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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."
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.
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.
Did Mike use his personal email to discuss P4P "donations" to a personal charity? No.
See above.
If there is no issue, then why is Indiana explicitly withholding emails due to sensitive nature?
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/02/pence-used-personal-email-state-business----and-hacked/98604904/
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The administration of Pence’s successor, Gov. Eric Holcomb, released 29 pages of emails late this past week. But it withheld others, saying they are deliberative or advisory, confidential under rules adopted by the Indiana Supreme Court or the work product of an attorney.
Holcomb’s office declined to disclose how many emails were withheld.
from tfa:
Vice President Mike Pence used a personal AOL email account to conduct sensitive state business -- including issues related to homeland security
not illegal? sounds illegal to me.
"but, his emails!"
let 'em fly. douse the R's in the same shit they gave hillary.
DROWN them in it. let them realize that any weaspon you use, the other side will use, when its THEIR turn.
assholes.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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
What was the law in respect to Hillary Clinton?
What was the law in respect to Pence?
It's the law that counts. Not private emails.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
If that were the case, the FBI conclusion would have settled the matter. Also, if that were the case, the rabidity on display would go unexplained. A much simpler explanation exists, the right's outrage machine riled up a bunch of people and it's not going to do so for Pence.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
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.
Except that the FBI conclusion flew in the face of the law. Comey laid out a clean cut case of over 100 counts of felony failure to protect classified information through negligence, then tried to excuse it by saying it couldn't be prosecuted because there was no criminal intent. The problem with that is the very crime he specified has no intent requirement. If you are entrusted with classified information and through your negligence allow it to be exposed to unauthorized access, you are guilty of a felony. And as moving Top Secret information (as Comey said was found in at least 8 emails) to an unclassified server from the physically separate TS network is always considered an intentional act she should have been prosecuted for Deliberate Security Compromise.
If you have access to Classified information you handle it carefully and keep it on the systems it is supposed to be on.
Hillary should have faced charges (hopefully she still will) for her criminal negligence with out nation's secrets. The outrage at Comey giving her a pass (days after AG Lynch met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in AZ) was not false it is fully justified.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
What did he do wrong?
Seriously, did you not read the headline? He uses AOL. He clearly can't be trusted with important decisions.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Clinton and Pence both hired a law firm to determine which emails would be considered private and which emails would be subject to the records keeping act. It was not illegal for neither Pence nor Clinton to use a private (non-gov) account, as long as they submitted all "official business" emails for record-keeping. Both did.
There is no material difference between using an AOL account or using a private server. Indeed, one could argue that using a private server you can at least account for who have had access to the emails. In the AOL case, there is no way of knowing. A private account - on AOL or a private server - cannot be used for classified material.
In the Clinton case it *was* determined that she had sent
- some emails where the contents was retroactively classified. This is not criminal, as Clinton the material *was not* classified at the time.
- A total of 3 emails which contained classified information at the time. However, the "classfied" markings were non-standard which could explain why Clinton did not notice them.
It was not illegal to set up at private server. Clinton was clearly aware that she should not use it for classified material; otherwise you would see a lot of classified material with standard markings on the server. Which there was not.
Maybe she should have realized that there was a risk that she may accidentally send classified material. IMO the greater risk was that state dept. employees would send classified material *to* her account. Was it reckless? Possibly. Criminal? No.
If Pence has sent classified material from his AOL account, it is equally illegal, regardless of whether the account was "official". If he did not instruct aides to avoid sending classified material *to* his account, it would be equally reckless.
Fun fact: Pence was hacked. Clintons email server was not.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
It's pretty much the same thing. 1. The law in both cases does not forbid using personal email for official business. (It should) Hillary did break State Department regulations, but those are not laws. 2. Both Hillary and Pence probably violated record keeping laws because there is no apparent effort to preserve those emails 3. Both broke public transparency laws by not adding those emails to the public record. Both had to be forced (Hillary by the Senate, Pence by the courts) to provide them to the public. In Hillary's case the emails inadvertently (as concluded by the FBI) contained some classified information. We don't know if Pence's emails contain any classified information but we do know that his email was hacked. So it's pretty much a tie. Both tried to conduct official business and keep it off the record. There should be a strict law against that. All official business should be conducted through official channels, all personal email and social media accounts should be examined periodically. All public records should be published periodically through out the time the person is in office, we shouldn't have to wait until the end of their term to see what they are doing. I would much prefer if all that information is made available in real time but it's probably not realistic for the government to be that transparent.
One compelling difference b/w the 2 - not that it counts to everyone who wants to see a moral equivalence:
- Pence archived all his emails, so any investigator who wants to look into that and draw conclusions is at liberty to do so
- Hilary deleted some 33k emails of hers, after being subpoena'ed to preserve them, including any emails about the Clinton Foundation.
In other words, no cover up attempt in one case, vs a desperate cover up attempt in the other
I just love the people who think they've found a massive smoking gun here -- you're far from the first.
Trump is using an unsecured phone to send... tweets. Messages broadcast to the universe.
Just imagine the harm that could befall the nation if one of those were to be intercepted.
You idiot.
To charge under the Espionage Act scienter is required. You are wrong, and Comey is right.
The statute you are referring to is 18 US 793(f):
(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.
It looks like you're right (and I'm sure the Republican news sources you read agree), but you're wrong.
"But we find no uncertainty in this statute which deprives a person of the ability to predetermine whether a contemplated action is criminal under the provisions of this law. The obvious delimiting words in the statute are those requiring 'intent or reason to believe that the information to be obtained is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.' This requires those prosecuted to have acted in bad faith. The sanctions apply only when scienter is established."Gorin v. US, 312 US 19, 27-28 (1941)
I'm guessing Comey is familiar with Gorin. Without the scienter requirement the clause is unconstitutionally vague. See Id. at 26-27. The reason he said no reasonable prosecutor would pursue the case is because that's the standard for Rule 11 sanctions.
Trump is using an unsecured phone to send... tweets.
He might also be carrying it in locations/situations that should be secure. For us mere mortals, just carrying an unsecured phone somewhere that classified information MIGHT be discussed is a big no-no. But, his dinner discussion regarding the North Korean missile launch suggests that he's a little lax on privacy, so why should his phones be any different?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
You said the FBI's recommendation not to prosecute "flew in the face of the law . . . because . . . the very crime he specified has no intent requirement." You are wrong. A plain reading of the statute shows a clear mens rearequirement.
This is the crime in question: "Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document [or other] information, relating to the national defense, . . . through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." 18 U.S.C. 793(f) (emphasis added). In turn, gross negligence is "[a] conscious, voluntary act or omission in reckless disregard of a legal duty and of the consequences to another party." Black's Law Dictionary (9th ed. 2009) (emphasis added).
If storing the classified material on her private server was not a "conscious, voluntary act," then the mens rea requirement here is not met, meaning the crime was not committed.
Here is a guy prosecuted for a much less-important violation of the same: http://legalinsurrection.com/2...
Only if by "less-important", you mean "more-important". The guy who's story you linked to, deliberate took pictures of equipment he was specifically prohibited from photographing with intent to distribute the pictures to people who were not cleared to see them. As I understand it, from having previously looked at this case, he was specifically warned that what he was doing was illegal, and that he could go to jail for what he was doing and continued to do it. So he deliberately broke the law with full knowledge that he was doing so and what the punishment would be if (when) he was caught.
Hillary, on the other hand has been crucified because she received several emails that contained, improperly marked, classified information over the course of her four years at the State Department. Material that the State department is on record saying it does not believe should have ever been classified.
Do you see the difference here? Because everyone who isn't blinded by partisanship does.
Fanatically anti-fanatical