For all the sturm und drang over Hillary's emails and server, it's another tempest in a teapot

[bigtree]

scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy
Everything You Wanted To Know About Hillary’s Email That The Media Refuses To Tell You: http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2016/05/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about.html … #ImWIthHer #p2 #uniteblue


___ For all the sturm und drang, the OIG criticizes Secretary Clinton for two things - first, for failing to comply with the ridiculous “print and file” archiving requirement that OIG itself admits few people follow; and second, conducting government business on private email connected to a personal server. What the report reveals however, (and what was unreported in the press) is that Secretary Clinton was hardly alone in these supposed “violations.” The IG notes that nearly 90 senior aides to Secretaries Powell and Rice used personal email. (IG report at 20). Secretary Powell himself not only used a personal email account, he connected a private laptop to the Internet through a “private” connection in his office, sidestepping the State Department’s portal (which was itself a violation of State Department rules). (IG report at 3, 21, 31). And when contacted by the IG during the pendency of their investigation, Powell, along with aides to Rice, ignored the IG’s entreaties to determine whether the email they sent via personal email could be retrieved. (IG report at 21-23).

The IG concluded that “Secretary Powell did not comply with Department policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.” (IG report at 22). The IG made the same finding with regard to Secretary Clinton with one important caveat: her submission of 55,000 pages of emails “mitigated her failure to properly preserve emails …” (IG report at 23, emphasis added). Powell not only failed to comply at the time, but snubbed a request from the Department that he contact his ISP to determine if his records were retrievable. (IG report at 22). Even so, the “file and print” requirement is only followed “sporadically.” The Department’s internal guidelines contain “no explicit penalties for lack of compliance” and the Department “has never proposed discipline against an employee [for failing to comply.]” (IG report at 14).

Ironically, had Hillary done as those 90 staffers and Secretary Powell had done and simply used a personal email account instead of her own server, it is unlikely any of her records could be retrieved. Instead, the State Department (and ultimately the world) got to pour through 55,000 pages of email, the vast majority of which was the boring work of government with some cherry picked threads of gossip and other click bait ephemera the media loves to focus on. Conversely, email Powell and his and Rice’s aides sent while we were at war in two countries and attacked on September 11th, 2001 are lost to history.

So, on the first point - failing to properly archive her records, no one has ever been punished for not following the rules and Hillary complied after the fact. But what about the dreaded private server? Well, the server is really a red herring. The issue here is corresponding over a system without proper security features - whether that is done using a gmail account or your own private server is incidental. But here’s the thing: not only was using personal email not prohibited when Clinton was Secretary, it still is not prohibited. While the federal record keeping law was amended in 2014, it did not prohibit the use of private email for official purposes, it simply required that a person who did so copy her official email account or forward a copy of the email to that account within 20 days. (IG report at 9). And the Department’s most recent guidance, issued in 2015, says that the use of personal email is “discouraged” except “in very limited circumstances.” The Department does not articulate what those circumstances might be. (IG report at 32).

Oddly, the conclusory nature of the IG’s findings (and those most heavily reported by the media) contain no substantiation. For a report with an average of four footnotes per page, the determination that Secretary Clinton had “an obligation” to discuss her email use is simply stated as fact without citing to any internal guidance, regulation or law. It is curious that such a finding was made, particularly since the report itself acknowledges that personal email use was not then and is not now, prohibited.

Surely, if Secretary Clinton ran afoul of Department guidelines, so too did the 90 staff members who worked for Secretaries Powell and Rice, along with what I have to assume are many other anonymous employees in a Department of thousands who probably use their personal email accounts from time to time. And the concern over the security of Clinton’s server is a fortiori for servers run by Google, Microsoft, and ISPs that are targets of daily hacking attempts. And it is not like government servers are bastions of security. The Office of Personnel Management was hacked last year, resulting in the theft of more than 10 million social security numbers of current and former federal employees dating back to 2000.

If you want to point a finger, look at the records management at the State Department - it is a total shit show. Some archived email cannot be retrieved because much of it is corrupted, password protected or contains no information (IG report at 15), the integrated archiving system did not come online until this year (IG report at 15), and the Department broke its own rules by failing to archive the email of 50 top political appointees (IG report at 16). Even if the Department wanted to determine the frequency or volume of personal email use by its employees, it “currently lacks the resources” to do so. (IG report at 19).

This is another tempest in a teapot...


read more: http://scarylawyerguy.blogspot.com/2016/05/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about.html

[lmbradford]

1. When talking about the illegal server...

You reverted back to talking about email. We get what you are trying to do.

Fail.

[bigtree]

3. lol

...an email critic complaining about conflation of subjects.

Hilarious.

[anotherproletariat]

2. Great read...thanks for posting! nt

[dsc]

4. I admit to being nothing like an expert on this

but what I can gather is that had Clinton done what was supposed to be done (use the department email and department computers) we would have been sure the email had been compromised (now we are unsure but evidence suggests that attempts were made but none were successful) and we would have none or only some of the email ourselves (and we apparently have all of it at least potentially). And we have been harmed by this, how?

[polly7]

5. What about using the private server she used to communicate with Blumenthal - who'd

been banned by Obama - as an adviser re Libya (also representing clients with interests in a post-war Libya), being paid through her Foundation, and whose completely wrong 'intelligence' she used (with no ability for scrutiny) to persuade Obama to intervene in a sovereign nation on the '7 countries in 5 years' hit list and help cause that horror, as well as all of the resulting suffering for millions since?

The IS and Boko Haram freaks who were let lose to fill the vacuums in Iraq and Libya created have burned people alive, beheaded, kidnapped, tortured raped - children even - among so many other atrocities. Is that nothing? Without Blumenthal's 'info', an ambivalent Obama may not have been pushed over the line for that 51-49 vote. Clinton told Blumenthal to 'keep em coming'. Another email celebrated getting Obama onboard as an early Christmas present!

Barack Obama says Libya was 'worst mistake' of his presidency.

Meanwhile, millions are either dead, maimed physically and mentally, orphaned, dying at sea, refugees in dangerous refugee camps where women (who'd previously been allowed many, many freedoms now denied by the fundamentalists now running those countries) and children are kidnapped and raped and murdered.

And check out this: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1002&pid=7857478

Nothing at all wrong with any of this?

[bigtree]

6. lol

bye.

[Octafish]

9. You find that funny?

You are very different person than who you say you are.

[Bonobo]

11. "lol bye"

Isn't that the mating call of the "yellow-bellied koolaidsucker"?

[840high]

8. Save your breath - this

scares her supporters.

[Binkie The Clown]

7. "tempest in a teapot", but it's a very large teapot,

and the whole country is inside it.

Compromising national security is not the trivial thing that Hillary apologists try to make it out to be. It's a big deal. Stop trying stop trivialize it.

[bigtree]

10. no official report says she 'compromised national security'

...email truthers and their internet accusations are no big deal. Deal with it.

[LAS14]

12. k & r

[catnhatnh]

13. You keep repeating that

several times a day and online in this forum as long as you want. Then watch this week as the news gets worse and worse. Then repeat more often. Maybe that'll do it...

[bigtree]

14. it's a tempest in a teapot

...soon to take its rightful place as a republican meme.

[bigtree]

15. kick

[Lucinda]

16. KNR