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Comey Denies Clinton Email 'Reddit' Cover-Up (politico.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The FBI concluded that a computer technician working on Clinton's email was not engaged in an illicit cover-up when he asked on the Reddit website for a tool that could delete a "VIP" email address throughout a large file, FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday. Republican lawmakers have suggested that the July 2014 Reddit post from a user believed to be Platte River Networks specialist Paul Combetta showed an effort to hide Clinton's emails from investigators. However, at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Comey said FBI agents concluded that all the computer aide was trying to do was replace Clinton's email address so it wouldn't be revealed to the public. "Our team concluded that what he was trying to do was when they produced emails not have the actual address but have some name or placeholder instead of the actual dot-com address in the 'From:' line," Comey said. Comey said he wasn't sure whether the FBI knew about the Reddit posting when prosecutors granted Combetta immunity to get statements from him about what transpired. However, he added that such a deletion wouldn't automatically be considered an effort to destroy evidence. "Not necessarily ... It would depend what his intention was and why he wanted to do it," the FBI director said.
just get used to it. they have mastered the coverup and own everyone who could charge them.
Laws for people who are named 'Clinton' and laws for the rest of us.
[Insert pithy quote here]
And others are incredibly resistant to admitting that Clinton is clearly breaking laws and suffering no consequences for it.
I appreciate the lengths Comey has gone through to show the double standard justice system. He says Clinton had no intent to hide anything, he never asked her if she did. He says the administrator had no intention of doing anything wrong, and again probably didn't ask him. Comey also rewrote the law claiming Congress wanted intention to be part of the law, which they didn't include in the wording, without having asked them. He also outright ignored her lying under oath to Congress, along with all the people who lied to the FBI during the investigation. He also failed to investigate any of the bribes Clinton took while SOS, didn't even look into it to see if there might be something.
Meanwhile...
The IRS targets individuals because they don't follow the correct political views.
Peter Thiel is investigated by department of Labor because he supports Trump.
Were the tea party members asked if their intention was to break laws? Was Peter Thiel asked if he intended to be discriminatory in hiring? It doesn't matter in those cases because they are not "important" like Clinton.
My big question, what can they now do to restore confidence in the system? I actually don't have an answer to that question at this time.
Have you actually looked at the conspiracies that Trump has pushed?
Birtherism (itself) was started by Clinton
Rafael Cruz (Ted Cruz's father) assisted in assassinated Kennedy
Global Warming is a Chinese hoax
Asbestos is safe
California is not suffering under a drought
Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered 9/11
Google is helping Clinton
Vaccines cause autism
Obama is a Muslim
Obama never attended Columbia University
Clintons murdered Foster
Scalia was murdered
ISIS provides phones to refugees seeking to enter the United States
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Either way he obviously tried to alter records that we under subpoena. This is so fucking corrupt it is unbelievable.
Will I get the same leniency and benefit of doubt if the FBI or Justice Department ever investigates me for the same or less serious crimes? (not that I'm planning any)
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
In light of recent events, the VIP email address spoken about was probably Obama's, not Clinton's.
Oh such Republican mock outrage.... where was it when George Bush was sending his emails using gwb43.com? His private email account used for official Whitehouse emails!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy
I'm surprised you didn't also mention Benghazi.
Why should Benghazi come up? That affair, in and of itself, isn't an example of her law breaking. It was an example (in the event of the death of the ambassador and three others) an example of her incompetence and dismissive attitude towards underlings. And it was an example (in the event of her and her boss deliberately, knowingly lying repeatedly to the public generally and to the faces of the dead people's families literally while standing next to their coffins) of her general aversion to the truth and her willingness to look you, me, and and everyone else in the eye and lie. About little things (where her name came from, whether she "landed under sniper fire," about being "dead broke" and having trouble buying her multiple houses, etc) and big things (like her motivation for and practice of running her State Department email off a home computer, the casual disregard for above-classified document security, and the destruction of federal records while under subpoena).
..." and similar demonstrable "little" lies, the type of which she also trots out every day). But when Clinton deliberately lies about her official conduct and has her entire staff getting immunity deals in order to protect her from consequences that would send anyone else to jail, it's an entirely different level of behavior.
... this coming from Clinton who personally launched the efforts to smear the reputation of multiple women with whom her husband had been screwing, including some of which were clear cases of abuse on his part. You can and should complain about Trump's ungraceful conversational style and bro-ish behavior. But Clinton's career of personal enrichment at the public trough, character assassination, and decades of deceit and lying is far more sinister.
That last bit IS about law breaking, but was more about the cover-up of her incompetence and lying. Her email arrangements, of course, were made so that she could run her foundation-related influence selling machinery without those pesky FOIA requests coming in later for a look.
When Trump BSes about trivial rhetorical stuff, it doesn't help. Just like it doesn't help when Clinton does the exact same thing ("I never said the TPP was the gold standard
It's especially awful to watch her trot out a hearsay anecdote from an occasionally unstable Miss Universe contestant from 20 years ago to show how mean Trump is towards Latinas (despite the endless praise he gets from Latina women working in many management roles throughout his company)
Regardless, neither are well suited to the office. But one or the other of them will be seating Supreme Court justices. That's all that matters at this point. His choices - which will come from a list we've already seen - will skew towards constructionist jurists inclined to preserve the rights the Constitution protects. Her choices will without question be liberals who, like her, promise to act early and often to erode those rights. I'd rather have his likely flavor of jurists in place when we have future cases involving the Commerce Clause, campaign finance, balance of power issues, and friction around the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth amendments.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yet, absolutely fucking nothing anyone can seem to do about it.
Anyone else would be in jail.
Give immunity to people you could prosecute for leverage, but they won't talk anyways. Pure evidence of intent and corruption, but oh well.
I mean, we might as well have the North Korean dictator feeding us propaganda. We the people know it's all lies, but we can't do anything about it and our state media is just bobbing their heads saying what they're supposed to say with their talking points that get sent out every morning.
Talk about totally fucked as a country.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Why should Benghazi come up?
Other than the fact that multiple investigations by Republicans over many years failed to point to anything that was really her fault. No, it's just their desperation (and yours) to pin it on her. I think you'd pin the Lindberg kidnapping on her if it would make you feel better. Even in your response you can't separate Benghazi with other things she may have done.
That last bit IS about law breaking, but was more about the cover-up of her incompetence and lying. Her email arrangements, of course, were made so that she could run her foundation-related influence selling machinery without those pesky FOIA requests coming in later for a look.
Yes she's so incompetent that the GOP can't charge with anything. What does that say about the GOP? Let me ask you: if you think she broke the law, would you support the FBI going after the Bush administration for using private emails as well? Also they deleted all of them which were never recovered.
When Trump BSes about trivial rhetorical stuff, it doesn't help. Just like it doesn't help when Clinton does the exact same thing ("I never said the TPP was the gold standard ..." and similar demonstrable "little" lies, the type of which she also trots out every day). But when Clinton deliberately lies about her official conduct and has her entire staff getting immunity deals in order to protect her from consequences that would send anyone else to jail, it's an entirely different level of behavior.
Trump lies daily about small factual things like what he said for which there is video. He lies about everything. For Clinton's TPP lie, it was rated as halfway true by Politifact. Yes she said it but at the time the TPP was not finished. She clearly opposes TPP in its present form.
It's especially awful to watch her trot out a hearsay anecdote from an occasionally unstable Miss Universe contestant from 20 years ago to show how mean Trump is towards Latinas (despite the endless praise he gets from Latina women working in many management roles throughout his company) ...
Unstable? How do you know she's unstable, again. Are you already attacking her character first? Freudian slip?
Her story is that he called her "Miss Piggy" and "Miss Housekeeping." If both are true, those statements are fat-shaming and racist. Your defense of Trump isn't that he didn't say those things (Frankly we all tend to believe he would) but that he can't be racist because he has Latina female workers? He certainly can say racist things (and he does) and still work with Latinas. The two are not mutually exclusive.
this coming from Clinton who personally launched the efforts to smear the reputation of multiple women with whom her husband had been screwing, including some of which were clear cases of abuse on his part. You can and should complain about Trump's ungraceful conversational style and bro-ish behavior.
Now you are deflecting about Trump's clear misogynistic tendencies by bringing up Bill Clinton. It still does not excuse what Trump does no matter how you want to deflect it.
But Clinton's career of personal enrichment at the public trough, character assassination, and decades of deceit and lying is far more sinister.
This is a false dichotomy as it implies Trump has never used character assassination or has had decades of deceit and lying. He has.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've been doing this IT thing for a long time. A very long time.
I don't think there is an IT expert/admin on Slashdot who would attest that--if given the job to engineer/configure an email server for Secretary of State (much less, merely private citizen) Clinton--this server was in any way designed or implemented properly. Not for security, not for compliance, nothing.
So... am I to believe that Hillary Clinton is so woefully incapable of finding a competent IT engineer/admin? Here is ALL OF SLASHDOT. Am I to believe that? Because, if so, she's woefully incompetent for ANY governmental position; I don't believe she should be in any position of power that directly impacts me, my freedom. And anyone who supports her, at this point, in this community, given what is so obvious to see about her character and her intentions, either has to be insane or be seen as complicit in her and her "party's" power grab. It is that simple.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
A very thorough timeline about the whole thing:
http://www.thompsontimeline.com/the-hidden-smoking-gun-the-combetta-cover-up/
Get a cup of coffee, it's long but worth it. The timeline is non-partisan and sticks to the facts, basically it is alt-right/trump troll/conspiracy free.
Bottom line: It doesn't look good at all.
October 28, 2014: The State Department formally asks Clinton for all of her work-related emails.
December 5, 2014: She turns over 30,000 emails from her @clintonemail.com account to the State Department. Another 31,000 emails from the same account were deemed personal, and Clinton kept those. Her lawyers did the sorting, no State Department or National Archives personnel had a chance to appraise or examine the remaining 31,000.
December 2014: Shorty after turning the 30,000 emails, Clinton decides she no longer needs access to any of her emails older than 60 days. Her staff is told to change the retention policy on her server, which will lead to the deletion of all her the emails that weren't turned over to the State Department.
The FBI later recovered about 17,500 of Clinton’s “personal” emails. FBI Director James Comey has said that “thousands” were indeed work-related.
March 25, 2015 and March 31, 2015: There were two conference calls between Clinton staffers and PNR, the company managing her emails. Between those two calls, Combetta, the PNR employee managing Clinton server (and Reddit user 'Stonetear'), has an “Oh shit!” moment and remembers that he’d forgotten to make the requested retention policy change back in December 2014. He immediately deletes all of Clinton’s emails and uses BleachBit to permanently wipe them.
He later told the FBI that at the time he was aware of emails mentioning a Congressional request to preserve all of Clinton’s emails.
Sometimes in 2016: The Justice Department gives Combetta some form of legal immunity.
The FBI having Combetta take the fall for the deletions while making an immunity deal with him *could* be a particularly clever move to prevent anyone from being indicted. That part isn't clear yet.
In any circumstances, the FBI giving Combetta immunity makes no sense at all. It's the equivalent of giving a hired hitman immunity without going after the person who hired him.
But if we're going to use these emails as part of a measuring stick as to who is more trustworthy, when we tally up all lie and half truths of our major candidates
If your best case for your candidate is that "they lie less than the other guy", and there are a huge long line of lies both candidates have, you're making the best case I have that you shouldn't vote for either one.
The newest revelation is the darling Hispanic Woman who says (no actual proof, which is what you're claiming for Clinton now) Trump said some "mean things" to her, was allegedly involved in a murder, and had relationships with drug dealers. A perfect fit for the Clinton Crime Family if you ask me.
AND if everything about the Clinton's is "ancient history" (as said by others) then why are they digging up what some Drug Cartel's Leaders old girlfriend has to say from 20+ years ago?
The double standards people use in defending Clinton is amazing.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Let's run with your conclusion - average guy does this, loses their job.
Let's also add that average guy does this, is then blacklisted from ever having any job with a security clearance again.
Hell, I'd be more than happy to see Hillary Clinton avoid jail if she was disqualified from working in any position in the government that required a security clearance :)
Couldn't agree more. There is no reason to allow political parties unlimited speech. We limit advertisers in every other venue. Consumer protection should be at its maximum when it comes to politics; not to limit choices but to ensure good practices by all actors.
I think you are confusing what is really happening here. I've seen all sorts of arguments about Hillary vs Donald and it almost always boils down to one basic argument.
1) Trump is worse than Clinton (Excusing bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior).
They mostly try to avoid her actual record, because quite frankly it SUCKS.Her four years as SoS are a complete disaster. Her stint as Senator is mostly resume lining material (no actual accomplishments), and that she won because she was Bill's wife isn't really that great either. Basically, she has no record of accomplishments. None. Which is why she is playing the "gotcha" game, and sitting there wondering why she isn't "50 points ahead". Well, when you run douchbad against asshole (I'll let you figure out which is which), it is clear that she shouldn't be "50 points" ahead, and why they are basically neck n neck.
If everyone who actually believes that NEITHER are good for America, actually voted for Gary Johnson (or Jill Stein), it would cause chaos in the election.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Even in your response you can't separate Benghazi with other things she may have done.
Because it was in the context of trying to get to the bottom of her (and her boss's) lying about the Benghazi mess for political reasons right before an election that it became clear she had been running her official email on (and ONLY on) a home computer. And in examining that situation, it became clear that she had - on becoming aware that she was under subpoena - that she destroyed tens of thousands of federal documents, and repeatedly lied about what she did, when she did it, and why she did it. Right: you can't separate the two topics because SHE is the one responsible for them being part of an uninterrupted spectrum of incompetence and deceit that doesn't begin and end with just one topic.
Yes she's so incompetent that the GOP can't charge with anything.
So the problem here is that you don't actually understand the different branches of government and how they work. That explains a lot about your rambling, here. "The GOP" is a political party. It has no authority. Are you talking about congress? They could charge her with contempt for lying as she did in under oath in front of them, and that's still a possibility. But otherwise, the only entity capable of charging her with anything is the Obama administration. You get that, right? No, apparently you don't.
Yes she said it but at the time...
Blah blah. She said that she did NOT say it, and that's simply a lie. Regardless, you're carefully avoiding the long career of deliberate lies about all sorts of things - from the ridiculously meaningless (why lie about why her parents called her Hillary?) to the clearly self-aggrandizing (landing under sniper fire!) to the long, long parade of lies designed to deflect from public awareness of her corruption. Everything from her days in Arkansas to countless bits of business under her control in the White House, to her frequent throwing-under-the-bus of staff with a lie about why, to her non-stop lying - right to this day - about her "mistake" in setting up an off-the-books mail server to hide her public records from scrutiny ... acts serious enough that the DoJ has been doling out immunity deals like candy. Focusing on how half-truthy her spin on the her "it's the Gold Standard" assertion was then or is now is just you trying to avoid the rest of her career's disingenuous handling of the truth.
Unstable? How do you know she's unstable, again. Are you already attacking her character first? Freudian slip?
OK, I guess you consider her to be a more authoritative voice on her character than the judge who said she threatened his life. Do you have a reason to consider that judge to be a liar? Please explain.
He certainly can say racist things (and he does)
Please explain some of the racist things he DOES say. Or are you one of these people who can't understand the difference between race and culture? While you're at it, of course, please chime in on Hillary Clinton's choice to do things like yukking her way through a skit at a fundraiser where the joke is that being late for events is an example of operating on "Colored People Time."
Now you are deflecting about Trump's clear misogynistic tendencies by bringing up Bill Clinton.
No, you just can't read. The issue isn't Bill Clinton, the issue is Hillary Clinton and her personal staff spending time and your tax dollars to deliberately engage in a campaign of character assassination against the women who - by either willingly or unwillingly being the Bill Clinton sexcapade and abuse show - were going to poison the well for Hillary's personal eventual quest for political power. She would never have progressed past being a lawyer getting rapists easy plea deals if she hadn't ridden her husband's coat-tails all the way to national office. S
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
he founded ISIS
You're not really saying that you can't understand a rhetorical reference to the rise of ISIS coming from the power vacuum that Obama created by pulling out of Iraq. Really? Or are you that unable to understand those sorts of references?
Comey's decision is rooted in practicality.
Right. In practical terms, he can't recommend prosecution because it was clear before hand that Obama's political appointee in charge of the DoJ wasn't going to prosecute his designated successor no matter how clearly the FBI established her trail of untruths and mis-handling of classified material. Loretta Lynch (and thus her boss, Obama) is the decision maker here, not Comey. You're just pretending you don't understand this.
it is a weak case
Weaker than the presence of classified material in Patreaus' home safe? Weaker than a bit of sensitive material in the background of a sailor's selfy shot? You know, things that resulted in criminal convictions and even jail time? But her flouting of both administration rules and the law, her possession of many classified documents on unsecure systems and her passing them around to her staff and lawyers (people without security clearances) - that's "weak" by comparison? You're deliberately pretending you don't understand the situation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
She has proven to be a capable Senator for New York.
Really? Are you referring to the totally failed, money-wasting exercise on upstate NY revitalization? Or were you referring to her support and vote for the war in Iraq? Or were you referring to all of those other great pieces of legislation she sponsored and saw through ... oh, right, there really weren't any.
Her time as Secretary of State is certainly something she should be proud of.
Why? Because her phony "reset" stunt with Russia worked out so well? Check with the people in Crimea and throughout Ukraine on that one perhaps. Or were you thinking of her proud handling of the affairs in Libya, where her championing of the use of force to topple the leader there, with essentially no further involvement, has resulted in chaos, death, and the insurgence of whole new ISIS and AQ-style franchises murdering people by the thousands? Yes! Really something to be proud of. Or were you thinking perhaps of her wise ability to so gracefully handle the situation in Syria, which has turned into a calamity for millions of dead and feeling refugees that are now swamping Europe and carrying radical jihadism with them? Yes, that was really a moment of pride, promising but never delivering on the support that the moderate anti-Assad segments of Syrian society needed, allowing the radicals to move in wholesale, followed by Russia and Iran. A real moment of pride, there.
I suppose what you really mean is that she can be proud that she leveraged her position as Secretary of State to get foreign governments to hand millions of dollars to her family business while she was in office, in exchange for better access to her while they had issues in front of the State Department. Yes, by her standards, she should definitely be proud of how wealthy she made her family while she held that public office. Way to go, Hillary!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So the choice is between someone that says mean things, and an unindicted felon who is above the law, and played fast and loose with Top Secret information.
Glad we've got our priorities straight on what to care about.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Statement by FBI Director James Comey
From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.
Emphasis mine.
18 USC 793 (f):
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
So, to answer your question, 110 counts of violation of 18 USC 793 (f). Stop being an apologist.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
She only deleted those deemed "personal". It's true some non-personal ones actually also got deleted, but there's no evidence it was intentional.
Electronically recovered versions of the "mis-deleted" ones showed no signs of a pattern to hide, but rather sloppiness/laziness in filtering, being the "skipped" ones had trivial topics. Comey said it appeared that whoever filtered the emails for personal-vs-work only read the title and maybe the first few lines rather than the entire message to see if it were work-related.
Again, there is clear evidence of sloppiness, but NOT of "intent" to hide.
If anything, there's the opposite because those electronically recovered after the fact did not reveal any "secret pattern" to the deletion. It's true they couldn't recover all the emails, but those who deleted them wouldn't know which of the personal-deleted set would wind up being eventually recovered in the lab.
Thus, there is actually counter-evidence of intentional hiding, because the FBI got to sample some of those intentionally deleted (for allegedly being "personal" when in fact they were not).
Table-ized A.I.
To be fair Trump would be well and truly under on multiple accounts of fraud if he didn't also represent the 1%. Dumbing it down to "says mean things" just shows your incredible bias on the topic.
Both of them are so deep in shit they are being kept warm by the core of the earth itself.
If you look at snopes.com, you'll find them debunking a fair number of accusations against Trump. Right now, I don't trust accusations against either Clinton or Trump until I get some sort of evidence (and normally Snopes and Politifact provide this in verifiable form).
I've been studying the accusations against Clinton enough to know that they're largely unfounded. The number of people who think she did something seriously wrong about Benghazi, or who believe the Clintons kill their political enemies, is frightening. The anti-Clinton people have achieved the "boy who cried wolf" status with me for the most part. I haven't studied the anti-Trump stuff as much.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes