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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.
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.
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 truth, anyone who has enough money and/or power gets to circumvent the law easier than poor people or average Joes.
A poor man and a rich man get charged with the same crime with the same amount of evidence; the rich man is more likely to walk away a free man. Various reasons: better access to better lawyers; society are more likely to take for granted the word of a well-dressed well groomed person than some scruffy guy in a hoody.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I've posted this before, but I guess that I'll have to keep reposting it every time someone claims there was no proof of intent.
Transcript of Gowdy questioning Comey. Lots of context, but note the bolded section:
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said "I did not e-mail any classified information to anyone on my e-mail there was no classified material." That is true?
Comey: There was classified information emailed.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton used one device, was that true?
Comey: She used multiple devices during the four years of her term as Secretary of State.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said all work related emails were returned to the State Department. Was that true?
Comey: No. We found work related email, thousands, that were not returned.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said neither she or anyone else deleted work related emails from her personal account.
Comey: That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work related emails in — on devices or in space. Whether they were deleted or when a server was changed out something happened to them, there's no doubt that the work related emails that were removed electronically from the email system.
Gowdy: Secretary Clinton said her lawyers read every one of the emails and were overly inclusive. Did her lawyers read the email content individually?
Comey: No.
Gowdy: Well, in the interest of time and because I have a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon, I'm not going to go through any more of the false statements but I am going to ask you to put on your old hat. False exculpatory statements are used for what?
Comey: Well, either for a substantive prosecution or evidence of intent in a criminal prosecution.
Gowdy: Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?
Comey: That is right?
Gowdy: Consciousness of guilt and intent? In your old job you would prove intent as you referenced by showing the jury evidence of a complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the public record and you would be arguing in addition to concealment the destruction that you and i just talked about or certainly the failure to preserve. You would argue all of that under the heading of content. You would also — intent. You would also be arguing the pervasiveness of the scheme when it started, when it ended and the number of emails whether They were originally classified or of classified under the heading of intent. You would also, probably, under common scheme or plan, argue the burn bags of daily calendar entries or the missing daily calendar entries as a common scheme or plan to conceal.
Two days ago, Director, you said a reasonable person in her position should have known a private email was no place to send and receive classified information. You're right. An average person does know not to do that.
This is no average person. This is a former First Lady, a former United States senator, and a former Secretary of State that the president now contends is the most competent, qualified person to be president since Jefferson. He didn't say that in '08 but says it now.
She affirmatively rejected efforts to give her a state.gov account, kept the private emails for almost two years and only turned them over to Congress because we found out she had a private email account.
So you have a rogue email system set up before she took the oath of office, thousands of what we now know to be classified emails, some of which were classified at the time. One of her more frequent email comrades was hacked and you don't know whether or not she was.
And this scheme took place over a long period of time and resulted in the destruction of public records and yet you say there is insufficient evidence of intent. You say she was extremely careless, but not intentionally so.
You and I
Also, intent matters when determining guilt.
I suggest you try, "Officer, I didn't see the sign" the next time you're pulled over for running a stop sign.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence .
In light of recent events, the VIP email address spoken about was probably Obama's, not Clinton's.
The good old "you too" fallacy - why no one ever holds politicians accountable for their misdeeds and illegal activitites today.
"Sure, my client robbed this bank, but come on. Is he the first person ever to rob a bank? Haven't plenty of bank robbers gotten off scot free? Is it really fair for us to single this one person out?"
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?
However, the law in question is one of those that do NOT require intent...does not even require being aware that the classified material was classified.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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."
Show me where he passed classified information though his private address..... Then we can talk..
I guess you are OK with Bush's private E-mails? No? So Clinton has NO EXCUSE here... You say so yourself if you want to hold this issue up as an example of what not to do..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You're just jealous he didn't "Ask Slashdot".
Dark Reflection
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.
I'm going to be pedantic and just point out that I doubt non programmers or non technical people will know about Stack Overflow even if they know google. Last time I checked Stack Overflow didn't have any chicken recipes.
Goes and looks just to be sure
Damn, scratch that, it does!
I'll be damned!
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Probably amazed he didn't know about Stack Overflow.
He did. I believe it went something like this:
Hi, I need to remove an emil address from a big file
* We're not here to do your homework n00b
* Try using Node.js
* Closed because fuck you that's why.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Which is why people still use the "But Bobby's Mom lets him smoke" argument, little kids try on parents. The thing of it is, we are supposed to be adults and not persuaded by childish arguments.
Pointing to another person's wrong NEVER justifies the wrong you're doing. Justice is never going to be exact, so we should stop trying comparison justice, and let each case stand on its own merits. Anything less leads to lawless anarchy.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Actually the deletion of email was enough "evidence" of guilt because legally it can be assumed that doing so is evidence of guilt. Gowdy made that case when confronting the FBI director. In fact, Gowdy pretty much proved that the FBI was complicit in the coverup by not prosecuting Clinton on the grounds that the FBI director actually gave.
But there is more, Clinton's Lawyer AND personal Aide (convenient dual role) Mills said in sworn testimony that she didn't know about the server until after it was destroyed, but they just found an email in which she ASKS about that same server, years before. She perjured herself. But nothing will come of it, because she is both a Clinton Aide and her Lawyer. The convenience of having Aides that are also Lawyers will now be fully realized, they will be pretty much untouchable, because you cannot untangle when she was being a Lawyer, and when she was being an Aide.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Which is why they go through a series of training meeting, of which Clinton doesn't recall attending, due to traumatic brain injury, but she is okay to be president.
Another "convenient" excuse. She either didn't attend the requisite training (a dereliction of duty, and evidence she isn't qualified to be President) or she did, and ignorance is no longer an excuse. Now, you might claim she is too stupid to understand (as Director of the FBI basically said), but then that doesn't look to good if you're running for President either.
The whole EMAIL thing is a tar pit for the Clinton's because she is either incompetent, or evil. There really is no other option. And as I have said before, (apologies to Arthur C. Clarke) "Any sufficient level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". So which is it, is she incompetent or evil?
Of all the things Clinton should have done, she did none of them. The argument "no proof" is utter bullshit, there is plenty of evidence, and proof is only a conclusion. If you see all the evidence, and can't conclude she is either stupid or evil, you're just being an obtuse party hack.
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 :)
"Bush was worse" logic of liberals ...
Pointing to bad behavior to excuse bad behavior is supposed to stop working when you're like 5 years old. Why does it still work with adults?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I bet the accepted answer uses a turkey instead of a chicken for some reason, and the one with the most votes rants about meat being murder.
I can answer #4. Because she fucking hid everything until a lawsuit from Judicial Watch forced the State Department to release some of the public documents generated by her term as SOS. Once the people had access to her public records, they started to notice that her email wasn't entirely on the government servers, but on her own. Then her lawyers and IT people started to panic (the infamous reddit post) because they knew that Congress would get involved soon, and it did.
The answer to #2 is that every agency seems to be in on the coverup to some extent. They have all been dragging their feet producing records, and several have "lost" drives, tapes, records, etc. IRS Commissioner Koskinen is facing impeachment for this same crap, but for a different scandal (not for Hillary's emails). Obama is probably going to need to pardon every single member of his cabinet and most of the senior management, or President Trump is going to need to build a brand new prison to house the "Most Transparent Administration in history (TM)".
#1 is crap. See Powell's email leaks. #3 is no, or at least not that I've heard of.
Here are at least three of the laws that she apparently broke:
18 US Code 793
18 US Code 798
18 US Code 1924
As to your conclusion, there are guys in prison today for violations of the exact same laws, and several are now attempting to appeal their sentences. At the time they were convicted, those laws were seen as strict liability, so their trial records do not include proof of intent. If those same laws, which haven't changed, require mens rea now, at the very least they need a retrial to establish intent.
See that "Preview" button?
"I know you're using Exchange server, but I have a script for Postfix installations I use on Ubuntu and it works great"
1- This isn't about some mx redirect thing (or a domain name), this is about storing the emails on a private server.
2- No, they don't necessarily. If you wanted to email a private email server, why would the government have that on record? At least one of the two parties would need to have their emails on a government controlled system. Which one seems like the better plan to you: you, me, and everyone else in the world, needs to somehow have accounts on a government server -OR- the secretary of state keeps emails on a state department server as per policy?
3- I don't know what you mean here. She used the clintonemail.com server for her work in the state department. There were tens of thousands of emails that were in question.
4- You are wrong. She announced her candidacy in April 2015. Here's a wired article from March 2015:
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/c...
(and archive: http://archive.is/2015.03.05-0... )
"The person who may had broke the law is the person who sent classified information to her email address."
That's not really how this works. But pretend it did. Here's Comey on it:
"For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters."
"However she is a politician not a IT expert."
She employed numerous IT experts, however, and certainly could be expected to know the implications.
"If it was an average guy who did this... Chances are they may had lost their job, but not had criminal activity put on him."
Clinton doesn't have any criminal charges being placed on her. She's never been indicted. Comey pretty much stated that anyone else would be in hot steaming shit.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press...
"To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."
Quite honestly man, you can google this. You've been able to google this for awhile. To me, the most interesting part isn't the emails, it's the consistent stream of bad information out of Clinton herself. On March 10th, 2015 (before she announced for president), she said "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material."
That was either an omission or a lie. But if you follow it forward, it just gets sillier- at almost every chance to discuss this, she dissembled, provided false information, or maybe even straight fucking lied. The fact that you or I would never work again if we made this kind of mistake, the bizarre deletions, the possible foreign intel implications- that's all whatever compared to the fact that this was just deny, deny, deny until the evidence caught up.
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.
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.
No, but pointing to someone else's acquittal does give you grounds to demand to be acquitted as well on the basis of equality under law, to which you are entitled.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.