The Daily Beast is saying the regulations weren’t in place until after she left State.
If the article is accurate, then maybe what she did wasn’t so stupid, if she doesn’t plan to run for President. If she does, which seems to have a probability of about 99.99%, then it was still stupid.
If the article is accurate, I find it hard to call not complying with a rule that doesn’t exist as stupid.
If that’s true, it mitigates the situation somewhat, but not completely.
It would certainly leave her in the clear from a legal perspective, but in my view, her actions would still constitute a political and transparency impropriety. Maybe nothing that would involve any official sanction, but certainly something that would give me pause in evaluating her as a candidate. I believe that our officials should prioritize transparency in their dealings.
I think a lot of the blame here must be placed on the (lack of) regulations. I am, quite frankly, astounded that it (apparently, if The Daily Beast is right) took until after 2010 for the government to implement rules that senior officials’ official business must be conducted using their official government email address. That should have been put in place back before Bill Clinton ever left the White House.
Also, The Daily Beast says that Clinton handed over her emails, but it doesn’t dispute the NYT’s assertion that her own staffers decided which emails to hand over. This shouldn’t be something left to the “judgment” of people who might have an interest in preventing some information from becoming public.
Wow. Maybe it was the wrong link, or maybe I’m completely missing your point, but I don’t see her saying anything even half stupid, let alone something justifying your vitriol. Seems to me she just misunderstood what Stewart was saying, and defended the Dems. Nothing stupid, let alone execrable, about that.
I’m a big Stewart fan, and I pretty much ignore Pelosi, but I was on her side for that debate. Stewart acted as naive as I’ve ever seen him, wondering why the Dems couldn’t pass perfect bills instead of just bills that improve things.
To me, a huge difference between the Dems and Reps is that the Dems actually try to govern, while the Reps pass all these stupid bills (like the 40-whatever bills to rescind Obamacare) just for show. Of course the Dems could have passed a perfect bill when they had the majority in the House, but they knew it would face a filibuster in the Senate if they didn’t write it with the cooperation of a bunch of obstructionist Reps, and so that’s what they had to do.
I don’t find it hard at all. If she knew she was going to run for President, then she should have known that the date the right wing spin machine will use is the date the regulations were first approved, not when they were finally published. Fox News viewers are not big on nuance, and if she is forced to defend herself by beginning every sentence with “Technically…,” I can already hear Hannity and Limbaugh invoking Bubba saying “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Besides, what reason did she have NOT to use an official account? Jeez, I use different email accounts for different purposes, and I have slightly less motivation to keep things separate than a sitting cabinet secretary.
Condi even said on FOX today that it was standard practice to use private email addresses.
Yeah, but
Hillary '16: Continuing Standard Practices, Complying With Existing Laws!
would never fit on a lapel pin.
Colin Powell did the same thing so all of the over-the-top vitriol should apply to him as well.
If that’s true, and i’m happy to accept that it was, then it was shitty practice on the part of government as a whole.
Of course, if there’s one area where Democratic and Republican politicians can often get together, it’s on the notion that transparency is for suckers, and that the public should be happy with whatever scraps our leaders choose to feed us through carefully managed press conferences, official websites, and the tame Sunday news programs.
Condi and Powell used private e-mail, but now Hillary is being hammered? :rolleyes:
One is reminded of Umbrella-gate where Obama was chastised for making a Marine hold an umbrella over him in the rain, thus disgracing the Marine. When photos of Bush-41 and Bush-43 under Marine-held umbrellas appeared, the [check forum] Americans-who-make-us-want-to-puke never explained why that wasn’t disgraceful.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Can I hijack a Pit thread to ask a sincere question? Some savvy Internet users use something like PGP to protect their e-mail from eavesdroppers. Do high officials use something similar?
Hillary used her own private server which was (and is) apparently pretty well hardened, but I haven’t seen anything about encryption.
I agree. Hillary should get a pass but we should now have proper procedures in place and someone to make sure they are being followed. Just like private sector.
In all companies I have worked for, you would only use your personal e-mail account to let the helpdesk know that you can’t get to your business e-mail account.
I haven’t seen anything describing the security controls she had in place. Can you point to a source?
OK, but even if we accept, for the purposes of this discussion, that the server itself was secure, its very presence cuts both ways, and further suggests that personal privacy and lack of transparency were a factor here.
As this AP/WaPo story notes:
There are numerous stories about people and organizations who have filed FOIA requests with the State Department over the past four or five years regarding Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, only to be told that no records can be found in relation to their inquiries. And this is because the emails that were supposed to be archived were still on Clinton’s server and had not been turned over. The State Department wasn’t hiding them; it couldn’t turn them over, because it didn’t know they existed.
It’s true that previous administration figures like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice used personal email for at least some of their communications, but from what i can tell this case is substantively different, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s not much of a concern with Rice because she apparently rarely used email AT ALL during her term, whereas Clinton uses email as a central component of her work. Also, if i understand the articles i’ve been reading correctly, Colin Powell was using an official email address for some of his emails, and he was also turning over emails from non-official account/s on a regular and ongoing basis, as they were created.
Clinton, by contrast, kept all of her emails for an extended period of time, such that emails that should have been handed over, and should have emerged in response to FOIA requests, were only handed over in one big dump when she was pressed by the folks at NARA. Also, those emails were vetted by her own staff who, because they were doing this well after the fact, and not as an ongoing and regular process, had opportunities to make post facto decisions about which emails to turn over, and therefore more opportunity to hide emails that might have seemed uncontroversial when created, but that might now prove politically damaging.
Look, i don’t think this is the end of the world. If Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination for President, it wouldn’t stop me supporting her, especially given the field of likely Republican opponents. But it does add just another brick to the ever-growing edifice of Clinton family hubris and self-serving political decisions.
I’ll work this back to the issue at hand so it’s a “hijack” that ultimately pertains…
I can speak from uniformed service in DOD. I also once had an additional duty related to Information Assurance that required a long online class (took me longer than the single digit hours that actually got put in to related duties and was basically unnecessary for what I actually did at my most basic level). ISTR some of the key documents for the standards were DOD level so that would have applied to DOD Civilians as well as uniformed. Obviously DOD is not DOS. Systems that handled classified information were classified themselves and treated basically like a plain text paper print out of the information. Those systems passed all their information encrypted and wouldn’t talk directly to unclassified systems. There were separate email accounts for classified vs unclassified systems and never the systems would meet. You couldn’t simply send data by email between the different systems. Spillage between systems could be a BAAAAAD thing. More than cats sleeping with dogs level of mayhem but maybe less than Fox News finding actual proof that Nancy Pelosi was a Sith Lord chaos…maybe less.
Encryption later found it’s was to the unclass network to handle personally identifiable information(PII) like SSNs, medical information, etc. It could and did cause issues in some ways. My government BlackBerry couldn’t handle the military required level of access control to handle that information. That was a good thing… except when people encrypted stuff that didn’t need encrypting or included PII that wasn’t central to the issue. My issued BB got a lot less useful after encryption started being used and misused. Hillary loved her BB.
Unclass email obviously could and did talk to what most think of as normal internet email. We also had regulations that prevented us from bulk forwarding an official account to a private account. No just fowarding email to your own smart phone; you rated a BB to access your official account or you accessed it on a computer.
Which sort of makes me question how Hillary managed all her stuff from one account especially given her love of her BB. I have to ask myself if Hillary was sending classified or otherwise sensitive information via her personal account and whether that was properly secured. That’s different than most of the recreational outrage I’ve heard. Colin Powell references using personal email sometimes for information that wasn’t sensitive. Colin Powell should have had experience to manage data based on sensitivity and using the appropraite system. That’s a big difference from routing all business through one personal account.
The dumb part about this rather trifling scandal is that the Clintons didn’t let any of their allies know there was a problem. So you’ve got all kinds of defenses of her, most of them based on ignorance. Ben Cardin’s is particularly good for this thread:
The candidate herself is still not saying anything.
What candidate?
What problem? It was neither required for her to do so, not was it generally done, at least by the small sample set we have.
Yeeah, but it was a Clinton, so different rules apply!