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Scandal Over Clinton Emails Still Isn't A Scandal
LV McF ?@Chitown1216 19h19 hours agoAppears Clinton email scandal only exists in the minds of partisans
http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-not-scandal-464414
from Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek:
____ Here’s what this new inspector general’s report shows: When senior State Department officials swam in the deep pool of email rules, there were basically no lifeguards on duty. The office for ensuring compliance with the federal rules on communications—staffed by the people who were supposed to be reading all the Federal Register procedures and policy statements—has been a horrifically underfunded, understaffed and ineffective group for many years, starting long before Clinton arrived at the State Department. As the report says, “Longstanding systemic weaknesses related to electronic messages and communications have existed within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.… The Department generally and the Office of the Secretary in particular have been slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications.’’
That means there were problems—lots of them. Many employees at the State Department not only used personal email accounts, they refused to use their government-issued laptops because they were lousy. A 2011 email cited by the report underscored this point. Written by the department’s former policy planning director and sent to Clinton, it said, “State’s technology is so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively.”
With out-of-date equipment and poor support, plenty of mistakes were made. A good example is when Powell had a private internet line installed in his office so he could use his personal email account on his home laptop. Under the rules, the new line shouldn’t have been put in, but it was. Powell, like every other secretary of state, never read the entire Foreign Affairs Manual; he dealt with foreign crises, wars and international diplomacy while depending on the relevant staff to determine whether it was appropriate to put a jack in his wall.
Clinton’s personal email process was a far less clear-cut as a potential violation—and may not have been at all. The Foreign Affairs Manual allowed for the use of personal email accounts under certain conditions, but never described what those conditions were. (That is why one of the recommendations from the inspector general’s report is for the State Department to issue “enhanced and more frequent guidance on the permissible use of personal email accounts to conduct official business.”)
If Clinton’s account arrangement for nonclassified emails did not fit within the confines of that rule, none of the experts told her so. Clinton had groups of people responsible for overseeing her email operations, including one specifically dedicated to the job with the title "Special Adviser to the Deputy Chief Information Officer." He worked for Clinton throughout her entire term as secretary of state. In addition, the chief operations officer knew about the account, as did the deputy chief of staff for operations.
Then there was the division specifically charged with overseeing all communications systems for the Office of the Secretary and Its Executive Secretariat, or S/ES in State Department lingo, which included Clinton and all of her direct staff. The group responsible for email, computers and the like is called S/ES Office of Information Resources Management, better known as S/ES-IRM. As the report makes clear, officials in S/ES-IRM knew about Clinton’s email arrangement and were in frequent contact with the official directly in charge of maintaining security on Clinton’s private server. Near the beginning of her time in office, the division prepared memos about her use of a private server, which was in the basement of her guarded home. S/ES-IRM staff met multiple times with the special adviser in charge of the private email account and server, and sent emails to Clinton’s senior staff describing technical issues that arose with the system and the actions taken to resolve them. The special adviser also met with the department’s Cyber Threat Analysis Division to discuss the email system and security issues. The bottom line is that Clinton’s email arrangement was not some dark secret—the staffers who spent their careers learning the sections of the Foreign Affairs Manual that relate to emails knew all about it. And the report cites nothing to suggest Clinton or her staff were told by the experts that there was any reason she shouldn’t use the system.
That doesn’t mean there were not concerns...
read more: http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-not-scandal-464414
56 replies
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Would you say these things in front of your bosses at work, I wonder?
For honest, responsible people, the truth is whatever it is, and they accept it.
People enjoying that peculiarly intense dislike of Hillary, though, don't need truth or reason for their attitudes. So in this case whatever happens no harm/no foul to them, right? Nothing changes for them. And for them this was never about emails or national security anyway. It was always about the hope of using the Justice Department to take her out. A hope for a modern witch burning. Malice run amok.
Good article, BigTree, thanks, even though I already knew far more than I could ever have wanted to about the State Department's email system.
