Apparently, ALL her emails were from a personal email account. I mean if this is true, and I wouldn’t be surprised Hilary thinks she is above the rules everyone else follows. It’s not just about accountability, although I suspect that was the reason she did this. where was her emails being hosted, and who in their right minds would have let her set up a private email account as the Secretary of state.
If it’s true, could this be toast for her Presidential ambitions?
A lot of US government people use private email including one of her predecessors, Colin Powell. Congress does it, the white house does it. Nearly anyone that can call her out on it is also probably guilty, even if they used their private email only once for official business. One reason, state.gov emails are blocked in some countries and cannot be used while visiting that country.
And any email she exchanged with an official government account (the president, her staff, etc.) at their official account, is still on official record. As long as she didn’t transmit classified information, not really a foul. But there will be those that will try to make it seem criminal.
I’m sure lots of them do it, Bush and Cheney got called on it too.
You would think with Snowden leaks there would be enough awareness with even the technological illiterate to figure out that if the emails are not stored on government servers, then the company that hosts the site the emails are stored on will have access to them and probably all their employees. Apparently she (or whoever created the site for her) called the site ClintonEmails.com. Seriously? Like that wouldn’t draw peoples attention.
I’m sure there must be more to this story, I find it hard to believe Hillary would have been so stupid.
[quote=“Mick”]I’m sure lots of them do it, Bush and Cheney got called on it too.
You would think with Snowden leaks there would be enough awareness with even the technological illiterate to figure out that if the emails are not stored on government servers, then the company that hosts the site the emails are stored on will have access to them and probably all their employees. Apparently she (or whoever created the site for her) called the site ClintonEmails.com. Seriously? Like that wouldn’t draw peoples attention.
I’m sure there must be more to this story, I find it hard to believe Hillary would have been so stupid.[/quote]
Not stupid, evil. Or at least, not a principled defender of accountability- she was apparently pissed that some of the emails from Bill’s Administration had been used to attack them, and one assumes, wasn’t about to let that happen again.
tango 42 said
[quote]And any email she exchanged with an official government account (the president, her staff, etc.) at their official account, is still on official record. As long as she didn’t transmit classified information, not really a foul.
[/quote]
But not those with private persons the State Department had been dealing with, or foreign government officials- a considerable lapse, in a Sec of State. Particularly as this started in 2009, when the Dems had been raising hell over the Bushies use of private emails to avoid accountability.
[quote=“Mick”]
You would think with Snowden leaks there would be enough awareness with even the technological illiterate to figure out that if the emails are not stored on government servers, then the company that hosts the site the emails are stored on will have access to them and probably all their employees. Apparently she (or whoever created the site for her) called the site ClintonEmails.com. Seriously? Like that wouldn’t draw peoples attention.
I’m sure there must be more to this story, I find it hard to believe Hillary would have been so stupid.[/quote]
Not stupid, arrogant. She believes – with good reason – that it won’t make any difference if she gets caught. I suppose it may Chappaquiddick her presidential ambitions, but that’s it. (And isn’t that redundant, given Benghazi?)
Guccifer is in jail and Snowden is in hiding, while all sorts of powerful scoundrels are free and expanding their power over us. Contemplate that.
And Benghazi? Seriously?? The penultimate* dead horse of non-issues, investigated again and again with no wrongdoing found? Don’t make yourself look like a fool…
The ultimate is the birthers, in their obsessive bid to try to prove Obama was not born in the US, despite being shown evidence after evidence confirming that he, in fact, was.
I don’t think it’s going to make a difference unless it’s shown she abused it in some way. For one thing it’s not an issue that is going to resonate with the public–did someone mention Chappaquiddick? lol–and harping on it might even backfire for that reason. Another, if it’s an issue why wasn’t it an issue during her four-year term. It could hardly have escaped notice.
They seem to be in the denial stage, legitimizing her use by past precedent, or by saying she handed over a ton of emails or by saying certain policies didn’t come into effect until after she left. You’re right I think about this not resonating with the public and we will wait and see how much impact this has on her.
But at some point they will have to acknowledge setting up a private email to do business is a very bad idea. I would be fired for it, and I work for a relatively small tech firm. Even then with more confidential information it’s expected to encrypt the information and attach the file rather than send plain text. It’s 2015 and this is expected in a lot of working places, not just so the firm has a backup of communications, it’s so the communications can be stored securely and by competent IT staff.
Although I doubt she was sending highly classified material by email, in plain text, unencrypted, to me thats just insane even for the technically illiterate. I’m pretty sure the State department have some guys in IT that know just what they are doing and have a separate system which is incredibly secure and doesn’t involve bouncing emails off outside servers that would be susceptible to man in the middle attacks.
But she did hit the jackpot on this, people are pissed off with lack of accountability, transparency, obvious attempts of deceit and security issues. Hard to run for president and claim these are things you care about when people just need to point to her personal email account while secretary of state. Someone must have told her this was a bad idea, I think shes about to get a very long lecture on why.
Looks like a lot less here than meets the eye
:[quote] The new regs apparently weren’t fully implemented by State until a year and half after Clinton left State. Here’s the timeline: Clinton left the State Department on February 1, 2013. Back in 2011, President Obama had signed a memorandum directing the update of federal records management. But the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) didn’t issue the relevant guidance, declaring that email records of senior government officials are permanent federal records, until August 2013. Then, in September 2013, NARA issued guidance on personal email use.
[/quote]
Then, in October 2014, the rules were applied to the State Department. No SoS before John Kerry used a gov. email address
[quote] 1. Clinton was not the first Secretary to use a private email account. In fact, John Kerry is the first Secretary to use “a standard government email address,” according to The Washington Post.
Clinton turned over her emails to the State Department. It’s not clear whether her predecessors did the same.
The Times article says the “existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi.” This is incorrect. Gawker reported this first, in March 2013.
At the time Clinton was Secretary, the Federal Records Act didn’t require federal employees to use government accounts, only to preserve records of their communications. This, Clinton seems to have done.[/quote] thedailybeast.com/articles/2 … -fast.html
And, as the writer points out, if the NYT is accusing Clinton of breaking actual regulations, why didn’t they mention the date those rules came into effect?
[quote]Clinton still has some questions to answer, two that I can think of: Why did she not take a state.gov address? And is the Times accurate in writing that “her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act”? If she can’t put forward persuasive answers to these two questions, then there may still be something here.
But the Times has some questions to answer to: Did you know that the new regs went into effect after Clinton left office? And if you didn’t, why not? And if you did, why did you leave that fact out of the story? One can imagine Clinton coming up with decent answers to her questions, but it’s kind of hard to see how the Times can. [/quote]
Her doubling down and insisting she did nothing wrong won’t stand the test of time. She may have found a legal loophole that got plugged after she left office and probably is not going to be found having done anything illegal. But everyone, even the young turks in Chris’s video know what she did was wrong. Some articles like this are suggesting what she did was illegal. Yes, Hillary Clinton Broke the Law But I suspect she would argue she was preserving the records so didn’t break the law and apparently has now handed over a ton of them, so that should be that.
However, there are a bunch of FOIA outstanding on Hillarys emails, they never got anywhere, because the Government didnt have her emails. Now the only one who knows if the full information that should rightfully be disclosed under a FOIA is Hillary. There's a reason a Federal Records act exists, in no small part because people have a right to know what government elected representatives are doing and to provide oversight.
Here's Jay Carney from 2011 telling all the reporters how everyone knows to use government email accounts for official purposes. Hillary is screwed if she admits wrong doing, screwed if she doesn't.
This is, or at least should be an issue, and not just another Fox news canard - after all, the Bush administration was criticized for non-transparent use of e-mail, and those who criticized the Bush administration at the time should also criticize Clinton if she’s guilty of the same thing.
Vox, which generally is on the liberal side of things, has a moderate-lengthed piece on this; they’ve also got another article that digs a little deeper into the comparison with the Bush years.
As much as anything, it’s making me very worried about the near-total lack of a Clinton alternative on the Democratic side.
Everyone is the US government does it. It is rampant. If they prosecute her, then they will need to prosecute 10’s of thousands of others doing the same thing including Congress. What she did isn’t “illegal”. Maybe she didn’t follow guidance, but that doesn’t make it illegal.
The law says records must be preserved. There’s no evidence she didn’t preserve every record so it’s hard to see how this could be interpreted as illegal. If the law said she must use a gov’t email account, then it would be illegal. This is very simple. What the National Review article basically says is that since HRC can’t prove she saved every e-mail, she must have broken the law. Last time I checked, that’s not how the legal system works. Compare this to the Lerner e-mails at the irs, which was obviously breaking the law. I would say its not transparent and typical Clinton behavior, but not illegal and won’t hurt her candidacy. I think she’s a snake but there’s not much here to make me dislike her more.
Is there a more succinct way to illustrate just how truly fucked the political scene is in the US? The phrase “could this be toast for her Presidential ambitions” being connected to email address usage?
Is there a more succinct way to illustrate just how truly fucked the political scene is in the US? The phrase “could this be toast for her Presidential ambitions” being connected to email address usage? [/quote]
I think I will not weigh in too heavily yet and wait and see how this plays out. But, interestingly, it was MSNBC that covered this more than CNN and Fox. Seems to me not everyone on the left has got the memo about her shoo in for Democratic candidate for president.
Is there a more succinct way to illustrate just how truly fucked the political scene is in the US? The phrase “could this be toast for her Presidential ambitions” being connected to email address usage? [/quote]
I think I will not weigh in too heavily yet and wait and see how this plays out. But, interestingly, it was MSNBC that covered this more than CNN and Fox. Seems to me not everyone on the left has got the memo about her shoo in for Democratic candidate for president.[/quote]
Obviously politics has always been a big game, but the game is becoming so comical at this point that people actually care about email usage? And I thought the Obama college transcript thing was absurd, this is on a whole other level…
[quote=“BrentGolf”]
Obviously politics has always been a big game, but the game is becoming so comical at this point that people actually care about email usage? And I thought the Obama college transcript thing was absurd, this is on a whole other level…[/quote]
She was head of the State Department making decisions related to Libya, Iraq, Iran. Taking to heads of state, theres a reason for an official records act, people have a right to ask questions and file FOIA requests. As Judicial watch, AP and Gawker did and congressional committees. Only to be told nothing could be found. Truthfully, the state department didn’t have the documents, because they were sitting on Clintons server at home. She was concealing them, for over 6 years, all 4 years she was in office and for 2 more after she left. Even now, we only have her word for it that they were all turned over.
She set up this server, the same day she took office. Never set up a .gov account and she knew, since she blasted Bush for having a secret email account 2 years earlier, that all state employees, including her were supposed to conduct business on an official account, and if personal email had to be used, and she knew any use of it was frowned upon, it should be forwarded to the .gov account for official record keeping purposes.
