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Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email At State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, according to State Department officials. She may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business," said attorney Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the "letter and spirit of the rules."
Not really. The really one remaining significant difference between the parties is that public shaming is still a career-ender in the Democratic party. There's no post-scandal career phase as an evangelical preacher, Fox news commentator, or both waiting for guys like Anthony Wiener or William J. Jefferson (the freezer cash guy).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
She must have sent a huge number of e-mails to 1000's of people. Didn't someone notice that the e-mails were from hillary@gmail.com instead of hillary@state.gov?
If I got an email from her dealing with official business, I would have questioned why it wasn't from a "real" e-mail address - as in whitehouse.gov or whatever.
Why didn't anyone say something sooner? Didn't someone suspect her emails the same way I would suspect an e-mail from a Nigerian prince needing help?
...and I'll bet pretty much any ranking politician does much the same, and thinks along the same lines - in any party, in any country, in any system of governance.
If I'm honest, I reckon to be a politician of any note, you pretty much have to be a bit under-handed from time to time, and you pretty much have to push the rules to their limits. If you just want to be a local politician, or even maybe a national politician that doesn't do much more than that (what we call 'back bench' here in the UK) then you can probably be fairly noble, if you really want to be. If you've got any sort of ambition though, then you've got to 'play the game' considerably harder than that, and so pushing boundaries of the rules/decency/morality start to become more of a requirement.
I've heard it said that we get the type of candidates for political office that we do because the system is not attractive to good and noble candidates.
It also rings true that we have lowered the bar of expectation with regard to decency and morality from our politicians.
Fortunately, we can both still vote in our respective nations to change this perversion. FWIW, there are many candidates for the upcoming presidential vacancy I would be less pleased to see in power than Mrs. Clinton.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But NONE of the government recipients or people who used to be in government notified any authorities in the US Government that Hillary was violating the rules that they had to follow. So are they all complicit in breaking the law?
Given that private email accounts are not likely secure, how is it that other government official would send sensitive and sometimes secret materials to a private email account of Hillary's. That would also make any government official who sent official emails to Hillary guilty for not following the law.
Just another example of the fact we must follow the law or get hammered by government departments, but when the Clinton's violate law, it's just time for another spin job from Bill & Hillary: "What difference does it make?" with arms raised and screeching. God help the US.
That may surprise people here. The Republicans have done a good job painting her as the quintessential ultra-liberal Democrat, but really she is no such thing. She is, in fact, from the right wing of the party and could have been an establishment Republican a generation ago. She is widely reviled by the left over her vote on the Iraq War Authorization of Military Force (although to be fair, Joe Biden voted for it too and he's seen as generally reliable on liberal issues, as long as he doesn't open his mouth).
On the other hand she's the first really plausible female presidential candidate for a major party, and I think a lot of people who want to see that milestone project a great deal of their hopes on her. But what makes her plausible in the first place is her acceptability to the establishment.
And what makes her acceptable to the establishment is her competence and personal accomplishments; being married to Bill helps. But the Ivy League education, experience in high profile NGOs and partnership in a major law firm mean she's seen as serious by "serious people". But in this case that should be held against her here. She's not like old Uncle Joe (Biden), whose heart is in the right place but who the hell can tell where his mind might go a-wandering; Hillary is someone you expect to have her head in the game. She knew damn well that conducting official business on non-government servers is exactly what people do when they're breaking the law.
I'm neither a Hillary partisan nor a Hillary hater. On the political spectrum I tend to fall a little to the right of the most vocal Democratic base and to the left of the establishment "DLC" wing that dominates the party at the national level. When the Secretary of State does something this fishy, that's a big deal. I think there should be something like a special prosecutor appointed, even though when the words "Clinton" and "special prosecutor" are uttered in the sentence the word "circus" can't be far behind. But then if the special prosecutor finds no indictable offense I'd be happy with that result.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This seems indicative of sense that the rules do not apply to me.
Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this. There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.
Plus, they've known that Clinton's been doing this since the Benghazi investigation, when Clinton staffers rifled through those personal email accounts to provide 50,000 messages for the investigation team. That this issue makes headline news now, the day after she officially announces her presidential election campaign, is pure politics to control the narrative.
Yeah, not really possible to put politics aside for the moment, since that's exactly what this is.
95% of the public won't even remember this incident come election time. And odds are more people will end up voting for her since she has no records from when she was in Government service. Its kind of hard to paint the opposite side as bad or terrible when there is no absolutely zero record of what she actually did...and you can bet that her political operators will go out of the way to find embarassing stories about her opposition....
And so as most modern liberal candidates go, she will win simply because she voted present for long enough in the pillars of power.
That is what Obama has taught us anyway. The real route to power in this country is having no records except being present, and saying the right stuff while having a surplus of charisma....and than destroying your opposition through personal attack. The end result is that everyone who is elected is nothing short of a psychopath without any morality. Everyone else gets destroyed and has their friends and families targeted by political operators. What kind of normal person would knowingly subject such attacks to their own family and friends? Yep, you guessed it. Which is what we get as a country.
And so, while we think we have the right to select candidates and to elect who we want, the truth is that the media has already decided in most cases who will win based on what stories they publish and on which page.
The American experiment therefore is to see how well psychopaths can run a country. My guess is that it will last two generations before the people finally get fed up and string whoever is in power at that time up and we than have another revolution. It will happen eventually...
I've heard it said that we get the type of candidates for political office that we do because the system is not attractive to good and noble candidates.
It's not just us. Plato raised this as a general problem in ancient Greece. Good people-- the kind of people we should want to be in a position of power-- are quite possibly never the people who are lusting to put themselves into a position of power. That's the one-sentence summary of "The Republic".
This seems indicative of sense that the rules do not apply to me.
Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this.
That's a broad and largely inaccurate statement.
A lot of them will care very much, but not enough to vote for a candidate with much more serious flaws.
I highly doubt it, her cult of personality is too big. Articles defending her using the tu quoque defense are already popping up. Hillary Clinton could tap dance in stilettos on a box full of puppies and PETA would praise her for mercifully saving them from a life of enslavement. If you really cared, you would simply abstain from voting for that particular office. A vote for the lesser of two evils is still evil. If the only choices I had for 2016 were Clinton or Bush, I wouldn't vote for either.
There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.
What does this have to do with Benghazi? If anything there's a major difference in that Clinton actually did something wrong in this one.
The point isn't whether she did something wrong or not, the point was there will be very few people talking about this in the future, regardless of her actions. The media will quite simply ignore this because they will be in the tank for Hillary the way they were for Obama in 2008 & 2012. I didn't vote for Obama, but I was actually glad that he got elected in 2008, because that meant that neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain would be president.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It will be an interesting exercise to compare the Bush Whitehouse Email Controversy' with Hilary's erupting email 'scandal'
Ken
Setting aside completely whether I agree or disagree with your main point, I have to take exception with your assertion that "if you don't deploy you aren't real military anyway." Truth is, "real military" goes when and where "real military" is ordered to go, and does whatever job "real military" is assigned to do. If one spends one's tour in CONUS exclusively at a supply depot or on some administrative staff, it's because that's where Uncle Sam orders one, and that's where one contributes to overall national security. (I say this, by the way, from the perspective of one who has deployed operationally many, many, times over a military career spanning three decades -- no offense meant, just a pet peeve).