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

[billfish678]

I had to laugh this morning when I heard this on the news.

Someone from the Clinton camp had issued a statement that (paraphrasing) “Mrs Clinton had complied with BOTH the spirit and letter of the law”.

Besides the run of the mill people making shit up type scandals its almost always ONE OR THE OTHER of those two you aren’t doing that gets you in deep doo doo.

And IMO, being Hillary, she’s violated both.

Leave it to the Clintons to take that old lawyers advice about how to argue your case and crank it up to 11.

[Bricker]

@Boyo_Jim

Since using personal email for official business as against federal policy, and it’s already been acknowledged she did so, what further accusations are necessary? Just the fact of doing it, whether she’s selling official secrets or trading cake recipes, IS wrongdoing. It’s quite a big scale, I’ll admit.

The general tenor of the accusations goes beyond technical violation of NARA policy.

[Boyo_Jim]

It depends on what your definition of “spirit” is, and what your definition of “letter” is. I am reasonably certain there is more than one letter in the law.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Bricker

The general tenor of the accusations goes beyond technical violation of NARA policy.

General tenor? Have there been an specific accusations beyond, “It’s bad not to have these records for the sake of history”, or perhaps, “this demonstrates a kind of arrogance that is unacceptable”? I agree with both of these accusations. I haven’t heard anything beyond these except maybe, “She’s probably hiding something.”

As a lawyer you would know better than I whether the following argument could be sustained in court, but here’s what I would like the State Department to do. Given that she (or an aide) has already acknowledged misusing her personal account for government business, the State Department should … sue? … ask for a search warrant? … to the contents of her personal accounts with the aim of recovering any and all such emails.

[billfish678]

Is Is.

2.0

[steronz]

@Boyo_Jim

General tenor? Have there been an specific accusations beyond, “It’s bad not to have these records for the sake of history”, or perhaps, “this demonstrates a kind of arrogance that is unacceptable”? I agree with both of these accusations. I haven’t heard anything beyond these except maybe, “She’s probably hiding something.”

You’re not watching the fear network, then.

[Boyo_Jim]

@steronz

You’re not watching the fear network, then.

Ok, you got that right, I don’t watch Fux.

But here I am, a crazy left wing progressive Democrat, and I think there should be legal action taken against her. Not an arrest or anything, but I think her “volunteering” to look through her emails and turn over relevant emails is not sufficient. Also, it might take a court action to get to her service provider to see if any emails she deleted during her tenure might be recovered.

[GIGObuster]

@Boyo_Jim

General tenor? Have there been an specific accusations beyond, “It’s bad not to have these records for the sake of history”, or perhaps, “this demonstrates a kind of arrogance that is unacceptable”? I agree with both of these accusations. I haven’t heard anything beyond these except maybe, “She’s probably hiding something.”

As a lawyer you would know better than I whether the following argument could be sustained in court, but here’s what I would like the State Department to do. Given that she (or an aide) has already acknowledged misusing her personal account for government business, the State Department should … sue? … ask for a search warrant? … to the contents of her personal accounts with the aim of recovering any and all such emails.

Or we should ask if the scandal is also a manufactured one like Whitewater.

Hillary Email ‘Scandal’? Not So Fast

But let’s hold on a second. A close reading of the Times piece reveals one potential big hole in the case. I’m not saying the Times is wrong here. It’s still a foggy situation. I am, however, saying this: You have to know how to read these things, and if you do know how to read them, there’s a big question here that could—potentially—exonerate Clinton to some or maybe even a considerable extent.

The article says that there were “new” regulations that Clinton was supposed to abide by. It notes that one past secretary of state, Colin Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, sometimes used his personal email account “before the new regulations went into effect.”

So, a key question would seem to be this: When did the new regulations go into effect? If 2007 or 2008, then Clinton would appear to be in direct violation of them, depending on what precisely they said. If later, it gets a little murkier.

Oddly, the Times article doesn’t say. It doesn’t pin the new regs down to a specific date or even year.

A senior State Department official emailed me to say that “in October 2014, a Department-wide notice was sent out which explained each employee’s responsibilities for records management. Consistent with 2013 NARA guidance, it included instructions that generally employees should not use personal email for the transaction of government business, but that in the very limited circumstances when it is necessary, all records must be forwarded to a government account or otherwise preserved in the Department’s electronic records systems.”

So if these new regulations went into effect after she left State, then what rule did she violate, exactly? And, if this is true, why did the Times not share this rather crucial piece of information with its readers? No one could possibly argue that this fact isn’t germane to the story. It’s absolutely central to it. Why would the Times leave it out?

Here are a few other specifics surrounding this matter that the Times article doesn’t make clear. These facts are already making the rounds on the Internet:

1. Clinton was not the first Secretary to use a private email account. In fact, John Kerry is the first Secretary to use “a standard government email address,” according to The Washington Post.

2. Clinton turned over her emails to the State Department. It’s not clear whether her predecessors did the same.

3. The Times article says the “existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi.” This is incorrect. Gawker reported this first, in March 2013.

It’s a little too early to know exactly what the facts are, and how culpable Clinton is here of any possible wrongdoing. But of course it’s not too early for people to read the Times story and start making noise about a “pattern” of Clinton behavior that this falls into.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Bricker

I am, always, driven by principles. I analyze the facts of every situation by applying the principles, and the result is what the result is.

If this were a Republican SoS, I would be saying the same thing, and (presumably) you’d be arguing or at least silently believing that my defense of the Republican was partisan, and that if a Democrat were involved I’d have a different take on it.

What principles lead you to analyze this situation such that you presume that Miller would be at least silently believing that your defense of the Republican was partisan and different from how you’d treat a Democrat? It seems a little unreasonable to accuse someone of something which by the very nature of it there can be no evidence.

By presuming that you presume that there are no circumstances in which Miller, having read the hypothetical thread, would not at least think you were acting in a biased manner.

[Defensive_Indifference]

Gawker has a pretty good article about this here. They describe Clinton using her personal email address (hdr22@clintonemail.com) for what would certainly be SoS business, making the communication unavailable to FOIA requests and, presumably, anybody else who had an interest in it. Key bits of the article:

@Gawker

Clinton’s email address was hdr22@clintonemail.com; the handle seems to refer to her maiden initials (she was born as Hillary Diane Rodham). The notorious hacker Guccifer first revealed the email address in March 2013, after he gained access to the AOL account of former Clinton White House staffer Sidney Blumenthal, and sent screenshots of Blumenthal’s inbox to several news outlets. According to those screenshots, Blumenthal was regularly sending Clinton what appeared to be freelance intelligence reports—including information and advice about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya—all of which clearly fell under the rubric of official State Department business.

<snip>

After we published the story about Blumenthal’s correspondence with Clinton, we filed a FOIA request with the agency for all correspondence to date between Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, specifically including any messages to or from the hdr22@clintonemail.com account.

<snip>

But the State Department replied to our request by saying that, after an extensive search, it could find no records responsive to our request. That is not to say that they found the emails and refused to release them—it is conceivable, after all, that the State Department might have attempted to deny the release of the Clinton-Blumenthal correspondence on grounds of national security or Blumenthal’s own privacy. Instead, the State Department confirmed that it didn’t have the emails at all.

Which is exactly why Clinton used a non-State Department email server to conduct her official business.

So, we know of at least some SoS business that is now invisible to legit requests. I don’t share Bricker’s confidence that Clinton didn’t communicate with foreign leaders on her personal email. Obviously I have no idea what the SecState’s work process is like, but I would think it likely that she’d send emails to foreign leaders, business people, think tanks, lobbyists, etc., and that those emails should be subject to oversight, investigation, and FOIA requests like everyone else’s in government.

On the topic of security, the domain registration information for clintonemail.com says that it’s hosted at 208.91.197.27, by a provider in the US Virgin Islands called Confluence Networks. Reporting about an unrelated issue, Security Week says Confluence Networks is basically a domain parking service. When a domain registered by Network Solutions expires, it gets transferred to Confluence Solutions, who put up one of those parked domain sites. (As an aside, you have to love Confluence Network’s very informative web presence.) If you go to clintonemail.com now, you do get one of those dopey parked pages.

Probably the domain was hosted somewhere else, then expired at some point and was dumped over to Confluence. I doubt it was hosted by Confluence all along. Here’s why we care, though: after the domain expired, it’s very likely that people would have still been sending emails to hdr22@clintonemail.com. Someone would surely not have gotten the message to stop sending their sensitive information to Clinton’s old address. Her email address was still on someone’s group distribution list, or still captured in someone’s careless Reply to All on an old email. What happened to those emails? Did Conlfuence set up a catch all email box for anything coming in to clintonemail.com? Is some bored admin in the USVI thumbing through those emails intended for the former Secretary of State? I guess we’ll never know. If she had been using the State Department email system, this at least would not be an issue.

Was using a personal email address against the law? I have no idea. Was it fucking stupid? Yes. Yes, it was.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

In Florida, all government e-mails are a matter of public record anyway (with a very few exceptions.)

Including e-mails sent TO the government by private persons? Or quoted in replies? Does a Floridian contacting the government automatically lose all right to privacy in so doing?

[Bricker]

@Revenant_Threshold

What principles lead you to analyze this situation such that you presume that Miller would be at least silently believing that your defense of the Republican was partisan and different from how you’d treat a Democrat? It seems a little unreasonable to accuse someone of something which by the very nature of it there can be no evidence.

By presuming that you presume that there are no circumstances in which Miller, having read the hypothetical thread, would not at least think you were acting in a biased manner.

First, I said “presumably,” as opposed to “certainly,” which was intended to signal it was ismply my presumption, not a confident certainty.

Secondly, Miller said:

@Miller

Hang on, Bricker is defending a Democrat by saying that a Republican used to do the same thing?

Goddammit, am I stuck in the Mirror Universe again? How many of you have goatees right now?

The tone of this post is supportive of my presumption.

[Bricker]

@Boyo_Jim

General tenor? Have there been an specific accusations beyond, “It’s bad not to have these records for the sake of history”, or perhaps, “this demonstrates a kind of arrogance that is unacceptable”? I agree with both of these accusations. I haven’t heard anything beyond these except maybe, “She’s probably hiding something.”

General tenor and specific accusations are not necessarily the same thing.

Can I point out a simple fact?

Before e-mail existed, back in the Dark Ages, we used to use things called “pens” and “typewriters.”

Does anyone believe that the Secretary of State is now forbidden from picking up a pen, writing a letter to a colleague or a foreign potentate, sealing it, affixing a stamp to it, and mailing it?

[Boyo_Jim]

@ElvisL1ves

Including e-mails sent TO the government by private persons? Or quoted in replies? …

Yes – even it, within the email, they request that their email be kept confidential.

@ElvisL1ves

…Does a Floridian contacting the government automatically lose all right to privacy in so doing?

They lose the right to privacy of whatever was in the contents of email that they sent, and some of them included a LOT of personal information.

I can’t give you a cite right now, but there were a flurry of stories shortly after the release saying what Bush did was not in any way illegal, just boneheaded.

Also, this stuff hadn’t been “just out there”. Someone would have to file a FOIA request with the state to specify exactly what information they wanted, so the information was more or less safe for the vast majority of those people until Jeb dumped it out.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@ElvisL1ves

Including e-mails sent TO the government by private persons? Or quoted in replies? Does a Floridian contacting the government automatically lose all right to privacy in so doing?

Yes, pretty much. If you want your communications with Florida government agencies private you call or write a letter. In fact, every government agency - including counties and municipalities - are required to post the following on their websites.

E-mail addresses are public record under Florida Law and are not exempt from public-records requirements. If you do not want your e-mail address to be subject to being released pursuant to a public-records request do not send electronic mail to this entity. Instead, contact this office by telephone or in writing, via the United States Postal Service.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Bricker

First, I said “presumably,” as opposed to “certainly,” which was intended to signal it was ismply my presumption, not a confident certainty.

But I, too, used “presumably” in my reaction to your post, and pointed out that it was your presumption. I received your signal loud and clear. I don’t think you need to correct me on that point.

Secondly, Miller said:

The tone of this post is supportive of my presumption.

Not especially. The tone of the post seems to be jocular surprise.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Bricker

General tenor and specific accusations are not necessarily the same thing.

Can I point out a simple fact?

Before e-mail existed, back in the Dark Ages, we used to use things called “pens” and “typewriters.”

Does anyone believe that the Secretary of State is now forbidden from picking up a pen, writing a letter to a colleague or a foreign potentate, sealing it, affixing a stamp to it, and mailing it?

I don’t know, but I would bet that there are similar record keeping requirements for written documents. There certainly are at the Wisconsin State agency where I work. There are rather elaborate definitions of what constitutes a “record”, and statutory requirements as to how long they must be retained. Certainly a business letter from our Secretary to some other Secretary or someone in a commercial company would constitute a “record”, and copied and retained.

[elucidator]

@Bricker

I am, always, driven by principles. I analyze the facts of every situation by applying the principles, and the result is what the result is… I often support conservative players. But my actual support is reliably predictable: conservative positions, NOT partisan actors.

We are not worthy.

[Shodan]

@Bricker

Does anyone believe that the Secretary of State is now forbidden from picking up a pen, writing a letter to a colleague or a foreign potentate, sealing it, affixing a stamp to it, and mailing it?

As long as Bill doesn’t lick the stamp.

Regards,
Shodan

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@wolfpup

There seems to be highly conflicting information about this. Some say it’s “unprecedented” for a high level official to use personal email like this. Others (including the State Department, IIRC) say that John Kerry was the first to routinely use a .state.gov email. In any case “unprecedented” seems wrong since as already noted the Bush minions were doing it.

Several people have asserted this in this thread, but I wonder if someone has more details of it. From what I see on Politico, it looks a bit different than what HRC did.

In 2007, the Republican National Committee announced that a large volume of emails generated by 22 officials in President George W. Bush’s White House, including political adviser Karl Rove, had been deleted and were unavailable for congressional investigators. The officials used the GOP email system in an effort to separate official and political work, but may sometimes have mixed the two.