Let’s leave the personal comments out of it, please.
Ok. But the idea that I attack Johnny Ace’s credibility whenever we disagree is not based on actual happenings.
Except that’s not the issue at all. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. The issue is, “Old Lady with power deliberately set up her email server outside of the secured government network because she didn’t want the government or the public to know what and to who she was emailing and then when the government asked for the emails she deleted 30,000 of them declaring, 'Oh, you don’t need to see those. The head of the State Dept. said it was ok to delete those and by the way I’m the head of the State Dept. so all is ok.”
If a republican had done this all the liberals would be frothing at the mouth.
Republicans did do “all this”- and far worse- and, as I recall, nobody from the Bush admin was indicted. You might remember frothing, but I sure don’t remember anything like this.
Well, shit, you know how it can be! Every morning, you mean to brush and froth, but you are still shaky from nightmares about Il Douche winning the Presidency… So, you skip it, you know you shouldn’t. Then you read some meatball telling you that Hillary is to blame for Islamic terrorism, Coors “beer”, and the rise of Oroes over Hydrox…and you can’t help it, you froth like a motherfuck.
The defense that the Bush Secretaries of State “did it too” earned 3 Pinocchios on the WaPo fact-checker.
She already said it was a mistake, and most likely it was. Absent some evidence of dire consequence, it fails the Big Hairy Ass Deal test. Trying to pump it up to reach that thrashold is like trying to inflate a Japanese condom into a Zeppelin.
I’ll try to explain my position one last time, and then let the thread die.
A reasonable person of good judgment who holds a highly sensitive and important position does not ignore explicit, important, incontrovertible security advice provided specifically to that person. If someone does that, your estimation of their good judgment should decrease.
Most of the reasoned disagreement with that thesis in this thread is not disputing the general premise, but instead whether it applies to these facts. Specifically, many people are arguing that the advice in this case was not actually important–that it was the State Department equivalent of Bob the corporate IT guy or the Best Buy Geek Squad telling you not to write your password on a post-it note. That argument strikes me as uninformed and naive. It rests on one or both of two false premises:
It doesn’t matter because she wasn’t hacked. There isn’t any reason to believe there would be evidence of a hack because of how this server was set up and monitored. Given the number of foreign governments with the capability of doing this, and the likelihood of having targeted the US Secretary of State, the odds are pretty high that it was compromised. But, in the end, none of that actually matters because whether she was hacked or not doesn’t affect the quality of her judgment. If she wasn’t hacked, it wasn’t because she correctly judged that this setup was secure. No expert believes it was secure. It was because she was lucky. That doesn’t retroactively bless her judgment.
It doesn’t matter because none of the data was sensitive. First, this ignores the related issue of the monitoring of her Blackberry. There is no serious dispute over whether sensitive conversations were held within earshot of her hackable Blackberry. But even confining ourselves to her email, there are lots of examples of sensitive email have been offered. Among them is that she sent and received emails about imminent drone strikes in Pakistan. Moreover, whether or not classified information was sent and received, however, simply having access to a Secretary of State’s email about work matters is a significant security breach.
Does that mean everyone should vote for Trump? Of course not. He demonstrates worse judgment on a daily basis. But while this might not matter in the general election, it probably will matter over the next eight years of a Clinton presidency for this simple reason: As citizens, we will doubtless be asked to take positions on policy that depend, at least in part, on how much you trust her judgment. Because of this server/blackberry business, I think she may be inclined to ignore expert advice that is inconvenient or that she doesn’t understand. That informs my willingness to defer to her good judgment. I cut Obama a lot of slack because I believe he is a careful thinker with good principles and more information than I have. Because of this server stuff, I don’t think I will cut Hillary the same slack. And I don’t think you should either.
More than that, I think it’s important to recognize that this was a real problem and not some right-wing invention. Whether you fault Hillary or not, we should obviously spend some time and resources in making our diplomatic communications more secure. If that results from this, that is an unequivocal good thing.
You’ve done it before. I really don’t care about it enough to go combing through a pile of previous posts, but I remember it. Whatever. Refrain from doing it in future.
Kind of a bizarre conclusion.
-
Clinton uses private email, turns over a significant percentage of them, and is universally chided for making a very poor decision to use private email in the first place.
-
Powell uses private email, is not able to turn over a single one of this emails, and nobody cares.
And the conclusion for the fact-checker is that Clinton is not being honest about being the only former Secretary of State to turn over personal emails, on the basis that Clinton had to be asked to turn over the emails.
I can’t follow that logic at all.
I’d take that bet except, as far as I can tell, it would be impossible to judge. Her statements about the situation have changed continually. For example, this is from the N.Y. Times:
March 10, 2015: Sez Clinton
“When I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” Mrs. Clinton said in March. “Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone.” Mrs. Clinton said that since a vast majority of her work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, they would be archived by the government."
This is false. She never asked. At least that is what the Inspector General concluded.
[QUOTE]
The report also notes that she had an “obligation to discuss using her personal email account” but did not get permission from the people who would have needed to approve the technology, who said they would not have done so, if they had been asked. Link. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/hillary-clinton-email-inspector-general-report-223553
Therefore she lied.
Sez Clinton:
That is a lie. Link.
That turned into:
Which is also a lie. Link. That is clearly marked classified.
The problem with a bet is that Clinton, in normal Clintonian fashion, continually changes what she has said about the issue and lies about things in subtle ways (Remember the whole “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” where, if you define sexual relations to exclude blow jobs, it isn’t really a lie?). The change from ‘no classified information’ to ‘no information marked classified’ is perfect example of this. Turns out both are lies, but it works for Clinton as people are running around arguing whether or not it is a lie instead of focusing on the utter stupidity she displayed in setting up her email.
Of course, none of this matters because we suck. We elect these idiots. We support them when they lie, we cover for them (unless, of course, they are caught with a dead girl or a live boy).
And therefore we end up with Clinton Vs. Trump, which says much more about the voters than anything else.
Slee
Well I don’t remember it but I reserve the right to do so in the future when appropriate.
Wait, what?
Are you referring to the box that’s on the right-hand side of the email? That says CONFIDENTIAL? And has the date that it was applied, 01/29/2016?
And then are you looking at the date on the email itself, April 9, 2012?
Now, since you wear a security hat at work, you MUST realize that the classified marking was applied FOUR YEARS after the email was sent, right? Is this the kind of crack crime-solving investigatory techniques that are brought to bear at your place of work?
What was marked classified? That link shows an email about the timing of a phone-call. Was there a classified attachment? Emails about phone call timing aren’t classified, even if someone stamps “classified” on them… in day to day work with classified material, which I have done for more than a decade, it’s incredibly common for even low-level staff to use common sense and not treat something as mundane as “the call is confirmed for 730 am” as classified, even if for some reason the page is marked as such.
If a blank sheet of paper says “TOP SECRET”, that doesn’t mean it’s actually Top Secret.
Apart from the other criticism, if this is the smoking gun, it’s nothing.
EDIT: Also, what Ravenman said.
Appropriate my ass. You were piling on with crypto (who was demonstrably wrong in his thought process) with no proof whatsoever. Nor did you contradict the point I originally made.
Wrong. For it to have been a lie, the phrase “which was allowed by the State Department” would have to be equivalent to “I asked for permission” (and was granted it).
But these phrases are not equivalent. There is no lie.
If the distinction between the phrases is unclear to anyone whose brain is fogged by their reaction to Clinton, examples might help:
I used blue ink for making corrections on my own docs as it’s easier for me to see than red, which was allowed by my department. (I didn’t ask permission to use the blue ink; I just used it, and no one had a problem with it.)
I declined to wear the “MagicBand” electronic ticket on my wrist during my recent visit to Epcot, which is allowed by the park employees. (I didn’t ask permission–I just put the damned thing in my pocket.)
*I parked on that grass lot on the south side of campus, which was allowed by the University, and found that it’s a lot closer to my classes. * (I did not ask for permission to park there.)
In many aspects of daily life we do things which are allowed, without asking permission to do them. Doing things which are allowed (by whatever appropriate authority) is not synonymous with asking for permission.
The entire argument that Clinton was Being Bad by not getting permission is weak, given that her use of private email/private server was not a secret. The State Department was well aware that she was using the email/server and had every opportunity to stop her. They did not do so.
Similarly with your other claims of LIE: they rely on false equivalencies between differing gradations of “classified information” (information that was not classified at the time it was posted but later was so categorized). Weak, again.
It’s unimportant because it is not important enough to change anyone’s decisions about her in the future, in terms of voting or just about anything else.
Not really. Other Secretaries of State were indicted in the State Department report (not that you would know from the breathless Right Wing media coverage) and in fact we knew they used personal email before the report. The FBI even contacted Powell. And Clinton turned over her emails; Powell has not.
Yet somehow I am not furious about his and Rice’s actions. Go figure.
It’s wierd how so many of those articles have “Rice got classified emails” in the title and “Rice never used email” in the body. And the fact that Clinton had an apparently fairly unsecure server set up in her basement really does make it a little different.
But again, she’s running against Trump so she could take a shit on the tomb of the unknown soldier and still be a better choice for President.
Say, is this a scandal yet?