It's not about how tuned in she is to new(er) stuff like Teh Interwebz. This is a classic case of lefty "The First Amendment Doesn't Apply When We Don't Like It." That little corner of the constitution is even older than she is. No excuses for talking wistfully about book banning, or Harry Reid's use of the senate floor to escape libel laws when just plain profoundly lying about someone he doesn't want to see elected. That particular Reid episode was disgraceful, and you might think he'd have come to regret it, but a reporter just asked him about it the other day, and with the smuggest possible expression on his face, he essentially said, "My guy won, right?"
It's not about how old either of those two are. It's a character issue.
You would also need to address the presence or absence of such email in her printed-out dump of cherry-picked messages. If it's missing from that pile, it adds to the picture.
And we'd have to see how you imagine the testimony going from the assistant (not that the assistant would be the one in legal jeopardy with regard to federal laws here, other than perjury-related ones).
Recall that the only records we have of external emails are printed. She has not even suggested that she or her staff were in the habit of CCing/forwarding any correspondence with non-State-Dept people to some special place at State. She's only said that she figured the act of corresponding with people IN the State's mail system was a good enough way for those in-house messages to be legally kept. Because her only discussion about this was a single press conference in which she hand-picked the reporters and pre-screened the questions, she wasn't asked about how she thought that mechanism would protect her correspondence with people in other agencies or countries. And that leaves us with her personally selected hardcopies... which investigators have said are missing any records at all from long blocks of time.
All they have to do is turn up one example of a third party's communications with her, something that she chose not to print, and which she has (as she's said she's done) destroyed, and we're back the FRA again. Destruction of official records. The, "Gee, I thought we were CCing all of that to State" defense doesn't work if there no examples, at all, of any habit of or even attempt to do so. Nobody at State has said, "It's my mailbox she sent copies to," or "Here's the name of the mailbox we set up for her to CC to," and indeed multiple investigations and FOIA requests have found no sign of such a repository ever having been established, let alone used.
How about you pick a specific "guilty" scenario, a "sample" email, and we'll each run that scenario through our models (assumptions/perspectives) about how Fed emails and/or the email-related laws work or don't work step by step.
Scenario: A freelance fixer and political operative long associated with and sometimes in the employ of Clintons sends to her an email containing what he describes as very sensitive diplomatic intelligence about people, events, and governments in the Middle East and Europe. He sends this to her in the context of her role as Secretary of State, but of course sends it to her not on her State.gov account (because she told State not to set one up for her), but to her personal mailbox on the private server in her house, using a domain she paid a contractor with a phony name to set up for her the day she was named to the job.
Open receiving this email, she takes it into account (or doesn't - she may have considered its importance to her policy ideas and the execution of her job as being insignificant... though that's not her call, that's for State's archivists to decide), and that's that. There's nobody and State that she thinks should also read it, so she doesn't forward it to anyone. There's no mechanism in place for that email to be automatically copied over to State or to any other federal institution. Nothing happens to it for the remaining years of her tenure there - a violation of the Federal Records Act and of the 2009 NARA - and nothing happens to it when she leaves office. She doesn't provide that correspondence, or any others like it, to State's archivists.
Years go by. She has done nothing to make that correspondence part of FOIA-able records. Multiple FOIA requests and investigations have come and gone, seeking exactly such documents, but State says there are none, because of course they've never seen it, and can't where she's got them stashed in her house.
Eventually the fact that a hacker has exposed the existence and exclusive use of this private mailbox, along with it dawning on multiple investigators and reporters just how deliberate she's been in keeping this material away from scrutiny, she has her private (non-cleared) employees assist her in choosing which emails she thinks she wants the public to see, and prints them on paper. She mentions that she has deleted tens of thousands of messages that she doesn't consider appropriate for State's review, and that she will never make those messages available to any party for a review of her process.
Messages like the one from her third party intelligence source may, or may not be included in the print-outs - it will take time to find them, because she delivered that correspondence not in a simple-to-search file of messages, but in a redacted stack of paper - the most time and labor intensive choice possible for the transcription and review of those government records.
Scenario two: exactly the same, only the message she received is still sensitive, but is marked as such, and is from someone in the Defense Department. She's now keeping sensitive and/or classified information outside of the secure platforms required by law, and since it was meant for her eyes only and not something she decides to forward to someone at State, the information is once again beyond reach for any FOIA request or investigation that looks to State's archives for official records.
The email may be at DoD because it was sent from there, but investigators can't know to look, since there is no record at State of such a message ever having been sent to the person running State. If she decides to dispose of that message along with the tens of thousands of others she deleted, we'll never know - unless investigators pursue the matter by researching the records of every other federal entity, including legislative offices.
The "there's always one or two rotten apples in a barrel" argument is only reasonable when they are genuine exceptions, and they are genuinely punished.
You mean like we send them to jail, like we do? I'm glad you agree with me.
It doesn't look onerous, other than the fact that the FAA has said they are issuing no such certificates because - other than some mil grade stuff - there is no path to such a certificate currently available. Further, the certification of the aircraft itself has nothing to do with the larger problem: they are allowing NO commercial activity, of any kind (that includes research by companies like Amazon) without operators - each and every one who will be at the controls - having a 333 waiver. And even then, they must be licensed pilot, and have direct control, and line-of-site over the aircraft at all times. In other words, the reason Amazon took all of this activity to Canada is because there is no practical or legal way to do it in the US. For which we have the current administration to thank.
And the point about the Taliban is not that they want a medieval theocracy, but that they want a medieval theocracy in their own country.
Except, most of the Taliban are trying to set up a medieval theocracy in another country (read up on where that movement is from, who they are demographically, and where they are operating). And they're hip-deep in relations with outfits that are trying to spread the same thing throughout the middle east, and of course into and across Africa. There are distinct lines between some of these groups, but in other cases they and those they support or with whom they work make it pointless to try to separate them. Which is why today's slaughter by Al Shabab in Kenya is, in practical terms, right in line with the goals and efforts of the group you say is just trying to do their own thing in "their own country." That's a completely naive perspective on what they're all about.
And no, it doesn't matter what side you're on. Oppressive regimes that jail or slaughter people for thinking the wrong way, or kill teachers for teaching girls to read, are only a "really depends on what side you're on" situation if you have a completely poisonous case of moral relativism. There's no "freedom" being fought for when the objective of the fight is to reduce freedom. You aren't really trotting out the "freedom means being free to prevent other people from being free" notion are you? Really?
Going to war with Iran would be like going to war with Maryland.
You've never been to Maryland, have you? You'd never win such a war. There's too much paperwork involved in even establishing a war in Maryland. Just the recurring fees and annual compliance filings with the state would be enough to crush the fighting will of any invading army. Not to mention the tax rates on any pillaged loot seized during said invasion, especially in certain Maryland counties, would be enough to make the whole thing completely unprofitable. Just don't bother. Invade nearby Virginia, or maybe Delaware or Pennsylvania, instead. They're much easier to deal with.
I mean don't you ever question why the treatment of women is always specified when describing the enemy?
It's an excellent barometer of culture. Everyone has (or had) a mother. Hey look! Something we all have in common. So it provides a common perspective from which to evaluate how various cultures treat people. And cultures which stone women to death for having been raped are, objectively, less free than cultures that don't. One trots that example out because the vast majority of people with any sort of intellectual honesty can substitute at least one woman they're likely to know (perhaps their mom?) for the unknown woman in that scenario, and then examine their own reaction to it.
I've noted "arab" has become a major porn category in the past 10 years
Yeah, it's almost like a huge part of that culture has been increasing its access to the internet, and has been integrating with societies across Europe and North America. Shocking!
but don't you think it's odd that war consistently has descriptions of women (always specifying a distinction between yours and theirs)
No, the discussion generally revolves around the treatment of women, not "the women." Your inability to make the distinction is pretty telling.
The US revolutionaries fought for freedom for rich white men while enslaivng Africans and ignoring everyone else.
You might want to actually read some history. You know, just for fun. And so you can peek under the hood and see that things are wee bit more complicated than your cartoon villain version.
just because they aren't fighting for -YOUR- concept of freedom, doesn't mean they aren't fighting for freedom
Which is exactly why I cited examples where any rational person couldn't get it wrong. Nobody who is fighting for the power to take away other people's freedoms (say, of speech, assembly, religion, etc) is fighting for freedom. It's possible to objectively look at two different fights, and see where one is actually about freedom, and the other is about gaining power to deny freedom.
Your knowledge of the revolution and the governance of England is also rather lacking.
The governance of England (not to let it off the hook there, even so) was not the same as England's governance of the colonies. Don't tell me to learn more about it when you paint with a brush so broad you miss out on that reality. The Americans were fighting to be free of how England was ruling the colonies. Even if you consider the then-state-of-affairs in England to have been the model of freedom (plainly not true), the colonists did not enjoy the same liberties or representation.
That's not to sugar-coat the man Che became and his eventual ruthlessness.
"Became?" He started out that way, and didn't stop. He was no champion of a constitutional democracy. Didn't seek one, and didn't act to establish one. What he and dictators like Castro found to dislike about the regimes against which they rebelled has nothing to do with their vision for a totalitarian communist paradise. They set out to achieve what the Castros have been using violent oppression of their own people to preserve ever since.
If they were ever about freedom, they wouldn't need to lock people away or simply kill them for speaking their minds.
Their currently proposed rule changes contemplate a simpler grade of permit, but still make no provision for BLOS flight. You'd still need to pass an FAA operator's test, and pay to sit and re-take it every year. The proposed rules also require each and every aircraft to be registered - something that makes flying continually changing prototypes off the work bench a near impossibility.
I'm not "totally off base," I'm aware of the actual situation. You're just engaged in wishful thinking, or making excuses for the administration, and hoping nobody will do any fact checking.
You really want to make the case that America of all countries has clean hands and a clean conscience in this dirty enterprise called war?
Do you mean that when a huge undertaking involving actual, you know, human beings taking action in opposition to a monstrously violent totalitarian regime sometimes involves some of those human beings doing assholish things... that therefore the side that's acting to prevent oppressive totalitarianism is wrong to fight it? You'd rather allow groups like ISIS, or people like Stalin, or fun outfits like the Khmer Rouge to just carry on being brutal across the board as part of their purpose and policy than risk deploying against them on the off chance that not every action taken to oppose them, by everyone involved in the fight, will pass your purity test? Better to let the house burn down than to risk having anyone involved in trying to put out the fire be a jerk, I guess.
There is still hatred towards the Japanese over what they did
Right. Because that's what they (the country of Japan) set out to do. Cruelty and torture and rape weren't the actions of a few idiots/asshats in the Japanese army, those things were the stated tactics, the official policy, from the top down. That wasn't assholishness by abberration, and prosecuted (a la the WV guards at Abu Ghraib), that was marching orders. Your need to confuse the difference between that, and things like what Japan systematically did in China, shows you to be either completely misguided, or simply trolling. The latter, most likely.
When the people who actually drag school teachers out of their classroom to shoot them in the head for teaching girls publish videos of doing so online to show how serious they are about it, you can claim "land grab" and "it's all fake" to your heart's content, but you'll know you're lying, just like the rest of us will know you're lying.
And here in the US, we are told that women are denied the chance at education
Who's "we" and who is doing the telling? There are more women in college then there are men. So, basically you're just blathering.
we are a Christian nation
They "land grabbing" revolutionaries you're complaining about fought, among other things, to tear down the form of government under which they were living... one that DID establish a government-backed single religion. They were so opposed to that, in the form of the constitution's first amendment, they baked freedom from that ever happening again right into the nation's chartering document. Not that you've probably ever read it or anything.
I remember when Red Dawn came out (the first one) that we discussed the differnce between freedom fighters and terrorists.
The answer was history.
No, the answer is: look at what they're actually fighting for. "Freedom fighters" who fight for the opportunity to deny women the right to go to school, or to set up a regime where people who aren't willing to claim faithfulness to one single state religion are not freedom fighters. It really is that simple. US revolutionaries fought to be free from what was essentially a military dictatorship (the monarchy) that didn't provide some rather important freedom-related features (like those we see protected in our constitution). When freedom fighters are fighting for actual freedoms, then that's what they are. When "freedom fighters" are fighting to institute totalitarian rule (like, say, Che Guevara and company did) they're not freedom fighters at all. The Taliban aren't fighting for freedom, they're fighting to set up a ruthless medieval theocracy. Doesn't matter what they call themselves, it's what they do.
Sure, perfectly legal if you make all of your drone research team run out and get a pilot's license, and then file flight plans for every single test. You know, if you take a quadcopter out into the parking lot and hover it ten feet off the ground to test a delivery mechanism, you need an FAA licensed pilot and a filed flight plan for all 30 seconds that will take. Sounds like a really great environment in which to conduct thousands of man hours of testing, huh?
And no, there is no provision in the FAA rules for Amazon to test a single flight where the vehicle goes out of line of site of the hands-on operator. The entire premise of what they're researching is prohibited, barring a waiver that they've only issued to an operator in rural Alaska inspecting pipelines while using existing, military-class equipment.
There's only one way to punish Amazon for taking this activity outside of the US. We must find a way, since they have a business presence in the US, to add a larger regulatory and tax burden onto them until they submit, and return this activity, which we won't let them do anyway, to US soil. At which point of course we will not reduce that new tax or regulatory burden, but that'll show 'em anyway.
Sorry, you lost me here. What does "THEIR" refer to, FAA or FOIA.
Now you're just being coy. Do you really think that it has ever been a feature of the Freedom of Information Act to require the archivists at the FAA to scour, say, the records kept by Justice, or Agriculture or Commerce etc when someone submits a FOIA request to the FAA for all correspondence involving a given FAA official on a given topic? Of course not. It's understood that the FAA is the keeper of all of the FAA staff's correspondence. If that agency's director was running all of his official mail through a private domain on a server kept in his house, and corresponded with, say, a Senator or someone at Justice, the FAA's own mail archives would have no record of that because said message never traversed the FAA's systems and the archiving mechanisms they have in place. A FOIA request to the FAA's records office for that official's correspondence with said Senator would - just like the FOIA requests for some of Clinton's mail - come up dry. Why? Because a FOIA request to the FAA doesn't cause the FAA's archivists to ask every other agency in the government to also scour the archives of all of those agencies.
We have no record of Clinton's correspondence with anyone in any other agency or branch of the government because the FOIA requests to State can't come up with them. Because those messages didn't traverse State's systems. Her claim that she was relying on her correspondence with other people at State to serve as a record of her official mail deliberately avoids the topic of how her personal server was allowing State to keep records of correspondence that didn't involve State's mail servers or archives. The only possible record of such external communication was going to be found through bottomless research against mail servers all around the government and the world, or through access to her own server - which she says she's wiped clean and will not allow anyone to see. We also get her own personal decisions on which fraction of her email she decided to print to hardcopy, rather than simply passing along in their entirety. And this she did only when pressed to do so, long after she left office. That is in direct violation of the Federal Records Act generally, as well as the 2009 NARA. That it's also in contradiction to her own signed policy just helps to illustrate how phony she's being on the subject.
Thus, mere using of the State Department emails BY ITSELF would not guarentee longer-term archiving
But using that system would have been a good faith effort to comply with the FRA and NARA. Rather than make that good faith effort, she deliberately acted to keep her records from going anywhere near State's servers, didn't provide ANY of the records during her tenure, and didn't provide any when she left.
Ideally an assistant would assist H in doing that rather than her spending her own time deciding what needs "official" archiving
Yeah, an assistant DID. A personally paid aid, working for the family foundation. Someone who's not cleared for sensitive/classified information, and whose paycheck is funded in part by the millions of dollars Clinton collected from foreign donors to her family enterprise while on tour as the country's top diplomat. Regardless, she's the one telling the press that she decided when a message wasn't to be kept for being irrelevant from the State archivist's perspective. I'm sure the career archivists appreciate being told what to think and cut out of that process - not for the incidental use of a staffer's private mail, but for ALL of the top official's communications.
So printing is a crime?
I didn't say that. But because it is the slower method with more work involved, it reflects a deliberate choice to produce the required documents in a way that maximizes the delay in allowing FOIA requesters to see the result
Otherwise, it appears you are making up rules out of your tail end.
What? Clinton herself signed a memo to her staff reminding them that they had to use state.gov mailboxes for their official correspondence. The woman you're trying to let off the hook certainly supported the common practice of each department (which have to handle their own FOIA requests) maintaining their own records. Do you really think that when someone at, say, the FAA gets a FOIA request, that it's the intention or the practice for their own records people to then contact hundreds of other agencies and departments to scour THEIR records for FAA-related correspondence? I guess you might think that if it allows you to ignore the hypocrisy of Clinton's own words.
Otherwise, please don't speculate based on your impressions and personal notions about how the guts of gov't work or don't work.
What are you talking about? You're essentially saying that absolutely no career archivists and investigators can be trusted to know if they've looked through stored email records, but we can trust Hillary Clinton to be 100% upright when she tells us that we have to trust her when she says that the tens of thousands of records she destroyed were without relevance to the multiple inquiries that she's stonewalled for the past few years. You operate on a really bad case of mixed premises.
Please stop wasting my time with so much idle speculation.
Who's speculating? She's the one who says she destroyed the records without allowing State archivists to do what they're required to do with all of the staff under her (review mixed private/official communications to make judgement calls about what's a public record). She's the one who deliberately transformed convenient, searchable electronic records with context-providing header info into clumsy, labor-requiring hardcopies... and only after they were demanded of her long after leaving office. Her own description of her actions shows that she didn't provide State with any magical CCs of her communications with external third parties or other agencies, but YOU'RE the one saying not to worry, she probably CC'd somebody, somewhere, somehow, in order to be in compliance with the 2009 NARA requirement. Since you're so tired of speculating, how about being specific on why you think the thing that she's carefully avoided saying she did was none the less actually done, even though it left no trace whatsoever for multiple investigators to find at State? Please, be specific.
Which specific item of mail are you talking about here? Please be clear about timelines, and who, what, when, and where.
That's the point. There ARE NONE. The only way your lame, blithe dismissal of that can be anything other than shameless spin is if you are asserting that she never exchanged a single piece of official email with anyone in another agency, branch of government, or third party/nation. How about answering one single question: do you really think that's true, that she neither sent nor received a single email from anyone in the Senate, at the CIA, at DoJ, in Germany/Japan/UK/Arkansas/NY, or with any long-time fixer like Blumenthal during her entire tenure? Not a single email? Yes or no.
If you say no, then please just stop the hand-waving "she did nothing wrong" nonsense, since it's BS. If you say yes, then please just stop everything, including voting, because you're either toxically naive or being completely disingenuous.
So, yes or no? One single email with any one single contact outside of subordinates at State?
Failing to stop your multi-thousand-pound vehicle as you drive at a military checkpoint is telegraphing violent intent. At least, that's how the guards have to treat it. Driving a suicide car bomb at/through checkpoints is a well established tactic, and has produced a no-compromises protocol in response. When you give off all the signs of violent intent, there's really no way to just let them carry on and decide later if they were a threat. It's not video game with a retry button the guards can push after they've been blown to pieces.
I took it to mean that the perps were white. If they were brown then it would have been a terrorist case.
No, you're getting your media memes all wrong. If they were brown, it would have been, by default and without any need for further analysis, another case of police brutality blah blah blah. Please get your coverage spin in sync with contemporary standards. There are people who make a living off of faux racial outrage, and if you don't help their hype, they're going to have to find other work.
"It needs to be fixed" can read like "It needs to be changed from its current state to a new state, in which is has been fixed." What it needs is something that, once done, will put the act of fixing it in the past tense. "It needs some fixing, so that it will then be fixed." If you're going with the shorter "It needs to be fixed," the "to be" needs to be there if you're going to used that future-sense changed state of "fixed." Or, one should just use: "It needs fixing," where "fixing," a gerund, acts like any other noun that would serve as the object of the sentence.
"It seems fixed," on the other hand, is a completely different construction. There is no assertion of the need for an action (like needing TO BE fixed). It's an observation about its current state (it's in the state of already having been fixed). The "seems" casts mild doubt on the quality of the assertion, but that's just modifying the word "fixed" in this case, which is acting as an adjective (the thing is fast, the thing is light weight, the thing is expensive, the thing is fixed). Think of saying, "It looks blue." Normal usage is rarely, "It looks to be blue," any more than it is, "It seems to be fixed." You could replace "seems" with "feels," knowing that you'd also be far more likely to say, "It's no longer wobbly. It feels fixed," than you would "It feels to be fixed."
So, are you one of those grammatical hypocrites
No, it seems I'm not.
Inquiring minds want to know.
No, an inquiring mind would have thought it through before trotting that one out.
Sending to the Senate and Congress would ALSO likely qualify, since they are Federal systems.
No, that doesn't cut it. Each agency/department has its own archiving systems, especially those that deal (as State does) with sensitive and frequently compartmentalized information. That's why FOIA requests go to the agency and to "the government." And of course that still doesn't have anything to do with all of her correspondence with other governments and other non-State.gov parties.
Let's ignore Blumenthal, since you have lots of patience still waiting for him to say that's not his correspondence with Clinton. He's only had a couple of years, so I'm sure he's still gathering his notes. Happily, he's apparently not nearly as clever as Clinton herself, and used an AOL mailbox while routinely sending her his intel memos. And AOL will have retained all of that, and is very responsive to subpoenas.
Thus, it just may be impossible to prove that Mrs. H "never sent a compliant copy of message X"
But the existence of a single piece of correspondence with her long-time aide/confidant Blumenthal or anyone else outside of State will show where she was violating the law. Why? Because two years worth of FOIA requests to State turned up no such emails. You're saying that maybe she CC'd them to unknown mailboxes at State in order to archive them. If so, multiple exhaustive FOIA requests would have turned up perhaps ONE email, yes? State's mail servers contain untold thousands of messages between staffers there and correspondents throughout the rest of the government and other third parties around the world. But not a single one tucked away as a CC or BCC from Clinton's home-based private server that shows sending or receiving such mail. State's IT people responded to FOIA requests saying there was no such data. They have her notes to staff, but nothing between her and third parties that she CC'd in the way you're suggesting. None.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about how tuned in she is to new(er) stuff like Teh Interwebz. This is a classic case of lefty "The First Amendment Doesn't Apply When We Don't Like It." That little corner of the constitution is even older than she is. No excuses for talking wistfully about book banning, or Harry Reid's use of the senate floor to escape libel laws when just plain profoundly lying about someone he doesn't want to see elected. That particular Reid episode was disgraceful, and you might think he'd have come to regret it, but a reporter just asked him about it the other day, and with the smuggest possible expression on his face, he essentially said, "My guy won, right?"
It's not about how old either of those two are. It's a character issue.
You would also need to address the presence or absence of such email in her printed-out dump of cherry-picked messages. If it's missing from that pile, it adds to the picture.
... which investigators have said are missing any records at all from long blocks of time.
And we'd have to see how you imagine the testimony going from the assistant (not that the assistant would be the one in legal jeopardy with regard to federal laws here, other than perjury-related ones).
Recall that the only records we have of external emails are printed. She has not even suggested that she or her staff were in the habit of CCing/forwarding any correspondence with non-State-Dept people to some special place at State. She's only said that she figured the act of corresponding with people IN the State's mail system was a good enough way for those in-house messages to be legally kept. Because her only discussion about this was a single press conference in which she hand-picked the reporters and pre-screened the questions, she wasn't asked about how she thought that mechanism would protect her correspondence with people in other agencies or countries. And that leaves us with her personally selected hardcopies
All they have to do is turn up one example of a third party's communications with her, something that she chose not to print, and which she has (as she's said she's done) destroyed, and we're back the FRA again. Destruction of official records. The, "Gee, I thought we were CCing all of that to State" defense doesn't work if there no examples, at all, of any habit of or even attempt to do so. Nobody at State has said, "It's my mailbox she sent copies to," or "Here's the name of the mailbox we set up for her to CC to," and indeed multiple investigations and FOIA requests have found no sign of such a repository ever having been established, let alone used.
How about you pick a specific "guilty" scenario, a "sample" email, and we'll each run that scenario through our models (assumptions/perspectives) about how Fed emails and/or the email-related laws work or don't work step by step.
Scenario: A freelance fixer and political operative long associated with and sometimes in the employ of Clintons sends to her an email containing what he describes as very sensitive diplomatic intelligence about people, events, and governments in the Middle East and Europe. He sends this to her in the context of her role as Secretary of State, but of course sends it to her not on her State.gov account (because she told State not to set one up for her), but to her personal mailbox on the private server in her house, using a domain she paid a contractor with a phony name to set up for her the day she was named to the job.
... though that's not her call, that's for State's archivists to decide), and that's that. There's nobody and State that she thinks should also read it, so she doesn't forward it to anyone. There's no mechanism in place for that email to be automatically copied over to State or to any other federal institution. Nothing happens to it for the remaining years of her tenure there - a violation of the Federal Records Act and of the 2009 NARA - and nothing happens to it when she leaves office. She doesn't provide that correspondence, or any others like it, to State's archivists.
Open receiving this email, she takes it into account (or doesn't - she may have considered its importance to her policy ideas and the execution of her job as being insignificant
Years go by. She has done nothing to make that correspondence part of FOIA-able records. Multiple FOIA requests and investigations have come and gone, seeking exactly such documents, but State says there are none, because of course they've never seen it, and can't where she's got them stashed in her house.
Eventually the fact that a hacker has exposed the existence and exclusive use of this private mailbox, along with it dawning on multiple investigators and reporters just how deliberate she's been in keeping this material away from scrutiny, she has her private (non-cleared) employees assist her in choosing which emails she thinks she wants the public to see, and prints them on paper. She mentions that she has deleted tens of thousands of messages that she doesn't consider appropriate for State's review, and that she will never make those messages available to any party for a review of her process.
Messages like the one from her third party intelligence source may, or may not be included in the print-outs - it will take time to find them, because she delivered that correspondence not in a simple-to-search file of messages, but in a redacted stack of paper - the most time and labor intensive choice possible for the transcription and review of those government records.
Scenario two: exactly the same, only the message she received is still sensitive, but is marked as such, and is from someone in the Defense Department. She's now keeping sensitive and/or classified information outside of the secure platforms required by law, and since it was meant for her eyes only and not something she decides to forward to someone at State, the information is once again beyond reach for any FOIA request or investigation that looks to State's archives for official records.
The email may be at DoD because it was sent from there, but investigators can't know to look, since there is no record at State of such a message ever having been sent to the person running State. If she decides to dispose of that message along with the tens of thousands of others she deleted, we'll never know - unless investigators pursue the matter by researching the records of every other federal entity, including legislative offices.
The "there's always one or two rotten apples in a barrel" argument is only reasonable when they are genuine exceptions, and they are genuinely punished.
You mean like we send them to jail, like we do? I'm glad you agree with me.
It doesn't look onerous, other than the fact that the FAA has said they are issuing no such certificates because - other than some mil grade stuff - there is no path to such a certificate currently available. Further, the certification of the aircraft itself has nothing to do with the larger problem: they are allowing NO commercial activity, of any kind (that includes research by companies like Amazon) without operators - each and every one who will be at the controls - having a 333 waiver. And even then, they must be licensed pilot, and have direct control, and line-of-site over the aircraft at all times. In other words, the reason Amazon took all of this activity to Canada is because there is no practical or legal way to do it in the US. For which we have the current administration to thank.
And the point about the Taliban is not that they want a medieval theocracy, but that they want a medieval theocracy in their own country.
Except, most of the Taliban are trying to set up a medieval theocracy in another country (read up on where that movement is from, who they are demographically, and where they are operating). And they're hip-deep in relations with outfits that are trying to spread the same thing throughout the middle east, and of course into and across Africa. There are distinct lines between some of these groups, but in other cases they and those they support or with whom they work make it pointless to try to separate them. Which is why today's slaughter by Al Shabab in Kenya is, in practical terms, right in line with the goals and efforts of the group you say is just trying to do their own thing in "their own country." That's a completely naive perspective on what they're all about.
And no, it doesn't matter what side you're on. Oppressive regimes that jail or slaughter people for thinking the wrong way, or kill teachers for teaching girls to read, are only a "really depends on what side you're on" situation if you have a completely poisonous case of moral relativism. There's no "freedom" being fought for when the objective of the fight is to reduce freedom. You aren't really trotting out the "freedom means being free to prevent other people from being free" notion are you? Really?
Going to war with Iran would be like going to war with Maryland.
You've never been to Maryland, have you? You'd never win such a war. There's too much paperwork involved in even establishing a war in Maryland. Just the recurring fees and annual compliance filings with the state would be enough to crush the fighting will of any invading army. Not to mention the tax rates on any pillaged loot seized during said invasion, especially in certain Maryland counties, would be enough to make the whole thing completely unprofitable. Just don't bother. Invade nearby Virginia, or maybe Delaware or Pennsylvania, instead. They're much easier to deal with.
I mean don't you ever question why the treatment of women is always specified when describing the enemy?
It's an excellent barometer of culture. Everyone has (or had) a mother. Hey look! Something we all have in common. So it provides a common perspective from which to evaluate how various cultures treat people. And cultures which stone women to death for having been raped are, objectively, less free than cultures that don't. One trots that example out because the vast majority of people with any sort of intellectual honesty can substitute at least one woman they're likely to know (perhaps their mom?) for the unknown woman in that scenario, and then examine their own reaction to it.
I've noted "arab" has become a major porn category in the past 10 years
Yeah, it's almost like a huge part of that culture has been increasing its access to the internet, and has been integrating with societies across Europe and North America. Shocking!
but don't you think it's odd that war consistently has descriptions of women (always specifying a distinction between yours and theirs)
No, the discussion generally revolves around the treatment of women, not "the women." Your inability to make the distinction is pretty telling.
The US revolutionaries fought for freedom for rich white men while enslaivng Africans and ignoring everyone else.
You might want to actually read some history. You know, just for fun. And so you can peek under the hood and see that things are wee bit more complicated than your cartoon villain version.
This is apparantely not a joke ... it is from the whitehouse.gov website
Well which is it?
just because they aren't fighting for -YOUR- concept of freedom, doesn't mean they aren't fighting for freedom
Which is exactly why I cited examples where any rational person couldn't get it wrong. Nobody who is fighting for the power to take away other people's freedoms (say, of speech, assembly, religion, etc) is fighting for freedom. It's possible to objectively look at two different fights, and see where one is actually about freedom, and the other is about gaining power to deny freedom.
Your knowledge of the revolution and the governance of England is also rather lacking.
The governance of England (not to let it off the hook there, even so) was not the same as England's governance of the colonies. Don't tell me to learn more about it when you paint with a brush so broad you miss out on that reality. The Americans were fighting to be free of how England was ruling the colonies. Even if you consider the then-state-of-affairs in England to have been the model of freedom (plainly not true), the colonists did not enjoy the same liberties or representation.
That's not to sugar-coat the man Che became and his eventual ruthlessness.
"Became?" He started out that way, and didn't stop. He was no champion of a constitutional democracy. Didn't seek one, and didn't act to establish one. What he and dictators like Castro found to dislike about the regimes against which they rebelled has nothing to do with their vision for a totalitarian communist paradise. They set out to achieve what the Castros have been using violent oppression of their own people to preserve ever since.
If they were ever about freedom, they wouldn't need to lock people away or simply kill them for speaking their minds.
there is no requirement for a pilots liscence. you are totally off base
Yes, there is. The only way you can get a section 333 waiver is if you are a licensed pilot. Period. Here's the existing process:
https://www.faa.gov/uas/legisl...
Their currently proposed rule changes contemplate a simpler grade of permit, but still make no provision for BLOS flight. You'd still need to pass an FAA operator's test, and pay to sit and re-take it every year. The proposed rules also require each and every aircraft to be registered - something that makes flying continually changing prototypes off the work bench a near impossibility.
I'm not "totally off base," I'm aware of the actual situation. You're just engaged in wishful thinking, or making excuses for the administration, and hoping nobody will do any fact checking.
You really want to make the case that America of all countries has clean hands and a clean conscience in this dirty enterprise called war?
Do you mean that when a huge undertaking involving actual, you know, human beings taking action in opposition to a monstrously violent totalitarian regime sometimes involves some of those human beings doing assholish things ... that therefore the side that's acting to prevent oppressive totalitarianism is wrong to fight it? You'd rather allow groups like ISIS, or people like Stalin, or fun outfits like the Khmer Rouge to just carry on being brutal across the board as part of their purpose and policy than risk deploying against them on the off chance that not every action taken to oppose them, by everyone involved in the fight, will pass your purity test? Better to let the house burn down than to risk having anyone involved in trying to put out the fire be a jerk, I guess.
There is still hatred towards the Japanese over what they did
Right. Because that's what they (the country of Japan) set out to do. Cruelty and torture and rape weren't the actions of a few idiots/asshats in the Japanese army, those things were the stated tactics, the official policy, from the top down. That wasn't assholishness by abberration, and prosecuted (a la the WV guards at Abu Ghraib), that was marching orders. Your need to confuse the difference between that, and things like what Japan systematically did in China, shows you to be either completely misguided, or simply trolling. The latter, most likely.
And here in the US, we are told that women are denied the chance at education
Who's "we" and who is doing the telling? There are more women in college then there are men. So, basically you're just blathering.
we are a Christian nation
They "land grabbing" revolutionaries you're complaining about fought, among other things, to tear down the form of government under which they were living ... one that DID establish a government-backed single religion. They were so opposed to that, in the form of the constitution's first amendment, they baked freedom from that ever happening again right into the nation's chartering document. Not that you've probably ever read it or anything.
I remember when Red Dawn came out (the first one) that we discussed the differnce between freedom fighters and terrorists. The answer was history.
No, the answer is: look at what they're actually fighting for. "Freedom fighters" who fight for the opportunity to deny women the right to go to school, or to set up a regime where people who aren't willing to claim faithfulness to one single state religion are not freedom fighters. It really is that simple. US revolutionaries fought to be free from what was essentially a military dictatorship (the monarchy) that didn't provide some rather important freedom-related features (like those we see protected in our constitution). When freedom fighters are fighting for actual freedoms, then that's what they are. When "freedom fighters" are fighting to institute totalitarian rule (like, say, Che Guevara and company did) they're not freedom fighters at all. The Taliban aren't fighting for freedom, they're fighting to set up a ruthless medieval theocracy. Doesn't matter what they call themselves, it's what they do.
But testing? Perfectly legal right now.
Sure, perfectly legal if you make all of your drone research team run out and get a pilot's license, and then file flight plans for every single test. You know, if you take a quadcopter out into the parking lot and hover it ten feet off the ground to test a delivery mechanism, you need an FAA licensed pilot and a filed flight plan for all 30 seconds that will take. Sounds like a really great environment in which to conduct thousands of man hours of testing, huh?
And no, there is no provision in the FAA rules for Amazon to test a single flight where the vehicle goes out of line of site of the hands-on operator. The entire premise of what they're researching is prohibited, barring a waiver that they've only issued to an operator in rural Alaska inspecting pipelines while using existing, military-class equipment.
There's only one way to punish Amazon for taking this activity outside of the US. We must find a way, since they have a business presence in the US, to add a larger regulatory and tax burden onto them until they submit, and return this activity, which we won't let them do anyway, to US soil. At which point of course we will not reduce that new tax or regulatory burden, but that'll show 'em anyway.
Way to go, Executive Branch.
Sorry, you lost me here. What does "THEIR" refer to, FAA or FOIA.
Now you're just being coy. Do you really think that it has ever been a feature of the Freedom of Information Act to require the archivists at the FAA to scour, say, the records kept by Justice, or Agriculture or Commerce etc when someone submits a FOIA request to the FAA for all correspondence involving a given FAA official on a given topic? Of course not. It's understood that the FAA is the keeper of all of the FAA staff's correspondence. If that agency's director was running all of his official mail through a private domain on a server kept in his house, and corresponded with, say, a Senator or someone at Justice, the FAA's own mail archives would have no record of that because said message never traversed the FAA's systems and the archiving mechanisms they have in place. A FOIA request to the FAA's records office for that official's correspondence with said Senator would - just like the FOIA requests for some of Clinton's mail - come up dry. Why? Because a FOIA request to the FAA doesn't cause the FAA's archivists to ask every other agency in the government to also scour the archives of all of those agencies.
We have no record of Clinton's correspondence with anyone in any other agency or branch of the government because the FOIA requests to State can't come up with them. Because those messages didn't traverse State's systems. Her claim that she was relying on her correspondence with other people at State to serve as a record of her official mail deliberately avoids the topic of how her personal server was allowing State to keep records of correspondence that didn't involve State's mail servers or archives. The only possible record of such external communication was going to be found through bottomless research against mail servers all around the government and the world, or through access to her own server - which she says she's wiped clean and will not allow anyone to see. We also get her own personal decisions on which fraction of her email she decided to print to hardcopy, rather than simply passing along in their entirety. And this she did only when pressed to do so, long after she left office. That is in direct violation of the Federal Records Act generally, as well as the 2009 NARA. That it's also in contradiction to her own signed policy just helps to illustrate how phony she's being on the subject.
Thus, mere using of the State Department emails BY ITSELF would not guarentee longer-term archiving
But using that system would have been a good faith effort to comply with the FRA and NARA. Rather than make that good faith effort, she deliberately acted to keep her records from going anywhere near State's servers, didn't provide ANY of the records during her tenure, and didn't provide any when she left.
Ideally an assistant would assist H in doing that rather than her spending her own time deciding what needs "official" archiving
Yeah, an assistant DID. A personally paid aid, working for the family foundation. Someone who's not cleared for sensitive/classified information, and whose paycheck is funded in part by the millions of dollars Clinton collected from foreign donors to her family enterprise while on tour as the country's top diplomat. Regardless, she's the one telling the press that she decided when a message wasn't to be kept for being irrelevant from the State archivist's perspective. I'm sure the career archivists appreciate being told what to think and cut out of that process - not for the incidental use of a staffer's private mail, but for ALL of the top official's communications.
So printing is a crime?
I didn't say that. But because it is the slower method with more work involved, it reflects a deliberate choice to produce the required documents in a way that maximizes the delay in allowing FOIA requesters to see the result
Otherwise, it appears you are making up rules out of your tail end.
What? Clinton herself signed a memo to her staff reminding them that they had to use state.gov mailboxes for their official correspondence. The woman you're trying to let off the hook certainly supported the common practice of each department (which have to handle their own FOIA requests) maintaining their own records. Do you really think that when someone at, say, the FAA gets a FOIA request, that it's the intention or the practice for their own records people to then contact hundreds of other agencies and departments to scour THEIR records for FAA-related correspondence? I guess you might think that if it allows you to ignore the hypocrisy of Clinton's own words.
Otherwise, please don't speculate based on your impressions and personal notions about how the guts of gov't work or don't work.
What are you talking about? You're essentially saying that absolutely no career archivists and investigators can be trusted to know if they've looked through stored email records, but we can trust Hillary Clinton to be 100% upright when she tells us that we have to trust her when she says that the tens of thousands of records she destroyed were without relevance to the multiple inquiries that she's stonewalled for the past few years. You operate on a really bad case of mixed premises.
Please stop wasting my time with so much idle speculation.
Who's speculating? She's the one who says she destroyed the records without allowing State archivists to do what they're required to do with all of the staff under her (review mixed private/official communications to make judgement calls about what's a public record). She's the one who deliberately transformed convenient, searchable electronic records with context-providing header info into clumsy, labor-requiring hardcopies ... and only after they were demanded of her long after leaving office. Her own description of her actions shows that she didn't provide State with any magical CCs of her communications with external third parties or other agencies, but YOU'RE the one saying not to worry, she probably CC'd somebody, somewhere, somehow, in order to be in compliance with the 2009 NARA requirement. Since you're so tired of speculating, how about being specific on why you think the thing that she's carefully avoided saying she did was none the less actually done, even though it left no trace whatsoever for multiple investigators to find at State? Please, be specific.
Which specific item of mail are you talking about here? Please be clear about timelines, and who, what, when, and where.
That's the point. There ARE NONE. The only way your lame, blithe dismissal of that can be anything other than shameless spin is if you are asserting that she never exchanged a single piece of official email with anyone in another agency, branch of government, or third party/nation. How about answering one single question: do you really think that's true, that she neither sent nor received a single email from anyone in the Senate, at the CIA, at DoJ, in Germany/Japan/UK/Arkansas/NY, or with any long-time fixer like Blumenthal during her entire tenure? Not a single email? Yes or no.
If you say no, then please just stop the hand-waving "she did nothing wrong" nonsense, since it's BS. If you say yes, then please just stop everything, including voting, because you're either toxically naive or being completely disingenuous.
So, yes or no? One single email with any one single contact outside of subordinates at State?
Who said they were using violence?
Failing to stop your multi-thousand-pound vehicle as you drive at a military checkpoint is telegraphing violent intent. At least, that's how the guards have to treat it. Driving a suicide car bomb at/through checkpoints is a well established tactic, and has produced a no-compromises protocol in response. When you give off all the signs of violent intent, there's really no way to just let them carry on and decide later if they were a threat. It's not video game with a retry button the guards can push after they've been blown to pieces.
I took it to mean that the perps were white. If they were brown then it would have been a terrorist case.
No, you're getting your media memes all wrong. If they were brown, it would have been, by default and without any need for further analysis, another case of police brutality blah blah blah. Please get your coverage spin in sync with contemporary standards. There are people who make a living off of faux racial outrage, and if you don't help their hype, they're going to have to find other work.
Example: "It needs fixed" vs. "It seems fixed"
A poor choice of things to compare.
"It needs to be fixed" can read like "It needs to be changed from its current state to a new state, in which is has been fixed." What it needs is something that, once done, will put the act of fixing it in the past tense. "It needs some fixing, so that it will then be fixed." If you're going with the shorter "It needs to be fixed," the "to be" needs to be there if you're going to used that future-sense changed state of "fixed." Or, one should just use: "It needs fixing," where "fixing," a gerund, acts like any other noun that would serve as the object of the sentence.
"It seems fixed," on the other hand, is a completely different construction. There is no assertion of the need for an action (like needing TO BE fixed). It's an observation about its current state (it's in the state of already having been fixed). The "seems" casts mild doubt on the quality of the assertion, but that's just modifying the word "fixed" in this case, which is acting as an adjective (the thing is fast, the thing is light weight, the thing is expensive, the thing is fixed). Think of saying, "It looks blue." Normal usage is rarely, "It looks to be blue," any more than it is, "It seems to be fixed." You could replace "seems" with "feels," knowing that you'd also be far more likely to say, "It's no longer wobbly. It feels fixed," than you would "It feels to be fixed."
So, are you one of those grammatical hypocrites
No, it seems I'm not.
Inquiring minds want to know.
No, an inquiring mind would have thought it through before trotting that one out.
But why didn't the FBI's country-wide license plate trackers not catch them?
Hint: not everything you see on NCIS or CSI:Wherever actually works like it dos on TV.
Or is that only to trace their movements after they do something bad?
It can definitely help to be able follow the trail after someone does something especially awful - sometimes bad guys actually have accomplices.
But more to the point in this case: reports are that the vehicle they used was stolen, along with its license plates.
That really doesn't mean it needs quoted.
To be, or not to be. That is the ques... no, it's not even a question in this case.
Sending to the Senate and Congress would ALSO likely qualify, since they are Federal systems.
No, that doesn't cut it. Each agency/department has its own archiving systems, especially those that deal (as State does) with sensitive and frequently compartmentalized information. That's why FOIA requests go to the agency and to "the government." And of course that still doesn't have anything to do with all of her correspondence with other governments and other non-State.gov parties.
Let's ignore Blumenthal, since you have lots of patience still waiting for him to say that's not his correspondence with Clinton. He's only had a couple of years, so I'm sure he's still gathering his notes. Happily, he's apparently not nearly as clever as Clinton herself, and used an AOL mailbox while routinely sending her his intel memos. And AOL will have retained all of that, and is very responsive to subpoenas.
Thus, it just may be impossible to prove that Mrs. H "never sent a compliant copy of message X"
But the existence of a single piece of correspondence with her long-time aide/confidant Blumenthal or anyone else outside of State will show where she was violating the law. Why? Because two years worth of FOIA requests to State turned up no such emails. You're saying that maybe she CC'd them to unknown mailboxes at State in order to archive them. If so, multiple exhaustive FOIA requests would have turned up perhaps ONE email, yes? State's mail servers contain untold thousands of messages between staffers there and correspondents throughout the rest of the government and other third parties around the world. But not a single one tucked away as a CC or BCC from Clinton's home-based private server that shows sending or receiving such mail. State's IT people responded to FOIA requests saying there was no such data. They have her notes to staff, but nothing between her and third parties that she CC'd in the way you're suggesting. None.