New York Times: Hillary Clinton illegally used private email for all State Dept. business

But you are guessing and hoping too. You nod in time to the intelligence IG but ignore the state dept. that's a choice.

Indictment isn't a sure thing until it happens.

But I'm sure our media has us expertly informed here in any case. Riiiiight.

 

To iterate, I have to guess. We all have to. Because the FBI inspector general is not commenting on the details. Which, again, I'm guessing means that there is nothing further to the story than he-said-she-said.

That being said, when it comes to politics, some people play chess while others play poker. Mrs. Clinton has been calling the Republicans raises at every turn. It's time for someone to turnover the cards or fold.

 

And common to other U.S. Secretaries of State, apparently. But we care in an election year when it's a polarizing candidate. I'm sorry but those claiming this is a purely objective story are ignoring a lot of basic context & history.

 

I'm not guessing or hoping, it is established that thousands of her emails had classified information in them.....that's a crime. It's like having a video surface of someone robbing a store, it's not speculation to suggest that an indictment will be handed down at some point.

Some can bury their heads in the sand and just hope this all goes away, but it's super unlikely that it will.

 

I reject that assertion. I am strongly of the opinion that this matter can be viewed objectively, purely on the facts. I couldn't care less if every Secretary of State since the invention of email used a private server for all of the their Government related email - it doesn't change the fact that it a) was negligent b) was in exceedingly poor judgement, c) put sensitive (and potentially confidential) information at heightened risk of exposure and d) introduced the perception that it was done to prevent disclosure under FOI and e) left Hillary Clinton as the sole arbiter of what emails should be preserved as "Government related business".

I am yet to hear any reasonable or credible argument to the contrary.

 

Just make sure you are as upset about the other Secretaries of State and the standing practice, and then it makes sense to me.

 

She shouldn't get a pass for breaking laws just because her predecessors broke the same laws, though. How many of her predecessors ran for president? I don't think anyone carried smartphones, much less sent an email the last time someone tried.

 

On A, B, and C, that's not necessarily the case. I'd point out that Russia hacked the State Department email services, and China hacked our federal employee databases. For all we know, the Clintons' server was more effectively secure. That doesn't make it right or wrong ethically, but it does affect whether she put info at heightened risk of exposure.

On D, that's certainly true.

On E, not really relevant. That's true of all federal officials, even on government email servers. They all get to choose what they believe is relevant and should be preserved.

 

We know a bit more than that. I can't believe you would even suggest it.

 

Indeed uh oh, now they got here. Lol.

Twitter makes folk reactionary and joyful everyday.

 

Sitting governors and senators from multiple regions of the country and with some bi-partisan legislative record is really all one should expect from a Presidential primary. Trump says more about a certain subset of private citizens, how they get information, resent authority and trivialize civic processes for the sake of entertainment than he does about the GOP. If not for him and maybe Carson, one could just as fairly criticize DNC/DLC for not having any other female candidates in the pipeline or rising moderate officials twenty years after Bill and Gore.

 

Well if it is proven to me that previous SoS did this and it was standard practice (maybe you can show me the evidence), then I am flabbergasted and it needs to be stopped (as I understand it has). But it is not a defense.

And I guess you are suggesting that this is only an issue because she is running for president? Are you suggesting it should not be? Sorry, but anything goes in this Primary/Presidential system and this issue is serious enough that it should be fully examined.

 

I think it's wide spread and typical practices because of... politics and the environment these people live in. No politicians want their info public or accessible by the other side more so today because of twitters and 24/7 new flashes that almost always help the less informed to be even less informed.

Congress can fix this. Just make it clearly criminal to use any private servers for any communication involving public works. They won't.

 

I think two things are fishy:
(1) Her server behavior and her reluctance, bordering on refusal, to turn over some materials in a timely manner. Even if she's afraid (reaonsably, after the last 25 years, starting with whitewater!TM) of a witch hunt / scavenger expedition, she's a public servant and should have complied more quickly to all the fair requests.
As others have suggested, I imagine she handled a server this way (but I emphasize imagine -- I have no idea) for a combination of: fear of her many fervent political enemies mining her email for out-of-context leaks to make her look bad; being a control freak in general; and (quite possibly) thinking she could handle things more securely with her own team. As others have noted, the state dept. has been successfully hacked.

(2) That the hubbub just happens to coincide with political silly season. Her enemies, including most of the GOP, were determined to go after her on some scandal or another, whether they had to manufacture it or not. Benghazi was exhausted of further possibilities after several investigations and hearings. This email stuff is the only other available option right now.
If there wasn't an election right now, I absolutely believe we wouldn't have all this expanded coverage. But it is possible that it's just a coincidence.

I think it's extremely difficult to see this investigation as purely separate from her candidacy. Do presidential candidates need extra scrutiny? You bet. But is some of the scrutiny in this case subjective with intent to harm? We would be naive, in my view, to deny that.

EDIT: agree with the points of bnb below, esp. re: FOI. vvv

 

my bigger concern with the emails is their removal from gov't records re: hearings/FOI etc. That whole checks and balances thing. Being worried about her opponents distortions seems a poor excuse for circumventing what seems to be pretty basic protocol.

If her concern was security, she could have asked the gov't to beef it up.

And her explanation of not wanting to carry two phones was pretty poor.

....and I really don't know how her actions differ from those of former politicians. Sources are so biased I'd have to spend too much time trying to decipher the true differences.

 

The security on her private server is irrelevant, for two reasons. Unless she was given exact hardware and software provided to the government, it would not have passed standards unless it was tested.

More importantly, there are protocols that are to be followed. If every public servant decided that their security is just as good or better, we would have some serious issues. She does not get an exception because she is a Clinton.

 

Yeah, I've never advocated for such a whacky idea. And I had deleted the paragraph you quoted, b/c it doesn't really capture my thinking on it. I thought bnb's post was more the point.

And while she shouldn't get an exception, she sure does get an extra helping of grief, whether it's earned or not. Little of both in this case, it seems.

 

I'd actually like to hear that the DoJ is investigating other former high-ranking officials for improper handling of documents. I understand Collin Powell used private email for government business as Secretary of State. That's worth a look, at least. A lot of other public servants have as well, though most probably don't handle sensitive materials as much as the Secretary of State does. So, I'd start with the ones with the highest risk profile, and start investigating.

(This might sound like a what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander argument, but I'm sincere. I want Hillary and everybody else that may have mishandled documents to be investigated and potentially indicted. If everybody does it, prosecute everybody.)

 

You forgot to add: She lied about it, and lied about her reasons for doing it. It was the latter that I found most...interesting. Lots of people in government use private email servers (although most don't use such accounts *exclusively*, which is what leads to the items above being facts without any room for debate). Her reason, though, simply holds no water. "because I didn't want to use two mobile devices". Uhhhh...no reason to! People everywhere connect to work and personal email on their one phone. This indicates that she thinks she can do whatever she wants, make up some stupid excuse for it, and get away with it. Not only in that a very untrustworthy position to take, it is very condescending, as well. Hillary clearly thinks people are just plain stupid. Sadly, she may be right...lots of people out there defending her. Personally, when someone plays me for the fool, it pisses me off. Politicians (not just Hillary, although she seems to do it soooo often) count on just that, and, sadly, they tend to be right. They lie to us constantly, and as long as they are 'our guy/girl', we take it with a smile. We are the stupid lemmings they need to get elected or reelected. Not sure when that will change, but this is just the latest example of it.

As others have pointed out, though, perhaps the bigger issue here is...how on earth did this happen to begin with? How is someone allowed to set up email that is completely outside the security/perveyance of the government? This is ridiculous. Every company I've ever worked for prohibits the sending of work email from anything but work accounts. They lose the ability to track/recover such emails (which is EXACTLY why Hillary really did this), and that puts them at risk. In the government's case, it puts ALL of us at risk. That this was even allowed to begin with is a HUGE deal, which isn't getting much, if any, coverage or publicity. And they can't say they didn't know. She had to get permission, and things had to be set up on government systems to allow mail to get to/from her account. She would also have either had to request that a government account not get set up for her, or that any mail that did go to that account got redirected to her 'real' account. They would have noticed there wasn't any mail in her account. Others would have to know what her 'real' email account was to send email to her (Obama admits he knew what that was). All kinds of ways they would have known. Yet nobody did anything about it. They *knowingly* put our country at risk. There is the real story, yet the one no one is talking about.