This week the Justice Department told a federal court former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had the right to delete personal emails from her private server.
The public records lawsuit was filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group seeking access to the Clinton emails.
Clinton said she received about 60,00 emails as SOS about half of which were personal and deleted. The others were turned over to the State Department.
I have yet to hear the main stream media acknowledge this vindication. Now it couldn’t be because they drank the right wing propaganda, witch hunt, smear campaign kool-aid against Hillary, could it ? Pathetic.
Next scandal ? Hillary has been having an affair with her husband since they met in law school.
P.S. If you’re looking for the New York Times apology retraction check out their classified section with a magnifying glass !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
The issue here is who decides what is “personal” and “not personal”. If Ms. Clinton had followed accepted practice, then each email would have been logged in government archives, and government personnel would have determined which was personal and which was not.
We already know that some of the emails she declared as “personal”, and deleted, were in fact official — we know that because we got the other side of the exchange from individuals whose accounts were properly logged.
I get that as a passionate supporter of Ms. Clinton, you are entirely comfortable with her having the absolute and final word on what was and was not personal. You are entirely comfortable with her deleting everything she decided was personal, including of course whatever emails others might conclude were NOT personal. Since we already know that at least some of the deleted emails were in fact not personal, we are left to guess at how many official emails were similarly mis-categorized and deleted. I get that you are sure that that number is very small.
One does not have to “drink right wing propaganda”, or be on an anti-Clinton “witch hunt”, or anything else, to be at least concerned about all this.
If Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, or any other Republican official, had done this, would you be as enthusiastic about approving this way of handling potentially significant public records? I would not be so eager to leave a GOP official off the hook. In fairness, I therefore argue that we should also not let Ms. Clinton off the hook.
…for you to accept that there is nothing to see here?
Also, are you seriously suggesting that emails regarding planning Chelsea’s wedding, for instance, should have been exchanged through her state.gov account or otherwise open for inspection to make sure they really were just about the wedding? If so I would disagree in the strongest possible terms. Everyone is entitled to their private lives, even the highest-ranking officials.
Once again, as you do so often, you attempt a false all-or-nothing dichotomy. Hillary Clinton could have easily separated her work life from her private life by using a government-issued laptop and phone for her government business.
It was Ms. Clinton who created this “intrusion” into her “private” life by so completely intertwining them. It was Hillary Clinton who decided to use her private server EXCLUSIVELY for ALL her email, public and private.
While Ms. Clinton was at home, conducting personal business, then of course she would send emails regarding planning Chelsea’s wedding on her server. If desired, I suppose she could have carried a personal laptop along with her personal phone.
EVERY professional that I know, including myself, is issued a “work” laptop for “work” business. For those of us whose work requires a smartphone, we are issue one of those as well.
I have NEVER suggested that Ms. Clinton is not entitled to her private life — although the “private life” of a President is ALWAYS a matter of national security, and national security concerns always trump personal concerns.
Had Ms. Clinton used a government-issued laptop for her government business, I would join you in dismissing the rest of “Benghazi-gate” as meaningless right-wing noise. That is not what she did.
The more you ratchet up your defensiveness, the more damage you do to your candidate’s reputation.
…one could ask how do we know that she kept personal and job separate. You are objecting to her unilaterally deciding after the fact which emails are which and deleting the personal, but the alternative is for her to decide unilaterally which emails to exchange via which system in the first place. I fail to see the substantive difference between deciding before or after the fact since the result is ultimately the same.
I do defend her, but I don’t understand why you see it as negatively “defensive”.
Had Ms. Clinton been in the habit of separating public from private emails, then it would have been easier to separate the two today.
You raised the example of correspondence about Chelsea’s wedding — nobody would question her deletion of such correspondence. If someone had claimed that sensitive information was emailed on her personal server, the burden of proof would have been on the claimant to show that it occurred and that it was improper.
In that scenario, the overwhelming majority of her work-related email communication would have been on a government server. It would have been trivially easy to produce (or not produce!) in response to a subpoena. If any deletions of ANY work-related email occurred, there would have been backups. Staffers, including attorneys, working for Ms. Clinton would almost certainly NOT have had the opportunity to delete ANY emails.
When Ms. Clinton left office, she and her staff could have requested that any private correspondence on her work account (such as correspondence about Chelsea’s wedding) be deleted. Those requests would have enumerated the specific messages, and an IT employee would have been able to confirm that they were as described. Such deletions would have been routine and not newsworthy.
In summary, the audit trail after the fact is a key difference between the two scenarios.
Like Hawthorne’s SCARLET LETTER let’s make her suffer public humiliation for the rest of her life.
Whatever happened to letting the punishment fit the crime. In this case it wasn’t even a crime; it was poor judgment for not separating her GOD DAMN EMAIL ACCOUNTS !
She apologized for the mistake. What more do you want ? A pound of flesh maybe? Or should we have her drawn and quartered until she recants all her sins, too !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Suppose Dorothy Doright, a high-ranking government official in charge of a major agency, decided that using a government expense account, credit card, and checks was “too inconvenient”. Suppose that Ms. Doright instead used her personal checking account and associated debit card for ALL her banking business, public and private. When she traveled, she charged everything — airfare, hotel bills, meals, meeting expenses, gifts, everything — to her personal account. Suppose that upon leaving office, she closed the account and destroyed ALL her financial records — every receipt, notation, meeting note — everything.
Now suppose that a government auditor learned of this and asked her to produce records showing her use of public funds. Suppose her response was to have her accountant offer a list of expenditures and her solemn assurance that each and every one was legitimate and was exactly what was claimed — and with no receipts or even notations about what restaurant or hotel was paid or who was there.
Would you argue that the auditor was going on a politically-motivated “witch hunt” if the auditor was not satisfied with that response?
Any high-ranking executive in a private business who did such a thing with company money would be in SERIOUS legal trouble. In today’s world, any high-ranking executive in a private business who did the same thing company email would almost surely be both fired and sued, whether or not the actions were illegal.
You and Christopher are demanding, loudly, that Ms. Clinton get a pass for behavior that would land ANY private executive — and I would argue any GOP official — in gravely serious trouble.
What I want from the two of you is recognition of the gravity of her action. If she becomes our candidate, and I have to partition off my contempt for this kind of behavior so that I can somehow support her (because I will HAVE to), then it seems to me that the least the two of you could do is show some respect for me and show some awareness of the stretch you are demanding that people like me make.
I also ask you to bear in mind that I am a life-long Democrat. What do you think a voter less committed to our shared vision than me will do with all this — including your responses?
for the love of God, Tom, you can’t accuse someone of a crime based on an analogy !
Tell me in simple English what LAW she broke.
Evidently, the Justice Department prosecutors don’t believe there was any criminal intent in what she did. Do you know something they don’t ? If so would you mind sharing it with the rest us rubes ?
If we have reached the point where we are now going to criminalize everyone who exercises poor judgment then we better start building more prisons.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Where do I accuse her of a crime? That’s your over-reaction, not mine. Please re-read my last three paragraphs, for comprehension this time. You are getting hysterical about criminalization that nobody here (at least me) is suggesting. In fact, YOU are the only one flaming about it.
Was my comment about the Justice Department action hard to understand? OF COURSE they haven’t accused her of criminal intent in deleting emails. Neither have I.
In my view, the Justice Department decision has as much import as an observation that the sun arose in the East this week. Yes, it’s true. In my view, it means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
How many different ways do I have to say “I don’t accuse Hillary Clinton of committing any crime” before you hear me?
n/t
If you are a government employee using a government card or a private employee using a corporate card, and charge personal non-job related expenses to it, you can justly be accused of stealing from said government or company. I would take such a scenario much more seriously than exchanging emails.
Let me perhaps belabor the point of the analogy.
Yes, misusing government funds is theft. The reason that records are required, and the reason that executives are prohibited from co-mingling personal and corporate assets, is that everybody understands that such co-mingling makes it far more difficult to discern when theft has occurred and far more likely for theft to take place.
I get that to you “exchanging emails” is apparently trivial and unimportant nonsense. Interestingly, I seem to remember you being one of the voices loudly excoriating both Edward Snowden and Julian Assange for their “treason”. Mr. Snowden, in particular, was far more careful about ensuring that he knew what he was disclosing. He did not, to my knowledge, publish anything that could be used to penetrate the security mechanisms of the highest levels of world governments.
There is a high likelihood that whatever material was on her server is now known to potentially malicious entities. Since we will never know what was on that server initially, we won’t know — unless and until it is used against us — what was compromised. Are you familiar with “Enigma”, the Nazi encryption engine that was cracked by the Allies? Do you appreciate the gravity of what that compromise meant in WWII? Do you appreciate WHY the fact of its cracking was kept so confidential?
Even if the content of Ms. Clinton’s email messages was trivial, simply knowing the IP addresses, the routing tables, the aliases, email addresses, message signatures, and a gazillion other things are ALL serious potential breaches. Today, we don’t know what the content of those email messages was, because Ms. Clinton’s actions have destroyed the chain of custody that would lead any objective agent to the evidence needed to say one way or the other.
I remind you that Ms. Clinton was presumably corresponding with the highest-ranking civilian and military people in the US and in the world. Her blunder exposed an ENORMOUS amount of information that could be very harmful in the wrong hands. Much more harmful, in fact, than some staffer who fraudulently redirects a few thousand dollars of expense money into their own funds.
I assure you, again, that regardless of how seriously you take such complacency, if ANY executive of a modern corporation did the same thing they would be facing grave consequences.
…my feelings toward Assange and Snowden. I have never called them or believed them to be traitors. In fact I believe Snowden at least appropriately blew the proverbial whistle.
n/m
A working mother in the government gets phone calls on her office phone. Some of them are personal in nature (her daughter is getting married soon) and some are work related. Communication is very different in people’s minds than money.
Consider that the last 2 people who had the job, Condi Rice & Colin Powell, used a single email for work & personal, and the policy allowed it, it was within reason to decide that. It was only in 2014 that the policy changed to mandate separate email addresses.
Moreover, Karl Rove was at one point a govt employee as senior policy advisor in the White House, and Karl Rove used his personal email for govt.
Condi Rice did not use a personal email address. She also apparently didn’t use email much at all.
Colin Powell used a personal address, but did not have a private email server. Colin Powell also served from 2001-2005. Clinton served from 2009 to 2013. The changes in email use and especially email security between those times was enormous (as just one example of the giant change – Gmail wasn’t even publicly available until 2007 and still in beta until 2009).
Yes, Karl Rove used an email server run by the RNC. That definitely makes me feel better about Clinton doing something similar. I’m sure he only did it for matters of “convenience” and in no way to have greater control over what may have gotten out.
You repeat another half-truth that ends up being a deception in the way you cite it.
Neither Ms. Rice nor the more frequently cited Colin Powell used their private email server EXCLUSIVELY.
If Mr. Rove did so, then he committed the same error as Ms. Clinton, and is subject to the same criticisms.
If Mr. Rove were to be a leading Democratic candidate, would you also ask me to overlook HIS grave error? I hope not.
Sure she can delete personal e-mails. And Charles Manson could have sent his roomates down the street to borrow a cup of sugar from Sharon Tate. If that was the truth then Manson would be innocent.
Problem here is once again Hillary and too cute by half. She wasn’t some mid-level manager at the RMV trying to also run a home with 3 kids and mean-well-but-doesn’t-get-it-husband.
A President Hillary Clinton is a president that we can’t trust. And that’s based on her record. Like this e-mail shit we have to deal with.
Let’s not forget the Clinton Foundation and all the international moiney flowing into it when she was secretary of state.
But if the guy in charge of a state motor pool buys fan belts friom a third cousin Fred Wyshak will indict him.
I don’t trust this woman at all.
The promotion comment — “There you have it — perpetuates an unfortunate misunderstanding about the issue.
The decision by the Justice Department confirms a right that has been stipulated by reasonable participants in this discussion all along — Ms. Clinton had a right to delete personal emails from her personal email server. That is irrelevant to the question of whether some of the files deleted may have been work-related, it is irrelevant to the questions about the propriety of having Ms. Clinton and her staff be the exclusive arbiters of what was and was not “personal”, and it is irrelevant to the questions about Ms. Clinton’s sensitivity to the importance of preserving the security of each communication medium used by a high-ranking official for government business.
The Justice Department might just have well added “The sun set in the west”. In my view, this post does not merit promotion. The final three “paragraphs”, in particular, strike me as hyperpartisan gloating that ratchet up the hostility among fellow Democrats before the primary season has even begun.
of impropriety, say the press and the pundits. It’s a matter of trust, say the people who never trusted the Clintons.
It’s not fair. So what? Don’t want to vote for her? Don’t vote for her. I think Fred overstates his case, but jeezaloo, there’s no meat here. Switch to Benghazi. Or the death of Vince Foster.
Who “in power” specifically has
1.) Had a private email server installed in their home
and
2.) Used the private “email server” (Note: I didn’t use the words “email account”) EXCLUSIVELY for ALL her email, public and private
for President, I doubt we would know. I wasn’t being specific about abuses of power. I don’t see the damage caused. Should she have done otherwise. Sure. Is it politically advantageous for some to point it out? Definitely.
You’re on the other side. I’d be surprised if you weren’t concerned about it and didn’t want to make it an issue. And I don’t blame you. That’s politics. As an issue for Democrats to worry about? I think it’s counterproductive.
To me this is the crux of the matter. Rather than say look what horrible judgement she showed by using her own server I start with the assumption that she knew exactly what she was doing and that we CAN trust her judgement. Given that she has operated at the highest levels and should know better as SomervilleTom for one has pointed out , I assume that she did in fact know better, that her judgement regarding security was sound, and therefore it’s OK. I’m confident that she wouldn’t have done this if she had even a moment’s thought that there may be security concerns with this course of action.
Like I said, she found a loophole and exploited it, and it was perfectly legal. Just like our quarterback. But the issue at end-shouldn’t all the balls be 15 PSI and shouldn’t the league control them? Shouldn’t the government control all the servers it’s employees are sending highly classified info on? Is being obfuscated by partisan bickering.
Just because the GOP is making her out to be a devil, doesn’t make her a saint on this one. She screwed up, she apologized, and she should use this as an opportunity to mandate that every employee using classified information has to use a secure server handled internally by our counter cyber espionage officials.
…which is why I have said the failing is on the department rather than the Secretary.
She was in charge of the Department at the time, and could’ve chosen to adhere to the same rules it’s ground level employees adhered to. The fact that she was allowed to choose otherwise, that the choice was perfectly legal, and that Republicans are critiquing her for that choice does not alter the fact that it was a poor choice.
That said, let’s also be clear that she has owned up to it, something Tom and other critics here should give her some credit for. She can do more to make this a teachable moment and educate the country on cybersecurity, showing that even a high level official like her has to take it more seriously in this day and age, and propose a pledge for her opponents to follow that as President they will hold their staff and themselves to the highest standards of cyber behavior. Jeb for one, likes private servers too, and has been far more reckless with them.
I get that you support your candidate.
There is simply NO WAY that a Secretary of State who knew what they were doing would push government emails through an unsecured server physically located in their private residence — while in CHINA no less.
There is simply NO WAY that doing what she did while in China was a result of sound and informed judgement.
Maybe things are more secure than you think after all. It’s not about my candidate at this point. I believe in playing fair, and I would defend another Democrat or even a Republican on the same set of facts.
We have no way of saying with certainty whether her private server was more or less secure than the State Department severs, but I think I can safely presume that it was significantly less secure, seeing as I know my private sever at home and my current jobs servers are significantly easier to access and less secure than the ones I used at State.
And State has been compromised on several occasions, without going into too much detail, there is basically an open flow of information within the classification grades which is what enabled then Bradley Manning, despite a low rank and lower classification, to download and then dump a ton of high level information into the ether without any kind of vetting or foresight. There were also successful Russian cyber attacks against American assets in Georgia during that crisis the summer I worked there. Just as there have been similar attacks against the Baltic states and American assets in Ukraine since.
I do not doubt that the emails we are now reading on Vox and other sites were read by Russian and Chinese intelligence agents, possibly Iranian ones as well. John Kerry has openly admitted this is a possibility even on his secured email, it always is, we were told in our briefing of 30 that at least 3 of us interns at the briefing likely worked for foreign intelligence services. And you bet the CIA has similar assets in other capitals, it’s the nature of spycraft, but it is downright reckless to use an unsecure private email with the real cyber threats that are out there.
You say “why not”?
We’re not talking about deep, profound and arcane mysteries here. She went to China, sending and receiving government emails using a server that didn’t even have a certificate.
This is at the level of using “Password” as her password and leaving her router unencrypted so that any drive-by “war-driver” can check out her stuff. “War driving”, for the un-initiated, is driving slowly through neighborhoods with a laptop, looking for unsecured routers inviting connections.
There is no way Ms. Clinton could even have known that she was actually communicating with her server, and not some counterfeit inserted between wherever she was and her home. Most such “man-in-the-middle” attacks involve simulating the behavior of the original destination, obscuring the presence of the intrusion. The inserted server can do something as benign as maintain an archive of every bit that goes in both directions across the compromised connection. It can be much more malevolent, of course.
Assuming that balls may sometimes fall upwards (or that the sun might stop in the sky on special occasions) is an absolutely TERRIBLE way to interact with the real world. Your assumption about Ms. Clinton and her server is similarly absurd.
I’m pretty sure Clinton exercising good judgement is a lot more likely than the reversal of gravity or stopping planetary motion.
If the concern were as obvious as you make it sound I assume we would all know better, just like it’s common knowledge that “password” does not make a secure password. I simply cannot fathom either HRC doing or the government allowing something so obviously stupid so I’m left with the alternative that concerns have been addressed in ways that those of us on the outside have no way of knowing.
things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.
Once again, your assumptions lead you astray. Cybersecurity is not common knowledge. However, as attested to by jconway and others, it is drummed into every government employee with a security clearance. You believe that means that Clinton knew what she was doing, which you assume also means she knew it was safe. It wasn’t, and she has acknowledged that it was a mistake. Continuing to wave away our real concerns over the mistake’s security implications, and with what the mistake says about Secretary Clinton’s grasp of those implications, is ostrich-like.
There were really two issues that grind here, for me.
One, is the way Clinton supporters have treated the issue, which isn’t really on the candidate, but still makes me think that the campaign isn’t ready to handle a general election.
Two, what is on the candidate is the way that the response that could have come months and months ago only comes when the candidate is dragged by circumstances into making that response. That’s a pattern that is well-remembered by everyone alive in the 90s, and not fondly.
I agree with Charlie Pierce, she should really clean house and focus on winning a now competitive primary and doing so in a way that can fire up grassroots Democrats for a general election.
I am not encouraged by senior staffers like this:
I’ve made this argument in the recent past myself, and I still largely feel that there aren’t that many swing voters up for grabs anymore, something the data seems to back me on. and we seem to have a built in demographic lock on the electoral college, especially as the GOP races to see who can alienate Latino’s more, but I also feel that this current team is operating on an assumption that she is already the incumbent. And that is never a good place to be.
Ms. Clinton is not a deity. While your faith in her absolute goodness may feel marvelous, it is badly misplaced.
You are choosing to ignore concrete evidence of her humanity (evidence that she herself has already accepted, at least according to some) in favor of your apparently absolute faith in her inerrancy.
You seem to have finally accepted that what happened was “so obviously stupid”. The fact that you “cannot fathom” Ms. Clinton doing this seems more a reflection of your difficulty in facing inconvenient truth than any reality. The evidence that you deny of Ms. Clinton’s security blunder is even more compelling than the evidence of anthropogenic climate change denied by so much of the right wing.
Hillary Clinton is not a deity.
This is where we part ways, I completely agree that Hillary defenders here are going out of there way to ignore what was a poorly thought out decision involving classified materials that were possibly compromised. It’s something she has owned up to, and new standards are in place now so her successors can’t make the same mistake. I have every confidence she won’t make this mistake as President, seeing as it has already cost her dearly.
I’ve heard the apology, and accept it (my concerns are with her current judgement and value system).
My response was to Christopher’s astounding assumption that “she did in fact know better, that her judgement regarding security was sound, and therefore it’s OK”.