Hilary Clinton and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Personal E-mail Account

[doorhinge]

@wolfpup

Let’s look at the very first statement from the very first post that started all this off:

“Hillary Clinton did not have a State Department email account while she served as America’s top diplomat, a senior state department official said Monday, and instead used a personal email account during her four years on the job.”
So when these Congressional investigations were looking into Hillary’s communications as Secretary of State, did they just conclude that she had an extraordinarily quiet four years, and never sent email to anyone?

Or maybe they went through all the state.gov email records. Wouldn’t they have noticed that lots of folks were getting emails from Hillary, but she never seemed to be sending any?

Just how dumb are these Congressional committees?

As far as I know, investigators have repeatedly requested documents from the State Department, but not from Hillary’s private server. It doesn’t appear that the investigators knew that Hillary had control over her own server, and it doesn’t appear that the State Dept informed the investigators of that fact. If they had known, the investigators might have chosen to ignore it, but that’s unlikely.

It appears that the investigators are now aware that Hillary has her own server, and has complete control of who has access to her emails.

On the evening of September 11, 2012, Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

On Mar 4, 2015, Hillary finally urges the State Department to release her emails.

Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here. :rolleyes:

[Learjeff]

I’m pissed at Clinton for being stupid. Either that, or for being too clever.

@Bricker

She used a personal account but sent mail to the state.gov accounts of her staff, where that e-mail was properly retained as a record.

This is an idiotic excuse, because it’s an idiotic policy. It’s a policy that works for ONLY ONE of a set of communicating people, and only within the government. Now tell me, who is smart enough to be a Cabinet member but too stupid to consider this possibility?

Another idiotic excuse is her complaint that she’d have to carry two devices. Wrong: Even at the time, Blackberry phones could have multiple email accounts. Oops. Yet she knew enough about email servers to have one set up for her. She could as easily have asked how to set up her Blackberry. I call BS.

She did it for one simple reason: more control. And she proved that when she DELETED ALL THE IRRELEVANT EMAILS, which she herself says they did after HER TEAM separated out the relevant email.

Yeesh. 0 points for transparency. 0 points for good reasons.

@John_Mace

She needs to have an impartial 3rd party go thru ALL her e-mails and redact the personal ones. It’s absurd for her to expect people to trust her doing the redacting.

Yeah, too late, because they deleted them all!

And that’s the part where I guess she’s actually not stupid, but clever.

This will blow over. It’ll affect a few fence-sitters (people like me, though I’ve so totally pissed off at the Republicans for being assholes rather than good conservatives, I’m probably no longer on the fence.) But it won’t make a big difference in the long run. The timing is fortunately early enough for it to blow over.

But man, I’m annoyed at the stupid excuses she cites for keeping control of her communications. On the other hand, I don’t blame her for wanting to do that. Her husband got raked over the coals due to an “investigation” that led to information that was totally irrelevant to what was being investigated (and Clinton totally mishandled it, making matters far worse than they would have been.)

The truth is “I keep my shit close because I know what you fuckers would do with it, even were I blameless.” Of course she can’t say that.

No laws were broken, though.

Regarding whether Obama should have noticed, it depends on what email client he uses. For work I’ve been forced to use Outlook (or, “Outbreak” as I like to call it). It has the annoying property of going out of its way to hide email addresses – like, we’re not smart enough to handle them? What, is this an Apple product? And makes it necessary to go out of one’s way to actual see or copy/paste email addresses. (Sorry, Outlook rant over.) But, it’s plausible that he didn’t see her address.

[wonky]

@Learjeff

Regarding whether Obama should have noticed, it depends on what email client he uses. For work I’ve been forced to use Outlook (or, “Outbreak” as I like to call it). It has the annoying property of going out of its way to hide email addresses – like, we’re not smart enough to handle them? What, is this an Apple product? And makes it necessary to go out of one’s way to actual see or copy/paste email addresses. (Sorry, Outlook rant over.) But, it’s plausible that he didn’t see her address.

Yep, Outlook is what I use as well, and the information is just not very visible.

[doorhinge]

@Bricker

So what?

Perhaps Secretary Clinton feared that partisan investigators would fabricate reasons to investigate her, use those reasons to examine her e-mail, and use the contents of the e-mails to discredit her by careful mixing of fact, fiction, and out-of-context quotations, and sought to minimize this possibility by controlling her own e-mail storage.

So what?

Hillary has every reason to believe that partisan investigators, pundits, news media, and internet forum participants will use her actions, and emails to discredit her. Nothing new there. The same thing can be said for every politician.

However, Hillary’s emails were preserved on Hillary’s personal server, and it doesn’t appear that many, or any, Congressional investigations were aware that Hillary had her own server, and complete control over who has access to that server.

Did the investigations have access to Hillary’s emails? That doesn’t appear to be the case. Should Hillary’s emails have been included in the investigations? Yes, they should have. Should Hillary’s emails now be ignored because someone is tired of hearing about Hillary’s emails? No.

[Magiver]

@doorhinge

In an act of semi-transparency, Hillary Clinton has handed the State Department 55,000 pages of emails for public release – but in paper, not their original electronic format.

The tough task of going through Hillary's 55,000 pages of emails

Paper? Really? It appears that Hillary is still trying to stonewall any investigation into her State Department communications.

Who stores Hillary’s emails? Hillary. Who controls who has access to Hillary’s emails? Hillary. Who could have released Hillary’s emails to any of the previous investigations? Hillary.

Well in all seriousness it must have taken her 3 years since the start of the investigation to pick out and print 55,000 emails. You’d think someone in a cabinet position could afford an intern to blow through that kind of menial job.

I for one believe her when she says she went through the effort of setting up an independent email server because she didn’t like carrying 2 phones. If they could just make a barbie doll in her image that says “[del]math[/del] email is hard”.

[John_Mace]

@Learjeff

Yeah, too late, because they deleted them all!

Nothing is ever fully deleted.

@Magiver

Well in all seriousness it must have taken her 3 years since the start of the investigation to pick out and print 55,000 emails. You’d think someone in a cabinet position could afford an intern to blow through that kind of menial job. .

I see what you did there.

[running_coach]

@Magiver

You’d think someone in a cabinet position could afford an intern to blow through that kind of menial job.

Give the man a cigar.

[Lord_Feldon]

I’m not sure how having two email accounts would have been more transparent. She’d still have to make a decision as to which emails were personal and which emails were official when deciding which account to use. Why wouldn’t the scandal of the week just become HILLARY’S SECRET SECOND EMAIL ACCOUNT or HILLARY’S SECRET BURNER PHONE?

[Peremensoe]

@Lord_Feldon

She’d still have to make a decision as to which emails were personal and which emails were official when deciding which account to use.

She couldn’t tell when she was acting as Secretary of State, versus a private citizen?

[wonky]

@Peremensoe

She couldn’t tell when she was acting as Secretary of State, versus a private citizen?

I have that problem all the time. Let’s just say my husband was really surprised when I came home one day and… oh wait. He’s a mod now. Nevermind.

[Lord_Feldon]

@Peremensoe

She couldn’t tell when she was acting as Secretary of State, versus a private citizen?

I’m sure she could. But if her going through her emails and separating them into official and private is an Official Beltway Scandal, why would it be different if she separated them as she went? There would still be private emails going through a private server. If the problem with transparency is that the private emails might have been about official business, why would it be so much better for her to have had a government account and a separate private account at her fingertips 24/7? That sounds like more fodder for Beltway sensationalism, if anything.

[D_Anconia]

@Bricker

No. The POTUS was born August 4, 1961. When he was a teenager, there was no such thing as e-mail. It’s not at all surprising to learn that he doesn’t routinely notice such things.

So Mr. Obama, born in 1961, doesn’t notice to whom he’s emailing :smack:, but Mrs. Clinton, born in 1947, is savvy enough to have her own server? That’s your argument? Really? :dubious:

[elucidator]

Everybody knows lesbians are more tech-savvy than Muslims.

[Tom_Tildrum]

@John_Mace

What’s this bit from her about “wanting to use only one device for e-mail instead of two”. Is she using some obscure “device” that can only access one e-mail account? Maybe Bill should’ve bought her an iPhone as a “Welcome to your new SecState Post” present.

Fed here, and this part did not surprise me. For the rank and file, anyway, agency IT would not tolerate a second, private email account on the government handheld.

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Why is it significant to you that Hillary released her e-mails in paper form?

It destroys all the metadata. Best practices for a discovery request or investigative subpoena these days is to demand production in electronic format, for that reason.

@Bricker

Whether or not it’s proper for falling objects to accelerate towards the ground at 9.8 m/sec[sup]2[/sup], they do.

It’s proper for an investigating body to now seek as complete a picture as they legally can demand. But if the state of the law in 2008 crippled the 2015 investigative body’s legal tools for doing so, then that’s 9.8 m/sec[sup]2[/sup].

2008 versus 2015 is a false distinction. At either time, if State were to be subpoenaed, every employee likely to have responsive documents in his or her possession, custody, or control would be obliged to collect them and provide them to agency counsel for review and potential production. Failing to do so would risk putting the agency in contempt of the subpoenaing authority. I cannot fathom how one would argue that this obligation would not extend to official material on a private email account; to suggest otherwise would mean that an agency employee could shield a hard-copy document from subpoena simply by taking it home.

At this point, we don’t know what was provided in response to congressional subpoenas, and the agency’s production may indeed have been fully compliant. Congress can summon State officials to testify about how those subpoenas were responded to, however. If it turns out that the agency’s lawyers knew about her server and did not include it in the search for responsive documents, I could certainly see that as grounds to explore a contempt finding of some sort against the agency.

@Bricker

And I think this discussion is useless, and should stop. For all the pious condemnation, the simple fact is that as the rules existed during her tenure, she was not doing anything drastically off base.

We, as a society, enforce our desired conduct by the passage of law. If we wanted to force agency heads to use government e-mail systems, we could have passed the 2011 law in 2008. We didn’t. Secretary Clinton used that fact to her advantage, as a rational actor would do.

Obviously, though, some voters may evaluate a candidate based on standards that extend beyond bare compliance with law. Particularly within the Democratic party, there is some set of voters that cares strongly about transparency in government as an aspirational goal; candidate Obama made a deliberate effort to appeal to such voters in 2008. If any other Democrats seek the nomination in 2016, they might likewise seek to use this issue against Clinton. The idea that it is somehow illegitimate to evaluate a political candidate based upon her commitment to certain policy goals just strikes me as really quite odd.

[spifflog]

@wolfpup

And yet the Clintons are accused of being consummate political animals. How could Hillary have violated such an obvious rule of political common sense? Did she think that no one could possibly ever find out? Despite the fact that clearly at least some of these emails would likely eventually have to be released under FOIA? Or is it more likely, given the first point above, that Hillary saw it as no big deal, something that many others had done before her?

So your defense of Clintons is that they are such “consummate political animals” that she would never make such a mistake such as this? Are you kidding?? Where have you been the last twenty years or so?

If the “I want to say one thing to the American people. . . I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

and . . . “because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off”

aren’t clues that that they will do dumb things and think they can do what they want, I don’t know what to say, other than thanks for proving my point.

[spifflog]

@Bricker

No. The POTUS was born August 4, 1961. When he was a teenager, there was no such thing as e-mail. It’s not at all surprising to learn that he doesn’t routinely notice such things.

There is a term that describes this, and it’s being “conveniently stupid.” It’s when someone is the smartest person in the room - any room they’re in - but when it’s somehow convenient they’re then just plain stupid.

I read all the time how brilliant Obama and his staff are. Then all of the sudden they don’t know what this obscure thing is you call “email.” Email and email, what is email?"

I guess those degrees from Columbia and Harvard just aren’t what they used to be.

[CGav8r]

@spifflog

There is a term that describes this, and it’s being “conveniently stupid.” It’s when someone is the smartest person in the room - any room they’re in - but when it’s somehow convenient they’re then just plain stupid.

I read all the time how brilliant Obama and his staff are. Then all of the sudden they don’t know what this obscure thing is you call “email.” Email and email, what is email?"

I guess those degrees from Columbia and Harvard just aren’t what they used to be.

As has been explained countless times, it’s most likely Secty Clinton’s name, but not full email address, showed up on Outlook when he was emailing her. It happens when I email folks on my government computer and they aren’t in DHS intranet.
And I’d be surprised if the President spent a lot of time emailing her-more likely he called her directly, and his staff communicated with her staff.

[spifflog]

@CGav8r

As has been explained countless times, it’s most likely Secty Clinton’s name, but not full email address, showed up on Outlook when he was emailing her. It happens when I email folks on my government computer and they aren’t in DHS intranet.
And I’d be surprised if the President spent a lot of time emailing her-more likely he called her directly, and his staff communicated with her staff.

Copy all. And I certainly don’t expect the President to cull though the email address to see where they are coming from. He does have better things to do.

But his staff (his staff, who he is responsible for) must have known. So for the White House to be surprised at this is just not credible. The White House damn well knows who the President is emailing. It’s not like he’s discussing issues dealing with Iran with any emailer who manages to put “Clinton” in their “from” line.

Part of my interest in this is that I too work for the government. And it’s not even a question to me that I will conduct my tiny, tiny portion of the nation’s business on a government computer, and all of that work is the property of the U. S. Government.

[Bricker]

@spifflog

Part of my interest in this is that I too work for the government. And it’s not even a question to me that I will conduct my tiny, tiny portion of the nation’s business on a government computer, and all of that work is the property of the U. S. Government.

In 2006, dramatist Peter Morgan debuted a play titled Frost/Nixon, which was later adapted into a movie with Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as TV interviewer David Frost. One of the lines from that play has become somewhat of a pop culture meme: during the third and final TV interview, Frost has trapped the by-then former president into a series of increasingly damaging admissions about criminal activities with respect to the Watergate scandal, and Nixon resorts to the line, “When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” In the world of the movies, this is tantamount to an admission of complete guilt, since we all know that The President Is Not Above The Law.

But in fact, there are plenty of times when that statement is literally true. The President is, for example, the ultimate authority on what is and is not classified material. If I publish classified material, I can go to jail. The President can declassify whatever he pleases.

In this same vein, the law often provides heads of agencies with delegated powers. 21 U.S. Code § 802(9)(D) provides that any substance which the Attorney General determines is habit forming because of its stimulant effect on the central nervous system is a “controlled substance,” and contraband. I can’t remove potassium permanganate from the list and thereby make it legal to import and store, but the Attorney General can. So when the Attorney General does it, it’s legal.

In 2008, the law provided that the heads of each agency could mandate methods by which their agencies would comply with various federal record keeping laws. Hillary Clinton was the head of her agency. What you, spifflog, did to comply with your agency’s rules is not relevant to what Secretary Clinton did, since as the head of her agency she was free to designate one rule for her and another for every single other person who worked for State.

We may now wring our hands and talk about what poor judgement that was. We can’t argue, directly or indirectly, that it was outside her authority to do.

[Bricker]

@spifflog

There is a term that describes this, and it’s being “conveniently stupid.” It’s when someone is the smartest person in the room - any room they’re in - but when it’s somehow convenient they’re then just plain stupid.

I read all the time how brilliant Obama and his staff are. Then all of the sudden they don’t know what this obscure thing is you call “email.” Email and email, what is email?"

I guess those degrees from Columbia and Harvard just aren’t what they used to be.

In matters of convenience, I notice that your argument conveniently ignores the multiple observations about how e-mail clients often don’t display the true SMTP-formatted destination.

Moreover, your argument suffers from the fallacy of equivocation, in which a similar word is used in two different ways while the argument suggests the reader should consider them identical.

If you “read all the time how brilliant Obama and his staff are,” those observations are presumably made in the context of domestic governance or international policy and relations – the ordinary business of a president. So far as I’m aware, there is no massive public meme about how brilliant Obama is in mechanical engineering, for example. I assume you’re not reading all the time about how brilliant Obama and his staff are at applying Young’s modulus to various homogeneous isotropic materials, or how brilliant Obama and his staff are when they announced that CBC encryption in SSL 3.0’s block cipher padding is not deterministic. Right?

You know, or should know, that comments about Obama’s brilliance are generally intended to be limited to his areas of known expertise, in other words. No one is contending Obama is a brilliant physician, physicist, or philatelist.

And of course no one is claiming he has any particular expertise in e-mail. He’s an ordinary user, no more or less tech-savvy than the general run of Americans in his age group.

There are boatloads of reasons to criticize President Obama and Secretary Clinton. Their participation in American government has been a net negative for the country.

But why, with that vast acreage of criticisms to farm, are people instead resorting to making shit up?