As I said in my original post, neither she nor any Government employee would have assumed this strategy would work. I am certain she would have been thrilled if it had
been able to avoid FOIA requests, but it stood no chance of doing that as she certainly would have known at the time. Her recorded communications related to work are part of FOIA, the details of where they are recorded are irrelevant.
As for a delay in starting the FOIA searches, yes that is a result of her maintaining her own email server. But it didn’t stop the FOIA searches because it can’t. FOIA is unpopular with the Government. No one likes their daily activities parsed and reviewed years later for possible mistakes. That the State Dept tried to do a poor job of responding to the FOIA requests by saying they searched and didn’t find any relevant emails is the fault of the State Dept staff. When that didn’t work, they went back and performed the searches they were supposed to. Where the emails were stored was never the issue as far as the FOIA searches were concerned.
I am not saying she did any of this to be a good public servant. She did this to reduce the attacks she knew were coming. She was going to be criticized no matter what she did and this was her attempt to minimize the trouble. Her strategy didn’t work very well, but it isn’t a dumb strategy.
And to repeat, the classification issues have nothing to do with where the emails were stored. All these classification issues would have come up exactly as they have regardless of where the server was located.
Are you really attempting to maintain that if all of these emails were on a government server at State that the same issues would be in play? That’s absurd. She could state that she followed all the guidelines and rules, and that the emails are protected in a government facility under government control.
As a Government official with a requirement to use electronic communications for classified Government work Clinton has a need for access to classified email on classified Government networks. No one has said whether Clinton had a classified email account or how many classified emails Clinton sent or received on said network. Could have been zero, likely it was lots. Those aren’t at issue here. But she certainly was aware that no classified information could be sent on an unclassified network. Seriously, it is a pretty simple rule to learn and comprehend. If it is marked classified, don’t put it on an unclassified network. Period. She has clearly and repeatedly said that she didn’t do that.
The classification issue she is facing is whether she wrote down information that she knew or should have known to be classified in emails sent on a unclassified network. According to Government reviews of her unclassified emails, she did that, or at least someone did that. It happens. A lot. Fortunately, the vast majority of such cases aren’t in the full glare of a national political campaign. Will anyone get in trouble for this? Likely not. But it is possible.
I agree that the real issue here is one of Clinton’s judgement. She made a bad decision. But it isn’t as easy as some people seem to think. Her private email server isn’t necessarily a bad idea, at least at the time. There are pros and cons to the decision. In her position I am not sure what I would have done.
It seems to me that many of these emails were to non-.gov email address by the simple fact that this was the only email account she used – obviously it was being used for both official and personal purposes. But it is imminently clear that there were a lot of emails going from this account to .gov addresses.
What I was attempting to say is that if she were attempting to fully subvert FOIA (notwithstanding the silliness of trying to do so in such an incompetent way, and how the chances of success were basically zero), this was a really poor plan to do so.
If I were advising someone sitting in the 7th floor of the State Department, and I wanted to communicate by email in ways to avoid disclosure under the law, I’d probably recommend something like this:
Establish your own email account for purely personal purposes.
Establish a second email account for purely official purposes.
Ask other officials to establish their own non-official email accounts for me to contact them.
Don’t send emails from your “non-official official” email address to .gov accounts, ever.
Don’t use your second email account for personal purposes, ever.
Purge the second email account regularly.
I’m no IT guy, but this strategy seems to me to be the brain-dead minimum version of communications security. And Clinton apparently did less than the minimum that anyone could expect of someone trying to protect their emails from disclosure.
Given what I know about this whole situation, the most plausible explaination for Clinton’s email habits is clearly more in the “she just doesn’t know how to deal with technology so we’re going to make this as simple as humanly possible, even thought it is not a good idea” as opposed to “Clinton attempted a diabolical plan to avoid email disclosure in order to keep her murder of Vince Foster a secret.”
For the 50th time in this thread, YES, the same issues about classified information would still be in play. Nobody can send classified information on an email system connected to the Internet, even if the servers are owned by the government. Period. If it is connected to the Internet, no classified information goes on that system. There are special systems not connected to the Internet for dealing with classified information, and those email addresses are not “yournamehere@state.gov”.
If there’s one factual matter that everyone needs to understand, it is that sending classified information on “yournamehere@state.gov” is exactly the same security violation as sending it on “yournamehere@gmail.com.”
How is creating your own server more simple than just using a government account? Further, let’s not create a strawman here. I’m not saying anything about it being some diabolical plan to hide some conspiracy theory illegal activities. We know that in politics innocent communication gets taken out of context, twisted or skewed to misrepresent. I think she just wanted to avoid the scrutiny that public disclosure can bring.
But for the purposes of these retroactively classified communications it would certainly be far more forgivable if the communication was on a secure government communication system than entirely housed on a private server.
Look, if there was anything to this story, we wouldn’t be talking about an FBI investigation. We’d be talking about reopening the office of the Special Prosecutor.
I think it is simpler than establishing a government account in that I’m under the impression that Clinton was using the private email server well prior to her being appointed Secretary of State. So rather than establish a new email address for official business, as was clearly the common sense thing to do, Clinton kept using the system she had been for some time, only now it was for both personal and official email.
Had a government account been established, she would have had to start using two email addresses. Which I know isn’t a huge burden, but you have to agree, is very slightly more complex than only using one email account for everything.
That is exactly what I am stating and it certainly isn’t absurd. It is in fact true. With regard to classified information, stating she followed all the guidelines and rules would not have meant anything. And in fact, I believe she has said that. Not that it means much.
As for emails being protected if they are “in a government facility under government control”, I don’t see that as realistic. After all there are 5.3 million government employees, retirees and contractors with letters from OMB warning us to check our credit histories that shows how much good such protection is. And there have been similar if smaller breaches many times in the past. The Government is the biggest target there is. Everyone is trying to break in. Some succeed.
You are probably not alleging that being on a government computer system is more secure than being on a private system, just that she could use that as cover. Perhaps she could. But all these classification issues would be exactly the same if she had been on an unclassified government server. She would have had no more (or less) defense if they had been on the government server than on a private server. And being on a private server doesn’t in any way reduce the FOIA exposure either.
She made a bad decision. The only reason I can think of that she might have thought a private server would be a good idea is to avoid charges of using Government resources for private use when she sent/received emails about her non-government activities. That does make sense to me. As it turns out, not enough to justify the private server, but it does avoid one potential problem
Yes and no. Spillage is treated differently than having unauthorized classified material in your home. And our security team here at DoD (I can’t speak on State)would react much differently to spillage on a DoD system on a DoD server than it would if there was TS SCI spillage that I sent from my gmail account.
After the clusterfuck that was the last set of Special Prosecutors, I believe congress repealed/chose not to renew that law. Having essentially private individuals with no accountability but with all the powers of the Government turned out to be a bad idea and congress quietly realized that. I don’t believe Special Prosecutors are possible any more.
But even now, didn’t she basically turn over just a portion of the emails from that address saying that roughly half were personal in nature? It seems to me that the difference between personal and government business would leave a lot of gray area when you consider her Clinton Foundation activities that included communicating with foreign states and was employing some of the exact same people as her state department with Huma Abedin and others. Hillary was the gatekeeper for all of this communication. That seems like an incredibly poor system even if everything is above board. She decides what is subject to FOIA requests and no one else.
[QUOTE=Hillary Clinton]
Well, My personal emails are my personal business, right? So we went through a painstaking process and turned over 55,000 pages of anything we thought could be work related. Under the law, that decision is made by the official. I was the official. I made those decisions.
[/QUOTE]
Look, I’m already saying that this was a bad system. That’s totally clear. Pointing out that official and non-official emails were comingled doesn’t dispute anything I’ve said or think. I’ve never said that I think doing official business on a private email system is “above board,” in fact, I think it was a terrible idea on many counts.
What I have addressed in several posts responding to you is your assertion that the email system was an attempt to subvert FIOA. What I’ve said many times, and I’m saying again, is that I don’t think that the email system was intended to subvert FOIA, for the simple reasons that: the system existed prior to her appointment; there was a lot of emailing from her account to .gov addresses, which is a dumb thing to do if one is trying to keep those communications secret; all signs point to technical ineptitude rather than “those scheming Clintons trying to keep secrets” for the reasons for her using only one email account.
[QUOTE=Washington Post]
Examining the registry information for “clintonemail.com” reveals that the domain was first created on Jan. 13, 2009 – one week before President Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.
[/QUOTE]
But it’s basically what every other person does. I know I have multiple email addresses. Most people I know have a work email address and a personal email address. I’ve never used my personal email address for work business. That’s pretty basic stuff. I’m guessing most gainfully employed professionals would say the exact same thing.
So if she says it was personal (and she’s the one who makes the determination) and it was not sent to a .gov account how would it ever be subject to FOIA search?
[QUOTE=Politifact]
For example, even if Clinton had sent every email to individuals with state.gov or other federal agency addresses, that procedure would hamper State Department compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests for Clinton’s emails, said David Sobel, who directs a FOIA project at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedom advocacy group. It would not be apparent to agency personnel conducting the search that they would need to search the accounts of myriad employees to locate all of Clinton’s emails, he said.
“In fact, State likely would have argued that it would be unreasonable to conduct such a far-reaching search,” Sobel said.
In 2013, Gawker filed a FOIA request to the State Department for emails between Clinton and long-time adviser Sid Blumenthal after a hacker had revealed emails that Blumenthal sent Clinton. Although the emails were already known to the public, the State Department told Gawker that no such correspondence existed. Gawker believes this shows that Clinton was able to use her personal email to thwart the FOIA process.
[/QUOTE]
This says that the system was created for her presidential run in 2008. “For instance, the server installed in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home as she was preparing to take office as secretary of state was originally used by her first campaign for the presidency, in 2008, according to two people briefed on the setup. A staffer who was on the payroll of her political action committee set it up in her home, replacing a server that Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, had been using in the house.”
And I have family members who are totally incapable of understanding what a text message is. I have family members who use the Jitterbug flip-phone because that’s what they understand how to use. Pointing out that basically everyone else nowadays uses smart phones and whatnot doesn’t mean that my family members are up to no good for using old technology. Some people are just like that.
And yes, it is very, very common for most people to use multiple email accounts. That doesn’t mean that literally everyone is comfortable using multiple email accounts. Again, I think it is perfectly clear that Clinton ought to have established, and learned to use, if necessary, a state.gov email account. But just because that was the right thing to do, does not mean that there were not simple, non-conspiratorial reasons why she did not.
I think this may be a case of talking about two different things. It seems like this specific domain that she was using was created on 1/13/09 while the Clintons may have had the system ahead of time, originally for Bill Clinton and then later her campaign. It also seemed to have been upgraded or overhauled several times including immediately prior to her taking office.
Regardless, I think it is at the very least clear since this specific domain wasn’t even registered until right before she took office that this wasn’t her pre-existing email address that she just kept using as a matter of convenience.
I’m not sure that putting in a new hard drive and establishing a new domain name is exactly smoking gun evidence of anything.
I will say that the weakest part of the “Hillary just isn’t comfortable with learning new computer stuff” is that she apparently had several types of mobile devices, including iPads and Blackberries. Kind of hard to square that circle.