Hillary's Email Scandal

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Hashi Lebwohl
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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

The FBI obtained its warrant to begin reviewing the e-mail messages on the laptop over the weekend.

Some people are calling for Comey to be arrested for violating the Hatch Act. My response to that would be: if Comey gets arrested for violating Hatch then Hillary should be arrested for violating Title 18 Chapter 101 Section 2071.
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Post by Cail »

The Hatch Act doesn't apply to an ongoing federal investigation.
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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

Indeed. That is simply the Democrat method of attempting to shoot the messenger.

Huma claims that she was having difficulty printing out e-mail messages from her State Department e-mail account. That is complete rubbish--if she cannot print something, or has difficulty printing something, the first thing she should do is call her IT Department's Help Desk. I know that to be true because I am the Help Desk at my corporation and when people have problems printing they call me. You don't forward the e-mail messages to your Yahoo e-mail account, which is incredibly insecure. Speaking of a lack of security, was her Yahoo account one of the ones which was recently compromised about a month or two ago?
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Post by Avatar »

So, without any conclusion or judgement on my part, I found this interesting:

The actual FBI report on the whole email thing: https://vault.fbi.gov/hillary-r.-clinton

Conclusions drawn by some guy from the released FBI report: https://medium.com/the-curious-civilian ... .t4asmczej

He's basically saying that all these people bothered by the scandal don't actually know what it is about. Worth a look maybe. :)

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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

That is a wonderfully apologetic piece but it doesn't excuse the fact that as Secretary of State she should never have been allowed to use any non-State Department e-mail servers, regardless of how convenient or familiar it might have been. Her mobile devices should also have been issued to her from the State Department IT team (which they probably were) even if they were devices with which she was not completely familiar. Based on the contracts we have with service providers, if you are a remotely-based sales person with our corporation and you get issued a phone you will get an iPhone whether you want one or not--you don't get a choice.

Whether she meant to or not, she violated the laws regarding the handling and storing/caching of government documents.
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Post by Avatar »

I don't think he was disputing that, just pointing out that it's not this massive leak of sensitive data / state secrets or evidence of nefarious or criminal dealings.

Just policy-violating data management. Which is really not the way it's being spun.

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Post by Zarathustra »

Av, the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not investigate policy violations or data management. They investigate crimes. Serious crimes. Federal crimes. In this case, we're talking about the violation of the Espionage Act, which forbids the transmission, destruction, or stealing (i.e. removing from classified servers) of classified, national security information.
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Post by Avatar »

Sure. My point is still that it appears that the emails themselves appear to have actually been pretty innocuous.

That said, I didn't read the FBI report, just the inferences that some people have drawn from them. Y'all are free to do the same.

Was just adding it to the discussion is all.

You should see the shit that's happening here if you want to talk about corrupt officials etc. :D Our president has been found guilty of violating the constitution, his oath of office, and the executive ethics laws and he's still the president. :D Welcome to Africa.

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Post by Zarathustra »

Comey found 1000s of emails containing classified information, including the very highest levels of classified info--i.e. national security level secrets. That's not innocuous. And that's just in the emails that she turned over after her team wiped the server and deleted 30,000. In other words, those are just the ones she missed.

The Weiner computer has 100s of 1000s, and we're now learning that it has State Department emails. The fact that she was so careless with official government records itself is not innocuous. It illustrates an almost treasonous lack of judgment, a moronic recklessness that can only be explained by an even larger desire to hide her communications from the people she was supposed to be serving. The fact that there is no other explanation for such stupidity in a smart woman, combined with the fact that she deleted 30,000 before turning them over, is enough to surmise that she has indeed succeeded in hiding the worst from us.

In other words, they only appear innocuous (to the extent that they do--which I reject) in as much as she succeeded in her deception and cover-up.
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Post by Holsety »

If I was more educated on technology I might be able to understand this, but why is it proving difficult to trace emails sent to clinton's server? I mean, those sent from government accounts? I know there are countless government agencies and such, but it feels like our government should at least be able to trace, say, emails sent from state department employees to clinton's private email server.

As far as I can tell, emails weren't rerouted to her private email from her state dept email - it looks like she never agreed to have a state dept email set up. It looks like at least some of the people in the state dept would have been sending emails directly to clinton's private email server, and it was definitely a .com address, not a .gov email address.

If it's not clear, what I'm asking is: if there are state dept employees who sent classified information to Clinton's email server, are they implicated?

This would not exonerate clinton since we already know she deleted her own emails, and it looks like she failed to archive them, too.

EDIT-Even if every email Clinton deleted was completely innocent, her/her campaign's inability to provide an adequate explanation/backup of her emails and be transparent about what went on has wasted so much of time that it approaches criminality, and I am not really trying to be funny here.
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Post by Holsety »

BTW I think the laws hashi quoted could maybe be argued inapplicable to the issue at hand (I feel like every key verb could be deflected as not quite what clinton did, but it's a tedious argument), but I don't think this one would be:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
from:
www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/28/141630 ... ate-server

I don't know if I agree with every single argument the author made, but I think he/she basically made a solid argument.
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Post by Zarathustra »

Holsety wrote:...if there are state dept employees who sent classified information to Clinton's email server, are they implicated?
The FBI handed out numerous immunity agreements to those implicated in this investigation, for some bizarre reason.

Don't forget, there's at least one email where Hillary is explicitly telling people how to remove the classification heading before emailing it to her. They knew exactly what they were doing. That's why Obama used a pseudonym to contact her on her private server. (Why that's not a bigger story is beyond me.)

After Comey made the case that she was extremely careless in handling classified info, she was only saved from prosecution because (he said) there's no evidence that she intended to mishandle classified info. But that makes absolutely no sense. Not only is there the email where she tells underlings to remove the classified heading before sending to her, but she had to know from the very beginning that a Secretary of State would be receiving classified documents! It's part of the job! There's absolutely no way she could have set up that server WITHOUT the intent to improperly handle classified information.
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Post by Avatar »

So after going through the new emails they're sticking with their recommendation that she should not be charged.
Z wrote:Comey found 1000s of emails containing classified information, including the very highest levels of classified info--i.e. national security level secrets.
Did you get that out of the report? What I saw being bandied about was that of 62,000 emails, 110 were classified at the time of sending / receiving.

Not "state secret" classified, just 110 had any level of classification at all, at the time.

About 2,000 more became classified to some extent later.

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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

Holsety wrote:BTW I think the laws hashi quoted could maybe be argued inapplicable to the issue at hand
That is entirely probable given that I am not a lawyer.

Yes, Comey has come out and changed his mind/switched directions again. At this point he has lost all credibility so that no matter who wins the election he is out. His best option is to tender his resignation and take his pension. Having already cried "wolf" once we may now ignore him on this particular issue. Even if some FBI research finds definitive, smoking-gun proof of a crime in the e-mails on the Weiner laptop it won't matter because the damage to the FBI credibility has already occurred.

Truthfully, although there is probably still evidence of some sort of wrongdoing or document mismanagement somewhere we should stick a fork in this topic--it is done.
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Post by Holsety »

That is entirely probable given that I am not a lawyer.
Not criticizing, I am not a lawyer either, and please note I've provided what may be more relevant (unsure).
Don't forget, there's at least one email where Hillary is explicitly telling people how to remove the classification heading before emailing it to her. They knew exactly what they were doing. That's why Obama used a pseudonym to contact her on her private server. (Why that's not a bigger story is beyond me.)
As someone who was ignorant of this, and looked into the reports on the emails: you know how it is - we don't know it was classified because the headings were removed. Why were they removed? Content redacted, but they were having trouble with the secure fax line so sent it nonsecure.
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Post by Ur Dead »

A valid question.
How did or whom transferred State Department emaisl to a machine that could be stolen from Weiner if a third party knew that they were there?

Would that be more damaging than General and former CIA director David Petraeus did?

Talk about incompetent with government documents.
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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

It is also suspicious that these State Department people have trouble sending faxes, even secure faxes. Fax technology is decades old at this point--it is about as trivial as driving a car (presuming you have been driving a car for more than 5 years). Besides, who uses phone lines for sending faxes these days, anyway? If you want to send a file you encrypt it, attach it to an e-mail message, encrypt that for an extra layer, then send it. True, most hackers probably couldn't intercept POTS telephone transmissions over copper but that is incredibly slow.

The other thing that no one has stated so far is that even if Hillary were somehow convicted of some crime between now and January 19, Obama would just pardon her.
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Post by Holsety »

Hashi Lebwohl wrote:It is also suspicious that these State Department people have trouble sending faxes, even secure faxes. Fax technology is decades old at this point--it is about as trivial as driving a car (presuming you have been driving a car for more than 5 years). Besides, who uses phone lines for sending faxes these days, anyway? If you want to send a file you encrypt it, attach it to an e-mail message, encrypt that for an extra layer, then send it. True, most hackers probably couldn't intercept POTS telephone transmissions over copper but that is incredibly slow.
Your general dislike for faxes is blinding you to the fact that they are actually still used. Even though it may be justified, and they may really be outdated, there is a sector where they are used frequently - even in offices where email is also used much, much more frequently. I honestly can't give you a good justification for it. But once you get over it and acknowledge that outdated technology is still used, you will realize that your dislike of the technology may be because there are real issues. For instance, in my experience a busy fax line can't receive another fax. An office may use their normal fax line as a phone line (note: I believe one of the sets of emails shows hillary wasn't sure if she should have the phone hung up or not). If Hillary bumped the phone cord, she could have dislodged it. If she has multiple lines (we used to at home), the fax may have been plugged into the wrong line. If you had a large volume of faxes (clearly not relevant in this circumstance) you can actually get a queue of faxes, even if it's set up so that the faxes will be re-sent if they fail. I really don't use faxes that often, but I'm still aware of some of these basic issues.
www.pcworld.com/article/2083980/why-the ... ll-it.html

You can't actually expect that, because a tech has problems, people won't use it, and that if they do use it, those problems won't affect them.

Believe me, many offices still use faxes. I honestly think the creation of a chokepoint is helpful to them until they need to go through one themselves - you are correct that they are slow.

I worked at a logistics firm for a few months in 2014 and they actually had a couple messengers who actually traveled by car with documents - I actually can't remember the specifications of which kinds of documents needed to be brought by them, but making sure to have certain kinds of documents would be ready for them around the time they made their second collection, which was before our office ended normal hours. Fax and email were frequently used at that office (generally when we scanned documents we emailed them to ourselves and faxed them to others) for documents. I dunno what the advantage was, whether it was security or something else.

All this being said, it's not really justifiable. If she was supposed to have sent it secure because, say, everything was supposed to have been sent secure, then she should have, even if it really was an innocuous document. We know classified documents got sent to a private server. She should've been archiving to a state department email - she refused to even have one set up when she joined up. Maybe there's worse and maybe we will find it, but it's already ugh.

Even if no particular secret leaked out, I think there's wrongdoing on Clinton's part, and I think it's fair to suspect some of the apparent mistakes made could be due to covering her tracks, but if in the consideration of that you find regular incompetence suspicious simply because it exists at high levels of government I can't understand you. It would have been there even if she hadn't been trying to do anything wrong.

Based on my understanding of how faxes work, removing the headings probably didn't affect the fax's ability to go through. I haven't ever heard of someone faxing something and the fax machine refusing to send it because it scanned the content and found something objectionable. That, or fax machines find the butts of impish office workers totally unobjectionable.

God, if a pardon got handed out to her that'd be disgusting. Wouldn't be the first time.
A valid question.
How did or whom transferred State Department emaisl to a machine that could be stolen from Weiner if a third party knew that they were there?

Would that be more damaging than General and former CIA director David Petraeus did?

Talk about incompetent with government documents.
Weiner's spouse was the one who would have potentially justifiable access to the documents as she worked for Clinton (not sure if it'd actually be true) - Weiner himself having access would be an issue, I think, even if no one else did. However, it's true that some of the statutes me or Hashi gave say that a government worker might be responsible for a third party getting access to docs, even if it was just the result of negligence.

Petraeus probably didn't do as much, I think. Because it looks like he stuck to talking to one person, it seems like it would be a lot easier to trace stuff coming out. Downside of course is that the record of what he said is probably murky/nonexistent since IIRC they were personal conversations. Because both Clinton and Petreaus were at a very high level, we . For context: it looks like Broadwell had about 300 classified documents on her computer - she had clearance to look at documents, but not to remove them from authorized storage facilities. I'm not sure if I got all that right - that's what it looked like based on what I read. It looks likely that Clinton shared information from britain regarding afghanistan with a guy who wasn't a gov't employee, sidney blumenthal, even though government protocol would dictate this level of information would be assumed classified even if it hadn't been already (i.e. in response to av's statements that some of the info wasn't classified when sent - the government is actually somewhat sophisticated, or is supposed to be, and government workers should know that at least some information should be treated as classified even if it hasn't been explicitly marked as such).

www.aol.com/article/2015/08/21/exclusiv ... /21225607/

Even in Petreaus's case, it is kind of hard to believe that sharing information with Broadwell wasn't partially motivated by a desire to influence how an account of his life would be shaped.
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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

I know many doctor's offices still use landline faxes, mostly because those doctors have not updated their technology in 20 years. The next time you are in a hospital or doctor's office, check out the tech--there is a niche subset of IT with almost guaranteed job security because those techs support medical devices which are no longer made. Not my previous job but the one two before this one was support for a hospital chain and some of the patient information systems were still running on DOS in 2006. No, I am not kidding.

Now that the election is over and Hillary lost, I am seriously considering closing this thread, as well. She is finished--there is no point in pursing her any more, even if she did bend and/or break some laws. She is now a has-been; time to let her retire into obscurity.
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Post by Zarathustra »

Close the thread if you want, but you'll have to reopen it. 8)
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