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Comey, Who Investigated Hillary Clinton For Using Personal Email For Official Business, Used His Personal Email For Official Business (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Former FBI Director James Comey, who led the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of personal email while secretary of state, also used his personal email to conduct official business, according to a report from the Justice Department on Thursday. The report also found that while Comey was "insubordinate" in his handling of the email investigation, political bias did not play a role in the FBI's decision to clear Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing.
The report from the office of the inspector general "identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account (a Gmail account) to conduct FBI business." In three of the five examples, investigators said Comey sent drafts he had written from his FBI email to his personal account. In one instance, he sent a "proposed post-election message for all FBI employees that was entitled 'Midyear thoughts,'" the report states. In another instance, Comey again "sent multiple drafts of a proposed year-end message to FBI employees" from his FBI account to his personal email account.
The report from the office of the inspector general "identified numerous instances in which Comey used a personal email account (a Gmail account) to conduct FBI business." In three of the five examples, investigators said Comey sent drafts he had written from his FBI email to his personal account. In one instance, he sent a "proposed post-election message for all FBI employees that was entitled 'Midyear thoughts,'" the report states. In another instance, Comey again "sent multiple drafts of a proposed year-end message to FBI employees" from his FBI account to his personal email account.
That was the issue with Clinton. Handling classified material improperly. Bid difference.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
Strzok and Page also used personal email to conduct FBI business. And yes, it was probably illegal - their work-related communications must be subject to FOIA’s disclosure provisions.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
The OIG report also says Comey claims he didn't know Anthony Weiner was married to Clinton's chief of staff Huma Abedin...
Director of the FBI.
I've long suspected that use of personal email accounts is so rampant in government that if the FBI did prosecute, half of congress would be torn between destroying their own emails and trying to dig up anything the other party sent them from a person address. It's only a big deal with it can be turned into a political weapon.
Go back to the Bush administration and Colin Powell had a personal server too... and he too used it for business... .. but, but, but, but, but ..... HILLARY!!!!
1,2,3 the righties scream
Meanwhile the IG report drops and results in no new indictments, no firings... a big nothing burger... yawn.
But he's still subject to the same records retention laws that Clinton was willfully subverting.
so nothing confidential at all, just employee memo drafts?
But he's still subject to the same records retention laws that Clinton was willfully subverting.
And how would sending an email from his official FBI account to a personal Gmail account subvert any record retention laws? In one case there are no records retained in government servers, in the other case there are. This does not sound like the same thing. Possible leaking of secure information is another matter, but that is not the main problem from my understanding.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Ok
Clinton wasn't accused of using personal email for business. She was accused of transmitting top secret documents over unsecured personal email (very illegal), and using personal email to communicate state business secretly outside of officially logged and recorded channels (also illegal).
Is this what Comey is accused of? If not, everyone can fuck off with their "he did it too" shit.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
You jest. But the discussion is already filled with ACs who'd just as soon see someone dead than be civil about their political opponents.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
(U) Comey was investigated former Secretary of State Clinton for her handling of classified materials.
(U) Unclassified materials were found on an insecure personal server that she had set up to work from home
(U) She claimed that she had no knowledge that any of the documents on that server were classified -- meaning some variety of confidential (C), secret (S), or (most likely at her level) top secret (TS). She believed it was all unclassified (U)
(U) Her claim is fucking ridiculous, because in classified documents every page, heading, sentence, and bullet point, and source reference is preceded by note just like this: (U) (FOUO) (C) (S) (TS)
(U) Is this painful to read? This is the sort of thing that she claims was missing from her documents.
(U) You can't get such documents off of the secure network. To get such documents on her private server, she or a lackey uploaded them.
(U) For her story to carry water, she would need someone with clearance level similar to hers to print, re-type, scan, and emailed her such documents, all while lying to her about doing so.
(U) She fucked up. Badly. It may have hurt her chance to become the de facto ruler of the world.
(U) Most people who get caught for lesser fuck-ups end up going to jail.
The rhetoric about this issue is highly partisan, including your post. However, I don't think this is a liberal/conservative issue, really.
As a state employee, I'm allowed to use my personal email address for official business. Once in awhile I do so, if I want to have a particular discussion outside of work hours while not checking my work email for other business. Nothing I'm doing is sensitive, and I'm allowed to do it provided the emails are sent to an official state email address reasonably soon.
If Comey is using a personal email address to send himself drafts of agency-wide letters, that doesn't seem problematic. Comey isn't going to be sending sensitive information to the entire FBI.
Comey did completely mishandle investigating Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Neither liberals nor conservatives approve of how Comey handled that investigation, so I don't think that's a controversial statement. Clinton was also incredibly reckless, to say the least, in using a personal email server for handling sensitive information. That is, indeed, problematic. As for there being a political bias, Mike Pence also used a personal email account to conduct official business while he was the Governor of Indiana. That email account was hacked, exposing sensitive information. Mike Pence didn't break Indiana law, and I'm not aware of him ever being investigated over the matter.
While both Clinton and Pence have been heavily criticized for using personal email for conducting work-related business, neither has faced serious consequences for doing so. I don't see a political bias here, for or against conservatives.
As for Comey, using a personal email address for a few emails that don't appear sensitive doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Comey's credibility is gone, but it doesn't have anything to do with this. This seems like a non-issue to me, especially compared with all of the other issues surrounding Comey.
What? Comey undermined Clinton _twice_. First when he publicly excoriated her for her personal email server use in June and then when he announced a new investigation just two weeks before the election.
If anything, he was Trump's tool.
Ok. Clinton wasn't accused of using personal email for business. She was accused of transmitting top secret documents over unsecured personal email
Classified, actually. Top Secret is considerably higher; "classified" is not the same as "top secret".
Amusingly, her server turns out to have been more secure than the State Department server. The State Department got hacked, but the Clintons didn't. https://securityintelligence.c...
(very illegal),
In fact, all she had to do was issue an exemption stating that her server was allowed for classified email. As Secretary of State, she had the authority to declare what server are secure!
What I don't understand about Comey is that he all but threw the election to Trump while panning Trump left and right.
It's easy to understand. Comey and the rest of the beltway didn't even suspect Trump might get elected. The purpose of that farcical reopen/close stunt was to clean the slate; Clinton would win the election and enter office with no outstanding investigative hangups.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Plenty of people holding clearances and many whose careers were ended (or put in jail) for far less cared about that shit.
Then how did those darn Russians get her emails? The alternative to badly secured server hacked by Russians is the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Pick your poison carefully.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
to her credit she didn't throw him under the bus for it.
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"Amusingly, her server turns out to have been more secure than the State Department server. The State Department got hacked, but the Clintons didn't. https://securityintelligence.c... [securityintelligence.com] "
The OIG report released today SAYS that foreign governments had at least one of her emails marked Secret - from her server.
Top Secret is a classification, as are Secret and Confidential. 'Classified' itself is not a classification at all.
Then how did those darn Russians get her emails? The alternative to badly secured server hacked by Russians is the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Pick your poison carefully.
The DNC email leak was from the DNC, not the Clinton server (and was years after Hillary left the Secretary of State office). It was done by phishing John Podesta's account: https://www.apnews.com/dea73ef...
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/03/ap-investigation-russia-hack-dnc-clinton-emails/
"Comey arguable lost Clinton the presidency (or at least contributed to it) by announcing the email investigation etc at with what we'll call "very interesting timing", or at best amounts to simply bad luck for Clinton."
Well then by all means Clinton should run again in 2020. Pretty please?
That doesn't mean she wasn't hacked, it means that the state department detected their hack, while Hillary didn't.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
"As Secretary of State, she had the authority to declare what server are secure!"
Not true. The Sec of State only has classification authority over documents originating with the Dept of State. The classified info they found originated in other agencies.
This is what a smear campaign looks like.
Sigh. Political games are not headlines, but I guess the morning show folks need something to cluck about.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
There's many stories in the 500 page report though. Pointing out this detail seems more like a dedicated spin bot than anything else though- Hillary sent and received SCI data and TS data on her private server. Coney forwarded incomplete memos so he could work them during his evenings like the gray soulless minion that he is. Even lumping these two together is silly.
"so that Russians could access it.."
Citation? Actually, never mind.
"Just think of the October announcement of the reexamination of the case and it being shut again two days later as a way to reinforce that this is a non-issue right before the election."
Are you kidding me?
Imagine tables reversed: ...and then two days later has a press conference saying "on further review, not enough evidence has been found to proceed with charges."
FBI director has a press conference 11 days before the election and states "The FBI is reviewing allegations that Mr. Trump molested an under-age female."
And you're telling me that wouldn't have been an election-killing attack on Trump?
Get real.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Record unemployment. Greatest personal and business tax breaks in years. Manufacturing is coming back to the USA in record numbers. Lowest black unemployment ever. Republicans are doing a great job. I'm getting raises at work. Best foreign policy we've had since Reagan. I like how the country is moving right now. If Trump runs in 2020 he has my vote.
How could it not be a shitty job? It involves running the government. The thing we can hope is that while running the government they can dismantle as much of it as possible.
On page XII in the report, the IG says the department “identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters.”
The IG expressed “profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered our review.”
The contact between FBI agents and the media extended to receiving “improperly receiving benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events.”
“The harm caused by leaks, fear of potential leaks, and a culture of unauthorized media contacts is illustrated in Chapters Ten and Eleven of our report, where we detail the fact that these issues influenced FBI officials who were advising Comey on consequential investigative decisions in October 2016,” the report states.
The IG is forceful in its opinion that the problem with leaking is not “with the FBI’s policy, which we found to be clear and unambiguous.” Instead, the leaking phenomenon “appears to be a cultural attitude among many in the organization.”
According to charts provided in the IG report, one reporter had contact with 12 FBI officials, including an FBI executive and unit chief.
Another reporter contacted an assistant director 21 times and a special agent 23 times, according to the IG. Some FBI employees were in contact with multiple reporters, with one special agent contacting various journalists 32 times.
Stop. You are wrong.
Information is classified - every agency has a large document called a Classification Guide that describes what sort of information that agency considers worthy of classification.
Documents are supposed to be marked if they contain classified information, to allow people to know how to handle the document without reading it. Even if not marked, the information in the document is still classified; it just isn't labelled.
The phrase "classified at the time of sending" is a lie. The documents may not have been MARKED as containing classified information, but they did. There is no such thing as "classified after the fact".
Additionally, Clinton sent documents containing NRO imagery that was clearly labelled TOP SECRET at the time they were sent. They were classified, were correctly labelled, and were from an agency Clinton had no authority over. All of your BS excuses (even if they weren't lies) still wouldn't apply to those.
Clinton sent classified info, knew it, and told the FBI to fuck off - then got away with it because the highly-ambitious Mr Comey thought she would be his next boss.
I swear, on Slashdot, Trump & Hillary have become Godwin's Law 2.0
It is nearly impossible NOT to find a reference to one or both of these idiots in every single topic. Every Damned One. O.o
AS Secretary of State, as a former senator, HRC is responsible for determining what is and is. It classified (at any of the three levels) WITHOUT relying on 'markings'. That's like saying it was OK for her to rob a bank because no one told her it was illegal.
It's a childish defense for something that someone who was responsible to know better.
Ken
HRC used a personal server exclusively for 100% of her work-related emails while Secretary of State - she never, in her entire tenure as Secretary logged into a state Department email account.
Comey sent (3x) drafts of mass departmental emails he planned to send to everyone in the FBI to his private gmail account, presumably to work on them at home gonvieniently.
These are in no way comparable 'offenses'.
I find it hard to believe HRC's private server more secure than the state department email server she should have used - it is simply non-sensical, State had a full-time staff working round-clock to secure their servers, HRC bounced her server from part-time contractor to a web hosting firm.
The IG report clearly states that HRC's email server was accessed by foreign agents - is it only a problem if the Russians hacked her server? Is it OK if it was the Chinese or North Koreans?
Ken
> That and the FBI was actually pretty pro-Trump.
Are we reading the same report?
Page 5:
Page 420 shows a text saying "we'll stop" Trump from becoming President--a text that was somehow completely omitted, rather than redacted, from previous disclosures.
Page 430 shows FBI agents getting 'gifts' from the media.
Page 461-2:
You may want to read more than just the conclusions at the end.
"The FBI is reviewing allegations that Mr. Trump molested an under-age female."
And you're telling me that wouldn't have been an election-killing attack on Trump?
There is no way that would have 'killed' his election chances. There were allegations flying around about Trump walking in on underage girls changing their clothes all the time at Miss Teen USA, and 60 million idiots still voted for him. His voters absolutely do not care how or what Trump does to women (or girls).
The DNC email leak was from the DNC, not the Clinton server (and was years after Hillary left the Secretary of State office). It was done by phishing John Podesta's account:
There were three distinct leaks: one from the Clinton server, one from the DNC and one from Podesta. The Podesta leak has nothing to do with the DNC leak and the phished Podesta account is on gmail.
So, when saluted you return the salute. It's common courtesy regardless of who salutes you. As an NCO in the Army I occasionally had a nervous young soldier salute me, I'd return the salute then correct him/her as to my rank and that I was enlisted not an officer and thus not worthy of a sniper check.
It would have been a problem if he hadn't returned the salute as it would have been an insult to ignore the salute.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
In all the news about Hillary Clinton's email servers, I never saw ANYTHING that would indicate Hillary Clinton has any technical knowledge.
Maybe it's because how flippant she was about it? "Wipe the server" "You mean with a cloth?"
Maybe it's because she deleted so many emails before granting access to the FBI?
Maybe it's because she was head of the Department of State and should have asked somebody if she honestly had no technical knowledge?
Maybe it's because she has almost no credibility and the only ones voting for her were doing it of party reasons, anti-trump reasons, or for gender reasons>
You mean like negotiating an historic agreement to denuclearize North Korea?
His summit with North Korea did not lead to Kim agreeing to anything he hadn't already agreed to. In fact what he signed did not concede anything at all, and recognized Kim as the leader of North Korea.
Posting some of the highest job growth numbers the nation has ever seen?
The change in job growth between 2016, 2017, and 2018 is not statistically significant. That gives no reason to expect that this would not have happened had anyone else been president.
Record stock market highs?
You're ignoring the record stock market falls in with those "record" highs.
Why would Trump want to distract the media?
To try to distract us from his repeated use of the constitution as toilet paper, of course.
But go ahead, try and name what illegal things you think Trump is doing.
If you can't google the growing list of laws Trump has broken, I'm not going to waste my time doing it for you.
despite an investigation that's nearing two years, the FBI is still unable to name a single illegal thing it thinks Trump or anyone in the Trump campaign has done.
You have several things wrong with that statement.
For one, this is not an FBI investigation, it is a DoJ investigation. That is an important distinction as it changes - amongst other things - the jurisdiction of the investigation.
Two, there have been numerous charges - and several guilty pleas - already brought against the Trump campaign.
Three, a two year investigation is actually quite quick considering the magnitude we are dealing with. The investigation into Bill Clinton's affair with Lewinski took much longer and lead to zero criminal convictions. The Trump investigation already has people behind bars or awaiting sentencing, and others awaiting criminal trials.
Four, Trump is still yet to be interviewed or served with a subpoena. The notion that he won't is at best pure speculation. Considering how much his attorneys are trying to argue that he is above the law is strong support that they are aware he has indeed broken the law.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He must be the most honest man in government.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It boggles my mind how liberals are ok with this but are outraged by a possibly illegal payment to a woman Trump allegedly had sex with.
You know if boggles the mind of liberals that you care about a handful of emails out of thousands sent over 4 years that contained bits of classified information, and you don't care that the actual President of the United States ordered illegal hush money paid and threats delivered to his former mistresses to keep them from speaking out during an election, then lied about the payments, and then lied about the affairs.
You should be self-aware enough to recognize that if we swapped the Democrat and Republican in this scenario you'd be ever more outraged about the reverse situation. I doubt the liberals would still care about the emails, though. I'm basing that on the fact that liberals largely didn't care that much when Bush and Cheney were using a private email system to avoid presidential records requirements, but conservatives sure as hell cared about the President's sexual morality when Clinton was in office.
Fanatically anti-fanatical