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Mike Pence Used His AOL Email For Indiana State Business -- and It Got Hacked (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Vice President Mike Pence used a personal AOL email account to conduct sensitive state business -- including issues related to homeland security -- as the governor of Indiana, according to a report from The Indianapolis Star. Not only that, but Pence's email account was also compromised last year, the report reveals. Because personal email accounts are not subject to same types of public transparency laws, it's up to the official and his or her transition staff to hand over any sensitive state-related messages for archiving. Emails from a state account are automatically stored on state servers and subject to public records requests. Pence's office claims the contents of his personal AOL account used for state business are in fact in the process of being archived. A larger concern, however, is security. By using a private AOL account to conduct sensitive state matters, Pence could have exposed sensitive state business. In the hacking incident last year, Pence's email account was compromised by a scammer who used it to try and extort money from members of his contact list by claiming Pence and his wife were stranded in the Philippines, The Indianapolis Star reports. This hack didn't appear to have had been designed specifically to breach Pence's office, which made clear that his AOL account could be compromised by relatively benign breaching techniques designed by spammers and low-level hackers. It is not illegal in Indiana to own and use a personal account while in office, nor is it against the law to handle work-related matters from a personal account -- so long as those emails are in some way archived. However, the Star reports that Pence made no efforts to preserve his AOL emails under after he left office and is only just now doing months after public records requests were first made. "Similar to previous governors, during his time as governor of Indiana, Mike Pence maintained a state email account and a personal email account," reads a statement given to the The Indianapolis Star. "As governor, Mr. Pence fully complied with Indiana law regarding email use and retention. Government emails involving his state and personal accounts are being archived by the state consistent with Indiana law, and are being managed according to Indiana's Access to Public Records Act."
Pence has the correct consonant after his name, so we don't need to investigate this any further. Only people with that cursed mark of the Devil need to be investigated (repeatedly) for offenses relating to email. We all know that Mr. Pence is the very model of morality and will be completely transparent and forthcoming on this innocent mistake.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
For a moment I thought there's really one area where the Dems are even stupider than the GOP.
The world is in balance again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>scrub his email server hardware after the fact during an investigation
That's called destroying evidence involved in a federal investigation. It comes with a 20 year sentence for anyone subject to the laws.
And you missed lying under oath. 15 years ago, in a wholly trifling personal matter, got a president Impeached. Now our elected officials can be caught red handed destroying evidence against themselves in a federal case and be greeted by the press and public with thunderous applause.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Fake News would imply the content was incorrect, invented or misleading.
This is not fake news, it happened. There is proof it happened. Just like most of Donald's "fake news" it's not that it's fake, its that he doesn't like it being made public.
Now, what Pence did is NOT illegal. You're not going to see an investigation into it because he hasn't done anything illegal. That doesn't mean it isn't a highly questionable thing to do. It also doesn't wash away the hypocrisy of being part of a ticket whose main selling point was that the main rival was unfit to rule for doing the exact same thing.
Absolutely not illegal what Pence did- but it's not fake news because it was a foolish choice he made and that partially reflects on his fitness to govern, just like it did, as his ticket pointed out, on Hillary's.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The use of a private email server wasn't prohibited by federal government statues applying to Hillary Clinton either... but that didn't seem to stop significant public concern.
Use of privatized and hacked email servers seemed to be of great issue to the general public which significantly contributed to many voters decisions during the 2016 election. So, based on the general public's flawed logic of determining significance relative to elected officials, this information regarding Pence is also quite pertinent to know.
Coverage on private email server issues from both sides was/is idiotic, but maybe this type of information is needed to help educate the public for their future choices.
Sensitive =/= classified.
Remember, Hillary repeatedly justified her use of a private server by claiming she "never sent or received classified material" (later amended to say "never sent classified material", later amended to say "what hard drive backups?")
The FBI investigation into her server did not focus on "sensitive" information, which is not a legal definition. It focused on "classified" information, which is explicitly defined in the statutes she was found to have broken.
Until such evidence that classified information was passed through an unclassified system, this is going to continue to look like the discordant screeching from a panicked and impotent leftist establishment that has been the story du jour of the past few months.
The use of a private email server to handle classified information is most certainly prohibited by federal law. Might want to double check your facts here.
Fake News would imply the content was incorrect, invented or misleading.
This is not fake news, it happened. There is proof it happened. Just like most of Donald's "fake news" it's not that it's fake, its that he doesn't like it being made public.
Now, what Pence did is NOT illegal. You're not going to see an investigation into it because he hasn't done anything illegal. That doesn't mean it isn't a highly questionable thing to do. It also doesn't wash away the hypocrisy of being part of a ticket whose main selling point was that the main rival was unfit to rule for doing the exact same thing.
Absolutely not illegal what Pence did- but it's not fake news because it was a foolish choice he made and that partially reflects on his fitness to govern, just like it did, as his ticket pointed out, on Hillary's.
It's FAKE because it's trying to create a FAKE equivalence between Pence's perfectly legal use of a personal account and Crooked Liar Hillary!'s ILLEGAL use of an entire fucking server to evade oversight and conduct CLASSIFIED business on the fucking internet.
And you FELL FOR IT.
Way to go.
A large part of Clinton's problems were because her use of private email servers looked like an effort to avoid legally required oversight: avoiding use of any government email account, not depositing government records when she left government service, and only disclosing things when caught. None of those factors look likely in Pence's case, but maybe something will turn up yet.
Did Mike share top secret information over his personal email? No.
Actually, we do not know what was shared. They are explicitly witholding "sensitive" emails.
AC conspiracy-mongering aside, we do know for a fact that he didn't share top secret information over his personal email for the profoundly simple reason that he wouldn't have had a top secret clearance at the time.
So there's no way he could have had top secret information to share -- unless, of course, Hillary emailed it to him.
If You or your media outlet was one of the ones that defended or didn't criticize as a fatal flaw: Hillary Clinton and her most glaring case of using personal E-mail server to cause security exposures and Fail to deliver items ordered by the court,
Then you already lost any right to criticize Pence, Etc, for lesser cases Of use of a personal e-mail account.
That seems to be pretty much All people and All the media outlets, by the way.
I don't agree, but For some reason we as a society decided it was all OK, At least for anything that was going on before 2016.
Of all the complaints about her emails, this has to be the most mind-boggling to me. Allow me to explain why.
The claim is that the purpose of her use of a private server was to evade public records laws and scrutiny. This is directly in contrast to the chain of events that led to the discovery of her email server:
1) Congress sends State Dept. a subpoena for Clinton's emails.
2) State Dept. IT, aware that they don't have them, sends a request to Clinton's people for the emails.
Now, what would you expect someone that was trying to avoid scrutiny to do, at this point, when they received the first official request for those emails? I'm pretty sure the answer is anything but "promptly and immediately start handing them over." I guess you can quibble about the emails that were marked as personal and not handed over, but really, I've yet to hear anything solid about that other than "she's shady I don't trust her and she's probably got all kinds of dirt hidden in those 'personal' emails." Moreover, this is direct evidence of a massive double standard, when people give those like Pence the benefit of the doubt, but refuse to give any to Clinton.
Hillary ran her own server in her basement and had her three stooges delete 30,000 wedding and yoga emails. Pence used an AOL account - the contents of which could have been obtained via subpoena at any time.
The former stinks of coverup - the latter just looks like an old guy using AOL because he didn't know any better.
Demoncrats are just searching. They're still talking about Russia.
What about Hitlery's:
Foreign govt donations while SoS?
Deleting email?
Election corruption in Detroit?
Connections with Saudis, Qatar?
DNC rigging?
They hosed themselves. Bernie would have won but good riddance. He's just as corrupt as the rest of them.
They are still in denial that the Midwest hated that pantsuit hag.
Fake News would imply the content was incorrect, invented or misleading.
I think there are two different definitions of "fake news" running around. In the original "fake news" story it was about a left-wing activist who wanted to "prove" right wingers were dumb and will fall for stupid shit so he created a news blog with completely made up facts, like that protestors were being paid $3500 to protest against Trump. This wasn't true, protestors were being paid around $16 via craigslist posts by people affiliated with Moveon.org, but it's useful disinformation for those who don't pay too much attention. Mention some protestors are being paid, and someone can scream "that was fake news!" And they're half right because they heard about the $3500 fake news and not the $16 real news. Anyway, then he'd post his fake news site in the comments sections of right wing blogs, and immediately someone would say "don't spread this crap, it's fake." The author then goes on NPR and says "hurr durr Trump won because these right wingers are peddling all this fake news I made!" Uh, if the left wing hack weren't making the fake news there wouldn't be fake news, if he weren't spreading it fake news wouldn't spread, and nobody believed him anyway. It's literally the "I was just pretending to be retarded" meme.
Then we have the way the mainstream media does fake news, which is fake context. People don't think in terms of facts, they think in terms of narratives. CNN does shit like this where you have a true fact (the video of the sister) but a fake narrative ('urged peace;" she did not). Or this story, where they're trying to conflate Pence's legal use of a private email account for state business with Hillary's illegal use of a private email server for classified information. The facts don't really matter. They're working a narrative ("Trump's administration is full of sloppy crooks who are puppets to Russians/Jews/aliens/Lizard Men from the Hollow Earth") using confirmation bias. Put out enough scary-sounding headlines describing legal behavior or wild speculation and confirmation bias takes over until people unironically believe that ultra-nationalist Jeff Sessions is a commie-rooskie agent. This won't work on Republicans or most normal independents, but the left has lost their grip on reality long ago, and Dems are probably checking under their beds for Russians at this point.
I have no idea how to break people out of these hallucinations. I wondered when Trump won the New Hampshire primaries and HuffPo ran their headline, literally in all caps "WAR IN EUROPE" sized that "NEW HAMPSHIRE GOES RACIST SEXIST XENOPHOBIC!!!!!" what would happen when Trump wins the general election? New Hampshire voters went for Trump because he said he'd get the $10 heroin off their streets, not because they're secret nazis. Would their readers snap out of it and realize HuffPo was misleading them? Nope. My FaceBook page is still full of hysterical women who think Russian Hitler is about to gas all non-straight white christian males. And the media just keeps adding fuel to the fire. How does this end?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Read what the OP said again. Don't Kelly Ann the conversation by changing it.
The use of a private email server wasn't prohibited by federal government statues applying to Hillary Clinton
That is a true statement.
The OP left out 2 things:
Things were done wrong, but just having a private e-mail server set up and secured by the Secret Service for the former President's use, and then used by Senator and Secretary H. Clinton was not what was wrong.
It was stupid to use it, but if no classified information had ever been sent or it wasn't done to skirt disclosure laws, then she would have just been embarrassed and not investigated.
The exact same thing applies to Pence. It is really dumb for him to use a private account for government business. If no Indiana "secrets" were revealed ( ie corn or soybean crop yields, pork belly futures), and it wasn't done to skirt disclosure laws, Then Pence is just stupid but not criminal.
Just as most of the Democrats still don't seem to realize that nominating one of the most despised figures in American politics as your candidate for POTUS is not a good strategy for winning an election, most Republicans don't seem to realize that being seen as acting exactly like the Democrats they're always complaining about results in the public despising Republicans as well.
The Democrats didn't win this last election, but neither did the Republicans. Trump won. Trump beat 12 Republicans on his way to the nomination. He wiped the floor with them. Some of them were extremely high profile, well funded candidates. Most of them were a waste of space. None of them stood a chance against Trump. Two years ago Trump was booed at CPAC, and Ted Cruz was held up as a shining example as the perfect, righteous candidate to lead the nation into its future. Trump walked all over "Lying" Ted Cruz.
Boehner, Ryan and others seem to act like they won last November. The Republicans lost. They lost a little less than the Democrats did, but Trump still whipped Republican @$$.
Sadly, both parties seem to be doubling down on the strategy of 'business as usual', which is a much greater threat to the country that the great orange one's erratic tweets.
Why don't politicians have compliance guys?
Why would they? When Hillary broke the law and used her private email server for classified information her voters said "THIS IS FINE AND WE LOVE IT!!!" The public would have to want compliance guys doing their jobs and punishing rule breakers but half of voters vocally approve of this sort of behavior, so why should the government give a shit?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You will see an investigation - the investigation into the Russian collaboration with the Trump campain . You can bet that those emails will be requested.