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Judge Orders State Dept, FBI To Expand Clinton Email Server Probe

Posted by timothy on from the what-did-she-scrub-and-when-did-she-scrub-it? dept.

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.

22 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Lying scum by Tyrannicsupremacy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Watching her act like she doesnt know what a "server wipe" is made me laugh a little. She takes scumbaggery to great heights.

    --
    http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
    1. Re: Lying scum by Entrope · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Lying scum by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That is irrelevant. The disgusting sack of shite had paid advisors and consultants to take care of this stuff. There are procedures in place. Obviously, Clinton decided that she was going to do things HER WAY - and in the process broke a metric shit-ton of laws.

      Her understanding of technology is totally irrelevant to the investigation.

      That said - I strongly suspect that she understands a lot more tech than you are giving her credit for. Who set up that server? Who administered the server? How did she access the server? Who decided what to turn over to the state department? Who made the decision that she would have her own private server, under her own control?

      The unsophisticated old coots down at the community center certainly don't have their own servers.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    3. Re: Lying scum by sabbede · · Score: 4, Insightful
      So, are you saying that two wrongs make a right, or that because you so strongly dislike the Right it's okay for the Left to lie, deceive and obstruct?

      Let me point out something very, very important - Thinking the other side is worse justifies nothing.

    4. Re: Lying scum by Entrope · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The way that you get everyone to follow the same laws is to enforce them fairly and predictably, regardless of who violates them. M. K. Gandhi is widely credited with saying (something like) "An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind", which exemplifies why the enforcement of this kind of thing should be as impartial as practical: otherwise it looks like partisan hits, which is corrosive to both compliance with the law and the larger political environment.

    5. Re:Lying scum by Entrope · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hillary Clinton should know what a "server wipe" is because she was in charge of the people who were managing this, she was the head of a Federal Department, and she wants to be President. Your parents might be random schmoes with no reason to know simple computer jargon, but high-level executives in the modern world do not have that excuse.

    6. Re:Lying scum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Where those her terrorists? If not, find a better strawman to burn.

      Look, I'm not a US citizen, but in the current circus that is the US elections, I tend to support the democrats. This is a breach of security unacceptable for a low level officer; in a secretary of state it would be tantamount to treason. The bottom line is that she broke the protocols in place and did something illegal with a huge potential to cause harm to the country.

      That simple fact would disqualify her from running for presidency and most likely would put her behind bars. That a lot of people still supports her blows my mind away; it means that in today US politics, party lines trump human decency and respect for the law.

    7. Re: Lying scum by sabbede · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's actually a necessity, not a practicality. Laws have to be enforced equally and predictably for the system to function.

    8. Re:Lying scum by DarkOx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No we don't know if she violated any laws yet, although it looks more and more like she probably did. We do know she at least violated some government practice documents, she was not obligated to comply with but should have.

      The issue isn't if she broke the law or not. There are bunch of people that would enjoy seeing Clinton in the slam but it won't affect things much beyond that. What matters is she should be losing this election. She was the Secretary of State for the United States of America. She either could have and should have recognized that she was dealing with sensitive information classified or not and cared enough about operation security to do something about it.

      So she knew or should have known the risks of E-mail its not 1998 anymore, everyone has heard the post card analogy with inter-domain mail. If she did not know she should have people around her to tell her that. If she did not listen or only select a bunch of yes men and women that is also a problem.

      Even if all the operational security issues and risks of e-mail were a surprise to her, you'd think her behavior would have very suddenly improved when Bradly Manning and a few other events took place, again nope, so we are left with willful ignorance, or gross negligence. Crime or not, prosecutable or not, there isn't a good spin you can put on it. Even Her own justifications about carry multiple devices etc have been contradicted, she has been evasive about it and her story keeps changing so she is only compounding it with lies and bad ones. She isn't a good candidate to lead the country pure and simple.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    9. Re:Lying scum by Jiro · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What she probably said was "I want a server that isn't subject to legally mandated retention or public records requests". The IT person then responded with "Sure ma'am" like you suggest.

      The fact that doing this also makes security hard is just a side effect. The security problem didn't happen because she told someone to make it secure without supervising them closely, the security problem happened because she decided she'd rather not be subject to the rules, and not being subject to the rules automatically comes with bad security unless you're really careful.

    10. Re:Lying scum by RingDev · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are procedures in place.

      Yup, from Rice and Powell the procedures were to wipe the server and delete all records of the emails so that they wouldn't be included in any records retention or available for inspection.

      If Clinton had followed the standing procedures, none of this would have happened. ;)

      -Rick

      PS: Don't take this as defense of Hillary. It's offense at the cherry picked nature of this witch hunt.

      --
      "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
    11. Re: Lying scum by JackieBrown · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Every time someone accuses Hillary of doing something nefarious with these emails I picture explaining to my mother that she will need to use two different email accounts for different purposes and the resulting blank looks that would ensue.

      Your mother was the Secretary of State?

      Your mother is running for president?

      Your mother has a staff that could have set up the phone for her to receive emails from two addresses?

      I really doubt your mom has the resources and training that Hillary has. The only thing your statement demonstrates is that a lot of people will not realize this is a big deal because they have no idea how things work.

    12. Re: Lying scum by Bartles · · Score: 4, Insightful

      President Walker will gladly exercise all the new executive powers that Barack Obama has snatched for the Presidency. Too bad you were silent then.

    13. Re:Lying scum by RingDev · · Score: 4, Informative

      From Powell's interview:

      Powel: I started using it [the private email server] in order to get everybody to use it, so we could be a 21st century institution and not a 19th century.

      But I retained none of those e-mails and we are working with the State Department to see if thereâ(TM)s anything else they want to discuss with me about those e-mails.

      STEPHANOPOULOS: So they wantâ¦

      POWELL: (INAUDIBLE) have a stack of them.

      STEPHANOPOULOS: â" theyâ(TM)ve asked you to turn them over, but you donâ(TM)t have them, is that it?

      POWELL: I donâ(TM)t have any â" I donâ(TM)t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files.

      And, in fact, a lot of the e-mails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the State.gov domain. But I donâ(TM)t know if the servers the State Department captured those or not.

      And most â" they were all unclassified and most of them, I think, are pretty benign, so Iâ(TM)m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.

      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
  2. Even if you bleed Blue this is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even if your a loyal Democrat, this is not good. Keeping highly sensitive documents on personal servers when your a top government official is just wrong. No matter if there is a smoking gun or not. Just the fact this goes against all protocol setup and defined to protect information is very troubling. It shows Mrs. Clinton totally disregarded protocol simply for her own benefit and possibly for a convenient way of controlling history and her legacy in case she messed up.
    This goes far beyond a Richard Nixon moment and I cannot believe how many people still thinks she is the best the Democrat's have for President??
    In my mind, she is just what America doesn't need in the White house. Another politician who makes up her own rules and disobey's government policy. Really?
    We want more of that in government? Hey, if your a Democrat do what you will next year at election time. But if Hillary Clinton is a choice. Do the right thing and don't vote that disgraceful piece of work into office. She has no place in public office of any kind.

    1. Re:Even if you bleed Blue this is wrong by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "I cannot believe how many people still thinks she is the best the Democrat's have for President??"

      An increasing number of people think Bernie Sanders is the best Democraft for President.. even if he isn't really endorsed by the party elite.

    2. Re:Even if you bleed Blue this is wrong by fey000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or perhaps *because* he isn't endorsed by the party elite? The appeal of Trump appears to be largely because he's not cut from the same cloth as the standard politician.

  3. Re: What with a cloth?!?!?! by Entrope · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. She deserves to be in prison by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even the average person who reads the news knows by now that TS/SCI materials can't legitimately end up in unclassified email systems. The very best she could argue is "I had no idea what it was and deleted it immediately" at which rate she's still guilty of not handing over the machine(s) to the federal government to verify that the data is actually gone.

    She needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because the alternative is that we live in a country where contractors and lower level civil servants go to Leavenworth while the elite gets to make cutesy jokes about destruction of evidence in a national security scandal.

  5. What you are missing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The emails were subpoenaed by Congress for an investigation. She deleted them 14 months AFTER the subpoena, which she then claimed she never got. The Congressman who subpoenaed them came on news the next day showing what he sent her requesting the emails. She deleted evidence during an investigation (obstruction of justice).

    Since then they have gotten more evidence of why she deleted them. This is all based on her original obstruction of justice and now they want to find out what she is hiding by not turning them over. She has lied at every step for not giving them over.
    1. I wanted to use 1 device. She used 3
    2. They were private emails to husband. Bill Clinton doesn't use email
    3. No classified documents. There are classified documents
    4. No documents were classified at time. They included signal intelligence which is classified at all times
    5. Server protected by secret service at her house. It was in a Denver apartment that didn't have an alarm.
    6. There are no backups. There is a backup server in New Jersey that is still not in government control.

  6. Re:Am I missing something? by cbraescu1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    By avoiding government systems Clinton potentially put lives, diplomatic relations, and US secrets at risk.

    The emails in question were believed to not contain classified info

    That's simply not true (and I'm surprised you could believe Clinton's utterly false claims). As per State department rules, anything related to foreign countries is classified by default, without any need for such marking.

    --
    Catalin Braescu
    Ofaly.com
  7. The emails were not 'born classified' by LetterRip · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...