Here's NYT odd headline: Justice Dept. Says Hillary Clinton Had Authority to Delete Certain Emails (HRC)
So there's the headline, and then the story, which the Times turns halfway-through into a story about the tech guy taking the Fifth:
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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said in a court filing this week that Hillary Rodham Clinton had the authority to delete emails that she did not believe were government records from the personal account that she exclusively used while secretary of state.
The statement was made in connection with a lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch. The group is seeking to force the government to search the server that housed Mrs. Clinton’s account for messages related to a video ad the State Department aired in Pakistan. Judicial Watch contends the ad was an apology for the Internet video that the administration initially blamed for inciting the 2012 attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Mrs. Clinton has given the State Department roughly 30,000 emails from the account that she determined were government records. She has said that she deleted about 31,000 other emails that she said were personal, and Justice said that those are not government records.
Under federal record-keeping guidelines, government employees are “required to review each message, identify its value, and either delete it or move it to a record-keeping system,” the Justice Department said.
“There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server,” the filing said. “Under policies issue both by the National Archives and Records Administration and the State Department, individual officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”
The filing was made on Wednesday, the same day that a former State Department information technology employee, who also worked for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, asserted his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in response to questions from Congress about the email account. The ex-employee, Bryan Pagliano, had been subpoenaed to appear before the House committee investigating Benghazi.
The panel wanted to question Mr. Pagliano, who helped set up the account, about Mrs. Clinton’s decision to use it, its protections and what the State Department knew about it.
Mr. Pagliano’s lawyer has contended that there is no incentive for his client to cooperate with investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s email account. Two senior Republican senators, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said on Tuesday that they were considering giving Mr. Pagliano immunity.
In a letter to Mr. Pagliano’s lawyer, they said that they “will certainly respect and defer to any legitimate assertion of an individual’s constitutional rights.”
They added, “With that being said, the committees also need the unique information you likely have in order to exercise their oversight functions under the Constitution, which are unrelated to any potential prosecution or criminal inquiry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/justice-dept-says-hillary-clinton-had-authority-to-delete-certain-emails.html
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