Hillary Clinton Tries To Quell Controversy Over Email, But Only Creates More Question
Hillary Clinton addressed the week-long email controversy, but her explanations only raised new questions.
Last week, we learned for seemingly the first time that, while she was Secretary of State from 2009 through the beginning of 2013, Hillary Clinton solely utilized a private email account that was set up on a server that was kept in her home rather than an official State Department email account. Rather than going away like a one-day story, the story has percolated in the political media thanks in no small part to the fact that new revelations and questions seemed to be coming out every day while the White House and State Department both seemed to be rather ham hammed in their response to questions about how it came about the Clinton was allowed to do this back in 2009, what kind of security was involved, who had control over the server itself, and whether or not Hillary Clinton had ever communicated with the President or other White House personnel using her personal email account. Through it all, though, there was almost no response from Hillary Clinton outside of a single tweet when the story first broke. Obviously, her advisers had hoped the story would die out on its own, but it became apparent by the time the new week began that this wasn’t the case so, today, the former Secretary of State addressed the media after an appearance at the United Nations, but her statements created as many questions as it answered:
Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday defended her exclusive use of a private email address during her time as secretary of state as a matter of “convenience,” saying that about 30,000 of her work-related emails would be made public, but that thousands more that she deemed personal had been deleted.
“I thought using one device would be simpler; obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way,” she said in her first public comments since the issue emerged last week.
She said that most of her emails were work-related, went to government employees and were captured on government servers. Mrs. Clinton said that the State Department would make public all of her work-related emails, but that her personal email — about issues such as her daughter’s wedding and the death of her mother — would remain private.
“I feel that I have taken unprecedented steps to provide these public emails; they will be in the public domain,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton spoke for about 20 minutes during a news conference, delivering a statement on women’s issues and denouncing moves by Republican lawmakers to undermine efforts for a nuclear agreement with Iran, before turning to the controversy over her emails.
Expressing a mix of regret and defensiveness over the matter, Mrs. Clinton emphasized that she broke no laws. “I fully complied with every rule,” she said, adding that no classified material had been sent on her email.
However, she remained steadfast that she would not turn over personal emails and said that those messages in fact had been deleted.
“They were about personal and private matters that I believed were in the scope of my personal privacy and particularly that of other people,” she said. “They had nothing to do with work. I didn’t see a need to keep them.”
The State Department said on Tuesday that it would publish online the full set of emails provided by Mrs. Clinton from her time as secretary of state.
“We will review the entire 55,000-page set and release in one batch at the end of that review to ensure that standards are consistently applied throughout the entire 55,000 pages,” said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman. “We said we expect the review to take several months; obviously that hasn’t changed.”
A smaller set, about 300 emails that had been provided to the select House committee on Benghazi, will be released earlier to the public.
The State Department also said it would give any reasons for redactions, in accordance with Freedom of Information Act guidelines.
Politico has more:
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign began on terms set by her adversaries – with a defensive Clinton telling reporters she won’t release half of the emails sent from a controversial private email account set up while she was Secretary of State and suggesting that they may not exist anymore.
Clinton, with the poise and clarity of a mid-campaign politician, said her decision to send departmental emails through a private email server at her suburban New York house was a matter of “convenience,” and that she regretted not keeping parallel government and private accounts.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said when asked if any of her emails compromised security. “Looking back, it might have been smarter” to have used government email, she conceded.
At times, the former first lady, who answered about ten questions, seemed to contradict herself, saying at one point that she had destroyed her personal emails, then suggesting they remained – off limits – on her family’s private server.
Clinton said her lawyers had examined all of her emails, about 60,000 in all over four years at Foggy Bottom, and sent every government-related missive — about 30,000 — to the State Department in the hopes that all would be released to the public on the Web.
Yet in an act of defiance certain to stoke a new round of questioning, Clinton said she had no intention of turning over any of the approximately 30,000 emails she deemed “personal” for the sake of her family’s “privacy” – exchanges she said included planning for daughter Chelsea’s wedding and her mother’s funeral, correspondence with her husband and her yoga schedule.
“Going through the emails, there were over 60,000 in total, sent and received. About half were work-related and went to the State Department, and about half were personal,” said Clinton. “I had no reason to save them, but that was my decision.
“For any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what is personal and what is work-related.”
When a reporter asked her if she planned to allow an independent commission to examine all of the emails on her personal server, she responded with a flat – no way.
“The server contains personal communications from my husband and me,” Clinton said of the system, which was originally set up to handle Bill Clinton’s post-presidential correspondence. “And the server will remain private.”
No one, not even Clinton’s most erstwhile defenders, thought the press conference would end the firestorm over the emails. “Look, the problem here isn’t about the emails, you guys are never going to be satisfied with whatever answers she gives,” said former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville. “Y’all are just going to go out there and say, ‘She raised more questions than she answered.'”
Today’s event at the United Nations was an exercise in a hastily-organized crisis management – staged a few feet away from a copy of Picasso’s Guernica, a gruesome depiction of raw human suffering during the Spanish Civil War. It featured none of the genteel stagecraft and personal dignity Clinton as a politician and private citizen craves — a push-and-shove tabloid press scrum in front of 25 TV cameras — more “Bonfire of the Vanities” than “Woman of the Year.”
Clinton’s staff says the time had come to defend herself after taking a week’s worth of incoming fire, but it came at a staggering opportunity cost – the chance to defining the aspirational terms of her candidacy to come, a campaign which will be based on her role as a gender pioneer and desire to articulate a post-Obama vision for saving the middle class.
Completely lost in the noise was the speech Clinton delivered Tuesday, which was intended to underscore the rhetorical highlight of her four-decade career in politics, her 1996 speech in Beijing declaring women’s rights identical to human rights.
“She’s taking a huge risk here,” said a longtime adviser, as Clinton prepared to take questions. “I don’t think she has a choice, but things could go wrong.”
Near the top of the press conference, after she had made statements regarding the speech she had just given at a United Nations forum and comments about the letter sent by Senate Republicans regarding the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, Clinton answered the question that everyone had been wondering about from the beginning; namely why she chose to set up a private email account for official business. Her explanation, that it was a matter of “convenience” because she didn’t want to carry around two mobile devices, is one that many people have expressed skepticism about. After all, as anyone who owns a current model iPhone, Android, or Blackberry smartphone can tell you, it most certainly is possible to have more than one email account on a mobile device at one time. I’ve had a set up like that from the first time I owned a smartphone, which roughly dates back to the time when Clinton first became Secretary of State. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump brings up, as others have since the press conference ended, the possibility that the phone Clinton was using, which was apparently a Blackberry, didn’t allow two accounts at the same time. However, it’s worth noting that, at the same time that Clinton was Secretary of State, former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was able to have personal and official email accessible on his Blackberry. At the very least then, Clinton’s claim that the decision to use a personal mobile device and an email server that she and her husband had personal control over rather than a government device and an email account tied in to government email servers was purely a matter of “convenience” just doesn’t withstand the credibility test.
Clinton also says that she and her advisers reviewed all of the emails on her personal account and turned over anything that was work-related to the State Department, that at least some portion of what she considered to be her “personal” email was deleted, and that she would neither be turning over the personal email for review nor the server for any kind of forensic examination. In other words, she’s asking the press and the American public to trust her, and only her, to make the determination of what is work-related and what is personal. Obviously, this would not have been an issue at all had she used a separate, government-provided, email account for official business to begin with but, once she started commingling the two, it strikes me that there something must be more involved in the review process beyond “trust me.”
Finally, Clinton’s response today did nothing to answer the questions regarding the security issues that seem rather self-evident here. Just how secure was this private server that Clinton utilized, for example? She said today that the server had been set up when her husband left office and that it was “guarded” by the Secret Service, but that doesn’t really answer potential concerns about hacking, which has nothing to do with the physical security of the server. It’s also unclear whether regular backups were made of the server, and who has control over those backups, and whether or not encryption was used in her communications with State Department and other government employees. It’s also unclear at the moment whether she ever used this personal email account to communicate with representatives of foreign nations, which would raise security issues all its own.
If Hillary Clinton’s intention in today’s press conference was to try to put this story to an end, then I would say that she failed miserably in that regard. At least for the moment, this story is not going away.
@ Doug
This story will never, ever go away. Fox & Friends will keep it alive till doomsday regardless of actual merit, just as they have Benghazi and so many others. Funny that no one seems to be concerned about Republicans using private email accounts for official business.
Hillary at the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women two weeks ago talking about how she uses multiple phones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXjB-HAhmUY
There is really no response HRC could have made to make the story go away. Let’s face, the right wing BS machine will keep this story alive for as long as it takes.What Clinton should have said is : ” I set up an email system that complied with the law and which fit my needs.I did nothing illegal or morally wrong. Every Secretary of State before me did just what I did. I’m complying with all lawful disclosure demands and will continue to do so. Thanks for coming.”
Did any other SoS have to answer these questions? Note that Powell deleted ALL his private emails. Kurt Eichenwald debunks this non scandal here:
The management of this mini crisis does not exactly assuage my concerns about her campaign. It is ham-handed and amateurish. Unbelievable. Literally unbelievable.
What makes this story particularly infuriating to me is that whether she committed a serious wrong or not is almost immaterial from my point of view. That’s not necessarily because I don’t care, although I’ve been conditioned to dismiss the seriousness of anything that provokes ‘outrage’ as purely partisan theatrics, but because if Hilary Clinton goes down over this, my alternative is… the Republicans. Frankly, give me the lying Democrat over them. If somebody would rise as a viable alternative to Hilary Clinton, then perhaps I would have leeway to care, but as it stands, eight years of George W. Bush and then seven (ongoing) of the Tea Party make just about any Democrat preferable by default.
Congratulations, Mrs. Clinton, you suck, but the other guys are supermassive black holes.
@stonetools:
I found Eichenwald’s article to be grasping to make the problem go away. He specifically notes that a non-government is OK as long as records are preserved then ignore that records may not have been preserved in this case.
@stonetools:
While not illegal, it was clearly in contravention of State Department policy at the time, and indeed other State Department employees were disciplined or terminated for similar actions during her tenure.
[]@michael reynolds: And how would you manage it?
Her response was blah, not terrible.
I think she must be trolling Republicans with the missing emails and the questions about how many phones she really had.
@michael reynolds:
The response isn’t great, but it’s early in the process and this will be soon be forgotten outside the right wing fever swamps. I guess what rankles for me is the idea that it’s not enough for HRC being morally and legally in right. NO, she must comply with some misty standard of propriety that no other political leader has to comply with. Witness:
If she is complying with the law, who cares whether it matches up with the Mataconis standard of convenience? As it happens, I get my work and personal email on my iPhone, whereas my wife does not. Both choices are personal AND legal. That should be enough.
Now the government later made the decision-which I support-that the SoS and others must use .gov email addresses for government business. Great-but that decision was made AFTER HRC left office. You don’t get to attack HRC for breaking the law retrospectively. At least, you shouldn’t if you are playing fair.
Join the real world, Hillary.
I use my work e-mail for work. My personal e-mail for personal stuff. It’s not just “a good idea.” It’s company policy.
She just took the default Clinton position
‘Lie, Lie, Lie, Deny, Deny, Deny’
@stonetools:
As someone much further down in the food chain, I’m sick of political appointess casually doing stuff that would be career ending if I did it. Be they Scooter Libby, General Petraeus, or Hillary Clinton, I’m pissed off by an increasingly brazen aristocratic class that none of the rules apply to.
@humanoid.panda:
There is no way to manage it, other than to just assert “I did nothing illegal. No emails constituting records have been withheld. That is all that I have to say on the subject. Have a nice day folks, and thanks for coming …”
Now, that she did nothing illegal is clear. There is no way that her detractors can come up with any sort of evidence that anything has been withheld. It’s impossible for them to do so.
So that leaves the situation at “the nuts who hate her will believe that she withheld emails, and they were never going to vote for her anyway, so who cares?”
The rest of the public will get bored with it, once no evidence of wrongdoing is (or will be, or can be) forthcoming from her detractors, and they’ll move on.
You handle things like this by throwing them back at your accuser & putting the burden of proof back on them.
Always interesting to see the notion of government transparency flying out the window and the deployment of the Clinton Reality Distortion Field. However, I believe she’ll win election and we will have several more years of this.
Who cares? Really, Who.the.f.cares? Outside of the RWNutJobs? Ohhhh…. I get it, after 6 years, let’s count them, that would be 2190 days, (and over 55,000 pages of e-mails) SOMEBODY…. finally noticed that their e-mails from Hillary DID NOT come from a .gov account? Really? 55,000 pages of e-mails????? And the Benghazi committee investigators had to have somebody TELL THEM??? REALLY???? OVER 3 YEARS AFTER THE ATTACK?????
Are there any competent people left in America? Even I would have noticed that.
ps; yesterday at Balloon juice I said I could not believe Obama did not know. Somebody insisted that the evil Hillary kept every body in the dark, and that Obama was blameless for this. Personally, I saw no blame anywhere (much ado about nothing) (Doug), but I repeated, he had to know.
Gee, whadya know?
@HarvardLaw92: Exactly.
@Stormy Dragon: It’s called the “art of politics” and people with pull use it to negotiate the best possible deal they can for themselves when taking a position in an administration. I would do the exact same thing if I could.
So would you.
Why am I supposed to care about this again? The choice isn’t between Clinton and someone reasonable, it’s between Clinton and a signatory to the recent Iran letter (or supporter). Also, has HarvardLaw92 has repeatedly pointed out, the law has been changed in the last couple years, so this isn’t an ongoing concern.
@OzarkHillbilly:
So basically nothing really matters but naked “might makes right” any pretense by anyone to the contrary is merely feigned for the purpose of mommentary tactical advantage.
@Stormy Dragon:
Can you link to anything proving this? I ask because the Right Wing BS Machine is great at manufacturing and repeating convenient falsehoods. What I see is black letter law allowing State Department officials to use nonfederal email, and a practice of them doing just that. So show your work, please. Note that the OP never claims that Clinton violated any law or policy.
@Hal_10000:
Well, they may or may not have been preserved. In the absence of EVIDENCE that they weren’t preserved, what we have is innuendo-and the presumption of guilt, instead of the presumption of innocence. I’d like to think that we are above that kind of McCarthyism-even in the case of a Clinton.
I’m still waiting for a law, regulation, guidance, or policy statement that she violated. Our resident Harvard lawyer was unable to locate one, and apparently, neither has Doug. But by all means, let’s presume that she did something wrong, because she is a Clinton and because the media and the Republicans say so.
@stonetools:
I respect you, so I say this reluctantly.
This kind of talk is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It reminds me of a story recently that came out of Wyoming where authorities struggled to prosecute a child abuse case because apparently, locking your kid in a cage against his will isn’t technically against the law.
I mean, I understand the right BS machine, as you so aptly put it, is going to latch onto this and latch onto it hard. This time I fear, though, they have the goods. This isn’t Obama’s birth certificate or Benghazi.
Hillary should have been managing her e-mails better. Professional standards have kind of formed on this kind of thing and she brooked them. Willingly, and with an excuse that wouldn’t save a customer service rep her job.
Doug,
Each department is different. In the Defense Department, where I work, this isn’t possible. A lot of civilian employers impose similar restrictions. I know some military reservists who have three iphones – a personal iphone, a government iphone and a work iphone issued by their civilian employer.
Still, I don’t buy that as an excuse for Secretary Clinton. Lots and lots of people have multiple devices for multiple roles and most of them don’t have aids around 24/7 to assist them.
@HarvardLaw92:
The trouble with that line of argument is that all the evidence is controlled by people loyal to the Clintons. I guess we just have to take their word for it? The conflict of interest in such an arrangement is pretty obvious.
You’re right that it wasn’t illegal – meaning it’s not something that was criminal. It was, however, contrary to the letter and intent of numerous government policies, a direct subversion of the intent of FOIA, contrary to good information and computer security practices, etc. It’s not exactly surprising this is a controversy simply because employees (both private and government, but especially government) are expected to conduct the business of their employer according to their employers rules in a manner in which their employer can monitor what they are doing.
@stonetools:
Hence the “While not illegal”. There’s no law saying I can’t wear shorts and a tank top to work either, buy if I insisted on doing so I would quickly be fired because it does violate the dress code policy.
Likewise, it was against State Department policy to use outside email:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/state-department-email-rule-hillary-clinton-115804.html
Are you seriously suggesting that you think during the time in question, anyone at the state department could use whatever email address they felt like?
@stonetools:
You don’t understand, you just can’t provide truth and facts, you have to look at it from their point of view.
Clinton is the new Black (presumed guilty till proven innocent)
@James Pearce:
You do understand that every SoS has been doing the same sort of thing, right? Also that the company policy at the State Department specifically allowed her to use nonfederal email systems to conduct government business? And that the policy didn’t change till AFTER she left? And that she repeatedly emailed her boss -the President of the United States-and probably several Republican Congressional leaders from her private email address and nobody gave a sh!t about this until about 10 minutes ago?
I’m all for holding Hillary to the same standard as everyone else in her situation and at her level. Where I get off the train is holding her to some arbitrary higher standard simply because she is a Clinton and dammit, we’re tired of the Clintons getting away with stuff.
The plain fact is that this time we don’t have the goods because she didn’t do anything wrong, so far as we know. That may change, but until it does…presumption of innocence.
Ahhhh….the 90s are coming back…we have 4-8 years of Clinton scandals to look forward to…whether such scandals are real or imagined will make no difference…the outrage meter will constantly be on high alert….it’s funny, but after almost 8 years of outrage with Obama over just about everything (except for being president while being black, which is sort of implied) one would think that many people will tune out any further scandals that come along…The Boy Who Cried Wolf fable and all of that…
@Stormy Dragon:
Thanks for the link. I’ve read and re-read that statement and I don’t see there a requirement that the SOS conduct government business only using a .gov address. Apparently, no one else saw such a requirement here either. So no, this isn’t a case of Clinton violating State Department policy. You’re welcome to try again.
@Andy:
Which is cause for disciplinary action by her supervisor.
Oh wait, she’s no longer employed. Oh well …
That rather depends on establishing that records (and that is a defined term) were actually withheld. Neither you, nor anybody really other than Clinton herself, can establish the validity of that claim. It’s impossible to prove or disprove.
And you know this because you’re an IT security expert who has inspected the server in question? Just asking.
Again, fire her. Oh wait …
Not trying to poo poo the concerns. I’m just saying that this is a non-starter. She could dump the entire contents of the server on the Capitol steps at this point and there would still be a never-ending litany of (utterly unprovable) accusations about missing emails. At this point, there is nothing but damage control, and damage control involves what I laid out above.
@stonetools:
That’s an interesting interpretation – I think everyone realizes that there are cases where business cannot be conducted on a .gov address. That is far different from what Clinton did which was to completely avoid a .gov address for all government business. To suggest that is not violating policy is pure sophistry.
I don’t care for Ms. Clinton and would love to vote for someone else; although, the current crop of GOP clowns is not exactly compelling.
New technology creates new problems. Has it previously been the standard that every communication received by the top government officials be public, every letter, every phone call, every whisper in their ear be made public? Is that a good idea? IANAL, but without an allegation of a specific act of wrongdoing should not things be allowed to be kept in private by public officials?
Hillary won’t be the last or only official using email. Is there a policy we should expect people to adhere to, and when did this policy come into existence?
Ultimately, I would like to see American politics evolve beyond the standards of a fourth grade sleep over where the who is more important than the what.
@An Interested Party:
One of the illusions of many liberals and Congressional Democrats leading up to 2008 was that if only we had different candidates than those slick Clintons, we would not have to deal with constant scandal mongering from the right wing BS machine. So everyone welcomed the squeaky clean Obamas and settled down in anticipation of a scandal free administration. How wrong they have been.
Wright, Ayers, whitey tape, IRS, Benghazi, ebola-the right wing BS machine has proven quite capable of manufacturing one “scandal” after another-often with help from the MSM.
The folks who think that things would be better if a Warren or O’Malley are living in a fool’s paradise, IMO.EVERY Democratic presidential candidate is going to face the same stuff, IMO. Scandal mongering is standard for the right wing BS Machine, I’m afraid, so expect more of it, no matter who the Democratic nominee is.
@Andy:
It apparently also was the interpretation of everyone until a few days ago. Funny that.
Now policy changed after she left ( and I agree with the change). But it’s also plain that what she did was permitted by the State Department policy at that time, and most people accepted this. You can call that sophistry if you want, but that’s how it was. Note that right through the Benghazi hearings, no Congressional Republican said a mumbling word about Hillary Clinton’s email practice. That speaks volumes right there.
@HarvardLaw92:
Yes, it’s impossible to prove or disprove, you don’t see this as a problem? Do you really believe it’s acceptable for public servants to keep all their records private and then release some portion of them years later while expecting us to trust them that it’s a complete and accurate record? One purpose of establishing an independent IT system is to assure that complete records are kept, not just records that passed vetting by the employees who made them.
Bogus ad hominem argument. Was her server secure or wasn’t it? Was the network monitored 24/7 or wasn’t it? Was the hardware in a secure facility 24/7 or wasn’t it? If you can’t answer Yes to those questions then it’s a problem. If the system can’t be audited then it’s a problem. That we are ignorant of the actual security of the system does not mean the system was secure.
Politically that’s all true. But it’s also entirely the responsibility of Hillary Clinton who could have avoided it all by properly using the DoS’ IT systems. It’s a bit strange you admit her actions were cause for disciplinary action by her “supervisor” (a strange term for a cabinet official) yet you turn around and lament about “unprovable” accusations. What’s provable – fact even – is that she violated department policy and the clear intent of many other federal policies to include FOIA and possibly the Privacy Act. Yet, according to your argument, none of this can be “proven” so to you it’s all much ado about nothing except unprovable accusations.
To me that’s an incredibly disingenuous argument, but readers can certainly decide for themselves.
@stonetools:
The underlying truth here, which I completely get, is that she well knew way back then that she intended to run again, and she well knew that every word she typed during her tenure would be endlessly parsed by political operatives twisting FOIA into a tool for opposition research.
In one fell swoop, she has both essentially denied them access to a valuable trove of information that could potentially be used against her, and she has forced them into the position of proving that she did anything wrong. The wingnut base, of course, will believe it, but like I said, they were never going to vote for her anyway, so WGAFF?
In her shoes, I would probably have done the exact same thing. Faced with a choice between 1) having to explain an email or emails – the content of which might look damning outside of a explanation of context which would be impossible to fairly explain in the 60 second soundbites that constitute both modern “journalism” and political campaigns – that someone is holding in their hand, or 2) being able to throw the burden of explanation back onto my accusers with an accusation that they can never prove, it’s a no brainer.
It becomes a choice between me being tied up playing an endless defense that I’ll never win, or tying up my opponents on playing an endless offense that they’ll never win.
That’s not even a choice, really.
@stonetools:
That you claim it was permitted by policy doesn’t mean it was. Not many who actually work in the DoS agree with you, nor does anyone who is an actual expert on government IT policy and government records. But here’s a test – your argument suggests that any State Department employee was free to set up a completely private email service to conduct all their government business – how many current and former DoS employees agree with that interpretation? Even Harvardlaw92 suggests it was enough of a violation to cause disciplinary action.
It wasn’t reinterpreted a few days ago, it was publically unknown until until a few days ago. More sophistry! Even government watchdog, oversight and FOIA groups were unaware until a few days ago.
@Andy:
In a world where the material in question wouldn’t be
minedtwisted for political advantage by the opposition? Sure, it’s a great idea. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.It wasn’t intended to be an ad hominem. It was intended to underline the larger point – you can’t answer any of those questions with specificity either way, and neither can anyone else other than her. She has no motivation at this point to supply additional bases for attack, so she’s obviously going to keep her mouth shut and ride it out.
Again, cabinet official or not, she was a government employee. The same disciplinary outcomes applicable to violating policy that apply to other government employees apply to her as SoS. The extent of the consequences for what she did is disciplinary action, and since she’s no longer employed – well, you get the point. It’s a non-starter.
Again, beyond personnel policies, you’re making an assumption that records were withheld in violation of FOIA. You can’t prove that assumption, ergo it’s untrue until proven otherwise. Presumption of innocence applies.
I’m not seeing how the Privacy Act applies at all here, but I’m game for an explanation.
@HarvardLaw92:
And this is why we can’t have nice things. Your comment simply justifies Clinton’s personal ambitions trumping public oversight, transparency as well as the public historical record of the activities of the US government. Legitimacy and transparency in government is, apparently, secondary to defending ambitious politicians against FOIA based opposition research. I wonder if you’ll make the same argument when the shoe is on the other foot.
@stonetools / @HarvardLaw92
I originally wrote “Clinton is the new Black” half in jest, but seeing your discussions with the various posters on this issue shows it wasn’t a joke. Guilty till proven innocent. Even when proven innocent you’ll still never convince those who don’t want to be convinced.
She’ll be the third black president.
@Andy:
No, I suggested that the appropriate option would be disciplinary action by her supervisor, and the determination of what, how and when to impose such action rests with the discretion of said supervisor.
In her case, that’s the president, and the president was aware that she was using a private email server. She emailed him from the fricking thing, and he did nothing to her.
At this point, the worst that could have happened to her would have been being fired, and even that is off the table because SHE NO LONGER WORKS THERE. What are you going to do, rehire her so she can be fired? 😀
Was it a somewhat dumb thing to do? Possibly, but it’s done now, and there is little, if anything, that can be done to her about it beyond a never-ending whine / litany of stink from the right about emails it can’t use against her because it can’t get its hands on them.
I particularly enjoyed her turning over 55,000 or so emails to the DoS, which now has to vet each and every one before turning over the non-sensitive ones to NRA. That process alone will take months, and when it’s over, if emails aren’t available, well …
“You’ll have to talk to the people at DoS about that. They withheld them. I didn’t” …
See where this is going yet?
@Andy:
The public always considers itself entitled to view, and to know, everything, and gasps in umbrage when it isn’t allowed to.
In a world populated by honest brokers intent on governing? Sure, I think what you are espousing is a great idea.
We don’t live in that world, and I think you’re being (more than a tad) idealistic.
@HarvardLaw92:
Based on the experience the Clintons had in the White House, I would say that she made the right decision. The GOP’s corruption there was profound. It was so bad that it’s unmentionable by the GOP. They replaced Robert Fiske when he was going to prosecute the criminals (e.g. the people who ripped off the Clintons). When Starr found nothing, because there was nothing to find, they just grabbed the Paula Jones lawsuit and went with that, even though it had nothing to do with Whitewater. In the end, a bunch of thugs chased down Monica Lewinsky like she was a world-class criminal.
I’m not a fan of the Clintons. I think she’s pretty corrupt. But she’s at least cynical enough to see the situation and behave accordingly. I don’t actually believe that the people cheered on Whitewater or thought it was deserved even care that it was a crock. They would set her up and do it again in a heartbeat .
@humanoid.panda:
Aside from 1) Don’t do it to begin with and 2) Don’t delete thousands of emails?
Well, it’s tough now, honestly. Don’t let the story build for a week and then come up with weak explanations. But once she deleted the emails she was screwed. Amazingly stupid. Just amazingly stupid.
@Modulo Myself:
I’m not a cheerleader for them either. I noted on a different thread that one would have to have been living under a rock not to notice the hint of an odor emanating from Chappaqua, and a good bit of that perception is their own doing.
That having been said, I agree with you. If she wants to run for the presidency again, this was the only option open to her. She had to weigh the choices and choose the least damaging one to her politically. No matter what happens, she was always inevitably going to come out of it tainted by a smell, so the only real choice open to her was smell mitigation. It’s sad that we live in such a world, but we do, and cynicism coupled with self-protection is the only path that makes sense in such a world.
@HarvardLaw92:
Agree completely with your analysis, but it does have the drawback of her not now having a politically acceptable explanation of why she did it that way, so she has to use the lame “convenience” explanation. It’s a matter of ” political” convenience, not the convenience of having one device, but she certainly can’t say that.
@HarvardLaw92:
I also think it’s to her advantage. She’s definitely a flawed candidate. That the GOP will end up chasing its own tail is its own fault.
Even Nixon’s enemies came to see things from his view, demented as it was. Watching this email stuff unfold makes me realize how out of it the GOP is. They don’t even know what they could be doing about it, except to ask ‘questions’.
Also, she played the press conference smart. The first election I really followed was 2000. Gore’s ‘No Controlling Legal Authority’ stuck around for the entire race. She gave them nothing of the sort.
@Stonetools:
I tend to think that why she chose to do it would be evident to anyone with a brain. Now granted, that rules out a sizable swath of the electorate, but many (I would wager the majority …) of them were never going to vote for her anyway.
People will draw their own conclusions, as they were going to do with or without every single email printed out in front of them. I’m willing to bet that a large swath of them also remember the witch hunt known as Whitewater too, and in that context, who wouldn’t cut those Republican scandal mongers off at the knees?
It’s a political calculation, and only time can tell if it proves to have been a wise one. I think she’ll be tainted, but she’ll probably weather it, if for no other reason than the GOP looks certain to provide another clown car slate of potential candidates for her to be compared to.
@Andy
And you're wrong about that. Everyone in the government and every foreign leader and every Congressperson that she emailed knew about it. They didn't care because what she was doing was not wrong, according to the law and the existing policy. Now if you want to argue, it should have been wrong, be my guest. But it wasn't at the time.
@Stonetools:
Removed
@HarvardLaw92:
Yup. Tried to fix it, but screwed that up. Thanks, ipad. Oh well maybe it’s just time to go to sleep. See you all tomorrow.
@HarvardLaw92:
Given that a large proportion of these emails were to other people who would have to retain them, one could, if one were so inclined, create an incomplete set of records that should have been retained, and then check to see if any of those were withheld.
This wouldn’t demonstrate that no records were withheld (for instance, her hypothetical emails to Obama’s personal email discussing their plans for a One Party Government), but they could demonstrate that records were withheld, and give some sense of the accuracy of the official business vs. personal email claims for the rest. It’s something that cannot exhonerate her, it can merely condemn her.
If nothing else, it is something to get an independent investigator to do, to create the impression that an independent investigator is required. That’s always fun. Republicans love that.
@HarvardLaw92:
Irrelevant unless you believe it’s acceptable to violate policy, undermine government oversight, and deny archivists and future researchers a complete record of the actions of the officers of the US government in order to provide a political advantage to an ambitious individual.
Yes, she will keep her mouth shut and ride it out. I agree with your analysis on her political strategy. I don’t agree that it’s justified because if you justify it for her, then you must justify it for others.
Additionally, asserting that there’s no evidence her server wasn’t secure isn’t a valid argument because there’s no evidence it was secure either. The problem is that we don’t know whether it was secure or not.
Anyone, except you I guess, who has ever worked in any large organization knows that rules do no apply evenly to those at the top and at the bottom. There are always “different spanks for different ranks.”
You are missing the point. The problem is that we can’t determine whether Clinton withheld records or not because she took actions that would ensure we couldn’t determine whether Clinton withheld records or not. The inherent conflict of interest in such a scheme is why organization third parties control the collection and maintenance of official records in all large organizations. Without that, the organization could not exercise accountability or limit corruption. You’ve made it plain in your arguments that you are perfectly willing to make an exception to these practices for Clinton justified by narrow and personal political interest – personally, I am not willing to make that exception for her or anyone else.
I’m out of this thread now, I’ve made my case and people can decide which argument is best.
@Stonetools:
Quoting that for the lols.
rules don’t apply to her, and her supporters don’t care. the main reason; her husband cheated on her so she can use the “scorned woman” thing in perpetuity. end of story.
@michael reynolds:
Look at the bright side, Michael, at least we don’t have to read the sordid details of her yoga warrior pose. So we got that to be thankful for.
I
Republicans ran a 6 year investigation on everything Clinton, and came up with nothing (well, nothing until they set up a sting to get Bill to lie about having sex with Monica) so it’s pretty safe to say that this story will NEVER go away.
I see it this way: about 47% of the voters hate Hillary Clinton no matter what, and about 50% of the people are somewhat ambivalent about her but they have no intention of voting for Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, Donal Trump, Marco Rubio, or Paul Ryan.
@HarvardLaw92:
Is it too much of a stretch to notice the irony of how the sides have changed? The SCOTUS is debating the letter of the law vs intent with the ACA. Now with HRC it seems intent matters more than the letter of the law. Is this the ‘both sides do it’ cynicism that everybody loves? *slow clapping*
Is it just me or does @Guarneri sound like he has Alzheimers? Non sequitur piled on non sequitur.
I’m on pretty much the same page as @michael reynolds: and @James Pearce:
As soon as she mixed the accounts, those personal emails should be “fair game” for examination. If I’m on my government computer, and I want to send a personal email, I don’t use my .mil outlook account. I open gmail.
Even if it’s not a legitimate legal problem, it’s certainly a political problem for someone running for President. From this point forward, it’s not an entirely unreasonable question (even for non right wing nutjobs) to wonder what might be in some of those emails that she’s not willing to share.
Personally, I’ll hold my nose and vote for her over any Republican, but I’m not terribly thrilled about the idea of a Hillary Clinton Presidency … and that lack of enthusiasm is a danger in the 2016 election. I don’t think Clinton is anywhere close to as much of a “sure thing” to win, as many Democrats seem to believe.
This is why this controversy won’t fly with the American people:
Now Jason Chafetz’s defense is that the Records Act doesn’t extend to Congress. Of course that’s the point. The law didn’t apply to the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s tenure.
The public can easily comprehend the hypocrisy of Congresspersons using personal email to conduct government business attacking Clinton doing the same thing.
The problem here is the inadequacy of left wing media. If Clinton was a Republican, Fox News, talk radio , and the right wing blogswarm would be blaring out the hypocrisy of the attackers 24/7/365. Left wing media is as usual divided and defensive about this, with the “good government” types wringing their hands and saying that we should in effect apply the Records Act retractively to Clinton and blame her for not complying with the current law back in 2009 and other left wing types cringing defensively because that’s what left wingers do when the right wing BS machine goes on the offensive.
Now its great that the Records Act makes it the law that executive employees use a government address to conduct government business. I think it should extend to members of Congress like that squirrel Chaffetz. But right now its perfectly legal for Chafetz to use his Gmail address to conduct government business,hypocritical though it may be.
@Todd:
Check around your office. Lots of government employees don’t do that, good practice though it might be. This I know for a fact. It’s why I don’t think this attack on Clinton will work, although I’m sure the RW BS machine will do its best.
Seriously….is there anything this woman could have said that wouldn’t have created more questions for our
outstanding fourth estate and political punditrystenographers pool?Whitewater
Castle Grande
Travelgate
Filegate
The Rose Law Firm
Vince Foster
Benghazi
Now this nonsense…and the only there that has ever been there is her husband getting an extra-marital hummer in the Oval office.
I wish the Clintons would go away….but only because the chattering class is never going to stop this total f’ing BS.
@HarvardLaw92:
It doesn’t take a CISSP to figure out why Mrs. Clinton proceeded as she did with her e-mail system: she wanted to have total control of it and ownership of the data, and say-so over what might be released at some future point. This isn’t the same as if she’d used GMail, which would have made it much easier for the government to obtain the e-mails. She knew what she was doing setting up her own system.
I do wonder who actually administered the thing–I mean, Mrs. Clinton is without a doubt a very intelligent person, but I’ve yet to see any indication she moonlights as an Exchange server admin.
FYI.
Clinton Fact Sheet on Issue
@Stormy Dragon:
I wasn’t aware of others being terminated.
Could you please provide a cite?
@Loviatar: I’ve been waiting to see how this crowd would handle criticism post-Obama. We’ve been told for 6 years that Republican positions are motivated by racism – a theory that has been nicely non-falsifiable. The only way to test is will be to see if Republicans remain critical of Democrats who are white. It’s going to be interesting to see the new “it’s because of something other than policy” formulation. Because she’s a Clinton? Well, that waters down the “unprecedented” angle with Obama. Because she’s a woman? They’ve tried to float that, but it doesn’t seem to stick.
@Andy:
Has it been determined that her server was NOT backed up, which would be contrary to good IT practice?
If she deleted mail from the permanent backup of the server, (versus the server itself) that would look very suspicious.
A cursory glance at social media vs the political chatterers this morning suggests that the general public cares not at all about HRC’s email accounts while the media is obsessed with them. #47Traitors is onto its second day as the top trend on Twitter. That is what agitates actual people. Emailgate is on its umpteenth day as the top story on Memeorandum. Everybody who isn’t a reporter or blogger is sick of it if they even noticed it to begin with.
A related news item from the NYT. I don’t think it really adds all that much, but someone may find it interesting.
No Classified Emails by Clinton? Some Experts Are Skeptical
There is this toward the end, though (unrelated to Mrs. Clinton):
There’s no scenario in which the storage, transport, and transmission of classified material using a personally-owned computer is appropriate or allowed. There’s no request urgent enough to justify it. Simply thinking about it gives me the willies.
This whole thing reminds me strongly of Joann’s plight in Office Space. For those who never saw it, she is constantly tormented by her boss for only wearing 17 pieces of flair, the absolute minimum as required by her job. She was in compliance with the policy. Her passive-aggressive jerk of a boss picks on her for not wearing more but when pressed will not demand Joanna wear more. He instead drones on about standards and “expressing herself” instead of coming out and stating that he wanted her to do more then what was required. His standards and the actual policy were two very different beasts. She becomes increasingly frustrated by someone trying to hold her to a different unspoken standard then what she was actually obligated to.
This is how Hillary should have dealt with this whole thing, just like Joanna did. She was never going to win with the Cons, so why not express yourself? (Apologies for the quality but what do you want from Youtube?)
I think part of what’s playing into this (and the Lois Lerner destroyed emails fever swamp) is how mind-numbingly inexpensive mass digital storage is today. You can go out (or stay in) and buy a terabyte external hard drive for
$130$61. Gmail, which is free*, gives you 15 gigabytes to store the minutiae of your personal communications in. In this tech-besotted environment it becomes hard to believe the government bothers to not archive all the emails any of its employees send or receive.I’d say to those people they don’t know about the effects of changes to monetary and tax policy in the last forty years on the ability of government to be “cutting edge” tech-wise, but that’s my peculiar take on it. Longer-term history’s not something I expect people to know intuitively but falling digital storage prices have been the norm for a decade now.
Then again, this conversation is already pretty limited to tech-savvy Americans, and that’s not a majority of the population.
*Except for how they sell personal information to digital advertisers and all the other digital privacy-eroding crap Google does that we’re just used to.
“rules” are for “commoners”- not the “clintons”. just deal with it, her husband cheated on her after all……
Now it’s hit the Daily Show: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nsy1a2/on-her-majesty-s-secret-server
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said when asked if any of her emails compromised security. “Looking back, it might have been smarter” to have used government email, she conceded.
But how many classified e-mails did she receive?
Also noted are the remarks by husband Bill that he said he has only sent 2 e-mails in his life/.
See: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/10/bill-clinton-still-doesnt-use-email/
She is an arrogant liar
@HarvardLaw92: You keep talking about “the world” with considering who makes it the way it is.
Mike
@KM: he becomes increasingly frustrated by someone trying to hold her to a different unspoken standard then what she was actually obligated to.
The other way of looking at it, and the way Mike Judge would probably write the scene today, is that Joanna was a self-centered and lazy employee who just wanted to put in the minimal effort and pick up her pay check. And her boss was trying, in the nicest way he could, to get her to have some enthsiasm for her job so she’d be a better employee and, perhaps coincidentally, be a little less miserable.
Way more people need to watch Extract.
Mike
“Looking back, it might have been smarter” to have used government email, she conceded…..
But smarter is not an attribute that the Clinton’s prefer to have. Lying, in-digressions, omissions, bloviating, and embellishing, are the preferred attributes.