Hillary's Email Scandal

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The very fact that she wasn't using a government e-mail server to archive all the messages means that she can never prove that she has given over everything. This, in turn, means that she cannot prove that she was in compliance with the archiving rules and regulations as well as meaning that we cannot rule out the possibility that she has some which remain hidden. Except for the die-hard HRC fans this sliver of doubt will be enough for Democrats to look elsewhere for future victory and/or leadership.

The only reason for her to use a private e-mail server is to keep things secret. If she were a private citizen I wouldn't have a problem with that; however, once you accept a public office you have to keep everything relating to that office above the table and visible in broad daylight.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

According to the New York Times, some people on Ms. Clinton's staff during her time as Secretary of State did indeed communicate with her at her private address using her private server about topics which were directly related to her position, specifically Benghazi. These particular e-mail threads have not been made public and even the NYT weren't allowed to read them. Sadly, their information came from an "anonymous" source who has access to the e-mail messages but this means we have no way to verify if the information is accurate--we have to take their word for it.

Truthfully, I don't think she was as interested in keeping the American public unaware about her activities as much as she was interested in keeping her boss unaware of them. There was never a lot of friendship or love between Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton, who was overlooked by the DNC for the nomination and who was given SecState only as a consolation prize. That post is high enough and close enough to be truly important but far enough away from the Oval Office itself that she had no chance of becoming President in case of some awful disaster. By keeping a private e-mail server she could take his advice and then make her own decisions without him knowing about them.

[SoulBiter]

You could be right. Regardless, this is going to hurt her chances to get elected. The Reps will make every interview, every ad, every talking point about this. She will spend the entire election defending this and no one will hear anything else she would like to have a platform on.

[Zarathustra]

The fact that her top aides all had accounts on her server seems to discredit one of her main defenses during the recent press conference, namely, that even though she wasn't using government computers (which would automatically produce records which would be a federal crime for her to delete, as she did with her own server), she was emailing people with government accounts, so most of her emails would all be preserved that way. Surely that lame excuse satisfied no one, but it gave her some measure of (im)plausible deniability on the issue of purposely hiding her official communications. But if she was emailing her top aides--her inner circle--on accounts on her own server, this is so much bullshit.

This also discredits another excuse from the press conference, i.e. that she set up her own home brew email server for "convenience." Surely it's not convenient to set up your own email server/network for your employees whom you have chosen to supply with accounts ... merely so you don't have to carry more than one device. This is going above and beyond for the purpose of "convenience," which is obviously a contradiction. No one goes to the trouble of setting up their own email server for themselves and their employees to save them from carrying more than one device. How dumb does she think we are??

Gawdy has officially requested the server. Now it will take Boehner to subpoena it.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Apparently she also used a Blackberry and an iPad to send e-mail from time to time, so she didn't exclusively use her private server.

She also claims that the e-mail server has been "wiped clean" and her attorney feels that turning over the server is pointless since no e-mail messages reside on it or any backup associated with that server. My advice: charge her with destruction of government documents. No, you may not be able to make the charge stick but she can't really prove herself innocent of the charge, either, since the messages are all gone.

[Avatar]

If it really has been wiped clean, that's probably suspicious, since we all (should) know that deleting something doesn't actually delete it.

To truly wipe it requires deliberate effort. If they've just been deleted, then they're not really gone and can almost certainly be recovered.

I swear 9/10ths of the world has no idea how computers work.

--A

[Cybrweez]

Why are you still talking about Hillary's emails? Don't you know Indiana wants to kill all gay people?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

If it really has been wiped clean, that's probably suspicious, since we all (should) know that deleting something doesn't actually delete it.

To truly wipe it requires deliberate effort. If they've just been deleted, then they're not really gone and can almost certainly be recovered.

I swear 9/10ths of the world has no idea how computers work.

--A

We have a program here for wiping hard drives that overwrites the MFT with 1s bit-wise (like using a hex editor) then reformats the drive. Once the MFT is gone and the drive has been reformatted data is not recoverable.

The best way to make a drive truly unrecoverable is to remove the platens from the hard drive enclosure then microwave them. Clearly, you can't do that with SSD drives--no platens--but microwaving it after scrubbing should do the trick.

No, they don't. It gets on my nerves watching so many TV or movie people "hacking" systems in a minute or two. When are scriptwriters going to understand how computers really work? I neither engage in the activity nor condone it but real hacking takes diligence, patience, and someone in the IT department being sloppy.

[Avatar]

Yeah, if I want to really delete something I do a 35-pass overwrite with random data (including cluster tips). (Although that apparently isn't going to work on new drives.)

--A

[ussusimiel]

The email scandal doesn't seem to be doing too much damage to Clinton's Presidential chances yet. The perception that she did something seriously wrong, predictably, follows party lines, so there is currently zero threat to her nomination.

u.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Why don't we all just drop the pretense and admit that the parties which comprise the False Dichotomy are interested only in getting elected rather than doing what is best for the country?

One of the voices on the radio this morning commented that our three most polarizing Presidents in our nation's history are, in order: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Ever since 1992 we have been on this long, slow decline where the Party Out of Power's only concern is sticking it to the Party In Power and the people in the middle on both sides are more prone to listening to the fringe. It was a little surprising that Democrats didn't try to impeach Bush and it is more surprising that the Republican Congress hasn't tried to impeach Obama. They don't need a conviction; rather, they would be satisfied just to put the impeachment onto the historical record.

[Zarathustra]

Ironically, the reluctance to impeach is driven entirely by partisan politics. It's no longer an issue of whether or not a president should be impeached on the basis of the principles involved (i.e. breaking his Oath about faithfully executing the laws and upholding the Constitution), but whether or not it will harm the impeaching party's chances if they go through with such a polarizing move.

The fact that Dems aren't disturbed by Hillary's transparent, premeditated conspiracy to hide her official communications from Congressional oversight and public knowledge is deeply depressing. They're already committed to her victory (damn their principles) before they've even had a chance to elect her. This kind of pre-commitment will give her free rein to commit even worse transgressions after her coronation as "The First Female President." I don't care what your politics are, if you're looking away from this scandal only so your candidate can win, you're a hypocrite and part of the problem. You're the reason why politics suck so much in America, and why we keep getting such horrible candidates. If you won't hold them accountable, what's the point of having a vote?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

If you won't hold them accountable, what's the point of having a vote?

This is because our candidate is right no matter what they say or do and your candidate is wrong no matter what they say or do.

So many of us are like the Drazi that it isn't even funny any more. Green! Purple!

[Avatar]

The point is to create the illusion of power.

--A

[Zarathustra]

House Committee asked Hillary if she had conducted official state business on private email two years ago. She delayed responding for months, and even then didn't answer the question.

Why wouldn't she reveal that she had private email when directly asked by the Committee investigating her? Gee, it's almost like she had something to hide.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The latest from the New York Times:

selected pages from the most recent round of e-mail released from Ms. Clinton. Of note here are that two e-mail addresses show up but I am fairly certain that "hrod17(at)clintonemail.com" was her personal address and that "hdr22(at)clintonemail.com" is a distribution group. Still, Sidney Blumenthal features prominently in these message threads even though he had no connection to the State Department at the time...

...which brings us to the second NYT article about Mr. Blumenthal's connections and the blurring of the boundaries between politics and business.

When the Clintons last occupied the White House, Sidney Blumenthal cast himself in varied roles: speechwriter, in-house intellectual and press corps whisperer. Republicans added another, accusing Mr. Blumenthal of spreading gossip to discredit Republican investigators, and forced him to testify during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Now, as Hillary Rodham Clinton embarks on her second presidential bid, Mr. Blumenthal’s service to the Clintons is again under the spotlight. Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a Republican who is leading the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, plans to subpoena Mr. Blumenthal, 66, for a private transcribed interview.

Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — wrote to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. According to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.

But an examination by The Times suggests that Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.

While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials. During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy.

The projects — creating floating hospitals to treat Libya’s war wounded and temporary housing for displaced people, and building schools — would have required State Department permits, but foundered before the business partners could seek official approval.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton or the State Department knew of Mr. Blumenthal’s interest in pursuing business in Libya; a State Department spokesman declined to say. Many aspects of Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement in the planned Libyan venture remain unclear. He declined repeated requests to discuss it.

So now we have another reason for her to want to keep all these e-mail messages on a private server--she was helping Mr. Blumenthal and his business associates in their attempts to get in on the ground floor in post-Qadafi Libya.

[Cybrweez]

These emails are from hrod17 address, going back to at least 2011. Is it true that her lawyer said during investigations that this address was created after her tenure at State and never used for State business?

[Zarathustra]

Two Inspectors General have asked the Justice Department to open criminal investigations in Hill's email scandal, now that it has come to light that her emails contained classified info, after the State Dept. finally has access to them (years after she left office and was supposed to give them up).

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The Democrats are in a weird situation here. The ones who don't support Hillary won't mind seeing her taken down another peg in the trustworthiness department, hurting her chances at getting the nomination, but they also run the risk that the scandal could touch Obama. If Obama decides that he has found a Democrat whom he wouldn't mind backing then he may help quietly push to get Justice to dig into the topic more thoroughly, given that he and Clinton never liked each other all that much.

[Zarathustra]

Two-month gap in Hillary's SoS emails coincide with escalating violence in Libya. It also coincides with the time in which one of her aides got an ethics exemption to work for both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation at the same time!

And yet we're supposed to think that Clinton bears no culpability for Benghazi (as she ignored the security requests of the late Ambassador Stevens), in addition to no conflict of interest between her Foundation and her position as Secretary of State! She stands accused of a cover-up on Benghazi, and yet she won't turn over the (illegal) server which would exonerate her--a private server set up for no other reason than to shield information from the public--and there happens to be an extremely suspicious and convenient gap in the emails she turned over, precisely when one would expect these issues to have developed?!?

If you're not suspicious about this, you're in denial.

Without a doubt, she compromised national security and quite possibly committed 1000s of federal crimes by keeping classified info on her personal server--a fact which she denied but has now been proven true:

WASHINGTON — Government investigators said Friday that they had discovered classified information on the private email account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used while secretary of state, stating unequivocally that those secrets never should have been stored outside of secure government computer systems.

Mrs. Clinton has said for months that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up in her house so she would not have to carry both a personal phone and a work phone. Her campaign said Friday that any government secrets found on the server had been classified after the fact.

But the inspectors general of the State Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies said the information they found was classified when it was sent and remains so now. Information is considered classified if its disclosure would likely harm national security, and such information can be sent or stored only on computer networks with special safeguards.


“This classified information never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system,” Steve A. Linick, the State Department inspector general, said in a statement signed by him and I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community.

link

So far, 10% of her emails (in the small sample examined by the IGs) contained classified info that risked national security. She has compromised our security and put people's lives in danger, all to protect herself from the legitimate public scrutiny which we'd expect to have of any government official, but especially one as high ranking as Secretary of State. Petreus was prosecuted for a much less egregious example of precisely this kind of crime. It should invalidate her from holding any public office, much less the highest one. That's not my opinion, that's actually the law.

Anyone who trusts Hillary to be president after this is a damn fool and a partisan tool. You really should be ashamed of yourself. This is reprehensible for any official to evade scrutiny in this manner and compromise our national security to do it. She CANNOT be trusted.