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Criminal Inquiry Sought Over Hillary Clinton's Personal Email Server
cold fjord writes: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Inspectors General from the State Department and intelligence agencies have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server while she was U.S. Secretary of State. At issue is the possible mishandling of sensitive government information. Dozens of the emails provided by Hillary Clinton have been retroactively classified as part of the review of her emails as they are screened for public release. So far 3,000 of 55,000 emails have been released. The inspectors general found hundreds of potentially classified emails. "The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. ... The inspectors general also criticized the State Department for its handling of sensitive information, particularly its reliance on retired senior Foreign Service officers to decide if information should be classified, and for not consulting with the intelligence agencies about its determinations."
Felons are barred from running for the office of President, correct?
You can be a lawyer who has been disbarred, though.
exchange
We can expect a zealous investigation of these allegations against Hillary by the Obama Justice Department. Not.
Obviously if you investigate far enough into this, you will eventually find the email between Hillary, Obama, and ISIS that orders the attack on Benghazi. It's in there, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This one is going to generate a thoughtful, nuanced discussion.
What difference does it make?
Everywhere I've been it depends on who is in charge as to whether something is classified or not.
In the state department, at that time, that person would have been Clinton; NOT the NSA or CIA.
The only rules possibly violated have more to do with to officials records act.
This is more likely misdemeanor mishandling of classified information. She should have and probably did know that people would be emailing her and she would be emailing them about things that were classified. The likelihood of contamination was very high. As demonstrated by the hundreds of emails found to contain classified information that were on her home server.
is she was ordered to give up her email to investigators. She gave them some of the mail and deleted the rest.
Whether we'd actually done anything wrong or not, if one of us little people had pulled such a stunt we'd be rotting in jail awaiting trial for destroying evidence, not running for president.
Releasing sensitive government email to the public should be a felony!
Huh? The Snowden guy is practically nominated for a Turing Award on this board every time his name comes up in the TFS, which is more than once a week.
Government or private servers, I don't think it is allowed/advisable to send confidential or top secret information by email... While a certain level of privacy can be expected in email communications, all parties must be comfortable with the content being made public. If not don't use email.
Ask yourself: "What would happen if I were employed in the federal government and mishandled government data in this same manner?"
I have a feeling the answer would be much harsher than what Hillary will get.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
"It is better to ask forgivness than permission."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I personally process and load emails for law firms to review.
I can tell you the following:
Hillary's actions were legal at the time and followed all the rules.
They were also unethical.
The rules have now been changed, so that what she did would now be against the rules.
Her emails almost certainly contain nothing incriminating. She is a smart women that has a lot of experience dealing with scandals and knows exactly what not to do.
They probably contain something personally embarrassing - at least a little bit. Anyone that's ever looked over people's emails know you see stuff - dirty jokes, inappropriate websites, angry emails with profanity, etc. Remember it's not just what she wrote but what other people's wrote to her.
It's obvious why she did what she did. But it's also obvious that if she were of stronger moral character, she would not have done it. She would have taken the slight chance that someone would find something embarrassing and accepted it as part of being a political figure. Because the coverup is always worse than the crime - even when no crime was committed. By giving her enemies this opportunity - where she ACTUALLY did something unethical - she has taken more damage than anything they were likely to have done by uncovering whatever they could find.
The way I understand it, the classification of information is the executive branch's prerogative. The President or the people he designate decide what is classified. If things are being classified retroactively, they are being classified under power Congress gave to the executive branch. That's fine, but it doesn't change what was classified yesterday. And it doesn't mean Hillary did anything wrong yesterday. Because in the US, information is not classified by default.
Let's be honest here, the only people mishandling sensitive material is the current government. Clinton wasn't hacked, but our Governments has been. She hasn't leaked any info out while our current government has. While what she did might of been wrong, it seems her stuff was in better hand then others. Not to mention the CIA spying on the Senate and other members of our Government.
If you want a safe mail server, you have to host it yourself.
Be seeing you...
4 legs bad 2 legs better!
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
Anything she gets will likely be harsher than Karl Rove managed to get for outing Valerie Plame.
All of this has been done before. Complete BS if she gets harsher treatment than the previous administration. I agree that we need to clamp down on the problem, but some retro activity would be nice as well.
Place something witty here
From what I've heard, and it's not like I'm following it closely, Hillary was not given an email address by the government (using the general term). So she continued to use her own.
Why isn't the investigation into how someone got appointed Secretary of State and no one thought to create an email account? The fact that months in nobody said "Hey, why doesn't she have an email account?" strikes me as odd. That no one sending her emails rose a red flag saying "why don't you have a government email?" strikes me as even more odd. This seems like a colossal IT failure and taking it out on the user is asinine. Of course, it seems to me that she also failed to request a government email box.
For all the buzz that Republicans are making such a fuss about this email failure I would like to remind you about the W. flub where the white house IT said "oops, we can't retrieve old emails".
I refuse to sign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy
But this was perfectly ok.
I'm pretty sure that destroying data that has been subpoenaed by Congress is not a misdemeanor.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Even if none of individual emails was classified, the aggregate of them was,
This is one of the weakest attempts to sully her name since the Benghazi stuff.
Under Bush hundreds of thousands of e-mails were routinely destroyed that pertained to 9/11, terrorism, torture, and violation of rights. No investigations, nothing came of it. This was stuff we knew was important.
But now, watch out, Hillary may have mixed personal and job-related communication. Now we gotta investigate.
Fucking Republicans.
Actually, Richard Armitage outed Plame.
Wrongs have been done before no doubt but the scale of this one was much larger than anything previously done that I've heard about. Rather than justifying the present with the past how about we tighten the rules, not loosen then. I'm 100% sure if any of us had done this we would be in jail forever. When a political elite does it it's fine. This shouldn't be a D vs R type debate where my guy is bad but not as bad as your guy (or gal in this case). How about we make this about anyone breaking rules, D or R, gets punished.
I doubt Hillary will get anything, as this is 100% politically motivated. I know of a much more serious case that resulted in nothing more than a hand slap, if you can even call the resulting action "punishment" at all. What might happen is something that should have happened 20 years ago - all official government communications will be handled via government owned devices and services, after which using private devices for government communications will be a violation.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Anything she gets will likely be harsher than Karl Rove managed to get for outing Valerie Plame.
All of this has been done before. Complete BS if she gets harsher treatment than the previous administration. I agree that we need to clamp down on the problem, but some retro activity would be nice as well.
So basically what you're saying is that you'd like to see the Obama Administration sink the same level as the Bush Administration when administering justice? Wouldn't it be better if Obama's Justice Department did the right thing and set the bar high for future administrations? Or is this just a case of "Their team got the kid gloves treatment, so mine should get it as well?"
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I work for a defense company subject to ITAR regulations.
If I did what she did, I'd be fired...escorted out by security.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Late Thursday night, the Times published a story claiming that the Justice Department had been asked "to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account," only to quietly change the story to say that the Justice Department had been asked "to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used." As in, the story changed from being about a potential criminal investigation into Clinton's conduct to being about a potential criminal investigation into the mishandling of sensitive information by ... someone not named. "
So, haven't you guys learned yet to ignore mass media reporting when it involves a Clinton? It's almost like someone with billions of dollars has been trying to smear the leading Democratic candidate for a few years now.
The Internet has no garbage collection
Alanis Morissette, is that you?
This is a politically motivated, but very necessary,
move on the part Obama during an election year.
Such a parade of ignorance.
Go figure the AC was the one to get it right.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status.” But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07...
Everything that was on that server was for use by Hillary Clinton. At no time was information leaked to the public. She had the classification for the information. If the material was 'classified' and she shouldn't have seen it, then it shouldn't have been sent to her. There is no data breach, but there is a lot of hand waving by a lot of people who like to wave their hands. The only people saying "Oh my Gosh" are people who like to say "Oh my Gosh". She has a right to privacy, it was her server. She can take off the private stuff if she wants. The government stuff is probably classified. Yup. Given the track record of the NSA and other agencies, I wouldn't be surprised if the data was *more* secure on her server. To be redundant, the people who are wringing their hands over this, are people who like to wring their hands. "The mens room is out of paper towels! Oh my Gosh! *wrings wet hands*."
I doubt Hillary will get anything, as this is 100% politically motivated.
The only way I could see this as being politically motivated is if Hillary asked the Obama Administration to launch an inquiry in order to find her 100% clear of the charges, so as to remove that bugbear from the debate in the future.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Dozens of the emails provided by Hillary Clinton have been retroactively classified as part of the review of her emails as they are screened for public release.
Nice. Retroactively classify information, then open a criminal inquiry over the release of classified information.
Absolutely no political motivation behind this witch hunt-- I mean investigation.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Ask yourself: "What would happen if I were employed in the federal government and mishandled government data in this same manner?"
First and foremost, you would lose your security clearance and would never again be eligible for one. That alone would end any career in federal government. That's not even counting the criminal aspect of violating laws on record retention, and never mind if there is anything classified sitting on her home server.
Of course her and Bill's ties to the massive foreign donors of the Clinton foundation would be an immediate disqualification for any position of public trust. And the favorable decisions made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton towards those donors should be prosecuted immediately. But it won't.
Imagine the liberties she'd take as POTUS...the horror.
Similar to sibling, I have previously worked for a defense contractor, subject to similar regulations... and among my duties, I was the primary sysadmin on the email MTAs (both the company and the DoD/DLA-owned ones).
If I would have merely seen someone in the company do what the Clintons did, and had not reported it? I would have immediately lost my IT-1 clearance, gotten fired on the spot, my employer would have probably been kicked off the contract, then we'd both be blacklisted from any further DoD consideration.
If I had done it myself? Getting fired would have been the least of my worries.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Obviously the Justice Department is being entirely political on this matter. So one wonders is there no other arm of justice in this entire country with standing to bring charges or an investigation into this matter, or will politics trump justice in all matters that raise to the level of interest by the President of the United States? It is a simple question. Is there any answer besides, "it's politics, stuff it?"
Huh?
The Rethuglikans are freaking out about Hillary. Absolutely losing their shit in a big way.
They can only stand up these 16 clowns, and the lead bozo is Trump.
Of course they are going to pull the stops out in every way they can to try to trip her up (except field a viable candidate).
I'm not thrilled with her as a default choice either, mostly because she is so hated by the Party of No that they will make Obama's impediment-ridden tenure look like a polite disagreement between librarians.
Hilarious. The lack of knowledge present here is remarkable.
Nor is blatantly ignoring records retention laws.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I liked Shrillary better back when she was letting interns do her real job for her.
This post would mean a lot more if the OP had gotten his their facts correct. Karl Rove didn't get kid gloves treatment. He didn't break the law or out anybody.
ITAR blows. I have to deal with it as well.
Its screw cap is loose and its conjunction fallacy got spilled everywhere.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
When I got clearance I was told by a rent-a-cop functionary in no uncertain terms that I would go to jail if caught misusing classified information. I wonder how he would react if I suggested I use my personal email address? What Hillary did is a blatant crime.
You are naive. The kind of equality you seek (the aristocrats held to the same standard as the proles) will *never* be achieved. That is simply not how humans do things.
It would make sense for justice to be blind to social status if humans actually were all equals. And maybe they are, in your opinion. But one thing all aristocrats agree on, regardless of political persuasion, is that proles are a lower class of humanity. Aristocrats will *never* see proles as their equals, and will *never* agree that the same standards of justice should be applied in both cases. They will also be completely intransigent on their evaluation of the moral status of harming proles vs harming other aristocrats (it is far more evil to harm an aristocrat than it is to harm large groups of proles, for any kind of harm you can think of).
That is how they see the world. Any one of them that speaks contrary to this is just playing to a crowd. Also, they (unlike you) have the wealth and power to ensure that their world view guides the creation and enforcement of the law, not yours.
This is the reality we face. You can talk all you want about how wrong it is and how we should change it, but the fact is we can't change it. We can only adapt to it and figure out how to thrive within it. Reality is not negotiable.
"How about we make this about anyone breaking rules, D or R, gets punished."
Looks like that may yet happen in this instance.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Since we know that none of the Clintons have the skills to run their own email server, we need to get the administrator of the email server in to testify. He needs to publicly admit before the world that he was so incredibly incompetent that there are no backups of the server.
Congresscritter: Just to clarify, you're the person who managed the Clinton's email server?
Admin: Yes.
Congresscritter: Could you please supply the committee with backups of the email server?
Admin: There aren't any.
Congresscritter: Again, just to clarify... You're actually an IT professional?
Admin: Yes
Congresscritter: And you're going to go on record, to say that this email server was not backed up?
Admin: Yes.
Congresscritter: You realize Mrs. Clinton was a senior administration official whose duties involve, among other things, negotiations with foreign governments?
Admin: uh....yes
Congresscritter: And what would you have done if, during negotiations, the hard disk on this computer had crashed, completely wiping out her email?
Admin: uh....
Congresscritter: So you're going to state, for the record before the world that as an IT professional, you're completely and utterly incompetent?
Admin: I'm not incompetent
Congresscritter: Then provide us with the backups.
This is an ex-parrot!
Scooter Libby got 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service.
Fair? Will Hillary face the statutory minimums for her transgressions?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You are correct in that I would like to see both administrations take some heat over their actions. As radical as the idea is, I feel both Administrations should have to answer for war crimes.
I still feel that under the current Administration, the adage goes, if the they did it, I can too. That seems to be Obama's mantra so far. I feel an election of Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton will be a continuation of this idea.
Place something witty here
I'm sick of seeing Hilary as an election trojan horse for the Democrats. I'll be glad if the DoJ launches an investigation on emailgate. If they find something that kills her candidacy, best do it before the Democrat National Convention. If not, there's no chance any Republican in the clown car will beat Hilary.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
That we have a choice of either Hillary Clinton OR a rag-tag group of nincompoop Republicans for president?
What a joke.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
So, you could have Hilary Clinton vs Donald Trump.
That's a really crap choice isn't it.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
She was Secretary of State for 4 years, and before that a Senator for 8 years, and in all that time NOBODY noticed that emails came from (and went to) a non-government address? And nobody said anything about it? Even assuming that most of the elected officials have less of a clue than the average citizen ("It's a series of tubes!"), they know about handling classified material, because they get lectured about it every year. And nobody seemed to think there was a problem all that time.
They were all just repeating rumors that were flying all over the Beltway.
How about we make this about anyone breaking rules, D or R, gets punished.
You simply cannot, not without bringing down the entire system. It is the very foundation of wealth/power. The bible passage speaks the truth: *Let the first who is without sin...*
Let's not worry about Hillary. I'm sure she prefers to take over Kissinger's spot anyway and work the next six presidencies at the state dinners, and she won't have to deal with the press.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...ou'd like to see the Obama Administration sink the same level as the Bush Administration when administering justice?
He passed that level a long time ago. The bankers he has in his cabinet should be in jail. I am surprised the revolving door hasn't spun off its hinges.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's largely because you need the best lawyers to navigate the complicated legal process. Only the wealthy and connected can afford the best lawyers.
In general, the laws governing this appear to be vague*, potentially contradictory, written by technically clueless lawyers, and interpreted by technically clueless judges. There's a lot of wiggle-room for interpretation, and the best lawyers can leverage that wiggle room to their advantage.
If you get a cheap lawyer, like the rest of us would have to, then the other side can use that fuzzy wiggle room against our C-grade lawyer, and we end up in jail with a cellmate named "Bubba".
* I've yet to see one clear-cut law that nails Mrs. C., despite lofty claims otherwise.
Table-ized A.I.
Seeing as they both ran email outside of the official email server as well.
Bull. The retention laws were vague.
I agree she exercised poor judgement in this regard, but "illegal" has yet to be established.
Table-ized A.I.
Well we don't get to vote for federal employees, only for elected offices. (hence the name)
The will of the voters should probably trump your perception of fairness.
That said, I would recommend that people not vote for a scofflaw as the leader of the free world.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
DID YOU READ?
RETROACTIVELY CLASSIFIED!
means she committed no crime at all.
Another desperate attempt to stop the inevitable.
As for State failing to let the Pentagon classify EVERYTHING, I think we understand the divergent needs to support the different missions.
Lie. he coordinated the crime of Conspiracy
(the aristocrats held to the same standard as the proles) will *never* be achieved.
French Revolution?
Let's at least prosecute in chronological order. Cheney first!
Will of the voters, you say? Elections in the US do not provide us with that information. People don't want to throw away their vote, so most vote against the worst instead of for the best.
I suggest watching some of this series: http://www.cgpgrey.com/politic...
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Anything she gets will likely be harsher than Karl Rove managed to get for outing Valerie Plame.
All of this has been done before. Complete BS if she gets harsher treatment than the previous administration. I agree that we need to clamp down on the problem, but some retro activity would be nice as well.
User 1 makes a statement that points out an injustice committed by a candidate of Political Party "A".
User 2 jumps in to claim that Political Party "B" had a worse injustice.
This situation plays out the same in comment threads across the internet. Switch the roles either way you want. A or B = Democrat, the other = Republican.
User 2 attempts to marginalize the injustice by claiming that party A did the same thing and received equal or less punishment than what is being suggested this time.
But who wins once the injustice supported by User 1 is carefully stuffed away in the margin? The same pattern will likely be made by User 1 when the roles are reversed. As this pattern continues, the punishment for injustice committed against citizens will only ever be reduced per situation. At best it will be matched.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Karl rove is not running for president
The justice department is currently not rolled by Obama , why would they want to hurt her chances . Hillary and bill have floated the law for years . They have low moral compass and should not be elected or trusted with anything. Instead the media treats them like the royal family .
I get the feeling that any normal citizen would receive a 4am no-knock raid with guns drawn and dogs shot.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
The NYT changed their story, because the focus of the investigation is not Hillary Clinton, but a current state dept staffer who may have mishandled her emails. Also no criminal investigation. The NYT has an anti-clinton vendetta - study was done a few weeks ago that said of the 40 op-eds that had run about the 2016 election that had mentioned Hillary Clinton, 0 had been positive, 40 had been negative.
http://www.archives.gov/about/...
If you say so. I believe they are very specific on what needs to be kept and what not. How much do you have to deal with official records?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Do you remember when the RNC accidentally wiped as many as 22 million emails from their private servers -- including 379GB of data from gwb43.com, the email server that was used by Bush and Cheney as well as White House staffers who were told to use the private servers rather than the gov't ones.
Not to mention that for 2001-2004, these servers automatically deleted emails older than 30 days. And then there's the fact that Karl Rove used these private servers (also RNC hosted) and continued to delete emails for at least a year after they changed their rentention policies.
Furthermore, Colin Powell used the private email server as well as Secretary of State and all of his private emails were lost.
And mind you... here's a few disasters they discussed in those deleted e-mails on private servers: The leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, the decisions to fire 7 US attorneys who were investigating Republican political scandals, the Patriot Act and the initiation of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, the highly-secretive Cheney Energy Task Force, lobbying of Medicare Part D (which they knew was an unfunded deficit bomb), the administrative response to Hurricane Katrina, etc. Not to mention the whole Iraq War and the Abu Ghraid prison torture policies.
Oh, and NO ONE WAS EVER PUNISHED.
I won't hold my breath.
What's suspicious about 2hillary4u@whitewater.biz?
Furthermore, Colin Powell used the private email server as well as Secretary of State and all of his private emails were lost.
If Colin Powell had run for President it would have been an issue. That is the detail so many people are missing.
Now consider the additional rules and policies that were implemented after Powell, perhaps inspired by Powell's handling. Now consider the greater common knowledge of hacking, official pentagon and white house servers getting hacked, and no one rethinking of whether a self-administered basement email server is a good idea for the Secretary of State. Legal or not it shows a severe lack of good judgment, which is a very important thing to consider in a Presidential candidate.
Here's what we know about this most recent "story" so far: http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
Oh, and explain to me again why this is on /. ? I thought this site was about tech and tech-related news. Could it be there's rank partisanship among the editorial staff? I mean, I can't recall seeing any front-page stories here about the comprehensive corruption of, say, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who, among other things, installed a secret WiFi router in his office so he could exchange email out of sight of mandatory records keeping laws. I mean, that's tech-related, right? Right??
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Except she isn't outing secrets for political gain. Mishandling documents is not the same as leaking them to the press.
Wrongs have been done before no doubt but the scale of this one was much larger than anything previously done that I've heard about.
You must not have been reading the news in the 2007? The bush white house used a private email server and deleted 20+ million emails
He didn't break the law or out anybody.
LOL.
May 2007: Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena's AG Gonzales to produce all Rove email about the dismissal of US Attorneys for all Rove email accounts. Also for all email related to Valarie Plame and the CIA leak. Rove' political aide was placed into a US attorney position by Rove's direction and through Rove's orders to fire 8 US attorney's that didn't aggressively prosecute some cases that were political in nature or because they started investigations into Republican officials.
Aug 2007: Karl Rove resigns... 'I think it's time to leave"
Sep 2007: AG Gonzales resigns...
May 2008: Rove subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee to testify about various things.
July 2008: Rove refuses, cites executive privilege.
Feb 2009: Rove was supposed to testify about the attorney controversy but fails to show.
July 2009: Rove finally testifies. Committee concludes Rove played a significant role in firing the attorney's, but did not press criminal charges in a move widely seen as the Obama DOJ being lenient with Bush-era officials and not wanting to establish a precedent of pursuing previous administration officials.
If we collectively choose to use our vote to subvert the process, by placing anti-votes instead of votes. Then shame on us and we deserve the results. This is what happens when you use the wrong tool for the wrong job.
(that series didn't contribute to the discussion)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The law is actually even clearer:
Actually no... it means that some emails were retroactively classified, others have been determined to have been classified at the time of sending:
Do try to keep up.
Yes, all hail President Sanders!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
And I don't mean that sarcastically. It really is almost certain that nothing held in that account is actually classified for reasons that would make it a felony to have on a non-secured mail server. But they will classify everything that is remotely government related because they have gotten used to just classifying everything.
And if they didn't classify an email like "Hi Jeff (Bezos), thanks for your phone call on your thoughts on net neutrality. Lets meet in the next few weeks to go over it", they have to declassify any other document of similar innocuous content that may accidentally inform people if they ever read it.
So they HAD to classify any old shit so that they could continue to classify everything else.
And at that point, it becomes holding classified documents (which shouldn't have BEEN classified) on an insecure non-government mail server. Which is a felony. Not because it was written thinking that informal chats or arranging meetings should be classified to keep it secret, but because it was never changed to reflect that any pissant conversation is made classified to keep anything informative out of the hands of anyone.
A genuine hoist by their own petard moment.
This possible investigation isn't about which email server Ms. Clinton used, it's about whether there was information in the emails that the State Department should have deemed classified but did not. Since Ms. Clinton's emails were released by the State Department, about 30 emails have been deemed to contain information that should have been classified.
Does this in any way implicate Ms. Clinton? No. When she sent the email, the information was not considered classified. Does it have anything to do with the fact that she did not use a government email server? No. Once again, the information was not deemed classified, so using her personal email server was legal.
Based on the information available, I agree with the inspector generals - the State Department should spend some time figuring out a better way to determine what information is sensitive and what isn't.
If they can't find a way to excuse the whole thing as youthful exuberance, the Inspectors General will find a low-level scapegoat to blame it on. What at this point does it matter? The Hillary landslide continues, all scrubbed clean by the Inspectors General. Huma Abedin for Secretary of State! Start the celebrations!
Scooter Libby got 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service.
Scooter Libby was convicted on two counts of perjury, one count of obstruction, and one count of making false statements.
Fair? Will Hillary face the statutory minimums for her transgressions
Yes. Given that Libby was not convicted for any violations of the Presidential Records Act, despite some 22 million emails disappearing and the use of a private email server to conduct official duties. Hillary will likely get the same: no conviction for anything to do with missing emails.
This is what happens when you use the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Which was my point.
(that series didn't contribute to the discussion)
Then either you knew some oinformation beforehand, or you didn't watch them. They explained exactly the problem with our voting system, the "wrong tool" we are using for the job.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
some oinformation
I swear I fixed that and it even showed in the preview. Damn it Slashdot, give me a freaking edit option.
It should have been:
Then either you knew that information beforehand
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
What EXACTLY is the object or thing or noun that she WILLFULLY "concealed, removed, mutilated, obliterated, or destroyed"?
To make a case, you have to identify at least one clear-cut object/instance.
If you find one that she she may have forgotten to CC the right reviewers, she could claim it was forgetfulness.
You'd have to show that she "forgot" often, or intentionally plotted to skip the proper CC.
I expect better details from slashdot nerds than one gets on a general political forum, where non-nerds process slogans and impressions directly to make conclusions instead of solid logic backed by reference-able details.
Table-ized A.I.
Um:
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Scooter Libby got 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service.
Fair? Will Hillary face the statutory minimums for her transgressions?
Libby released documents and confidential names of agents in the field putting actual lives in Danger. Unless you can prove Hilary's actions revealed secrets then the only thing she's guilty of is lax security. You can be sure as shit that if her email server was compromised wikileaks and other news sites would have released it already.
The French revolution happened a long time ago. Today, in France, as in the rest of the world, aristocrats are held to a different standard than the rest of us.
So no, the french revolution didn't achieve anything beyond replacing one set of aristocrats with another.
This is a basic element of human psychology. Once people obtain power over others, they only see other leaders as their equals, and they give concessions to their equals that they would never dream of giving to their subordinates. They can't help it, it is how the brain works.
Ask Martha Stewart. Hillary may not have stored classified info on her server, but destroying it after congress asked for it is the crime.
Who gave this liar a 5? Please verify claims made before awarding points.
Hilljerry should be thrown in prison simply for being a life long lying, cheating, stealing criminal.
Whether it is or not, Ms. Clinton didn't destroy any data that was subpoenaed by Congress. She destroyed personal email.
She didn't ignore retention laws. She turned over all the emails required by law.
Here's one example of this happening to another: Sarah Palin. Not even not charged, not even investigated, but the one who "hacked" in got charged.
Oh, Shrub also put a lot of his stuff through private mail servers when he was president, not merely in the cabinet. Nothing came of that.
But get one blow job...
Let's be clear hear. HRC is a warmongering neo-con wallstreet cocksucker on the Democrat team. Some warmongering neo-con wallstreet cocksuckers on the Republican team hate her because she is on the other team.
I hate them all because they are war mongering neo-con wallstreet cocksuckers. I don't give a fuck about what team they're on -- I care about what they stand for.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It isn't relevant because I don't accept them as an authoritative source. I take issue with much of their other videos on youtube, I watched about 1 minute of the Part I you linked. It's not really any different than what I've seen before.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
All of the emails she didn't turn over that she apparently deleted?
According to some of the stories, there were even emails where paragraphs were cut out, wouldn't that be mutilation?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
She was required, by law, to turn over her work emails. A Congressional committee subpoenaed the State Department for them. Later, after she had turned them all over and deleted her personal emails, the same committee subpoenaed her, again, for the same emails.
If "one of us little people" did the same thing, we'd be protected from big, bad government intruding into our personal correspondence just like she is.
I appreciate someone explaining the legal angle because tso many people have jumped to incorrect conclusions on the legality of her actions.
I also respect your opinion of her actions. That's a valid critique, one similar to mine.
I've seen no evidence the subpena said unconditionally "all", at least not after the fact.
Those details are important in code AND law. "Sorry, Judge, I forgot the WHERE clause in my SQL when reading the law".
Table-ized A.I.
The statute the sent Oliver North to prison might apply here. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Paragraph b, aside from other punishments, bars a person from holding public office.
The way I see it, the emails were filed with a public officer of the united states as required by par. a (HRC was a public officer so the emails sent/received were filed with her personally) and by deleting the emails, they were certainly "mutilated, obliterated, or destroyed". If deleting emails filed with the SOS is illegal, then that's good for 3 years in the pokey.
Next, under par. b, it is clear that HRC had custody of the records and again, destroyed them. If she is found guilty of par. b, she simply can't be president -- she couldn't be dog catcher. She'd be fully and finally retired.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
and what does that have to do with someone running for president doing it today????
Nothing
bu-bu-but bush, is not a good answer here
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
if you dont think they deleted for for political gain (protecting themselves from some kind of incrimination) i got this here bridge to sell
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
hence the reason obama is president
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
except for we have no way of knowing that besides taking her word on it.... and im not comfortable with her word
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Thank goodness our legal system isn't based on one person's "comfort" but on actual facts.
No he didn''t..lol..
Libby was charged and convicted for crap surrounding the investigation not outing plame. That wa Richard Armatage and it was known from the start of the investigation.
FFS, it's all over the internet and any reference site you wish to pick. Wikipedia, for all it's worth, even cites references. I cannot understand how in this day and age anyone would get this so wrong when it's so easy to do a cursory investigation into the matter.
except for we dont have the facts because they were deleted
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
And we're supposed to take whose word on that exactly? That's like saying that if the police have a warrant to search your house for some incriminating documents, and you are burning some in your fireplace as they come through the door they should be perfectly satisfied when you say, "Well, yes, but I only burned things you wouldnt be interested in.".
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Do you understand document retention laws? That happens every single day in the government. People in the government are required to judge for themselves whether something must be retained or not. If not, they delete it or shred it and it's gone.
Yes. And that's why it is illegal to remove any facts associated with a warrant or subpoena. The subject of an investigation doesnt get to choose which facts he/she thinks are relevant and hide or destroy the rest. Law enforcement and the judge/court/CONGRESS that issues the warrant or subpoena do. And any act that appears to circumvent that process is in itself an act of deviance of the legal process.
And it's not supposed to matter if you're a former Secretary of State, or a Senator, or a janitor, or a former gang member with half a dozen felony convictions.
There's a phrase for this very process in government: Litigation Hold.
When Congress or a court litigating a lawsuit issues a warrant or a subpoena, the whole system in which the data exists is frozen. Period. Every document, email, memo, system eventlog down to when the machines were patched, and who last launched a web browser from them. And from that point forward any person who so much as logs in to the system to look has to be specifically and separately cataloged and the event recorded to ensure the highest levels of "chain of custody" which are then provided to the requesting body. This is to ensure that no evidence is being tampered with, and any data there is later determined to be relevant by the officials doing the data search. You often cant even add data to the machine after the fact, depending on the severity of the case. .
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
perhaps, but not when you are under investigation, rules get stricter, and nothing should be deleted until checked out.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So the Inspector General of the US Department of State, answering to a Democrat who sits in the White House is looking into possible criminal charges against a Democrat who happens to be running for President, and it's "100% politically motivated" ?
This isn't some panel of congress-critters from the opposite party here talking into cameras for the sake of talking into cameras - this is a professional who's job it is to investigate these types of situations and recommend actions based on evidence. If anything was politically motivated at all, it would be road blocks put in his way.
Except that it's the INSPECTOR GENERAL for the US Department of State that we're talking about. Not some House Select Committee on Bashing The Opposition Party.
But that's ok - your use of the ever-so-witty term "rethuglikans" shows that objective thought and informed opinion are something you're not very familiar with.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I guess I'm unaware of when Sarah Palin was sending classified information in email. Shocking that she wasn't charged nor investigated for not having access to classified info that she could email on private servers...
But that's okay, you were going for the "The other guys did it, so it must absolve my favorite team too!" defense, which is a complete fallacy.
What exactly did SHE do ? ... such as Republicans ..
People sent her messages that years later - a small percentage of which became classified.
At the time they were sent TO her, they were not.
Go after the people who sent them to her
Really ?
You would get fired if someone outside sent non classified data to an individual inside ?
Thats what happened .
This is more likely misdemeanor mishandling of classified information.
Which, you'll recall, is what they let General David Petraeus plea-bargan to when they canned and prosecuted him.
During his affair with his female biographer he had given her access to his classified email account - so they could exchange love letters in the "drafts" folder. They apparently did this in the hope of avoiding the creation of an archived email trail, which they knew would occur if they sent the mail but didn't know would also occur with the system backups of the drafts folder.
The "mishandling of classified info", if I understand it correctly, is because she could, in principle, have read his other mail. Just as anyone who participated in the administration of Hillary's private mail server or the network connection to it could, in principle, have read or copied the State Department related emails containing classified info.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Whether that's true or not (I doubt it), she wasn't under investigation.
You would get fired if someone outside sent non classified data to an individual inside ?
Thats what happened
No, that's NOT what happened. Hillary gave out her home-administered email address to her State Department contacts and they then sent email containing classified info, as she (did or should have) expected them to do.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Scooter Libby was convicted on two counts of perjury, one count of obstruction, and one count of making false statements. ...
Hillary will likely get the same: no conviction for anything to do with missing emails.
But will she get penalized for the coverup, as Scooter Libby was? Wiping, rather than producing, the system disk sure looks like "one count of obstruction". (For perjury and false statements we'll have to wait for the mill to grind some more, but the TFA says it doesn't look good for her right now on those, either.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Everyone here who bought the "Hillary did something illegal because some Republican told the NYT she did" should be ashamed for not even trying to think.
http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-new-york-times-emails-357246
Newsweek shreds this story as being sheer incompetence by NYT. Someone really should fix the Slashdot story. But the Rethugs got what they wanted - AP, Reuters, everyone picked up the NYT story even though it was false. And corrected in the middle of the night.
It isn't relevant because I don't accept them as an authoritative source.
Slashdot isn't an authoritative source either, but you don't seem to mind commenting on its article submissions. I don't really see your point except that you have some particular beef with CGP Grey.
Regardless, the point remains, most "authoritative sources" agree that plurality voting does not necessarily reflect the will of the voters.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I liked Shrillary better back when she was letting interns do her real job for her.
That just shows that she knows how to delegate important tasks to someone competent to perform them - which is an important presidential qualification.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ask yourself: "What would happen if I were employed in the federal government and mishandled government data in this same manner?"
I have a feeling the answer would be much harsher than what Hillary will get.
When she got it sent to her address it wasn't classified. The memo is regarding stuff that's ben classified since then.
Regardless it's not usually illegal to receive Classified information. Otherwise most reporters would be in jail. It's what you do with it afterwards that gets you in trouble.
And all Hillary did was receive it on her email, turn most of the emails back over to the government when asked (while deleting the rest), and then let them decide what to release.
The quoted law would probably be found not applicable for public, IE elected, office by reason of unconstitutionality. ... The intent is that you can't just DQ your opponents from public office with targeted laws ...
Yep.
If the electorate wants a (known at the time of the election) felon to hold the office, that's their prerogative.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Really ? .
You would get fired if someone outside sent non classified data to an individual inside ?
Thats what happened
Yes, indeed. What appears to be at issue is that some emails were sent to HRC which at the time did not contain classified information but later became classified info. My experience is that what happens when this is found out is that the computer in question is quarantined until all classified material is removed. It actually almost happened to me at work. (I'm a DoD civilian employee.) I know of one other guy at work that was part of an exchange of emails between several people. None of the emails, by themselves, contained classified info, but taken together the entire email exchange was considered to have crossed the line by aggregation; all of them had to have their computers quarantined and scrubbed. I don't think anyone was fired or disciplined for this. A summary of what happened may have been circulated around as "lessons learned". I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of people had to renew their information assurance training. But no one went to jail or got fired, at least not that I am aware.
Bottom line: this story is more about politics than leakage of classified information. But of course that won't stop Republicans from making some good political hey out of this. One thing I am concerned about, though, is her use of personal email for public business. She said it was because it was "more convenient". I can certainly understand her reluctance to use the government's god-awful IT infrastructure. I was saying just today at work that this abomination seems to be inflicted on us by a hostile nation. But this does have obvious potential to be used by government officials to shield the public from scrutiny of performance of their duties. I would think that could be interpreted as an ethics violation at the very least.
And all Hillary did was tell us what she wanted us to hear so that she continues to have the best chance of being elected President.
FTFY
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
That would be a more credible argument if you explained why, precisely, anything Hillary has done is worse then you deleting an email on your company's server.
She ran her server. You run your company's server. You probably occasionally delete emails. She deleted emails.
As far as I can tell the only difference is that the government wanted hers for it's official records, and she was only able to turn over the undeleted ones. Which she claims had no bearing on her official duties. And she's probably technically right because she is a very smart lawyer, and therefore has a lawyer's grasp on when a Judge would see "official duty of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton" and "Hillary Rodham Clinton talking to her buddy about vaguely work-related shit."
No. No, she did not. That has been clearly demonstrated.
You can't be a lawyer.
I'm not one either, but the Constitution gives the requirements for Federal elected offices, and it can't be trumped by statute, so paragraph b does not apply to Federal elected offices even if you get convicted. Thus Ollie North for Senate was perfectly legal in '94.
I suspect you've got the definition of "public office" wrong as well. "Office" implies the formal office, so even an email sent to a state.gov address would be a stretch because when you email guy_a@state.gov you don't expect everyone who works in his office to be able to bring up the email immediately, and if Guy A told you he deleted it because he ran out of space you probably wouldn't immediately forward your copy to the DoJ. A clintonemail.com address is even further removed from the definition of "public office," because clintonemail.com's address is more analogous to your physical house's address then your physical office address, so no Court is gonna go with that. "Filed" is also a difficult word for your argument, because generally there's a formal procedure when something is filed, and just receiving emails doesn't count.
In other words assuming Hillary gets away with using her own private email server, it's virtually impossible to prosecute her for anything else.
Even assuming that most of the elected officials have less of a clue than the average citizen ("It's a series of tubes!"), ...
As a network professional who has done substantial architectural work on high-end networking products, where we used the term of art "pipes", I don't fault Ted Stevens, a non-techie, for instead saying "tubes" (when moderately-accurately describing the downside of naive network neutrality "treat all packets identically, regardless of type of service" prescriptions).
I may take issue with OTHER aspects of his argument. But I consider ongoing ridicule for using "tubes" in place of "pipes" to be a cheap shot (even if it IS funny).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Where's the part where he broke the law or outed a covert agent?
Actually it's the New York Times fucking up.
The word "criminal" doesn't appear anywhere in the actual paperwork, and the DoJ says it has nothing to do with Hillary's actions. To quote politico quoting the Times:
The paper initially reported that two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation "into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state."
That clause, which cast Clinton as the target of the potential criminal probe, was later changed: the inspectors general now were asking for an inquiry "into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state."
It seems like the Inspectors General are interested in why some of Hillary's emails were marked unclassified, and turned over to the public, by the State Department. While this is an investigation of a fuck-up, it is a) technically not criminal, and b) is not an investigation of Hillary Clinton.
Which means the most interesting thing about this story to me is why they screwed it up so badly. Nothing in their story turned out to be true, and they shoulda known it. Was it anti-Clinton propaganda that failed to work? Is it an pro-Clinton attempt to discredit future investigations into her email server? A pro-Clinton attempt to convince Bernie fans she's actually not the candidate of Wall Street? Was it an attempt at click-bait? Or did somebody just totally fuck up that reading comprehension thing and think he had a great exclusive when what he really had was fantasy?
I suspect the latter. But speculating about all other iterations is so much more fun.
Oh, and explain to me again why this is on /. ? I thought this site was about tech and tech-related news.
Because it relates to criminal penalties for mishandling email servers and classified information in email form?
Sounds like "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" to me.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
it is true, and yes when she deleted the emails, she was being investigated*
*perhaps investigated is not the correct word, however the facts are she was asked for all her emails and she didnt hand over all her emails.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Really? Please cite proof. Remember, the State Department has a lot of her emails that it hasn't turned over to Congress.
Okay, since you're sure it's true, please cite the statute that says when a person has been asked to testify before a Congressional committee, they lose the right to dispose of personal documents.
But you're not the Secretary of State.
Number one, people that high on the totem pole are generally the ones who classify documents (or at least the name that is used to justify the authority their minions use to classify them), which means that it is frequently legally tricky to charge them with leaking Classified info. For example let's say that something is classified under authority delegated some minion of the Secretary of State by the Secretary and ultimately the President. If the Secretary tells a reporter that information he has approved letting the reporter know, and over-ruled the minion who did the original classification. The regulation ordering everyone to send their email only to certain approved servers was also probably approved by someone at the Secretary of State level, so she probably has the same authority to say "and guess what, this is an approved server."
Given that the Constitution was written when Absolutism was the default Western form of government, your surprise that a Cabinet-level officer can do any of this shit by decree reflects the American people's inability to understand that the Constitution is actually that fucking old, and should probably be fucking refreshed; rather then reflecting any actual legal requirements of the Court system.
Number two, if the Secretary of State is gonna steal classified information she's gonna have a plan that's a wee bit different then setting up her own email server. The things China would want from a Secretary of State level person are mostly things she could say in a private phone conversation from her house (diplomatic positions, when the President's bluffing and not telling people below the Assistant Secretary level, etc.). If they did want the F-22 plans or something a private email could be useful, but only if the Secretary could convince somebody to send her the plans.
OTOH if I was an engineer for your company, the only thing of interest to China I'd have access to is those plans. The data would have to go through a) a thumb drive or b) the internet. And email is the simplest form of doing that on the internet.
She didn't ignore them. She retained the records she thought were covered by them. Whether she was actually right in her choices is another matter entirely.
you are moving the goalposts now.
the question is is she allowed to destroy documents on a server when documents from the server are being requested to be turned over
you dont get to decide whats personal and whats business, the DOJ (or agency making the request) decides that
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Only if they were official records.
If she can legally use her own server (which is debatable, but was also a practice of the previous administration, so it's very unlikely the people who had gwb43.com addresses or Colin Powell's private email address would prosecute that), then she can have private messages sent to that server, and she has no obligation to tell the government whether Bill is sending her naughty emails while he's doing speeches in Dubai. That's not an official record and her political opponents have absolutely no right to it.
Where it gets trickier are things like her donors giving her advice. They're probably her friends, and a friend telling the Secretary of State precisely what to do about Bibi is pretty much par for the course and I doubt Congress has the authority to force a Secretary to record all those conversations for the record; but she also owes those guys favors.
But she's a lawyer, so she probably has a very convincing case lined up explaining her reasoning for deleting those emails, and (as I mentioned) it would not suit the GOP at all to actually have her prosecuted for deleting 50k emails, because that would involve admitting their entire Bush White House should also prosecuted for deleting 22 million, and Colin Powell too. The GOP will bitch too high heaven because it helps them politically, and do nothing because that would hurt them.
Dude, you realize you just responded to a post saying she didn't turn classified info over to the Chinese, by implying she did do that? And this assertion is totally unsupported by any evidence except your refusal to trust her?
In a thread started by an article originally alleging she was being criminally investigated for something in this matter, but has since been changed to say that someone (but not her) is being investigated (but not criminally) for their decisions in which emails to turn over under FOIA?
Check the timeline. She says they were deleted "shortly after" December 5th. There was no subpoena (and thus no hold) until March 4th. Reviewing of the emails to decide which ones to delete, and which to hand over to the State Department seems to have happened in that Fall prior to December 5th.
So Congress could do a Contempt of Congress investigation under the "inherent contempt" rule, and actually imprison her for the duration of the Congressional term. But that would be a political disaster due to Dubya's use of the gwb43.com domain, including deletions after an investigation into his firing of attorneys, Colin Powell's use of his own address, etc.
And why is it a surprise that a Cabinet-level-official is sending emails with information that's classified?
Everything they deal with is Classified.
if i recall correctly, didnt powell get in trouble because of his email issue?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Don't think Powell got in trouble for that. IIRC the only reason we know about his is that his response to the kerfuffle this March was to say "BFD, I did it too." Which is all a quick google turned up.
Rove and Bush caught some heat, because they deleted something like 22 million emails from their server in the midst of the Congressional investigation into Bush's decision to fire a bunch of District Attorneys who were investigating corrupt pols with an 'R' behind their name. But they didn't get as much as Hillary has, probably because by '07-'08 nobody gave a shit about lame Duck Dubya; whereas today probable-Democratricf-nominee-Hillary is way more interesting then the nonexistant-probable-GOP-nominee or Lame Duck Obama.
I don't think it is accurate to call her a cocksucker. If she was we probably would never have heard the name Monica Lewinsky ðY
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
No, I'm asking you to prove a claim. You wrote,
in response to my statement that she performed within the law.
I asked if you were sure, and you said you were. So prove it. Government document retention is governed by statute. If the policy changes when being asked to testify by a Congressional committee, I'd like to read that.
Government statute includes guidelines as to what needs to be retained. Employees decide based on those guidelines what to retain and what not to retain.
The DoJ isn't involved. There is no criminal case. Congress doesn't have the right to decide what you can do with personal documents.
I implied nothing of the sort. The fact that you inferred it is on you.
All I said is that she is a politician, and she will do as politicians do.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Then it shouldn't have been on personal equipment.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If that was the case why did several previous Secretaries of State have their emails on personal equipment? You're in government, you know perfectly well that over-classification happens, and that it's likely that quoting any reasonably insightful BBC report will technically report info shared with government report some random bureaucrat has had Classified.
You can argue the rules of Obama's first term were dumb, but you can't argue she didn't follow them.
No. You did a lot more then that.
There is no alternative to the case I gave that does not involve her giving classified material to people who should not have it in a moral sense, because if she avoided doing that her story is 100% true and your "correction" is a flat-out lie.
Which means you did indeed imply she sent some info to really bad people, and you;re too chicken/committed to your lame attempt at humor to admit it.
She redacted the contents of each and every email that she provided by not printing the email headers (here's an example - https://twitter.com/davelevint...). As to the binary attachments, did she print a hex dump? Because, that's about the only way to completely reconstruct a Word document from a printout.
And then they were found...
Oh, and the 'private' email server was so that Republicans could conduct party (political) business OFF the federal servers. Hillary had a private server to keep all her OFFICIAL emails off government servers - by design - remember the 'gosh, I only did it so I would only have to carry one device' claim?
Ken
They fired attorneys that serve at the pleasure of the President - they are appointees.
Ken
The GOP set up a private server for party (political) business - don't think the Democrats have their own 'private' email server for democrat party business? Here's a hint, under federal law, neither party can use government resources for political activities - like when Al Gore called Chinese donors from the VP office 'because it was easier' or when Alan Greyson held a interview about his Senate race in his Representative's office.
The 22 million 'disappeared' emails were subsequently found - you somehow forgot to mention that.
And as noted above, the email server the GOP installed was for PARTY work, NOT official gov't work - unfortunately *some* small percentage of the emails on the party server wound up including some official gov't work. It's called human error, and those 'disappeared' emails were eventually submitted to investigators.
Ken
She was Secretary of State for 4 years, and before that a Senator for 8 years, and in all that time NOBODY noticed that emails came from (and went to) a non-government address? And nobody said anything about it? Even assuming that most of the elected officials have less of a clue than the average citizen ("It's a series of tubes!"), they know about handling classified material, because they get lectured about it every year. And nobody seemed to think there was a problem all that time.
Why would they?
Powell had a non-.gov address. Condi Rice apparently almost never emailed (but did use a .gov when she did). Several other members of the Bush administration used a gwb43.com address.
So I suspect that the only people who emailed her personally were close allies, or people who'd dealt with Powell; and they just figured that it must be nice being at that level.
How does that work? How does information 'become' classified after the fact? And, if that is a possibility, doesn't her exclusive use of a non-government email server for ALL emails open her up to the possibility that classified info was sent to her private server?
Ken
No previous Secretary of State exclusively used a private email server for all electronic communication - several had emails intended for them sent to their official email accounts on government email servers and forwarded to their private email accounts.
The Republican Party (under Bush'43) set up a private server to handle emails relating to Republican Party business with the intention of keeping party business off federal servers as required by law. Some republicans mistakenly discussed official work on the private email server, but that was the rare exception, as borne out when the 22 million emails were turned over to investigators.
Which brings us to the last point - the Republicans 'lost' 22 million emails... Briefly. Ultimately all 22 million emails were turned over to investigators and ultimately proved what was widely known - Bush administration fired political appointees that serve at the pleasure of the President, for political reasons, and the discussions of those political decisions were found on the...wait for it... Private Republican email server, set up so politicians could discuss political things (like firing political appointees for political reasons) and NOT run afoul of federal regulations requiring that political discussions be kept off government email servers.
Ken
So we don't hold federal email servers to the same retention requirements every public company is held to?
Odd. And convenient.
Ken
The law requiring official records to be retained for future reference and use was, like all statutes, passed by Congress and signed by the President. HRC also fired an ambassador for keeping email on a non-government server, so she knew what the rules were. She just didn't think she should have to follow them -- and the Obama DOJ apparently agrees that she is too good for our laws to apply to her.
Bravo!
What "classified" information did the former Secretary of State send from her portable device while walking in fresh air, or cooking up a mess of gumbo for Bill? While it is reasonable every Former President and their First Lady has continuing contacts with heads of other states, these retired public servants are still responsible to positively advocate for America's interests.
Sometimes a thought out if the blue BECOMES classified after the fact.
I doubt Hillary took classified information out of a SCIF in her socks like Admiral Poindexter!
There's a difference between political business and official business? News to me...
There's a difference between party business and official business? News to me...
Apparently you've never read the report on Amb. Gration. This is why he was forced out:
Key Judgments
The Ambassador has lost the respect and confidence of the staff to lead the mission. Of more than 80 chiefs of mission inspected in recent cycles, the Ambassador ranked last for interpersonal relations, next to last on both managerial skill and attention to morale, and third from last in his overall scores from surveys of mission members. The inspectors found no reason to question these assessments; the Ambassador’s leadership to date has been divisive and ineffective.
The Ambassador has damaged the cohesion of Embassy Nairobi’s country team by underscoring differences between offices working directly with Kenya and those with regional responsibilities. Country team members, particularly those from other agencies, relied on the recently departed deputy chief of mission to maintain a sense of common purpose at Embassy Nairobi. Unless corrected there is a risk that the country team will become dysfunctional. The Ambassador needs to broaden his understanding of why various agencies are part of his mission, cease avoiding contact with them, and work with the assistance of a senior Department of State (Department) official and the next deputy chief of mission to restore country team harmony.
The Ambassador’s efforts to develop and focus the mission’s work around what he calls “mission essential tasks” have consumed considerable staff time and produced documents of unclear status and almost no value to the Department in approving priorities and assigning resources. His efforts have also created confusion about the relevance of the embassy’s annual Mission Resource Request (MRR). The Office of Inspector General (OIG) team agreed with embassy staff that the mission essential task process added no real value to the management of the embassy.
The Ambassador’s greatest weakness is his reluctance to accept clear-cut U.S. Government decisions. He made clear his disagreement with Washington policy decisions and directives concerning the safe-havening in Nairobi of families of Department employees who volunteered to serve in extreme hardship posts; the creation of a freestanding Somalia Unit; and the nonuse of commercial email for official government business, including Sensitive But Unclassified information. Notwithstanding his talk about the importance of mission staff doing the right thing, the Ambassador by deed or word has encouraged it to do the opposite.
The Ambassador does not read classified front channel messages and has not established a system to have his staff screen incoming cables relevant to Kenya and U.S. interests in the region.
The Ambassador’s initiative to redirect programming for nearly $550 million in U.S. health assistance, while well intentioned, has proven disruptive and created confusion about its relationship to existing programs. He announced to the Kenyans the establishment of a new unfunded program, called Let’s Live, with the unrealistic aim of reducing by 50 percent in 1 year Kenya’s premature mortality rates for infants, mothers, and noncommunicable diseases.
You'll note six bullet points, of which one mentions email. I've bolded it because you're clearly too lazy to find it yourself. It also specifies "commercial email," which means something like gmail or an ISP-provided email address, rather then a private email server. You'll also note that he was not Secretary of State so literally none of the argument you were responding to applies to him.
As for the Statute, if the interesting bit of legal jargon known as "records" applied to email sent by the Secretary of State why are 0 of Colin Powell's emails in the possession of the State Department? And, if it's so important to you, is it so important to drag Hillary over the coals for "breaking" the rules by not turning over half her emails for a few a few years, when it is literally physically impossible for anyone to get their hands on 100% of Colin Powell's emails because he deleted them all?
Tell me, does the statute say that she has to do either of those things? Here's the answer - no.
We don't know what she did. All that we know is that which she has allowed us to know.
But the whole ordeal stinks of negligence on her part, something that someone in her position as candidate for Presidency would place a high value on covering up. And considering that she has been less than forthcoming in this situation, appearances lead us to suspect that she may indeed be covering up something.
Does that prove anything, either way? No. So unless proof is found and released, it's up to the voters to decide. (But who am I kidding; most voters had already decided their 2016 vote years or decades ago.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The DOJ not pursing this or not doing their job is 100% politically motivated
Dude, if this was so suspicious why weren't you up in arms when Colin Powell did it? Why didn't the media freak out when the actual President did it? Bush used his private email server to fire prosecutors for going after his political allies. Which we know because he fired all seven who broke Reagan's 11th Commandment (don't attack fellow Republicans), and nobody else, and all seven said their emails came from that server.
As for what we know on this case, what we know is precisely what I said. She had a private email server where people sent her shit. Some of that's classified, but she's Secretary of State so that was not illegal, or against any rule, in place at the time.
She turned a bunch back over when somebody decided that the Federal Records Act clearly applied to Secretary Clinton's email (but apparently not Secretary Powell's email, which was automatically deleted by the gwb43.com server after 30 days and is unrecoverable). Then the State Department decided what to release to the public. We know that's true because the IG report criticizing what was released said so.
There just isn't anything you can fir into that story that is a) illegal, and b) does not involve her sending the classified info to someone who should not have it.
It was her fault that outpost went down
What is your point about Amb. Gration? That he had at least five other bone-headed practices, so violating the Federal Records Act is not really an offense worth caring about? Even if true, does this help an official who presented Russia with an "overcharge" button for diplomacy, who wanted to obscure the events leading up to Benghazi because she pretended to not see what difference it would make to understand the truth, and who flagrantly violated State Department policy while her immediate underling was persecuting an ambassador for violating that same policy?
Perhaps Colin Powell also violated the Federal Records Act. State Department policy did not officially require use of government email servers (except in emergency situations) until the year he left the office. If he wants to run for president, there should certainly be a public debate over what he did or didn't do with regards to that. However, his primary defense -- that most of his emails were sent to government addresses -- is also Hillary Clinton's primary defense.
I did not directly address your facile arguments about what a foreign government would want from a Cabinet secretary's email because I thought the holes were so obvious: Hacking her server would give far more information than they could capture from a single conversation in her house, it is easier to do deniably, and at any rate the undeniable breach of federal law is in failing to put federal records in proper custody for preservation and oversight. For high-level officials, mishandling classified and SBU information is a real risk (and what the IGs here want to be investigated), but is not such a clear violation.
Because the media is in the tank for one political party. It's the propaganda wing for the Democratic party.
Valerie Plame outed herself by sending her husband to Niger.
I have a feeling the answer would be much harsher than what Hillary will get.
Yea ask Ed Snowden about that!
Are you sure you wouldn't be promoted to president of the company for your clear ability to disregard policies?
X
They were all just repeating rumors that were flying all over the Beltway.
This. Precisely this... Plame effectively outed herself many years prior to the alleged 'leak'. Ms. Plame, in her perpetual quest for self-aggrandizement certainly never expended any effort to extinguish these rumors herself until it became politically convenient enough to do so, all the while feigning shock and indignation.
What is your point about Amb. Gration? That he had at least five other bone-headed practices, so violating the Federal Records Act is not really an offense worth caring about? Even if true, does this help an official who presented Russia with an "overcharge" button for diplomacy, who wanted to obscure the events leading up to Benghazi because she pretended to not see what difference it would make to understand the truth, and who flagrantly violated State Department policy while her immediate underling was persecuting an ambassador for violating that same policy?
Your point is that it must have been against the rules because Gration got fired for doing it. But he was not fired for setting up a private email server, he was fired for a whole host of offenses that included installing his own special non-departmewnt-approved internet connection and using the email address from the ISP for his official duties. If you actually paid attention to the firing at the time you'd know their major problem with that was not that it was not a state.gov address, but that it's really bad optics when your Ambassador insists on installing an internet connection in his bathroom. State exists to be good optics.
As for the rest, you're really stretching. The Russians didn't seem to mind that button was spelled wrong (altho they did take glee in pointing it out), and the "Reset" worked fine until the Maiden protesters forced things. She's taken responsibility for Benghazi, which is pretty much all you would ever expect apolitical appointee to do.
Perhaps Colin Powell also violated the Federal Records Act.
If Hillary did Powell did. So did President Bush and Rove. She will never be attacked for it any place that matters because the people who can do that would also have to nail their own party.
State Department policy did not officially require use of government email servers (except in emergency situations) until the year he left the office.
State department policy did not require the Secretary to use a state.gov address until Kerry took office.
If he wants to run for president, there should certainly be a public debate over what he did or didn't do with regards to that. However, his primary defense -- that most of his emails were sent to government addresses -- is also Hillary Clinton's primary defense.
I did not directly address your facile arguments about what a foreign government would want from a Cabinet secretary's email because I thought the holes were so obvious: Hacking her server would give far more information than they could capture from a single conversation in her house, it is easier to do deniably, and at any rate the undeniable breach of federal law is in failing to put federal records in proper custody for preservation and oversight. For high-level officials, mishandling classified and SBU information is a real risk (and what the IGs here want to be investigated), but is not such a clear violation.
Below the Secretary of State level that's the only concern, because they don't know anything that hasn't been put in paperwork.
At the Secretary's level that's not as big a concern as the shit that isn't in the paperwork.
The things China cares most about are things that would not be put in an email to anyone. Very few Presidents are gonna put on official paper that a mission to stabilize some conflict involving China is a bluff. Very few would put on paper that they'd nuke Shanghai if the Chinese back down. A Secretary of State's impression that Obama is very very concerned about the South China Sea, and would actually increase his paper-commitment to it before backing down, or that he's only there because of everyone else and would back down rather then lose people (even if that's not what the paperwork says) is several thousand times more valuable then all the paperwork in the Federal government put together.
Mishandling classified material IS a criminal matter. There are many normal people that have lost jobs, been fines, even gone to jail for accidents involving classified information - deliberate mishandling, such as setting up an unauthorized and uncertified mail server while hiding it from investigators, should result in criminal charges.
But because famous politicians get breaks when their party is in power, Clinton will never be punished for what would have ruined the lives of others.
Because the anti-Bush portion of the media set up the narrative and ran with it. No one in the news ever mentioned Armitage, and did everything they could to blame Libby.
Once the story came clear, suddenly it was "no longer news worthy" and not worth talking about.
Are you suggesting that she ACCIDENTALLY shut down and destroyed her mail server? It was just a huge "oopsie!"? AFTER she was subpoenad?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Hillary sent an email to every state department employee telling them not to do exactly what she herself was doing, conduct official state department business on private email services... This is the same Hillary that now pleads ignorance of that very policy.
Ken
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Are you willfully this ignorant? Or just so fully in the bag for Hillary that you're willing to say anything at all to defend her, no matter how bad the situation gets? At what point will you admit that, at the very least, there are things here that don't look good for her?
We're not talking about placing blame for a fart in church here. We're talking about a Congressional investigation about the DEATH OF A U.S. AMBASADOR.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
These records management REQUIREMENTS are outlined in NARA (National Archive and Records Administration: http://www.archives.gov/about/...). Every federal employee is subject to these statutes. The only ambiguity could possibly be the interpretation of an official about what constitutes a federal record, and whether they can lawfully destroy the record. But I dont think any rational human being would consider a 2 month gap in the records of the for a Secretary of State, preceding an attack on an Embassy and assassination of an Ambassador, for instance, to be a coincidence. It is utter lunacy to argue that no important communication or decisions occurred by the Secretary in that period. Which means that (proven by the following LAWS) that the Secretary and the State Dept FAILED to properly retain official government records, punishable (as outlined and proven in the provided statutes) by law.
Records Management by Federal Agencies
44 U.S.C. Chapter 31
3101. Records management by agency heads; general duties
The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.
(My Notes: Please note the unambiguous "SHALL". It is not optional. It is not open to interpretation.This section alone is meant to ensure by law that no information that is/was integral to the course of government activity be destroyed. Period. End of story.)
3103. Transfer of records to records centers
When the head of a Federal agency determines that such action may affect substantial economies or increased operating efficiency, the head of such agency shall provide for the transfer of records to a records center maintained and operated by the Archivist, or, when approved by the Archivist, to a center maintained and operated by the head of the Federal agency.
(My notes: Not only may an agency not destroy the data, the agency MUST ensure that the records are provided to the National Archives for possible PERMANENT retention.)
3105. Safeguards
The head of each Federal agency shall establish safeguards against the removal or loss of records the head of such agency determines to be necessary and required by regulations of the Archivist. Safeguards shall include making it known to officials and employees of the agency--
(1) that records in the custody of the agency are not to be alienated or destroyed except in accordance with sections 3301-3314 of this title, and
(2) the penalties provided by law for the unlawful removal or destruction of records. 3106. Unlawful removal, destruction of records
(a) FEDERAL AGENCY NOTIFICATION.—The head of each Federal agency shall notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency, and with the assistance of the Archivist shall initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of records the head of the Federal agency knows or has reason to believe have been unlawfully removed from that agency, or from another Federal agency whose records have been transferred to the legal custody of that Federal agency.
(b) ARCHIVIST NOTIFICATION.—In any case in which the head of the Federal agency does not initiate an action for such recovery or other redress within a reasonable period of time after being notified of any such unlawful action described in subsection (a), or is participating in, or believed to be participating in any such unlawful action, the Archivist shall request the Attorney General to initiate such an action, and shall notify th
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
So now you have nothing to say?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Of course the PR is bad. People are trying to damage her politically.
We're not talking about a Congressional investigation into the death of a US ambassador at all. We already know everything there is to know about what happened in Benghazi. Multiple commissions have all come to the same conclusions. This is a political sideshow, one that's driven by the GOP, one that's designed to last as long as possible. The longer it lasts, the more possible political damage it can do.
If I was a fan of the GOP I'd be pissed. They should be governing, not playing politics.
No, I thought you had walked away from this. My last comment was Saturday, you waited 4 days to respond. Then after 1 day you accuse me of something? That's nonsense.
Again, you are confusing what the State Department has released and what Ms. Clinton turned over. We have no idea if there is a real gap.
The statutes you quote don't say what you think they say.
Section 3105 is about process. Did she make items 1, 2, and 3 known to her department? Yes, memos of that have been quoted in a vain attempt to prove she broke her own policies.
Section 3301 defines email as an official record. She knew that, that's why she turned them over.
Section 3302 is about duties of the Archivist and has nothing to do with Ms. Clinton.
Section 3303 is about the department providing information of what the department is maintaining to the archivist. Again, not relevant in this instance.
You still have come close to backing up your claim. Let me quote you again, just in case you forgot:
I'm not sure what your point was. The State Department hasn't turned over some emails from a certain period of time. So what?
Just realized you jumped into the middle of a conversation, and it wasn't you that I had been conversing with and it was not you that wrote the quote I included.
Very odd choice, I must say, to post that comment where you did since it had nothing to do with the thread.
What a ridiculous analogy!
In your comparison the police were looking for "documents" so destroying "documents" would be wrong.
In the case of Ms. Clinton, a certain subset of a certain kind of document were requested. None of those were destroyed.
To be close to a valid analogy, the fire in the house would be fed by firewood. That wood could be turned into paper, which could then be a document, which ... no, it's just too ridiculous.