Updated, see below
According to Reuters — not generally part of the Faux News Network — Hillary Clinton’s attorney has told a Senate panel investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks that the email server she used “had been wiped clean” (emphasis mine):
Representative Trey Gowdy said Clinton had not provided a single new document and her lawyer told the committee a server she used for emails while she was the top U.S. diplomat had been wiped clean.
“We learned today, from her attorney, Secretary Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server,” Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement.
Is there some other way to interpret this? Was Ms. Clinton actually operating her own email server? Or does this mean that some provider used by her did the deed?
I understand that the GOP hatred for the Clintons is nearly as intense as its similarly disgusting hatred for Barrack Obama. But even so, the emails either were or were not deleted. Ms. Clinton did or did not have a role in deleting them.
If the emails are truly gone, and especially if Ms. Clinton personally ordered them deleted or knowingly did nothing while a third party removed them, then in my view she is unfit for public office. If this turns out to be true, then nominating Ms. Clinton would be like nominating Richard Nixon after his role in the Watergate cover-up was disclosed.
Mythology has it that when when Mr. Clinton’s activities with Ms. Lewinsky were made public, Ms. Clinton’s reaction to him was a furious “What have you done to our Presidency?”
Ms. Clinton, what have you done to your candidacy?
Updated 28-March-2015
Published reports like this CNN report clarify the statement made by Ms. Clinton’s attorney:
In his letter to Gowdy, [Clinton lawyer David Kendall] said the former secretary of state “chose not to keep her non-record personal emails.”
“Thus, there are no … e-mails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized,” he wrote.
But she “has maintained and preserved copies” of work-related, or potentially work-related emails she turned over to the State Department late last year. Kendall did not specify whether the emails were kept in paper or digital form.
So Ms. Clinton has decided, unilaterally, that she and only she will determine whether individual emails were “non-record personal emails”. Given the history of the Clinton family with the GOP, I’m not surprised that she takes this posture.
In my view, the optics are still devastating. I truly wonder whether the political firestorm this is already creating is worth the exercise. Other individuals have pursued approaches such is an “in-camera” review by a neutral judge. This strategy rejuvenates the dying “Benghazi-Gate” foolishness that was, up to now, dying a well-deserved death.
Surely Ms. Clinton and her advisers understand this. It is hard for me to avoid wondering whether there are emails that she and her advisers fear would be at least misunderstood — all the more reason to find something less drastic than destroying the evidence that a third party requires.
Does “wiped clean” ever happen without someone deliberately causing it? If it was done because of some problem, such as a malware infection, you’d think they would say that. When they say “was wiped clean,” it has that passive nobody-is-to-blame look, like “mistakes were made.”
This looks bad.
It is also my understanding that the emails were largely exchanged with accounts belonging to .gov domains, so they would still be saved on the other end even if not on her end. Of course, I’ve never been as up in arms about keeping every bit of dialogue as you have anyway.
Wiping a server clean — destroying EVERY email, no matter who it was sent to or received from, is very different from failing to keep “every bit of dialogue”.
If even one or two emails were exchanged with even just one player connected to the attack in some way, and that player wanted to preserve “plausible deniability”, then that player would almost certainly NOT use a .gov account. The player would more likely use a private email account set up for just that one exchange and immediately deleted. It wouldn’t surprise me if Ms. Clinton had one or two exchanges with her husband about the tense situation immediately prior to or after the attack. Those exchanges would almost certainly NOT use a .gov account.
We are not talking about “every bit of dialogue”. The accusation, true or false, is akin to police investigating a crime scene. If a woman had been murdered in her bathroom, it would look VERY bad if the husband washed down every surface of the bathroom with bleach upon hearing the sirens of the arriving police.
Suppose Joe (a contractor with his own small business, grossing about $75K per year) has been accused of tax fraud, in the form of claiming deductions for expenses that Joe did not incur. The IRS is interested because Joe claimed a deduction of $25K, and says he should pay taxes on the $50K profit left over after that deductions.
The IRS demands that Joe deliver documentation of his expenses, including receipts. Joe says “I’m sorry, but I threw all that stuff away when I filed my returns. I shredded everything”. The IRS says “Joe, we really need to see the receipts that support that $25K deduction”. Joe says “Are you kidding? I don’t keep every little receipt”.
What would you say to Joe?
I would not have offered this post if the story was that some personal correspondence was withheld. That’s not the story. The story is that ALL her email was destroyed. ALL OF IT.
It seems that Ms. Clinton’s attorney has clarified his statement. Please see the 28-Mar-2015 update to the thread-starter.
Communication between spouses I believe is privileged, so emails between her and Bill are out of bounds anyway.
Joe should have kept his receipts for his own defense and protection, but given the idea of innocent until proven guilty I guess the IRS needs to find another way to prove fraud.
I’ll let the lawyers answer, but I’m pretty sure that the destruction of receipts in support of the claimed deduction makes Joe’s problem worse and the makes the IRS prosecution easier.
Regarding spousal privilege, as far as I know this is the first time we’ve had an ex-President communicating with a Secretary of State, potentially about matters of grave national security. There are already exceptions such as the “partnership-in-crime” exception, where marital privilege may not be used shield a spouse when the two are accused of conspiring to commit a criminal act together (such as a husband and wife who conspire to commit tax fraud).
Regarding her presidential candidacy, the Marital Privilege question strikes me as even more thorny. If an ex-President is consulting with a sitting President on matters of national security, and the two are married, I have a very hard time embracing the idea that their meetings and communications are rightly shielded from formal processes such as right-to-know and FOIA legislation.
Whatever the legalities, my preference is for both Mr. and Ms. Clinton to voluntarily waive any claims of Marital Privilege for exchanges relevant to public policy.
Well, let’s tie her to tracks!
Clinton’s attorney actually said that the emails have been “deleted” from the server. The expression “wiped clean” comes from Republican Gowdy. Clinton’s attorney did not use that expression. It’s not unusual to delete emails, especially after a period of time has passed.
I’ll update the thread-starter.
According to CNN:
So yeah, it looks like this is a major case of Right-wing fauxtrage over something fairly innocent. Especially the use of the word ‘wiped,’ which is much more stringent than ‘erased,’ and which did not actually happen.
And when I compared her to Nixon I caught merry hell. But no matter how fast you talk, 18 minutes of speech is minute compared to years of written documents.
…and those particular 18.5 minutes were just too convenient to be missing.
After the torture of the years of GOP harassment of Bill Clinton during his Presidency, it’s easy for me to appreciate the desire of Mr. and Ms. Clinton to stonewall the Benghazi charade (because it has been a charade).
In my view, this goes too far. If Richard Nixon had erased ALL the Oval Office tapes, I’m confident that he would have paid very a heavy price.
The fact that the GOP has abused government authority time and again in clearly partisan and personal attacks on the President (with both Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama) does not give license to the victims of those attacks to break the law themselves.
I’m confident that she has good legal advice, and I doubt that legal attacks against her will get very far in a courtroom. I think it’s AWFUL politics, though, and will alienate a large number of voters who were otherwise likely to support her.
is entirely apt, in my view.
The attitude toward little things like laws is, alas, also entirely the same.
This is yet another issue that exposes the real values of posters on this blog. Like the the filibuster or the deficit, compliance with laws like these is only important if the importance is good for your political team.
Doubtless, in three years’ time, when it turns out that the new President Bush’s Secretary of State has decided to personally delete portions of his/her files, based on what the Bush Admin deems “important, ” this will be something terrible again.
You mean Richard M., right? Not the present-day governor of Missouri.
I remember some story during the Lewinsky scandal, when some young reporter was told that what Nixon did was even worse worse than what Clinton (Bill) had gotten caught doing.
The reporter, wide eyed, wanted to know what sex acts Nixon had performed and with whom.
I can only imagine what you think Nixon actually did (hint: He actually broke laws).
Your comment has got to invoke a mini version of Godwin’s Law, in this context.
I don’t know what that has to do with anything at all. Do you even know what “Godwin’s Law” is supposed to be?
The Secretary of State is part of the executive branch of the US government, and as such is subject to oversight by the legislative branch of the US government. Oversight means that the legislative branch actually gets to see the records kept by the executive branch of what it is doing. That’s what “oversight” means. Those records are not private property. They do not belong to the individual keeping them.
Congress could subpoena the Nixon recordings because the records were a record kept by the executive branch. Congress can subpoena the Secretary of State’s correspondence files because those are records kept by the executive branch.
Nixon “accidentally” destroyed a portion of those records in order to avoid a Congressional subpoena; Secretary Clinton appears to have destroyed correspondence records in order to avoid a Congressional subpoena.
So here’s your hint: when an executive branch individual destroy records that do not belong to that individual, that individual “actually breaks laws.”
The tragedy of the Clinton Administration is that such enormous political talent was squandered by voluntary gifts– and such stupid gifts– to their opponents. It is remarkable that this campaign is starting off in that same pattern.
Were you to articulate the above in the form of a wish, I might actually agree with you, at least some of it
As a statement of fact, it is a fantasy on the order of “America does not torture.”
Can we keep it real, please?
That would be true … IF … Hilary Clinton deleted work-related emails. There is no evidence to suggest that she has.
Your perspective suggests that any executive branch employee has no right to privacy, that anything that they do can be subpoenaed by the Legislative Branch because it *might* have been business related. That seems preposterous on its face.
I do not agree with the philosophy of “they chose to serve, this is part of the deal”. Private is private, public is public, and congress does not get to set a policy that says “keep everything and we get to pore through them to see which is which”.
Ms. Clinton deleted emails that she and her staff say were “personal”. There is no way for anybody to validate the process or results. According to a USA Today story today, at least one email exchange blurred the distinction (emphasis mine):
I’ll leave aside the obvious response that Ms. Clinton’s “mistaken” response was in fact simply her use of agreed-on code words to properly avoid putting explicit references in email.
Whether or not it “seems preposterous on its face”, NO employee has a right to privacy when using an employer’s resources — hardware, network, software, etc. Private employers screen EVERY exchange to and from their networks, in part to maintain surveillance against industrial espionage.
A front-page example of why such oversight is needed in government was provided by episodes such as the General Patraus affair and related email exchanges involving his mistress.
In fact, Congress most certainly DOES have a right and even obligation to set policy that allows oversight of the Executive branch, including a determination of whether or not communications and documents deemed “personal” in fact are.
…but if there is an exact correlation of facts then my own reaction will be exactly the same. Nixon’s tapes per se wouldn’t be a story were it not for Watergate and Hillary Clinton has not been accused of breaking into and bugging RNC headquarters.
BTW, have you ever actually caught any of us in an inconsistency regarding the filibuster or the deficit? I’ll grant that the deficit attitudes might fluctuate given the economic circumstances and other priorities, which is legitimate IMO, but speaking at least for myself my view of the filibuster has remained unchanged regardless of the balance of power.
You seem to forget that “Watergate” was initially “just a break-in”, and the allegations against the Nixon campaign (at first, that was the target) were “ugly and baseless Democratic rumors”.
There ARE allegations against Ms. Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack. While we Democrats believe they are baseless and partisan (like the similarly empty allegations against President Clinton), the allegations nevertheless exist. The existence of the Watergate tapes was revealed much later, during the Senate testimony of Alexander Butterfield. Had the White House said, at the time of Mr. Butterfield’s disclosure, “we had them and we erased them”, then Mr. Nixon’s presidency would have ended right then and there.
…which is several books about Watergate, there was enough known well before the existence of the tapes came out. I’m actually not sure pre-emptive destruction would have sunk Nixon. They became part of his legal nightmare only after their turnover was demanded and he invoked executive privilege, then tried for transcripts only with plenty of expletives and unrelated material deleted. He was sunk when SCOTUS said hand them over which never would have happened if the tapes, which didn’t have to exist at all, had just been destroyed as a matter of routine.
There was quite a bit of reform, post-Watergate. Among those reforms is that records cannot be destroyed “as a matter of routine” because doing so evades legislative oversight.
Before he left the corner office, our former Governor, removed all hard drives and destroyed email records. That didn’t stop him from running for President. The allegations against Hillary are minor compared to what Mitt did.
To refresh your memory, here is a link to the Boston Globe Story.
I share your dismay about double standards. It seems to me that we have to be as disciplined with fellow Democrats (like Mr. Menino, Mr. Kineavy, and Ms. Clinton) as we are with Republicans like Mr. Romney.
I remember the episode, just as I remember Mr. Kineavy’s similar destruction of public records when the corruption investigation of Ms. Wilkerson and Mr. Turner led federal investigators towards Boston City Hall.
Had Massachusetts authorities aggressively pursued Mr. Kineavy, and made it clear that the practice of destroying such information is both illegal and not tolerated, then Massachusetts authorities would have been in a much better position to take a hard line with Mr. Romney.
I think Massachusetts authorities chose to not pursue Mr. Romney precisely because they did not want the same standard applied to themselves.
Mitt Romney did more than Secretary Clinton. A lot more. He had his entire executive team remove all hard drives when he left the State House. Then he ran for President, and shrugged his shoulders about the incident. So, why is it okay for Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate? How can republicans condemn Clinton for doing something smaller than an outrageous act of their own candidate?
I agree with you. I never said it was ok.
The fact that Mitt Romney did it does not, in my view, mean that it’s ok for our guys to do it.
The SJC ruled in the 90’s that the Gov. office was not part of the MA Open Records law and Galvin also gave the OK on deleting many of the redundant records – so Romney’s was not a unilateral and unsupervised action.
I see a Walker comparison invoked as well but do not know the law there.
State and Federal regulations are not the same and Clinton had an explicit duty as an administration official.
Bernard Law was not prosecuted, even though he knew of clergy sex abuse and did not inform authorities. The Attorney General at the time, Tom Reilly, determined that Massachusetts law did not allow him to prosecute Mr. Law. The law was subsequently changed.
In my view, Massachusetts law should not have allowed the actions of Mr. Romney or his staff.
BB is always plaguing the League with plays that are inside the rule book, but outside the norm. So they change the rules and grumble, and call it ‘cheating’.
Romney did not break any law in place, so how can he be prosecuted for a law you think is wrong?
I have not seen any request on BMG in the last 8 years to change the law that you feel is unfair; of course, a Democrat was Governor and what could HE ever do wrong?
Doubtless there will be calls to change it now that a Republican is Governor.
I objected, loudly, when Ms. Coakley treated Mr. Kineavy’s similar destruction of emails as a campaign stunt. I got the usual “Coakley Hater” complaints from the usual suspects.
I haven’t complained about the law because, frankly, I’m not familiar with it and attempting to change it is a waste of effort while the current crop of “leaders” is in charge. Both Republicans and Democrats in Massachusetts seem to like it just fine as it is (even though I don’t).
It’s a bad law, and it should be changed regardless of who is Governor.
I misunderstood your desire for prosecution. If you don’t feel the law is worth changing, so be it.
It’s bad enough to take your lead from GOP Bengahzi-gate conspiracy kooks, but it’s worse to insert Monica Lewinsky into your Hillary-hate.
The Lewinsky rule – any point you might have been trying to make is now bullshit once you invoke Lewinsky to attack Hillary.
Only if
1) Jeb is unfit for doing exactly the same thing. (He kept his emails on a private server as Governor; I believe they were also deleted, and at least were never made public).
2) The media ever challenged Mitt Romney in a serious way over his email-gate — in which he not only deleted emails, but had every single employee in his office ‘buy’ their hard drives and had them destroyed, so the public documents would ever be released.
Like it or not, the American Public has routinely decided this is not a big deal… when guys have done it (or worse) in the past.
If Hillary becomes “unfit” for office over this — when the multitude of guys who have done similar or the same in the past haven’t — there’s only one conclusion I can draw from it.
typo
Perhaps we’re seeing a symptom of the extent to which technology has outstripped our social conventions for managing it. I’m under the perhaps mistaken impression that ALL the documents of outgoing presidential administrations are reviewed following a process that includes oversight by third-parties, with a view of preserving even personal communications in the National Archives. The Nixon family spent decades fighting the disclosure of documents beyond the Watergate tapes that they felt were damaging to whatever was left of Mr. Nixon’s reputation. They lost that fight.
I don’t believe that an outgoing President gets to shred letters in their files claiming them to be “personal”. I think they are instead provided a mechanism for marking them such, and curators eventually take that into account when managing the archive.
The Presidency is a public office, and EVERYTHING a President does belongs to the public. In my view, it is not very different from the intellectual property agreements that govern every technical employee — when I invent something, my company owns it. It doesn’t matter whether what computer I use, it doesn’t matter whether I work on it on weekends or during the work day — my employer owns EVERYTHING I create. Employers usually provide a process where employees can disclose IP that is unrelated to the employer, and enlightened employers typically agree and allow me to do as I wish. Some of my colleagues are profoundly resistant to such IP agreements. They express that resistance by not taking jobs that require them.
I think we need an analogous process for email and other documents as well. I see our ad-hoc treatment of this as a reflection of our collective inexperience with the technology rather than a decision born of collective wisdom.
The fact that the “American Public” has routinely decided this is not a big deal is approximately as convincing as the fact that the American Public has also routinely decided that global warming is not a big deal.
I’ve never argued that either Mitt Romney nor Jeb Bush should get a pass on this. Both did the same, and I think both are unfit for the same reason.
…that everything a President does belongs to the public. There is such a thing as a personal life. Likewise, there is plenty that you do and talk about that is none of your employer’s business. In the case of POTUS, he lives with his family in the White House, which even though is public property should still give the First Family some privacy in non-official dealings. If anything rather than seeing one as unfit, I respect someone who pushes back and says this is mine.
I’m not sure I get the furor here. I understand that public officials public email should be made public. Are people arguing that public officials should not have any private email?
If you believe that public officials are entitled to have private email, then this can be accomplished two ways: either the public official would have two different accounts (public and private) and would decide which to use at the time of sending email, or the public official would have one account and would decide which emails to make public at some point in time afterward. Effectively, these are both the same, since the public official is deciding which emails to release.
Or should all emails from public officials be public? For example, “Hey Chelsea, I really think your new boyfriend is a goofball, Love Mom”.
So what is it?
If Secretary Clinton was communicating with any other government official, then there is a copy of the email on that government’ agency’s email server.
Remember, there is a sender and a receiver. So, there are always two. So, it’s not correct that, unilaterally, Clinton, alone, gets to decide what emails are “non-record personal” messages.
Except some of Clinton’s state department aides – had a email address on the clinton server.
By having control of what emails she releases – she has the ability to re-write the historical record.
Assume for a moment that she was Secretary of State during Pearl Harbor – or any other national tragedy – imagine what the conspiracy crazies would think ?
In this case they are probably still hoping to dig up emails between the Clinton couple detailing their plans to cover up their murder of Vince Foster.
I’ve seen nothing that indicates that any state department employees had an address on Clinton’s email server. Where does that claim come from?
According to some reports like this, some staffers may have used their own private email accounts.
I have found no sources that suggest that any of Ms. Clinton’s staff used Ms. Clinton’s private email domain or server.
From your link (emphasis mine):
This piece says the same as others have reported — staffers used their own private email addresses. Nothing in this piece alleges that any of these staffers used Ms. Clinton’s email domain or server.
Never mind that “gossip website” is a generous description of this rubbish, citing other rubbish without cites. “Weekly Standard senior writer Steven Hayes told Fox news”? Total crapola.
In this case, total crapola that says the same as the other sources — her staff also used personal email addresses. NOT the personal email domain or server of Ms. Clinton.
The reference to “huma@clintonemail.com” is in the London Daily Mail.
It purports to show a Lexis-Nexis citation for Huma Abedin on Ms. Clinton’s personal server. If the Lexis-Nexis entry is legitimate (and with this caliber source, i’t worth confirming), then it probably is evidence to buttress the claim of roarkarchitect.
Listed in those and other write-ups which led to my selecting that link and hence my pre-supposition that the sources would be of questionable credibility.
My reading comprehension is fine thank you.
This morning, it was in fact my reading comprehension that suffered, most probably due to caffeine deprivation.
I apologize for the nasty title, I saw the huma@clintonemail.com reference after I had already posted the comment.
I think that a written letter that a Secretary of State receives that says “Hey Mom, what’s with the trash-talk about Jimmy?” is TODAY treated as part of an archive and is subject to eventual disclosure. I think email should be handled following the same process.
I think that we need a process that allows private communications to be kept private (at least for some period of time), and that also allows an objective third party (not a campaign manager for the official, and not an attorney for the opposing party) to make the determination.
I think men and women who are not willing to live and work within such constraints are not suited for public office.
It should not be archived. It need not be inspected. I cannot more strongly disagree with the idea that expressed in your last line. We will sacrifice plenty of good and capable people that way. This is why I’ve said all along, resulting enforceable documents should be public record, but conversations that could easily have been conducted in person or by phone should not. Besides, in this example Chelsea is not a public figure. Why should her boyfriend angst be public record, especially when she was a minor?
What part of “my concern is about who makes the decision” is unclear?
I agree with you that a communication — whether letter or email — regarding Chelsea’s boyfriend is not a “public” record, in the sense that the general public has immediate and unfettered access. Hopefully any objective third party would come to the same conclusion.
At the same time, historians value and treasure personal communications of past Presidents (Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ come to mind). My understanding is that current practice and, I think, policy strives to strike a balance by insisting that such material be preserved but kept private for some period of time (such as “25 years after the death of any named party”).
Regarding the use of private email servers, here is one link to official policy (emphasis mine):
The distinction between “Presidential records” and “Personal records” is made earlier in the document:
I agree with you that the distinction should exist. The concern I raise is about who makes that distinction.
I also call your attention to the Nixon personal archives. The very existence of this archive demonstrates that our current policy is to preserve even personal records.
I feel that an otherwise “good and capable” person who is unwilling to embrace the implications of holding high office ought to be “sacrificed”. I suppose we will have to agree to disagree about this.
…but I guess I’m OK with those involved making their own decisions, just as I decide several times a week what email to delete and what to keep on my own.
Virtually the entire white collar working world operates under the constraint: keep your private email off the employer’s server. Often, this is just a privacy-protecting common sense precaution– the employer’s server doesn’t belong to you and anything you put there can be read by the employer.
Using a private email account sort-of keeps the private email off the employer’s server. It’s markedly harder to not use the employers network.
Both the server and the network maintain logs that likely contain everything. That’s why investigators should have, in my view, been given access to the servers used by Ms. Clinton. If, in addition to erasing the email directories, the Clinton team also removed the server logs, then “wiped” comes closer to being accurate. Without access to the servers themselves, we don’t know.
Also, for what it’s worth, the ISP used by the Clinton’s is also likely to have similar logs. ISPs differ in their log retention policies.
One for work and one for personal. If she had used her clintonmail server for her personal email – no problem – but it was her work email address.
If Hilary Clinton had a private email address that she used for “personal” communication, we would be in the same exact place that we are today, except that it would be referred to as a “secret private account”.
Had Ms. Clinton used a government-provided email address for work-related emails (as she instructed agency employees to do), she would have been within the law. Those work-related emails would also have been available to the government for FOIA requests and so on.
Please note that, according to factcheck.org, there is explicitly NO expectation of privacy for anyone using ANY government network:
Again, this is old news for any professional employed by pretty much ANY employer today.
The practice of using private email accounts for non-work-related exchanges is widespread enough that accusations about its mere existence would resonate only with Fox News listeners and ditto-heads (only about two-thirds of the public).
Still, even with this separation, legitimate questions can still be raised about whether particular emails were appropriately categorized as “personal”. This comes up frequently, for example in government investigations of “security leaks” involving journalists.
I get that you don’t like what she did, and for sure the law is often an ass. But please stop perpetuating the idea that Clinton broke the law.
Like the “wiped clean” server (which you also swallowed whole at first) this is a complete fabrication.
See cmd’s comment upthread:
This is astonishing, really.
Well, there are two distinct viewpoints on this thread, one offered by you (who is, as far as I know from your profile, a town meeting member) who says it’s fantasy or wishful thinking, and the other from an attorney (CMD) who says it’s illegal.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, it just seems that at the moment the viewpoint of CMD seems more persuasive.
The Federal Records Act, 43 USC s3101, requires agency heads to maintain adequate documentation of the activities of the agency. When HRC was Secretary of State, the statute did not refer to e-mail, but regulations required that any agency permitting employees to use private email had to take measures to ensure that all records are preserved in the agency record-keeping system.
So, using private email is not the issue– deletion of emails is. HRC says that she sifted through and produced everything “work related” after people demanded that she do so. Misdemeanor there– the law required that she archive this stuff on her own. But, okay, she did it after it was demanded. How do you know that what got produced is everything?
HRC says that she produced everything that should have been produced– that’s case closed, right there, for trickle.
The problem is that the few emails already out there make it pretty clear that personal and business email were very mixed together, and that no one really knows how these mixed-together emails were treated. So there are some emails in which they talk about Chelsea’s boyfriend AND about how to deal with Putin.
So the question will come down to whether everyone believes HRC, when she says that everything important was released. No one can tell for sure, because everything that wasn’t produced has been erased. For the most part, people will believe whatever they want to about HRC, good or bad.
My reaction is that this was a violation of law, but –so far–a misdemeanor. Separately, as someone who was alive in the 90s, my reaction is “This shit again?! Really?!
As has been reported by Gawker and ProPublica, a chunk of the “work” correspondence was released as a result of a 2013 email hack of Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, including correspondence about Libya. This correspondence is the subject of the Congressional inquiry into Benghazi.
So for me, the shoe will drop if it turns out that the the delivery of emails deemed relevant by HRC does not match up to obviously-relevant documents that are already made public. If that turns out to be the case, then this decision to delete emails is exactly the same as the Nixon erasure of the Watergate tapes.
As it stands, I am skeptical because HRC’s explanation of a lot of this is turning out to be hogwash as more information comes out, drip-style. (eg, I used the separate account because I only wanted one device– but, I email from an iPad) That is a familiar pattern that I do not wish to see repeated in the Oval Office.
A friend who is a software engineer in the security business considers her having her on email server – Criminal Negligence – I concur.
The IP address of this server would be know to anyone contacted by the Clinton foundation – it would be a target for any foreign country to hack.
She potentially put her communications and anyone who corresponded with her at risk to be revealed to any foreign government or entity.
I’m pretty sure the NSA has the material anyway.
But sadly – not any foreign governments 🙁
I wager here more time will be spent on Hillary’s email server than her beliefs and agenda for the Trans-Pacific Partnership between now and the election. We don’t have a political system anymore; we have a sideshow.
Like most Republican talking points.
Clinton’s Republican critics have so exaggerated the “scandal” in everything about her — most notably Banghazi — that the email controversy will probably have little impact. When everything is an unparalleled scandal, nothing is.
n/t
They’ve cried wolf a few too many times.
As Hillary Clinton: Coakley. I’m begging you guys, don’t nominate her.
Please note a huge difference in your analogy — Congress is NOT overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats. Democrats do NOT hold a veto-proof majority, nor is the Speaker of the House (at the federal level) effectively elected for life.
There is a FAR greater difference between nominating Ms. Clinton for president and Ms. Coakley for governor. The outcome of the former causes a HUGE difference in national affairs for at least a decade. The outcome of the latter is arguably (given the makeup of the Massachusetts legislature) irrelevant to state governance.
While I hope that we Democrats find a more progressive nominee than Ms. Clinton, she is still the overwhelming favorite. If she is nominated, she will still be overwhelmingly preferable to whatever bozo the GOP nominates. If Ms. Clinton is nominated, I will enthusiastically work to support her campaign (even while also encouraging Ms. Warren to keep influence her agenda).
A GOP president, working with a GOP congress in 2016, will be an unmitigated disaster for America. That is not the case for Massachusetts after Charlie Baker’s 2014 gubernatorial victory.
It seems to me there’s no question that if Clinton had had a .gov account that she used for all her government business and a .com account that she used for all her personal emails, that she could properly delete all the .com emails. They’re not public records as far as I can tell. So the real problem isn’t: “was she wrong to delete the emails,” but instead “did she do a good job separating out the work emails from the personal emails when she provided the work emails to the State Department.” I don’t know of any reason to think that she didn’t. So what are we talking about, really? The Nixon tapes, in contrast, were “documents” created by someone in the government to record business taking place in the Oval Office. There’s no comparison.
The Nixon tapes were created by equipment installed at the direct and personal request of Richard Nixon. There most certainly is a comparison.
Perhaps you should learn more about Watergate.
… in the White House. In his office in the White House. To record meetings he had while doing his job.
You wrote “The Nixon tapes, in contrast, were “documents” created by someone in the government to record business taking place in the Oval Office. There’s no comparison”.
When Richard Nixon ordered installation of the recording system and then used it, the resulting tapes immediately became “documents”. The recorded everything, personal and otherwise. In particular, every conversation on his phones was recorded — personal and otherwise.
Ms. Clinton ordered the creation of her own private email domain and server, and used it for all her communications, private and otherwise. The moment she (and apparently her staff!) began to use this domain and server, the resulting records became “documents”.
I (and, I suspect CMD, an attorney, among others) dispute your claim that there is “no comparison”.
We agree, don’t we, that her private emails are not public records?
I think the reality is that her “private emails”, like every communication of every government official, do not become truly “private” until the government says so. That’s why the language about “expectation of privacy” is so clear, and so all-inclusive — when using government servers and networks, NOTHING is “private” unless and until the government agrees.
I agree that emails between Hillary and Chelsea Clinton about yoga classes are private records, and a properly-functioning process would mark them as such. The rub, in Ms. Clinton’s case, is that her use of her own server for everything makes the differentiation much harder. As it stands, she and her advisers are the sole party making the judgement.
We know that there are exchanges between her and her staff. We know that at least one of her staffers had her account on the private domain. It is very likely that there were exchanges between her and her husband. We know that two very high-ranking military officers (General David Petraeus and General John Allen) were seriously compromised by “personal” emails with mistresses and friends like Jill Kelley.
In the context of this recent history, the public surely has a right to expect that “private” email exchanges be subject to third-party oversight.
At this point, I am curious about the servers themselves. It seems to me that the obvious answer is to give investigators from SOME neutral party (not necessarily Senate investigators from the Benghazi witch-hunt) physical access to the server hardware. I’d like a competent professional to have a chance to examine server logs, ISP logs, all that sort of thing, in addition to the “regular” directories where email programs save emails.
I think the larger question, for every presidential candidate of any party affiliation, is their appreciation for and willingness (or even enthusiasm) to cooperate with the document retention and security policies that rightly apply to every President.
only tell you the connection between devices – their address and protocol – not the content. A computer forensic investigator – might be able to recreate the exchange mailboxes – if the disk wasn’t properly wiped. If this system was run professionally – there should have been backups – actually – you will fill up your exchange disk (at least 2003 Version) – if you don’t perform backups.
My gut feeling tells me – while there are no backups – the disk was professionally wiped or destroyed.
Emails seldom go directly from the source to the recipient, most pass through at least interim mail relay server.
Most ISPs use linux based servers, running sendmail. The logging policy of those servers is ISP-dependent. Many ISPs log each email relayed through the server in order to identify spammers and other bad-guys.
I don’t know anything at all about MS servers. Any ISP that uses a MS server (IIS) deserves to be punished anyway. 🙂
My gut tells me the same as yours, but we really can’t know without somebody who knows what they’re doing looking at the hardware.
with ssl – does the email really pass through another server – ssl establishes a secure connection to an email server.
BTW – clinton mail – was an exchange server – and from what I understand a self-signed certificate – which is a security problem – it can create a “man in the middle” security problem.
See technical documentation for details (this link is just one of a gazillion). SSL means that the payload (email in this case) is encrypted in transit. It has no effect on routing, AFAIK.
One of the many reasons why high-ranking government officials should use government networks is to keep as much traffic as possible within government-owned (and presumably more secure) relay servers. Still, sooner or later the payload has to get from SOME government server to (or from) the recipient, and that portion will use the same servers (with the same vulnerabilities) as everybody else.
The fact that we are Democrats does not eliminate the political problem her behavior created.
The political problem is that what she did, especially in the context of her order that agency employees NOT do what she did, created the appearance that she was attempting to evade scrutiny of her correspondence. Her subsequent ham-handed handling of all this reinforces that appearance.
Ms. Clinton has transformed a partisan GOP witch-hunt into Benghazi from a dead carcass back into front-page news. That’s a political blunder that, in my view, is significant.
This is exactly what the GOP wants/needs and we gave it to them. Just handed it over to them like a piece of candy. Clearly we only have 1 person that can take the White House, and her name is Elizabeth Warren.
BMG needs to recognize that Hillary Clinton is a silent dog whistle to conservatives in the same way that Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann is to progressives. (Spare me analysis, comparison, etc. – I am speaking of reaction to them not their intrinsic qualities)
Had Bachmann or Palin behaved similarly when in the Cheney Administration, there would be riots in the streets of Arlington, not insistence that it isn’t a REAL law because her heart is pure and the big mean people want to seize on every little word.
Yes, yes they do. Just as you would about the other ladies. And if a candidate cannot understand that and abide by the rules, this is a kitchen she should get out of, apron and all.
The incredible hubris of the action makes me doubt the ability of a person whom I had regarded as a smart center-left woman to hold national elective office.
…that at least for me the same set of facts would yield the same reaction. I have no desire to see Palin’s and Bachmann’s emails either.
Like Tom.
The chief GOP Benghazi conspiracy goon cries ‘wiped clean!’ and Tom posts it here as fact that males her ‘unfit for public office.’.
The next day the GOP talking points turn to include ‘just like Nixon’, and like a good boy, Tom cries ‘just like Nixon!’
It’s time to let the Republicans carry their own water.
We seem to agree that it’s a dog whistle.
Perhaps we also agree that certain behavior is unacceptable whether done by Democrats or Republicans. Some of us believe that Richard Nixon committed crimes (for which he was never prosecuted). Some of us believe that Democrats should not do similar things. Some of us believe that Democratic candidates for high office should be politically astute enough to not through kerosene on a floor that is already burning.
Some of us don’t.
n/m
Most of us don’t.
Demonstrating contempt for national security or for electronic record systems designed to protect it is not a “GOP talking point”. Was General Petraeus the victim of a GOP witchhunt, or did the system that Ms. Clinton flaunted work properly in disciplining them?
Shit happens, to Republicans and Democrats alike.
Another Republican talking point.
Atta boy, Tom!
The Sleazy Hilary dog whistle is less shrill. Hell, it barely moves the mutts at all.
The Ghetto Fear dog whistle has a lower register, more visceral with undertone whistle.
The Sleazy Hillary model is all overtones with an extra dab of ‘the sky is falling’ if you work the embouchure just right.
Our man has many whistles. One day he’ll find a way to combine several like a kind of Rahsaan Roland Kirk of bullshit.
That server was not just used by Secretary Clinton. It was also used by her husband, President Clinoton. Maybe Secretary Clinton has nothing to hide, but Bill Clinton has something that he doesn’t want exposed. So, perhaps they are refusing to allow anybody to examine the server because they would like to keep public eyes off of some of Bill Clinton’s private emails.