Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Memo to Republicans: You've Got Fail


Hillary Clinton held a press conference today to answer questions about email.

A week ago, the New York Times reported that during her time as Secretary of State,  Ms. Clinton had used a private email server to conduct both personal and official business. The Times speculated on whether any rules may have been broken. None were, since the current restrictions on official State Department email use were not in place until John Kerry took over as SoS. Before Ms. Clinton, Colin Powell had also used personal email for state business, eliciting no one's concern.

Further, this was already an old story, since the State Department had requested last October for all former Secretaries of State to turn over all their old emails, and Ms. Clinton had complied shortly thereafter, producing 55,000 pages of documents. She has since asked that all those emails be made public. The State Department is reviewing them to remove any classified or personal material, and is expected shortly to comply with her request. Despite this, speculation rages from the usual suspects about what non-data she isn't hiding in the emails she has completely released.

Only three other former Secretaries of State ever used email at all --  Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.. Ms Rice and Ms Albright apparently hadn't made extensive use of email, and didn't produce any documents when the State Department requested them. General Powell hadn't retained any emails, having deleted them all, eliciting no one's concern, and so he didn't produce any either. Reportedly, speculation isn't raging about what these three aren't producing.

The server that Ms Clinton had used was one owned and operated by the Clinton family, and habitually used by the former president, William Jefferson Clinton. It was kept physically secure by the Secret Service, and its software was kept secure by the fortune of the Clinton family, who were able to afford the best software security available. There is no evidence of the server being less secure than any government servers, nor any evidence that any sensitive communications were compromised. This complete lack of anything to be concerned about seems to have led to raging speculation about how insecure the server wasn't.

The majority of emails sent to and from Ms, Clinton's account had either come from, or were sent to (or cc:'ed to) other people who worked at the State Department or in the Obama Administration, which means nearly all of the official emails already had copies on other government servers, leading to raging speculation about emails that are already in government possession. 

In short, Ms. Clinton seems to have followed both the letter and the spirit of the law, and is in the process of producing more information than anyone has asked for. Naturally, Republicans are therefore doing their best to invent a scandal, led by the current chef Benghazi persecutor, Trey Gowdy. As with all the other non-scandals Republicans have invented about the Clintons personally, the Obama Administration, or the Clinton Administration, nothing is expected to come from this non-scandal either, except a lot of snippy emails.

9 comments:

  1. If it wasn't so depressingly familiar (i.e. Clinton-bashing via make-believe or totally irrelevant or just plain WRONG "scandals") I'd laugh my head off.

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  2. And about those Sarah Palin emails that liberals were so obsessed with...

    Funny how partisanship dictates one's viewpoint.

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  3. Grog, I don't know anything about any Sarah Palin emails, and I frankly don't care.

    But nice attempt at deflection.

    I note you don't find anything to object to in the blog post itself.

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  4. This story doesn't interest me. What does interest me is hypocrisy and short memories.

    I hope like heck that Hillary gets the nomination, so I don't want to see her getting herself in to too many scandals.

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  5. You're going to have to explain what "hypocrisy and short memories" you're talking about. I honestly recall nothing about Palin letters.

    But since you don't care about this topic, why are you discussing it?

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  6. Ok, a quick google turned up this story about Palin whining that AFTER the 2008 election was over, she had to comply with FOIA requests to turn over her emails during her time as governor.

    Once again, you have a completely false equivalence. Palin was trying to keep some emails out of the public eye. Hillary is turning over everything, and did so months before this story broke.

    On the one hand, Palin was trying to avoid complying with FOIA requests. On the other, Hillary is not.

    What "hypocrisy" do you see? I admit to a short memory -- I didn't give a damn about Palin's emails back then, and I don't now. It never made my radar, because once the 2008 election was over, Palin's desperate attempts to stay in the media eye (as with is current bout of public whining) are little more than amusing nonsense.

    So tell me, on what possible planet is there any sort of equivalence here?

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  7. "Once again, you have a completely false equivalence. Palin was trying to keep some emails out of the public eye. Hillary is turning over everything, and did so months before this story broke."

    Um, what? After the 2008 campaign, Palin was deluged with FOIA requests for all her emails. She handed over everything. Her email was even hacked by a liberal, who was convicted. Meanwhile, Hillary also has FOIA requests for her emails. However, hers are on her own personal email server. She's handed over about half the emails, the others she's deleted as she claims they were "private". Gee, so much for FOIA if politicians can just setup their own email servers and delete the emails they feel like..

    "The server that Ms Clinton had used was one owned and operated by the Clinton family, and habitually used by the former president, William Jefferson Clinton."

    Evidently, Billy Jeff has only sent 2 emails in his life, so it wasn't much of a "habit", for him at least.

    "Naturally, Republicans are therefore doing their best to invent a scandal"

    MSNBC, CNN, and the 100+ reporters that showed up for press conference today to ask just about her emails...are doing their best too.

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  8. RG,

    As I said, I don't care about Palin's emails. If you want to treat them he same way you're treating Ms Clinton's, go right ahead.

    Let me know when you find something other than imagination here. I have no idea what the conspiracy nuts are hoping to find. Do you?

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  9. Hillary is toast. Ex director of FOIA requests says. Basically, no matter how much the Clintons want to make this "everyone does it", what Hillary did was truly unprecedented and malicious.

    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-defense-laughable-foia-116116.html?hp=t1_r#.VQhlZmyMJFW

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