# I have changed my mind about the Clinton email scandal (and so should you) **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [March 29, 2016, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514 "2016-03-29T13:31:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/61 "2016-03-30T04:04:03Z")
I see the usual suspects have arrived to burn the witch… ---
**Author:** ![Frank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frank)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/62 "2016-03-30T12:06:35Z")
> [@jayjay](#): > > I see the usual suspects have arrived to burn the witch… You’ve got to admit, Obama weighs more than a duck. ---
**Author:** ![CaptMurdock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/captmurdock/32/11736_2.png) [@CaptMurdock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaptMurdock)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/63 "2016-03-30T12:20:13Z")
I heard Hillary turned that Gingrich guy into a Newt! ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/64 "2016-03-30T12:30:03Z")
I think that laws related to the possession and communication of classified information are confounded by communication in the modern age. Most professional people work at home or on the go to varying degrees. A lot of people use personal email to conduct business in various lines of work. I get that public regulations may prohibit this technically in certain instances, but people are probably prone to forget. I’m not saying it’s right, but Clinton doesn’t appear to have done anything that Bush’s own national security adviser hadn’t done. How do we know that the people who are prosecuting the case against Clinton haven’t also committed similar violations? We’re talking about Clinton because Republicans wanted us to talk about Clinton. So here we are. ---
**Author:** ![steronz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steronz/32/11765_2.png) [@steronz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steronz)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/65 "2016-03-30T13:43:58Z")
> [@Richard\_Parker](#): > > I mostly agree. In fact, I think this new information makes clear that this probably wasn’t a FOIA-avoidance scheme. I’ve accepted Clinton’s “I did it for convenience” argument from day one, but I’ve never felt particularly empathetic towards this decision for the reasons you state. What this new information shows is that she didn’t just make her decision to maintain a personal BB only and then forget about, but that this decision had a consequence she perhaps didn’t see at first – she couldn’t access her email _at all_ from inside the SCIF on mahogany row. Can’t bring a wireless device in, can’t bring it up as webmail (presumably because she didn’t have webmail set up on her server at that point, but even if it were it probably would have been blocked), and you can’t configure Outlook to point to a commercial/civilian email server on a government computer. I’m amazed at one proposed solution, bringing in a private computer with a dedicated commercial line. In a SCIF! It’s laughably absurd from a security perspective. And yet, apparently she pushed hard for some kind of workaround. In the end, she chose to simply not have access to her email while in the SCIF. While I still give her the benefit of the doubt that being able to carry a single BB instead of 2 outweighed the difficulty of not having email access in one of her offices, it certainly puts a dent into the “convenience” argument. It’s not exactly convenient to argue with security folks about why you can’t bring an outside computer with it’s own network access into a SCIF. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/66 "2016-03-30T13:51:09Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > If the OP is correct, then this may demonstrate an extreme sense of entitlement that overrode good judgment, which would be a big mark against her. > > It would take many, many such big marks against her to make her judgment anything close to as bad as any of the Republicans, though, in my opinion. That’s a very understandable argument. But you should know your candidate, their strengths and their flaws. As you know, I’m a John Kasich supporter. But I know who the guy is: a career politician with no private sector accomplishments, he’s prickly, can be arrogant, and his mind can be a bit loopy at times in a Jerry Brown sort of way. Likewise, Clinton has a sense of entitlement. This is nothing new and something that many liberal commentators have talked about for years. That sense of entitlement leads her to believe that the rules don’t apply to her. I’m a bit disappointed that you’re just now realizing that this isn’t “Halperinesque” commentary, it’s who she is. It’s understandable to still support her despite this(I’d be voting for her myself if Gary Johnson wasn’t in the race), but don’t kid yourself about who this person is. As Bill Maher would state, “She’s your President, not your girlfriend.” ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/67 "2016-03-30T14:06:37Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > As far as I’m concerned, President of the United States is an awful job. You have all the responsibility and little power to prevent disaster. Only an arrogant person is likely to want the job. And it’s good that a few people do want the job. For this reason, I don’t judge a president, or potential president, the same way I’d judge a low level government official who acted similarly. One of the most fascinating things about the Presidency is that we do in fact hold the President to lower standards pretty much across the board. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/68 "2016-03-30T14:10:15Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > That’s a very understandable argument. But you should know your candidate, their strengths and their flaws. As you know, I’m a John Kasich supporter. But I know who the guy is: a career politician with no private sector accomplishments, he’s prickly, can be arrogant, and his mind can be a bit loopy at times in a Jerry Brown sort of way. > > Likewise, Clinton has a sense of entitlement. This is nothing new and something that many liberal commentators have talked about for years. That sense of entitlement leads her to believe that the rules don’t apply to her. I’m a bit disappointed that you’re just now realizing that this isn’t “Halperinesque” commentary, it’s who she is. It’s understandable to still support her despite this(I’d be voting for her myself if Gary Johnson wasn’t in the race), but don’t kid yourself about who this person is. As Bill Maher would state, “She’s your President, not your girlfriend.” None of this would be new to me, even if it’s proven to be so (and it hasn’t yet). Clinton’s a flawed candidate, and it’s not a surprise that she has a sense of entitlement. But that doesn’t mean that this particular accusation is true, or true for the reasons surmised. What’s Halperinesque is the tendency to wrap everything up in a neat little package as if “Clinton thinks the rules don’t apply to her” is actual analysis, as opposed to lazy sloganeering. It’s never that simple. There are reasonable criticisms of her, and reasonable criticisms relating to this kind of attitude, but something like that is just lazy faux-analysis punditry, not actual discussion, in my view. ---
**Author:** ![TheSeaOtter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ed655f/32.png) [@TheSeaOtter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheSeaOtter)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/69 "2016-03-30T15:20:19Z")
> [@CaptMurdock](#): > > I heard Hillary turned that Gingrich guy into a Newt! He didn’t get better. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/70 "2016-03-30T16:32:07Z")
I’ve never cared about the email thing and I’m not about to start now. If you looked back at some of the security issues we’ve had in the recent past, and at what people care about, its never been an instance in which sensitive info was leaked that caused the problem. The negative public opinion, as it relates to people like Snowden, the NSA spying on American citizens and hoarding information, unreported software vulnerabilities, Valerie Plame, Iraq WMD lies, the recent San Bernadino phone cracking demand of Apple, etc. has been about the government trying to get too much information or deliberately lying about leaks to promote an agenda. Its never been “Oh look, the government didn’t keep this a secret enough, bad government!”. In fact, people are more pissed when government does not leak or hold on to information because everyone has the unrealistic expectation that the government should be completely transparent and share everything. What Clinton did is a bit of laziness on her part to not use a secure server, maybe for accessibility, maybe for ease, but we now know its not to hide information. Can you honestly say that the information we’ve received from her servers are things you wanted her to keep secret, or that we shouldn’t know about? Of course not, everybody wants to know what’s there! So I really don’t care about this fake scandal at all, it will not be a factor in my vote for her ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/71 "2016-03-30T17:08:24Z")
The anti-Clinton arguments in this thread boil down to: _she MIGHT have revealed details of treaty negotiations in her emails; she MIGHT have posted gossip about world leaders in her emails; she MIGHT have sent bits of information that could be assembled into something that would hurt the USA._ In other words: the entire argument that Clinton is a Bad, Bad person rests on what she MIGHT have done. What if she did none of those things? What if her emails consist of requests for a particular type of sandwich for lunch, or queries about changing the time of a meeting, or reminders to aides to bring along a gift recently purchased for a diplomat, or questions about how a new recharger works? If your entire argument against a candidate is founded on what she _might_ have done, then you haven’t accomplished your undercutting goals very effectively. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/72 "2016-03-30T17:15:39Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ace](#): > > Sounds like something that one of the most idiotic ‘journalists’ of all time, Geraldo Rivera, did…but I don’t think it was a beach. SOMEONE told Geraldo, or the whole press corps, that these soldiers were landing on a particular beach at a particular time in a potentially hostile environment, and there were probably more reporters than soldiers at the site. And they were lighting up the soldiers with spotlights for their cameras. And it was a beach, because they came in by boat to an empty stretch of one, IIRC. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/6bbea6/32.png) [@Johnny\_Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Ace)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/73 "2016-03-30T17:21:48Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > One of the most fascinating things about the Presidency is that we do in fact hold the President to lower standards pretty much across the board. Lesser of two evils. Not quite the same thing. ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/74 "2016-03-30T17:22:01Z")
I don’t understand the whole issue of whether the information Clinton sent was classified at the time. That would be the crux of the issue if she was forwarding some sort of report that had already had someone rule on its classification status. But the nature of the job of SoS is that you exchange a lot of information on an informal basis that no one is going to rule on in advance. It’s not as if every time the SoS sends an email to some other government person she will clear it with security first to ascertain the proper level of secrecy. If she sends an email with some confidential information in the text it will never be classified as secret at the time she sends it. It’s only after someone wants to know whether it can be released to the public that a determination will be made as to what status of secrecy it has. In that context, pointing out that she never sent any emails that were classified as secret at the time she sent them seems like a pointless legalism. So I don’t understand why people keep bringing this up. Am I missing something here? ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/75 "2016-03-30T17:38:22Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > SOMEONE told Geraldo, or the whole press corps, that these soldiers were landing on a particular beach at a particular time in a potentially hostile environment, and there were probably more reporters than soldiers at the site. And they were lighting up the soldiers with spotlights for their cameras. And it was a beach, because they came in by boat to an empty stretch of one, IIRC. [This is the incident I’m referring to](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/12/09/hitting-the-beach-in-glare-of-the-night/079bf1ee-d0ea-48da-8b8a-82e85300e127/), a SEAL team landing at a beach in Mogadishu, Somalia. Less than a year later, the rather large firefight that inspired the book and movie _Back Hawk Down_, took place in the same area. According to the article, it seems the whole Pentagon was rather press-happy at the time, and quite freely dispensed information about upcoming military movements. So if I was gonna pick a military guy to can over this, it would be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – who at the time of the landing was Colin Powell. Too bad, I rather liked him. Bush 1 was President at the time, though he’d already lost the election by the time of the landing. ---
**Author:** ![steronz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steronz/32/11765_2.png) [@steronz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steronz)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/76 "2016-03-30T17:50:34Z")
> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#): > > I don’t understand the whole issue of whether the information Clinton sent was classified at the time. > > That would be the crux of the issue if she was forwarding some sort of report that had already had someone rule on its classification status. But the nature of the job of SoS is that you exchange a lot of information on an informal basis that no one is going to rule on in advance. It’s not as if every time the SoS sends an email to some other government person she will clear it with security first to ascertain the proper level of secrecy. If she sends an email with some confidential information in the text it will never be classified as secret at the time she sends it. It’s only after someone wants to know whether it can be released to the public that a determination will be made as to what status of secrecy it has. > > In that context, pointing out that she never sent any emails that were classified as secret at the time she sent them seems like a pointless legalism. So I don’t understand why people keep bringing this up. > > Am I missing something here? Yeah, I’m not sure how much of a primer you want on classified messages. We don’t know the nature of the classified information that was supposedly found. But if we assume a typical very-bad-case scenario, imagine that you have a clearance and sit in on a intelligence briefing. A slide pops up on the screen with a classification label, SECRET/NOFORN, and one of the bullets (marked with an S, for Secret) is “steronz wears panties.” You leave the briefing, sit down at your computer, and send an email to your buddy that says “steronz wears panties.” This is OK if A) you’re sending it on a classified network that can handle information up to Secret, B) your email is properly labelled so that all recipients know the information is secret, C) your buddy has a proper clearance, and D) he has a need to know. All of those conditions must be met. The scenario you described where you can send that information to anyone internally and a classification only needs to be determined at the time of a FOIA request is just bad on many, many levels. Again, full caveat, that’s probably not the sort of thing that happened in this case. But that should help explain the issue. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/6bbea6/32.png) [@Johnny\_Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Ace)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/77 "2016-03-30T17:51:56Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > SOMEONE told Geraldo, or the whole press corps, that these soldiers were landing on a particular beach at a particular time in a potentially hostile environment, and there were probably more reporters than soldiers at the site. And they were lighting up the soldiers with spotlights for their cameras. And it was a beach, because they came in by boat to an empty stretch of one, IIRC. Geraldo chose to try to advance his career by endangering the lives of a division of soldiers. That, or he was just completely clueless. Neither is flattering. He was embedded with the 101st Airborne and drawing a map of his location in Iraq on camera, _during combat operations_. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/78 "2016-03-30T17:53:37Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ace](#): > > Geraldo chose to try to advance his career by endangering the lives of a division of soldiers. That, or he was just completely clueless. Neither is flattering. > > He was embedded with the 101st Airborne and drawing a map of his location in Iraq on camera, _during combat operations_. See a couple of posts up. This isn’t what I was referring to. ---
**Author:** ![steronz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steronz/32/11765_2.png) [@steronz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steronz)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/79 "2016-03-30T18:01:11Z")
Just to close the loop a bit in case you haven’t participated in any of the other threads, there’s also a typical very-good-case for Clinton scenario. Imagine I’m a defense attache to Libya, and my choice of underwear is somehow important. A state department aide is having lunch with a Libyan foreign aide of some sort, and the Libyan fellow happens to mention a rumor going around that the US defense attache wears panties. You pull our your blackberry while waiting for the bus and send an email to your boss, saying “Libyans are worried about steronz wearing panties, we may need to do something about this.” That email gets forwarded to HRC. Years later, the DIA is reviewing a massive dump of emails from Clinton’s private server and discovers, much to their dismay, that the panties bullet from one of their own classified briefings is just hanging out in one of these emails. Even though the path it took to get there wasn’t through classified channels, even though it was probably printed in some Libyan tabloid and much discussed in all foreign affairs departments, even though it’s completely asinine to consider this information SECRET/NOFORN, it still technically is, which means technically there’s classified information on this unclassified server. Again, 3rd time, full caveat, we have no idea what classified information was actually on this server, but that’s probably closer to what it actually was. In any case, I don’t know that any of that is relevant to this thread. The bigger concern, really, isn’t classified information, but stuff that’s considered SBU – sensitive but unclassified. That’s the sort of thing that really is appropriate to send internally around an office, but is still not great if it escapes out into the wild. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2016, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514/80 "2016-03-30T18:10:17Z")
> [@Sherrerd](#): > > The anti-Clinton arguments in this thread boil down to: _she MIGHT have revealed details of treaty negotiations in her emails; she MIGHT have posted gossip about world leaders in her emails; she MIGHT have sent bits of information that could be assembled into something that would hurt the USA._ > > In other words: the entire argument that Clinton is a Bad, Bad person rests on what she MIGHT have done. > > What if she did none of those things? What if her emails consist of requests for a particular type of sandwich for lunch, or queries about changing the time of a meeting, or reminders to aides to bring along a gift recently purchased for a diplomat, or questions about how a new recharger works? > > If your entire argument against a candidate is founded on what she _might_ have done, then you haven’t accomplished your undercutting goals very effectively. What a spectacularly ignorant post. Have you not read a single news story? Requests for sandwiches would not be classified. We already _know_ that [over 2,000](http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article63218372.html) of the emails in question contain classified information, and that’s after she deleted many thousands more. The only question at hand is whether or not her mishandling of classifed information rises to the level of criminal offense. Geez, read a newspaper. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-have-changed-my-mind-about-the-clinton-email-scandal-and-so-should-you/750514.md?page=5)