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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."
This seems indicative of sense that the rules do not apply to me.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Did I win?
So exactly what shady deals has she been concocting with her rich chums then? And leaving no email trail?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Do you know what will happen to her? Not. A. God. Damn. Thing.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Sorry but "the shitstorm will be her punishment" isn't acceptable.
The rules are there for data retention and accountability purposes.
Didn't we learn ANYTHING from the whole Lois Lerner debacle?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
From the 'liberal' media of CNN, the Washington Post and Huffington post this morning.
Now I'm no fan of the Clintons, but if you don't see a coordination job then you're either a Fox news watcher or a Lotus eater ;)
Unlike poor Karl Rove who is rotting in jail for doing the very same thing, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy
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?
Who will apply the law to her? Her political allies in the DOJ? Who will look into it? Her political allies in the press?
When someone can never be held accountable, aren't they above the law?
Tomorrow: Everyone who wants her to follow the rules: sexists. They just don't like women in power.
The Bush White House email controversy surfaced in 2007 during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an email server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act. Over 5 million emails may have been lost or deleted. Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove lost emails, leading to damaging allegations. In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been deleted.
The administration officials had been using a private Internet domain, called gwb43.com, owned by and hosted on an email server run by the Republican National Committee, for various communications of unknown content or purpose. The domain name is an acronym standing for "George W. Bush, 43rd" President of the United States. The server came public when it was discovered that J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs, was using a gwb43.com email address to discuss the firing of the U.S. attorney for Arkansas. Communications by federal employees were also found on georgewbush.com (registered to "Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.") and rnchq.org (registered to "Republican National Committee"), but, unlike these two servers, gwb43.com has no Web server connected to it — it is used only for email.
The "gwb43.com" domain name was publicized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who sent a letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee committee chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation. Waxman sent a formal warning to the RNC, advising them to retain copies of all emails sent by White House employees. According to Waxman, "in some instances, White House officials were using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications." The Republican National Committee claims to have erased the emails, supposedly making them unavailable for Congressional investigators.
On April 12, 2007, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that White House staffers were told to use RNC accounts to "err on the side of avoiding violations of the Hatch Act, but they should also retain that information so it can be reviewed for the Presidential Records Act," and that "some employees ... have communicated about official business on those political email accounts." Stanzel also said that even though RNC policy since 2004 has been to retain all emails of White House staff with RNC accounts, the staffers had the ability to delete the email themselves.
There once was a senator from mass.
Who went out in search for a piece of asd
Lucked up and found it
But fucked up and drowned it
Even that didn't end his ass.
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.
Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.
When the people at the highest levels of power decide that the law doesn't apply to them, nothing at all happens.
So, on behalf of the rest of the world ... when the political leaders ignore the law and face no consequences, the rest of us want to send a big collective "fuck you".
This has nothing to do with her politics. If Bush or Cheney had done this, we'd want them prosecuted as well.
Laws which are selectively applied are crap. Assholes in power who believe the law doesn't apply to them need to be punished.
These laws exist so there is a public record of activities, not some place where you can sidestep that and conduct business elsewhere away from oversight.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You are glad that someone as seasoned at breaking the rules in technology is doing so? That sounds like a great thing to me. Here we go, here are more Government idiots who know how to use technology and will make sure that they have zero accountability! I am glad that the monkeys at the top finally learned the basics of interwebz 101 and know how to cover their tracks. We wouldn't want our Government officials to be held accountable now, would we?
I think you have misinterpreted the rules a bit. Campaigning and party activity are prohibited with government resources.
The President and Cabinet sending emails on implementing political goals are permitted activities. Sending emails about ?NC platform discussions are not permitted.
When I went through ethics training with the GC, it was very clear what was and was not permissible. From the GC point of view, the default was use goverment email and save every email.
I can see the desire, particularly at the executive level, not to leave a record because policy formulation can be a messy activity. However, I'm not sure that is the motivation in this case. First, there is no control over the retention of the other end and, second, a lot discussion happens on the classified side.
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.
Since the CIA monitors government email and the NSA monitors private email, I don't really think this is a security issue.
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"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken
"RULES?" Come on. If I kill someone I'm not "breaking the rules," I am breaking the LAW.
Likewise, this is Federal Law.
At least the apologists at the NY Times are out in force here to minimize it.
It will be an interesting exercise to compare the Bush Whitehouse Email Controversy' with Hilary's erupting email 'scandal'
Ken
After some quick digging, this appears to be the law broken:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Basically, she was required by law to archive her communications on federal servers. She did not.
Also of note, according to TSG she forwarded classified intelligence Emails to Sidney Blumenthal, who was not a federal employee.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/d...
Then there is the whole Fucking Common Sense thing about Government Employees using Government emails to discuss Government business.
Seems like it's a good opportunity to create a new, well deserved law that any correspondence about government business, policy or even what color you want your office painted needs to be done on a government email account.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
AND remember the liberal democrat cries about Sarah Palin's alleged use of private email for public use (until it was hacked and nothing was found) ??
Yeah, the same people who were screaming lunatic mad about that, are the same ones suddenly silent here. Those people need to be "named and shamed".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
So, I'd like to see the text of the "rule" saying she needed to use a .gov account before saying she broke the law. (People seem to be referring to the 2013 National Archives and Records Administration guidance as the "rules", but 2013 was after she left office.)
After some quick digging, this appears to be the law broken:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Basically, she was required by law to archive her communications on federal servers. She did not.
The link you give says nothing of the sort. The link states that a government may require an ISP to archive e-mail subject to a subpoena.
That has precisely nothing to do with State Department employees, nor does it say anything whatsoever about what e-mail addresses they use.
Also of note, according to TSG she forwarded classified intelligence Emails to Sidney Blumenthal, who was not a federal employee.
That is a great example of "ABCs"-- Argument By Changing the subject.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So releasing secure documents to someone outside of government is not "illegal"?
You really believe that?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.