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Judge Orders State Dept, FBI To Expand Clinton Email Server Probe
An anonymous reader writes: In a hearing over Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said that former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn't comply with government policies. He ordered the State Department to reach out to the FBI to see if any relevant emails exist on Hillary Clinton's email server. Judge Sullivan was surprised that the State Department and FBI were not already communicating on the issue following the FBI's seizure of Clinton's email server and three thumb drives of emails. More than 300 emails are being examined for containing classified information, and dozens of the emails were "born classified" based on content. Some of those emails were forwarded outside the government. There are also clues emerging about how some of the classified information made its way onto Clinton's server. The email controversy is beginning to show up on the campaign trail, an unwelcome development for Secretary Clinton. Reporter Bob Woodward, who helped bring down President Nixon, said the scandal reminds him of the Nixon tapes. It is interesting to note that the post-Watergate reforms have helped move the investigation forward.
Whether she knows what a server wipe is depends on the meaning of the word "is".
We've known this family is full of lying scum for at least 20 years. We've also known she (rather than Bill) likes to use informal processes to avoid government openness laws since the HillaryCare shenanigans in the early 90s.
The RNC case and this are worlds apart. The RNC operated email servers for partisan purposes that are illegal to perform using government resources (labor time, equipment, and so forth). Hillary Clinton operated a private email server to keep government records out of the government's hands, contrary to both policy and statute, when both of those were crystal clear about what was required. Any law or policy violations in the RNC case went against specific direction from higher-ups. In the more recent case, the law and policy violations were directed by a member of the Cabinet.
I don't know the relevant law (or really much of any law) in detail, and hope that someone here who does can express an informed, educated opinion.
Stuff that is TS/SCI (Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information) is what commonfolk call state secrets. It's stuff that is so important to national security that we call people who share it with non-cleared foreign folks spies and charge them with treason, and the punishment is up to and including death. It is a Big Frelling Deal. That's the heavy hammer that's being threatened and used against Assange, Snowden and Manning for doing the same thing, albeit on a larger and wider scale. Just storing it on a non-secure system within the government is considered Bad Form and subject to disciplinary action or worse. Printing it out and taking it home is Particularly Bad Form. Doesn't forwarding it over private email systems amount to all of that and much more?
Why aren't we calling for Hillary's political head, if not sending her to jail?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
1) From all accounts the material wasn't marked classified and apparently wasn't classified till after the fact and even that state may be in question.
2) Having a private server means nothing in this context. An unclassified server is an unclassified server, whether Hillary or the Government owns it. The violation would be the same.
3) No matter where the emails were republican operatives would pour over every tiny dot trying to find a way to destroy her. In fact this nasty political climate may have been part of the reason she did it in the first place. How the hell can anyone be expected to work in this kind of environment? Hell they are now resorting to active sabotage with groups trying to infiltrate and "find the truth" to various organisations and people they don't like.
4) So far I've heard no actual reports of significant damage to the country caused by her server, which other deliberate leaks of classified intelligence have arguably caused. Preventing such is the point of classifying information. If the information can cause no great harm then it may be over classified. In this case it has mostly been well Hillary is technically wrong, so she must be destroyed for the good of the republican party.
5) There can be little doubt that she handled some truly sensitive data that was classified that did not end up on her email server. She could not avoid it at her level. Now it is possible she screwed up with some percentage of it, and that is bad. Not following policy here is also bad, since in theory it increases the risk of exposure in the event there was a data spill. Of course with how incompetent the government is at handling information, I'm half betting that Hillary's server was the more secure of the two options! Good grief the government's office of personnel management has repeatedly been hacked which gives foreign intelligence service a how to list to compromise people! What has been done there? Nothing.
6) The alternatives to Hillary are either Bernie Sanders or someone from the republican clown car. I can't see Bernie getting elected, and, well, the ones in the clown car frankly scare the hell out of me. We will be right back in the ditch Bush drove us in, except it will be twenty foot deeper with Donald Trump's wall around it to make damn sure we don't get out again!
Read the effin statutes. The emails are not automatically classified if they are from a foreign government. They are only classified if the foreign government has stated they are classified.
The courts have ruled that being from a foreign government is not sufficient to be classified. The State Department argued that it was in a FOIA case and lost.
The case and the law are discussed in this link,
This provision of Executive Order 12,958 was a significant factor in a 1998 decision by the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that rejected the government's claim that a communication from the United Kingdom could be withheld from a FOIA requester because it had been classified by the Department of State. Weatherhead v. United States, 157 F. 3d 735 (9th Cir. October 1998), vacated as moot, 528 U.S. 1042 (1999) . The Ninth Circuit found that the government was unable to demonstrate that there was any specific reason for withholding the documents at issue and, therefore, without a presumption that foreign government information should be classified, the government could not justify withholding this document under the 1995 Order. The Court of Appeals panel also examined the letter, and found that its contents were innocuous and disclosure could not reasonably be expected to result in damage to the national security.
http://www.bushsecrecy.org/pag...
From Powell's interview:
You may also have forgotten the Bush Administration's use of private email servers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seriously, this is record of fact. Powell openly admitted to using a private email server, that he 'thinks' most or all of the emails were unclassified, and that he doesn't think that any that may have been classified were impactful.
Rice has not openly admitted it, but she was on the Bush admin's private web server and there were records that she "occasionally" used the official state department email system.
Politically speaking, Clinton's mistake was to keep a backup of the emails. Security speaking, this whole thing has been a wank fest for over a decade. At least Kerry started getting it cleaned up.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs