At least it wasn’t government business. Way to move the goalposts.
Those are government business because they dealt with an official issue: her need to get a State Dept email address.
But that brings up the other problem: she doesn’t get to decide what’s personal and what’s government.
But Republican Congressmen do? How do we know what they use their private email accounts for? Shouldn’t we demand to see their email too, just in case?
The problem with our current partisan media environment is that Democrats don’t bother to learn the details of democratic scandals and vice versa. Many of the Dem posters in this thread don’t know the actual factual details of the email controversy. It reminds me about how Republicans didn’t know what all the talk of yellow cake was about.
Does the Federal Records Act cover Congress?
From the wikipedia article, it seems to only apply to federal agencies, which would not include the President and VP, who I believe do have the right of executive privilege.
Oh, we knew, we were just inclined to view the controversy giving Bush the benefit of the doubt. “Britain has learned” pretty much gave Bush total deniability if it was wrong, but that got blown out of the water by the Wilson/Plame issue, which simply could not be justified at all. But the thing is, when you support someone a lot, you’ll latch onto anything you can and for a lot of us it was Joe Wilson, whose investigation basically consisted of asking around. It almost seemed like Plame had sent him there because the couple wanted a certain result. For a long time those of us who supported Bush thought that the State Dept and CIA bureaucracy were intentionally trying to kneecap the President.
But at some point the scandals just become too numerous and actions become too indefensible. The administration revealing the name of a covert agent in retaliation for Joe Wilson going to the media can’t be excused under any conditions.
Clinton’s sins are much smaller in scale, but still pretty inexcusable. It doesn’t matter how much Republicans have been out to get her, her obsession with secrecy borders on criminal.
What don’t we know that matters?
And what *do *we know that you would prefer we didn’t?
Why don’t you summarize what you know, and be honest, have you explored this controversy or just dismissed it, only absorbing the occasional headline?
Or you could answer the question. *If *you could.
I’ve been. She set up the server to evade the Freedom of Information Act, she violated the Federal Records Act by destroying work related emails, and she decided at her discretion what was work related and what wasn’t, which you can be sure an underling wouldn’t have gotten away with. Further, she lied pretty much every step of the way and then spun the rather damning IG report as an exoneration. Because she thinks you’re stupid.
Fact count in that post: Zero.
Amusing as usual, though.
Do we know this to be true? I’ve endeavored to be honest about her activities, but this sounds like speculation. Is there anything to show why she set up the server?
Did she (I truly don’t know)? From your own Wikipedia link about the act, it sounds like electronic records were added in 2014. She stopped being Secretary of State in 2013
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
In December 2014, the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 was signed into law by President Barack Obama.[2][3] This bipartisan act, which followed the 2011 President’s Memorandum on Managing Government Records, modernizes the Federal Records Act.[2][3] The act expressly expands the definition of federal records to include electronic records (the first change to the definition of “Federal record” since the enactment of the act in 1950).
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Adaher]
and she decided at her discretion what was work related and what wasn’t, which you can be sure an underling wouldn’t have gotten away with.
[/QUOTE]
Can you show me where this is not allowed? As Secretary of State, I know that she has wide discretion on what classification to apply to information. But does she have discretion to delete personal emails (i.e. if she emailed her daughter about her grandchild’s birthday, is she able to delete it, or does that email need to go through some sort of review process before it is deemed not work-related?)
I do agree that she has been cagey. However, I sympathize with her frustration, given that her predecessor was the first Secretary of State to request an internet connection in his office once he realized that he could not email people outside of the department on the government intra-net. She didn’t initiate the private email use (nor is it necessarily unprecedented to have a private server; Jeb Bush used one while Governor of Florida).
And given that it recently came out that the government was still using old style floppy disks for nuclear weapons, I do honestly wonder how modern and sophisticated the government’s own system was.
I know that you are editorializing, but I don’t see why this is the only explanation.
Because there is no way one can read any media summary of the IG report and conclude that the most important point is that what she did was just like what everyone else did.
Why just read media summaries? The report is online.
Skimming it again, I do note that it does answer some questions. For one, the server had existed from her time in the Senate.
And while President Obama did sign a law in 2014 expressly clarifying that email records are included, they were reasonably included previously. So I was wrong on that point (see Dopers? You can say you were wrong and your posting privileges won’t be revoked or anything!)
But those same regulations seem to acknowledge that private email use is allowed (as long as the records are preserved)
Further, the report notes that in 2009, the Code of Federal Regulations was changed to say that “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record system.”
And the report later confirms that the use of private email was permissible.
So is the scandal that she used private email, or is the scandal that she didn’t initially print and catalogue the private emails with the government?
If the scandal is the failure to print and file the records with the government, then we should certainly throw the book at her. What sort of punishment is she facing?
I’m guessing that an indictment is not forthcoming, especially since this is endemic across government.
But, it’s Hillary. Just because other people do it, too, doesn’t make it right! She didn’t properly print and catalogue her emails, and that is scandalous! The report says so!
As for the actual conclusion of the report
Now, it should be noted that Clinton is criticized for not having her private email system “vetted” by the government. But I’ll let somebody else take a stab at quoting those critiques. From where I sit, this is not such a severe breach of protocol that it warrants disqualification to be President.
As seen, I still expect that while a lot of Republicans will still swallow the idea from congress Republicans that Hillary will be indicted or arrested when the most likely outcome comes, that there will not be any serious charges, I do think that there will a good number of Republicans that will once again realize that they were duped by the Republican “leadership”.
What about the Libertarians?
Well, at least they are getting one thing right! 
There have been plenty of convictions for violations of secrecy laws where no criminal intent existed.
Moriarty, taking a step back from going after Clinton, she’s had two main defenses which are perfectly valid, IF she does something about those two problems as President:
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Everyone does it. That has to stop. Government transparency demands records be retained, plus it’s just sensible even if the public doesn’t get to see it.
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Overclassification. Nothing chaps my ass more than hearing Presidents complain about things they have the power to change. If State overclassifies things, issue new guidelines! You can do that, you’re the President! Another example is when the President said in his SOTU that the government had all kinds of contradictory and duplicative rules for tangerines or some such. Wow, if only there was someone in charge of the executive branch who could put a stop to duplicative or contradictory rulemaking. Fix this shit! This is why few respect government’s competence.
As even the FBI told us that Hillary Clinton is not the target of the security review, I have to agree with Weld.
You can bet that line is already cued up in the Clinton’s team response to Trump’s “major” speech next week about Bill and Hillary.
Unless you’re a ham sandwich. There can certainly be charges and indictments that can’t hold up under the law, if the prosecutor is on a political vendetta.
But that isn’t the case here either.