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Clinton Regrets, But Defends, Use of Family Email Server
dcblogs writes: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that, in hindsight, her decision to use a private email server to conduct official business was not the best one. But she is defending it and said the system was secure. Clinton, at news conference in New York, said the email server that she used had been set up for former President Bill Clinton. The system had "numerous safeguards" and is on home property protected by the U.S. Secret Service, she said. "There were no security breaches," said Clinton. "I think the use of that server, which started with my husband, proved to be effective and secure," she said. It still remains unclear about just how appropriate Clinton's system was. As a general rule, government IT policies don't give federal employees the option of using their own email accounts to exclusively conduct government business.
it will begin the death-rattle of the Democratic party. Progressives see through her like a dirty window.
What surprises me is that (while the concerns about discovery, transparency, and national archive access are relevant and important, and not clearly satisfied by this arrangement) there hasn't been more discussion of the security and handling-of-classified-materials aspect.
I get the impression that the Secretary of State likely deals with sensitive materials at work from time to time. I similarly get the impression that, if somebody with access to classified material were discovered to have taken a huge pile of it home and stored it in their garage, they might face some rather unpleasant questions and some...'career limitations' in the future.
Even if she is being 100% forthright with the National Archives, and absolutely everything there is on the up and up; in what sense didn't she have a big pile of classified documents just stored at home under who-knows-what security protocols implemented by god-knows-who? Are you actually allowed to do that? Do only little contractors get squished? What's the deal?
If the Clintons are known for anything, it is their ability to craft a message and stay on message. Remember, "It's the economy, stupid!"? The entire group is known for being able to quickly respond with a wall of on-message response to any crisis.
Yet in this case we had radio silence for a week, followed by this evasive and strange defense.
She repeated this a couple of times. It surprises me that none of the nerds here have picked up on this. She didn't want to have to carry two phones, so she used her personal email account. Nobody at her press conference thought to raise their hand and say "Uhm, excuse me..... but, you can have more than one email account on your phone."
We have Bill Clinton's people claiming that he's only sent two emails in his life just a couple of days ago, then she goes out and claims that the email server was set up for him, and she had to delete more than half of the email on the server because it was personal, stuff between her and her husband. Yikes. This is not the Clinton machine we are used to.
In the 90's the message was tight, and if facts were uncovered that contradicted the message then the whole team changed messages at the same time. They need to step up their game....
This sort of thing isn't unprecedented, the Bush White House had a policy of issuing important staffers two Blackberries, one that had a whitehouse.gov email and one that had a gop.org email, and using both systems indifferently for communication.
I sorta don't care in either place, at least from an ethics perspective, since all emails ever seem to do is trigger dopey years-long investigations and pseudo-controversies about the parsing of language and people going off half-cocked. Case in point: Benghazi.
On the other hand, I'd rather not people like this be president of the United States. I think Lindsey Graham has the right idea, if you're an official person, NEVER USE EMAIL. Write official documents carefully, or just call someone.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It is illegal to have classified information on a private e-mail server. The notion that she never sent or received classified information in six years is laughable.
Maybe the part about "I deleted all the unimportant emails. Trust me" part?
I can't wait to hear what happens when forensics gets to their machines and hopefully finds tons and tons of illegal activity.
No person should ever be allowed to do this, especially someone who doesn't understand the impact of doing this from a technology perspective and only from a political one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... , though in that case the email was hosted by the Republican National Committee.
I'm generally a Clinton supporter, and I'm really unhappy with the email thing. But it is the same as has been done before and will be done again.
Not to worry though, I'm sure that we'll have EVEN MORE investigations into this than we had into Benghazi, with the exact same results.
Destruction or attempting to hide federal records (which all SoS emails are) has always been illegal (since the 50's or so). The more recent law changes were more to clarify how records were to be archived (set a max 20 day limit on external records being transferred to your agencies official archiving system for example).
Her use of a private email account is also not illegal although it violated a State policy in place before she took office, but even when using private email all records are required to be turned over for archiving.
So she's not in violation of the 20 day law, since it was passed after her time in office, but she is in violation of the original law requiring all records be archived. Her only defense was that it took her team 2 years to finalize their archiving plan and they were just about to start when they happened to get subpoenaed. So far she has not shown any archiving plan was ever in place.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!