it before, so they really didn't think it was a big deal. Hence, they were guilty of being lax. Not crooked.
This is how institutions and communities begin to degrade to the point where there is constant division and hostility in the air.
I saw it for myself on a local level. This was back when I was new to the community and didn't have enough of the local background to understand just how far my neighbors were involved in a fight that involved the community leaders against a developer. In those early years they were talking to each other in front of me before HOA meetings began and it might as well have been a secret code, because I didn't have the context to realize what they were saying. For example, before one meeting, the Treasurer asked a question to an individual who played a major role in that ordeal. He was the Major's good friend. I refer to him as Resident Roy in my writing of my experiences.
Treasurer: "How is everything going?"
Resident Roy: "It's a House of Cards. One goes down, they all go down."
Did not know what that meant until years later. I didn't even know what a House of Cards was. But it's an important thing to remember if you're dealing with social networks in Central Florida.
Another thing I heard at a meeting: "No judge in the State will side with a developer against a homeowner." People agreed.
You see, because they believed they were immune, they went ahead supporting strategies that also had the effect of breaching fiduciary responsibility to the rest of us. They really believed they were Top Dogs and that no one would hold them accountable.
In many respects they did get away with it. The lawyers came up with a Settlement Agreement that contained a Confidential Clause and that helped bury the facts.
And that's how communities degrade. With that kind of cover, those who could, used the freedom from consequences to abuse the rest of us as they grabbed whatever they could to compensate themselves for their troubles. In my HOA, that would involve common grounds, as well as the trust and goodwill that is part of a healthy community life.
In sum, the Secret Service's excuse that no one has ever really made a big deal of record keeping is the kind of excuse that reinforces crooked behavior. And it would be a huge mistake to let them get away with it now, because the next time there might be even higher stakes involved.