NYT, MSNBC, CNN: Hillary broke the law
#1
Hillary breaking the law? Is anyone shocked?

The NYT just reported that while Sec. of State she violated federal law by conducting all her official on a private email account, thus none of her emails have been saved and backed up on government servers. Even her staunchest supporters are unable to defend her, especially considering the recent revelation that while sec of state, the Clinton foundation was receiving millions donations from both corporations and foreign countries attempting receive favor from the state dept which Hillary headed.

Quote:Politics
Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTMARCH 2, 2015
Photo
Hillary Rodham Clinton had no government email address. Credit Liam Richards/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press



WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.
Continue reading the main story
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Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.

“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.

Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.

But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.
Continue reading the main story

“It’s a shame it didn’t take place automatically when she was secretary of state as it should have,” said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a group based at George Washington University that advocates government transparency. “Someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment.”

Mr. Blanton said high-level officials should operate as President Obama does, emailing from a secure government account, with every record preserved for historical purposes.

“Personal emails are not secure,” he said. “Senior officials should not be using them.”

Penalties for not complying with federal record-keeping requirements are rare, because the National Archives has few enforcement abilities.

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, declined to detail why she had chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account. He said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State Department officials at their government accounts, she had “every expectation they would be retained.” He did not address emails that Mrs. Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government officials outside the State Department.

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.


The time frame for this Information revelation to have come out would have been during her appointment Time. That it comes out now led me to...



What at least a few of us have gotta be thinking: if she was striking a high-profile blow at either records retention or auditors, it's...


And others who, like Mrs. Clinton, are eyeing a candidacy for the White House are stressing a very different approach. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, released a trove of emails in December from his eight years as governor of Florida.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton’s private email account included encryption or other security measures, given the sensitivity of her diplomatic activity.

Mrs. Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, has used a government email account since taking over the role, and his correspondence is being preserved contemporaneously as part of State Department records, according to his aides.

Before the current regulations went into effect, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, used personal email to communicate with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders.

Last October, the State Department, as part of the effort to improve its record keeping, asked all previous secretaries of state dating back to Madeleine K. Albright to provide it with any records, like emails, from their time in office for preservation.

“These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s emails to ensure that we are capturing all federal records,” said a department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.

The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi as it sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides about the attack.

Two weeks ago, the State Department, after reviewing Mrs. Clinton’s emails, provided the committee with about 300 emails — amounting to roughly 900 pages — about the Benghazi attacks.

Mrs. Clinton and the committee declined to comment on the contents of the emails or whether they will be made public.

The State Department, Ms. Psaki said, “has been proactively and consistently engaged in responding to the committee’s many requests in a timely manner, providing more than 40,000 pages of documents, scheduling more than 20 transcribed interviews and participating in several briefings and each of the committee’s hearings.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/pol....html?_r=0



Quote:MSNBC’s O’Donnell: No Explanation for Hillary E-mail Story
by Ian Hanchett2 Mar 2015108

MSNBC’s “The Last Word” host Lawrence O’Donnell said that there is “no conceivable, rational explanation” for Hillary Clinton only using a personal e-mail during her time as Secretary of State on Monday.

O’Donnell dubbed Clinton’s actions “a stunning breach of security,” adding “if it’s true that she never used a State Department e-mail address, we have something that, at first read, has no conceivable, rational explanation to it.”

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters said that the story raises questions about how “forthcoming” Clinton is.

MSNBC Senior Editor Beth Fouhy wondered who in the State Department would have allowed Clinton to use only a personal e-mail for so long and how no one could have noticed Clinton repeatedly sending e-mails from a personal account. She also stated that it “makes no sense” for Clinton to act in such a manner.

Fouhy concluded the discussion by pointing out that the e-mails were discovered by the Benghazi Select Committee that critics had dismissed as a “political,” and “redundant” waste of time.

Quote:Gibbs: ‘Highly Unusual’ Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email As Secretary Of State
March 3, 2015 9:55 AM

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs believes it’s “highly unusual” that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would use a personal email account, and not a governmental one, during her time at the State Department.

The New York Times reports that Clinton only used a personal account to conduct government business over email as secretary of state. By doing so, it “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record,” according to The Times.

The former press secretary for President Barack Obama told NBC’s “Today” he can’t think of a reason why Clinton wouldn’t have a government email account.

RELATED: O’Malley Won’t Seek Mikulski Seat, Keeps White House Option Open

“I think it is obviously highly unusual. There are lots of briefings that you have when you go into the White House about preserving any email that you have, making sure that it’s part of your official account,” he said.

Gibbs said that Clinton’s camp needs to get out in front of the email story.

“I think it’s something that they’re going to have to explain in good measure today and probably figure out how to get a lot of those emails, or as many as they can, back in the archives,” Gibbs told “Today.”

Gibbs added that this will be perfect fodder for critics to hit back at the former secretary of state.

“I think there’s no doubt. I think it’s another one of those things the Clinton campaign – such as it is – is going to have to explain,” Gibbs said. “I think it’s much easier for critics to explain why they don’t exist than it might be for her to explain why she used her private email.”

RELATED: Hillary Clinton: ‘The Science Is Clear: Vaccines Work’

Clinton’s office said nothing was illegal or improper about her use of the non-government account and that she believed her business emails to State Department and other .gov accounts would be archived in accordance with government rules.

“Like Secretaries of State before her, she used her own email account when engaging with any department officials,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said. “For government business, she emailed them on their department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained. When the department asked former secretaries last year for help ensuring their emails were in fact retained, we immediately said ‘yes’.”

“Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government email, as long as appropriate records were preserved,” he said.

Potential Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has already gone on the offensive against Clinton. The former Florida governor tweeted that Clinton’s unclassified emails should be released.

“Transparency matters. Unclassified Hillary Clinton emails should be released. You can see mine, here. jebbushemails.com,” Bush posted on Twitter.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/03/0...-of-state/
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#2
Quote:Hacked e-mails indicate that Hillary Clinton used a domain registered the day of her Senate hearings
By Philip Bump March 2 at 10:15 PM

The New York Times reported Monday night that, during her tenure at the State Department, Hillary Clinton never used her official e-mail account to conduct communications, relying instead on a private e-mail account. As the Times notes, only official accounts are automatically retained under the Federal Records Act, meaning that none of Clinton's e-mail communication was preserved.

In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his e-mail hacked by "Guccifer" -- the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush's paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the "clintonemail.com" domain. The content of some of those e-mails was published by RT.com.
Bush calls for Clinton e-mails to be released(1:11)
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has come under fire for using a personal e-mail account for all of her work messages. (Reuters)

Examining the registry information for "clintonemail.com" reveals that the domain was first created on Jan. 13, 2009 -- one week before President Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton's confirmation hearings began before the Senate.

[Image: Screen-Shot-2015-03-02-at-9.41.02-PM.png]

As the Times notes, others have used private e-mail accounts for official business, including former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. The extent of Clinton's hidden communication, part of her work in a much more significant capacity, is unknown.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-...-hearings/

Quote:Experts: Hillary Broke the Law
8:37 AM, Mar 3, 2015
BY DANIEL HALPER


A CNN reporter, citing experts, said that Hillary Clinton broke the law by using her personal email account to conduct official State Department business while she was secretary of state.

CNN: Experts Say Hillary Clinton Broke The Law

"This is a very big deal," Brianna Keilar said to host Chris Cuomo. "And you said she may have broken laws or rules here, Chris, well a lot of experts say that she did by using only a personal account while she was secretary of state. This is a huge development, especially as Hillary Clinton is just perhaps weeks from declaring her candidacy for president."

"So her spokesperson says that she, while using this personal account, was adhering to the spirit and the letter of the law, but consider this: President Obama for instance he has a government email account. This is for a couple of reasons. Because it's secure and also for the preservation of historic records. She used only her personal account, and that means she and her aides have tremendous discretion when it comes to the preservation or handing over of documents for certain things, say Benghazi or other issues where documents may be needed."

Keilar went on to suggest other Democrats might be tempted to run for president after this latest revelation.
http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/expert...73502.html
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#3
I will not vote for Clinton. I can only hope there will be a better choice available.
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#4
Hillary Flashback: I’m ‘Most Transparent Person In Public Life’
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#5
(03-03-2015, 10:54 AM)Valuesize Wrote: I will not vote for Clinton. I can only hope there will be a better choice available.

O'Malley is going to announce shortly and I bet Warren jumps in too
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#6
Quote:Now The New York Times is reporting that Clinton used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, an apparent violation of federal requirements that her records be retained.
Exposed by a House committee investigating the Benghazi Consulate attack, Clinton brazenly dug in her heels. Advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal email and decided which ones to release: Just 55,000 emails were given to the State Department.
Transparency isn't the only issue. Clinton exposed confidential and potentially dangerous information to a nonsecure, commercial email system. She gave Chinese spies a better shot at reading her emails than U.S. taxpayers.
The Times quoted a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration who said there is only one scenario under which it's proper for Cabinet-level officials to use private rather than government email: "nuclear winter."
The rest of us are required to play by the rules. Why does Clinton think she's above them?
Clinton aides quickly funneled through friendly media channels examples of Republicans who used private emails, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Powell operated under a different set of federal rules than Clinton. Bush was not a federal employee (yes, he should release all of his Florida emails, and not just self-selected documents).
This is another Clinton trope: Deflect attention from their wrongdoing by pointing fingers at others—as if two wrongs make a right and they had never promised to set a higher standard.
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told The Times that she has been complying with the "letter and spirit of the rules." No, she hasn't. But here again is a reminder of the 1990s: When cornered, the Clintons denied facts and demonized detractors.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/twenty-si...s-20150303
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#7
Quote:Maybe Hillary Clinton Should Retire Her White House Dreams
Maybe she doesn't want to run in 2016, top Democrats wonder. Maybe she shouldn't.
By Ron Fournier

March 3, 2015 Perhaps Hillary Rodham Clinton shouldn't run for president.

Maybe she should stay at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, where the former secretary of State could continue her life's work of building stronger economies, health care systems, and families. Give paid speeches. Write best-selling books. Spend time with Charlotte, her beloved granddaughter.

Because she doesn't seem ready for 2016. Like a blast of wintry air in July, the worst of 1990s-style politics is intruding on what needs to be a new millennium campaign: Transparent, inspirational, innovative, and beyond ethical reproach.

Two weeks ago, we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted contributions from foreign countries. Assurances from the Obama administration and Clinton aides that no donations were made during her tenure as secretary of State were proven false.

I called the actions sleazy and stupid. Sleazy because any fair-minded person would suspect the foreign countries of trying to buy Clinton's influence. Stupid because the affair plays into a decades-old knock on the Clintons: They'll cut any corner for campaign cash. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his top aides used the White House as a tool to court and reward big donors.

Now The New York Times is reporting that Clinton used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, an apparent violation of federal requirements that her records be retained.

Exposed by a House committee investigating the Benghazi Consulate attack, Clinton brazenly dug in her heels. Advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal email and decided which ones to release: Just 55,000 emails were given to the State Department.

Those are our emails, not hers. What is she hiding?


Transparency isn't the only issue. Clinton exposed confidential and potentially dangerous information to a nonsecure, commercial email system. She gave Chinese spies a better shot at reading her emails than U.S. taxpayers.

The Times quoted a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration who said there is only one scenario under which it's proper for Cabinet-level officials to use private rather than government email: "nuclear winter."

The rest of us are required to play by the rules. Why does Clinton think she's above them?

Clinton aides quickly funneled through friendly media channels examples of Republicans who used private emails, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Powell operated under a different set of federal rules than Clinton. Bush was not a federal employee (yes, he should release all of his Florida emails, and not just self-selected documents).

This is another Clinton trope: Deflect attention from their wrongdoing by pointing fingers at others—as if two wrongs make a right and they had never promised to set a higher standard.

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told The Times that she has been complying with the "letter and spirit of the rules." No, she hasn't. But here again is a reminder of the 1990s: When cornered, the Clintons denied facts and demonized detractors.

The most obvious example is Bill Clinton's lying about his affair with a White House intern. "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," he said. Less remembered is an independent counsel's finding of "substantial evidence" that then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton lied under oath about her role in the 1993 White House travel office firings.


Many senior Democrats are angry, though not yet mad enough to publicly confront the Clintons. "This story has legs as long as the election," said a Democrat who has worked on Capitol Hill and as a presidential campaign manager. "She will be tripping over this crap until the cows come home."

Another presidential campaign veteran who held a Cabinet-level post in Bill Clinton's White House fretted out loud about the fact that the former first lady is breezing toward the Democratic nomination.

"We can't have a coronation when she's handing Republicans an inquisition," the Democrat said.

Put me in the same category. Like these two Democrats, I've known both Clintons for years. I admire their intelligence and passion and empathy. They've been good to my family. I've actually long thought that she has the potential to be a better president than he was.

But now I wonder whether there is a part of her that doesn't want to be president. She seems to be placing obstacles in her lane before the race begins. Is this sabotage or something else?

We've had sleazy and stupid—and, now, with these emails, suspicious. If she runs, are we going to have a full Seven Dwarfs?

Seedy.

Sanctimonious.

Self-important.

Slick.

My concern is that Clinton does not see this controversy as a personal failing. Rather, she sees it as a political problem that can be fixed with more polls, more money, and more attacks. In a Politico story about the push to assemble a presidential campaign staff, a former senior Clinton aide said, "We have had our head up our ass. This stuff isn't going to kill us, but it puts us behind the eight ball."

Due respect, Clinton's problem isn't a lack of staff. It's a lack of shame about money, personal accountability, and transparency.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/twenty-si...s-20150303
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#8
Relax, I'm sure the NSA has copies of all her E-mail. (along with all of SFliberal's)
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#9
If this is the biggest sin any of our political wanna-be's make this coming election cycle, we will all be lucky.
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#10
(03-03-2015, 03:29 PM)Wonky3 Wrote: If this is the biggest sin any of our political wanna-be's make this coming election cycle, we will all be lucky.

Ya. Lying about accepting money from foreign governments and corporations to gain favor while Hillary was Sec. of State and ignoring the Federal Records Act is no big deal. She's did what Clinton's do, lie and ignore the law. "What difference does it make?" She sounds like a perfect candidate for you dems.

All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal that others.


[Image: 83e0d-animal_farm_zpsf82b5c28.jpg]
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#11
(03-03-2015, 04:18 PM)SFLiberal Wrote:
(03-03-2015, 03:29 PM)Wonky3 Wrote: If this is the biggest sin any of our political wanna-be's make this coming election cycle, we will all be lucky.

Ya. Lying about accepting money from foreign governments and corporations to gain favor while Hillary was Sec. of State and ignoring the Federal Records Act is no big deal. She's did what Clinton's do, lie and ignore the law. "What difference does it make?" She sounds like a perfect candidate for you dems.

All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal that others.


[Image: 83e0d-animal_farm_zpsf82b5c28.jpg]

Those are CHARGES.
Let's wait and see what shakes out.
If she is guilty as charged, we (the Dems) will just put another good man or woman on the ticket. We got them stacked deep!
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#12
I don't know if this is a big deal or not, but if super secret stuff was discussed unencrypted, it would certainly ratchet up my concern. I can't imagine what Hillary was thinking, but I know Colin Powell and other politicians have done the same thing.

Why didn't the US Department of Government email Correspondence say something about this earlier?
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#13
(03-03-2015, 05:03 PM)Snail Wrote: I don't know if this is a big deal or not, but if super secret stuff was discussed unencrypted, it would certainly ratchet up my concern. I can't imagine what Hillary was thinking, but I know Colin Powell and other politicians have done the same thing.

Why didn't the US Department of Government email Correspondence say something about this earlier?

Her personal email may have been encrypted...we don't know do we? Still, rookie move and she should have used the right channel. And yes...whey NOW?
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#14
Quote:Pushback on Hillary emails falls short
A pro-Clinton armada of progressive groups led by David Brock – Media Matters For America, American Bridge and Correct The Record – is waging an aggressive effort to dismiss the coverage of Hillary Clinton's potential violation of federal email requirements as "deceptive."
The news of Clinton's use of personal emails for official business was first reported by The New York Times.
The Times article, by Washington-based reporter Michael Schmidt, stated that Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email address at the State Department "may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record." In reports and press releases, Brock's groups argued that Schmidt's article neglected to mention that the relevant portions of the Federal Records Act pertaining to such requirement did not go into effect until November 2014, after Clinton's tenure at State.
Unfortunately for these pro-Hillary groups, the regulations that are relevant to Schmidt's report – the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements – have been in place since at least 2009, when Clinton became secretary of state.
According to Section 1236.22 of the 2009 NARA requirements, which Schmidt provided in an email, "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."
In short, the State Department was required to ensure that Secretary Clinton's emails, including those on personal accounts, were preserved in an agency record-keeping system. The failure to ensure such preservation would therefore likely be in violation of the federal requirements, though it's not clear whether all of her personal emails – or just those related to official business – would be required.
Schmidt believes that all of Clinton's emails would be required, and pointed to a 2008 definition from NARA that defines federal records as "documentary materials that agencies create and receive while conducting business that provide evidence of the agency's organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and operations, or because they contain information of value."
Reached for comment, Media Matters President Bradley Beychok said, "Sloppy reporting created this ambiguity and the questions about which rule or law is being referred to should be directed to the New York Times. Last night, Politico itself reported that it was the 2014 law enacted after Secretary Clinton left office that was applicable in this case. Beyond that, now the New York Times' own source says Hillary Clinton didn't violate the law. It raises the question: did the New York Times ask its own source whether Secretary Clinton violated the law? If not, why not?"
He referred the On Media blog to a statement from Jason Baron, the former head of litigation at NARA, who said Clinton didn't "violate" the law and called the legislation "amorphous."
On Monday night, POLITICO reported, "A bill President Barack Obama signed last November declared that official messages sent on personal email accounts must be copied to an employee’s official account or forwarded to such an account within 20 days. The law, which was not retroactive, allowed employees to be subject to disciplinary action for failing to archive records but it did not carry criminal penalties."
Asked about the report at today's White House press briefing, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said it was "the responsibility of agencies to preserve those records even when those records exist on a personal email account.”
"The president, what he insists that all of the agencies do, is live up to the obligations they have under the Federal Records Act," Earnest said.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015...html?ml=ri
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#15
(03-03-2015, 10:30 AM)SFLiberal Wrote: Hillary breaking the law? Is anyone shocked?

The NYT just reported that while Sec. of State she violated federal law
by conducting all her official on a private email account, thus none of her emails have been saved and backed up on government servers. Even her staunchest supporters are unable to defend her, especially considering the recent revelation that while sec of state, the Clinton foundation was receiving millions donations from both corporations and foreign countries attempting receive favor from the state dept which Hillary headed.
I think you exaggerate. I read that she may haveviolated the law. BTW, what law are you referring to, because she has not violated the 2009 NARA law unless she has destroyed emails or refuses to release them right?

The new law requiring the use of government email accounts was passed after Clinton left her position of Secretary of State. I think I am right, but lets see what I might have misunderstood.
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#16
The latest. The server Hillary used was registered to a non-existent man and was housed in her house at mansion in Chappaqua. The lies and deceit continue but what do you expect.. she's is a Clinton.

Quote:Hillary Clinton’s Off-the-Books Mail Server Was in Her House, Registered to a Non-Existent Man

by John Hayward4 Mar 2015633
Stage 2 of the Hillary email scandal has been achieved, as yesterday’s “confused old lady who didn’t understand how email works” defense utterly collapsed with the Associated Press’ discovery that Clinton’s mail server was located in her house (her estate in Chappaqua, to be exact — the one she had to settle for because she was “dead broke” after Bill left office) and was registered under the name of a man who does not appear to exist.

To their credit, liberal media figures quickly realized this wasn’t a story that could be waved away with a laugh, some standard Obama Administration pabulum about how much this furtive crew values transparency, and a few whiny stories about how Republicans were known to use private email, too. (ABC News didn’t get the message, so they launched an abortive attempt to protect Hillary by taking a poorly-researched swing at the Gmail address on the business card of Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, completely missing the point that Hillary routed all of her correspondence through her personal email address, and Chaffetz isn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act laws that govern the Secretary of State. Five minutes of Google time would have saved these Democrat-operatives-with-bylines a ton of embarrassment.)

Chaffetz also isn’t running a questionably secure secret mail server out of his basement. Yesterday we learned that Hillary registered her off-the-books mail domain on the very day her Senate confirmation hearings began, which is a rather significant clue that she knew exactly what she was doing. This morning the AP brings us more details:

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton’s emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton’s secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account — hdr22@clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym — for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

But homemade email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.

“Well-protected from theft or a physical hacking?” None of the big hacking crimes of the last few years have involved the miscreant actually slipping into the server room wearing Groucho glasses and escaping with a huge mail server tucked under his jacket. As the AP goes on to concede, we still don’t know much about how truly secure Clinton’s mail server was, or exactly what she was sending through it. And it will be tough to ask the man nominally in charge of it, because he apparently doesn’t exist:

It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton’s $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.

The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton’s email server. The former president’s full name is William Jefferson Clinton.

In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton’s private email account was reconfigured to use Google’s servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google’s accusations in June 2011 that China’s government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.

Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton’s private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.

We’ve learned one thing this morning about the enigmatic Mr. Hoteham: he uses the same P.O. Box as the Clinton Foundation — subject of the other big Hillary scandal concerning foreign money donated while she was Secretary of State.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) of the House Benghazi Committee revealed yesterday that Hillary was using more than one personal account. Were they all running off her Chappaqua server? If not, how secure were the other servers she used? As for the early Clinton spin that everyone she communicated with inside the Administration was using a proper email account that would be captured by the legally required archive systems, it turns out two of her top aides had off-the-books personal accounts too — one of them the aforementioned Huma Abedin.

Even if the server was 100 percent secure, with protection equivalent to the State Department system Hillary was required by federal law to use, there’s still the matter of how her off-the-books setup allowed her to easily evade FOIA requests. The Associated Press mentions that it’s been waiting for more than a year to get some State Department emails it requested.

The New York Times, which broke the Clinton email story based on information from the House Benghazi Committee, today listed some other FOIA requests that appear to have been thwarted by Hillary’s secret email system, including more details about the AP request than the Associated Press saw fit to mention in its own story:

In 2013, Nitasha Tiku, then a reporter for Gawker, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking all correspondence on Mrs. Clinton’s private email account between her and Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser and onetime staff member in the Clinton White House. Some of those emails had already spilled into public view and been reported in the news media. But the State Department told Gawker that it could find no records responsive to the request, Gawker reported.

[…] In December, The Associated Press said its FOIA requests for records related to Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, the oldest of which was submitted in March 2010, were not answered. In addition to requesting Mrs. Clinton’s schedules, The A.P. asked for correspondence related to Huma Abedin’s special arrangement to serve as a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton and consult for private clients. “We have not received any documents yet, despite the promised deadlines, and we are evaluating the situation,” said Erin Madigan White, spokeswoman for The A.P.

Conservative groups have filed numerous requests for information about Mrs. Clinton as she prepares for a possible presidential run. Citizens United is expecting a court ruling on Friday about a lawsuit the group filed last year after the State Department would not disclose flight records that would have shown who accompanied Mrs. Clinton on overseas trips. The group had intended to cross reference the agency’s flight manifests with the donors who contributed to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The FOIA request was just one of 16 appeals the group has made to the State Department since May that have gone unfulfilled. Those requests also included specific correspondence from Mrs. Clinton and her closest aides, including Cheryl D. Mills and Ms. Abedin.

America Rising, an anti-Clinton “super PAC,” has submitted a dozen FOIA requests for State Department records beginning last June.

Requests included correspondence between Ms. Mills and Clinton Foundation leadership and Ms. Abedin’s communication with members of Teneo, a private consultancy partly run by Doug Band, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton. Ms. Abedin had a special arrangement that allowed her to work at the State Department and be paid by Teneo, which offers strategic advice to major global corporations. America Rising also requested Mrs. Clinton’s schedule during the annual Clinton Global Initiative gatherings in New York.

In all cases, the State Department acknowledged receipt of the FOIA requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents. “Unfortunately, Clinton’s own political calculation and desire for secrecy, as evidenced by her exclusive use of personal email accounts while at State, is preventing an open process and full, fair review of her time there,” said Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for America Rising.

Another FOIA request directed at Hillary, from Veterans For A Strong America in 2012, specifically requested information on any personal accounts Clinton might have been using.

Of course, as Obama’s damage-control teams have always understood, timing is everything; any story can be deflated, defused, and discarded if vital details are kept hidden for long enough. The scandal that would sweep a politician away on a tide of public outrage, if full disclosure was achieved quickly, becomes “old news” and is eventually interred in the mausoleum of footnotes if disclosure can be stretched out for long enough. The media is well aware of this, which is why they produce white-hot wall-to-wall coverage and keep stories bubbling with the “breaking news” discovery of dubious facts or trivial anecdotes when a Republican is the target.

Is that tactic going to work in this case?

We’re back to the same old lawless narrative of the Obama years: the press is ultimately judge and jury when high Democrat officials break the law, because the legal mechanisms that should restrain executive power and hold the ruling class accountable have been completely disabled. All the bluffs and gentlemen’s agreements that kept power in check have been called and discarded. Obviously those who were given false answers to their FOIA requests are angry (or, in the case of Democrat media organizations, querulous), but in the end, it’s not clear what they can do about it, other than complain… and eventually the Clinton-friendly media will stop relaying their complaints. What are the odds that liberal royalty like Hillary Clinton would actually be held accountable and punished for a deliberate, elaborate effort to evade federal law? Wouldn’t Obama halt any investigation before it did real damage to her, the way his agencies have acted to thwart investigation of the IRS targeting scandal?

Maybe not.

While White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest did try to peddle some flim-flam about how both federal law and the Obama Administration’s much-touted transparency requirements are really kinda sorta optional for important people like Hillary Clinton, he also admitted that “very specific guidance has been given to agencies all across the government, which is specifically that employees in the Obama administration should use their official email accounts when they’re conducting official government business.” In the unusual situations where personal accounts could be used, “it is important for those records to be preserved, consistent with the Federal Records Act.”

This could be Team Obama backing off to a safe distance before the Hillary email scandal detonates in a cloud of career-shredding shrapnel. Maybe some people on the Obama team are not entirely sad to see Hillary go down. Some of those people might be named “Obama.”

The bottom line is that our federal transparency laws are not trifles to be settled by soap-opera personal conflicts, spin teams, or the troubled consciences of Democrats in the media. It’s also not good enough to tell voters to sit on their complaints until they get a chance to vent at the ballot box in a couple of years. That goes double if Hillary’s scheme compromised national security. We can’t be comfortable about that issue until we know more technical details about all of the servers she and her inner circle were using.
Hillary Clinton’s Off-the-Books Mail Server Was in Her House, Registered to a Non-Existent Man
Reply
#17
The spin has started and its not going real well....

Quote:Media Liberals Struggle to Spin Hillary’s Email Scandal

Liberals are having a tough time dealing with Hillary Clinton’s secret-email scandal. First up, there was a visibly discombobulated Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC, whose concession there was “no conceivable, rational explanation” for Clinton’s actions, mixed with CNN’s Chris Cuomo saying the story “smells terrible,” and a variety of other incredulous reactions.

Notice that several of the snippets above include questions about how Clinton’s disregard for federal law and State Department email protocols might have jeopardized national security. That is a very disturbing possibility. Maybe someone in the media will even dare to ask Hillary about it, assuming she doesn’t pull her usual post-scandal, gaffe-aftermath disappearing act.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinsky seemed punch-drunk with the sheer absurdity of Clinton’s email scheme. Brzezinsky kept asking how it was possible for Clinton to get away with this for four years without anyone noticing, which is a good question, although I suspect part of the answer is that a great deal of media email contact with someone like Hillary Clinton is actually routed through her entourage.

It’s also possible that people who had only intermittent contact with Clinton didn’t notice the strange email address she was using, depending on how prominently their email software displays proper names instead of email addresses. Certainly numerous people in the State Department, White House, and other elements of the Obama Administration had to be in on the scheme, but it’s not entirely shocking that those outside the Clinton inner circle didn’t pick up on it.

Scarborough called the email story “staggering” and, like some other commentators, found it typical of Clinton’s arrogant disdain for the rules.

“Every day in Washington D.C. when the Clintons were there was another example of how they just didn’t play by the same rules as everyone else,” he grumbled. “They know no boundaries. This is shocking.”

That’s not a narrative Hillary wants to settle into the media, although of course they’re unlikely to harp on it after she’s facing off against a Republican.

The email scandal might be unleashing some bottled-up anxiety from media liberals about whether Hillary is the ideal standard-bearer for 2016. The more bitterly partisan Democrats-with-a-byline are going to be pissed that she’s vindicated Rep. Trey Gowdy’s House Benghazi Committee, which broke this story. Less partisan reporters will be sincerely discomfited by such a blatant effort to circumvent transparency. (They can handle subtle efforts from their favorite politicians, mind you, but there’s a difference between running a “back-channel” comms network and not having a “front channel” at all.)

Matt Lauer of NBC News and former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, who slipped through that wonderful revolving door that allows Democratic mouthpieces to become mainstream-media commentators, commiserated about Hillary’s unpardonable sin of giving Republicans easy points to score against her — a “lay-up,” as Lauer put it.

“I think it’s much easier for critics to explain why they don’t exist than it might be for her to explain why she used her private email,” Gibbs agreed, although he still held out some thin hope that Team Clinton would be able to spin their way out of it.

Ron Fournier of National Journal also hit Clinton for arrogance and the security risk she created by using personal email, and he didn’t hesitate to say where he thought all this was going, right in the headline of his piece: “Maybe Hillary Clinton Should Retire Her White House Dreams.” Having already denounced the Clinton Foundation fundraising scandal as “sleazy and stupid,” Fournier was in no mood for a double whammy of Clinton hubris: “The rest of us are required to play by the rules. Why does Clinton think she’s above them?”

Fournier efficiently dispatched the first feeble spin attempt from Clinton’s camp, which involved dredging up old stories of personal email use by Republicans from decades gone by: “This is another Clinton trope: Deflect attention from their wrongdoing by pointing fingers at others—as if two wrongs make a right and they had never promised to set a higher standard.”

Whether he personally agrees with the things Clinton critics have been saying for the past two decades — he pauses to praise Bill and Hillary for their “intelligence and passion and empathy,” and says he thought Hillary would make an even better president than Bill — Fournier was furious against Hillary for working so hard to validate all of them, including the Clintons’ habit of insisting they weren’t doing whatever they’ve been caught doing.

“We can’t have a coronation when she’s handing Republicans an inquisition,” he quotes an unnamed Cabinet-level official from Bill Clinton’s term.

Discussing the story on CNN, Fournier said of the State Department’s excuses, “There is no explanation here. That is all spin. There are explicit rules for this. There weren’t for past Secretaries of State.” He spoke of receiving several phone calls from panicked Democrats who wondered if Hillary might have been sabotaging her own presidential campaign in advance (in 2009?) because she didn’t really want to run.

“There are Democrats out there who are really freaked out,” he concluded.

Ron Fournier on CNN


There are many words for what Hillary Clinton did, but “inexplicable” is not one of them. And she did indeed “hide the banana,” because she communicated with numerous individuals outside the Obama Administration with her personal account, leaving us with only her word of honor that she’s handed over all of the material that should be in government archives.

If the reaction from liberal “thought leaders” is meant to convey signals to the base, the sum total of what they’re saying is: Don’t try to minimize this or laugh it off, don’t try to wave it away by bringing up other officials’ use of personal email, be ready for the complaint that she might have jeopardized national security, and understand this is going to fit unpleasantly well into the public perception of Clinton arrogance. What’s left to work with after that, except to doggedly insist that Clinton is working super-hard to hand over everything that should be in the archives, and hope the subject can be changed quickly?
Media Liberals Struggle to Spin Hillary’s Email Scandal

America can't trust Clinton. Snippets from CNN, MSNBC and others
Reply
#18
(03-03-2015, 09:03 PM)Snail Wrote:
(03-03-2015, 10:30 AM)SFLiberal Wrote: Hillary breaking the law? Is anyone shocked?

The NYT just reported that while Sec. of State she violated federal law
by conducting all her official on a private email account, thus none of her emails have been saved and backed up on government servers. Even her staunchest supporters are unable to defend her, especially considering the recent revelation that while sec of state, the Clinton foundation was receiving millions donations from both corporations and foreign countries attempting receive favor from the state dept which Hillary headed.
I think you exaggerate. I read that she may haveviolated the law. BTW, what law are you referring to, because she has not violated the 2009 NARA law unless she has destroyed emails or refuses to release them right?

The new law requiring the use of government email accounts was passed after Clinton left her position of Secretary of State. I think I am right, but lets see what I might have misunderstood.

Nope. You are wrong. It was passed in 2009.

And remember that Obama promised the most transparent administration ever. They new the law, they were getting emails from Hillary, and yet Obama did nothing to correct her.

Another point. There have been several Freedom of Information Act requests regarding Hillary's actions as Sec of State and the state dept responded to those requests that nothing was found pertinent to those requests. Now we find out that nothing was found because there were no emails of hers on government servers.

And now it is being discovered that Hillary's top aids were also using the same private email domain as Hillary via her mystery server at Chappaqua. The violations of law continue to mount.
Reply
#19
(03-04-2015, 10:24 AM)SFLiberal Wrote: The latest. The server Hillary used was registered to a non-existent man and was housed in her house at mansion in Chappaqua. The lies and deceit continue but what do you expect.. she's is a Clinton.

Quote:Hillary Clinton’s Off-the-Books Mail Server Was in Her House, Registered to a Non-Existent Man

by John Hayward4 Mar 2015633
Stage 2 of the Hillary email scandal has been achieved, as yesterday’s “confused old lady who didn’t understand how email works” defense utterly collapsed with the Associated Press’ discovery that Clinton’s mail server was located in her house (her estate in Chappaqua, to be exact — the one she had to settle for because she was “dead broke” after Bill left office) and was registered under the name of a man who does not appear to exist.

To their credit, liberal media figures quickly realized this wasn’t a story that could be waved away with a laugh, some standard Obama Administration pabulum about how much this furtive crew values transparency, and a few whiny stories about how Republicans were known to use private email, too. (ABC News didn’t get the message, so they launched an abortive attempt to protect Hillary by taking a poorly-researched swing at the Gmail address on the business card of Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, completely missing the point that Hillary routed all of her correspondence through her personal email address, and Chaffetz isn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act laws that govern the Secretary of State. Five minutes of Google time would have saved these Democrat-operatives-with-bylines a ton of embarrassment.)

Chaffetz also isn’t running a questionably secure secret mail server out of his basement. Yesterday we learned that Hillary registered her off-the-books mail domain on the very day her Senate confirmation hearings began, which is a rather significant clue that she knew exactly what she was doing. This morning the AP brings us more details:

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton’s emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton’s secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account — hdr22@clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym — for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

But homemade email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.

“Well-protected from theft or a physical hacking?” None of the big hacking crimes of the last few years have involved the miscreant actually slipping into the server room wearing Groucho glasses and escaping with a huge mail server tucked under his jacket. As the AP goes on to concede, we still don’t know much about how truly secure Clinton’s mail server was, or exactly what she was sending through it. And it will be tough to ask the man nominally in charge of it, because he apparently doesn’t exist:

It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton’s $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.

The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton’s email server. The former president’s full name is William Jefferson Clinton.

In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton’s private email account was reconfigured to use Google’s servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google’s accusations in June 2011 that China’s government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.

Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton’s private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.

We’ve learned one thing this morning about the enigmatic Mr. Hoteham: he uses the same P.O. Box as the Clinton Foundation — subject of the other big Hillary scandal concerning foreign money donated while she was Secretary of State.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) of the House Benghazi Committee revealed yesterday that Hillary was using more than one personal account. Were they all running off her Chappaqua server? If not, how secure were the other servers she used? As for the early Clinton spin that everyone she communicated with inside the Administration was using a proper email account that would be captured by the legally required archive systems, it turns out two of her top aides had off-the-books personal accounts too — one of them the aforementioned Huma Abedin.

Even if the server was 100 percent secure, with protection equivalent to the State Department system Hillary was required by federal law to use, there’s still the matter of how her off-the-books setup allowed her to easily evade FOIA requests. The Associated Press mentions that it’s been waiting for more than a year to get some State Department emails it requested.

The New York Times, which broke the Clinton email story based on information from the House Benghazi Committee, today listed some other FOIA requests that appear to have been thwarted by Hillary’s secret email system, including more details about the AP request than the Associated Press saw fit to mention in its own story:

In 2013, Nitasha Tiku, then a reporter for Gawker, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking all correspondence on Mrs. Clinton’s private email account between her and Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser and onetime staff member in the Clinton White House. Some of those emails had already spilled into public view and been reported in the news media. But the State Department told Gawker that it could find no records responsive to the request, Gawker reported.

[…] In December, The Associated Press said its FOIA requests for records related to Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, the oldest of which was submitted in March 2010, were not answered. In addition to requesting Mrs. Clinton’s schedules, The A.P. asked for correspondence related to Huma Abedin’s special arrangement to serve as a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton and consult for private clients. “We have not received any documents yet, despite the promised deadlines, and we are evaluating the situation,” said Erin Madigan White, spokeswoman for The A.P.

Conservative groups have filed numerous requests for information about Mrs. Clinton as she prepares for a possible presidential run. Citizens United is expecting a court ruling on Friday about a lawsuit the group filed last year after the State Department would not disclose flight records that would have shown who accompanied Mrs. Clinton on overseas trips. The group had intended to cross reference the agency’s flight manifests with the donors who contributed to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The FOIA request was just one of 16 appeals the group has made to the State Department since May that have gone unfulfilled. Those requests also included specific correspondence from Mrs. Clinton and her closest aides, including Cheryl D. Mills and Ms. Abedin.

America Rising, an anti-Clinton “super PAC,” has submitted a dozen FOIA requests for State Department records beginning last June.

Requests included correspondence between Ms. Mills and Clinton Foundation leadership and Ms. Abedin’s communication with members of Teneo, a private consultancy partly run by Doug Band, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton. Ms. Abedin had a special arrangement that allowed her to work at the State Department and be paid by Teneo, which offers strategic advice to major global corporations. America Rising also requested Mrs. Clinton’s schedule during the annual Clinton Global Initiative gatherings in New York.

In all cases, the State Department acknowledged receipt of the FOIA requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents. “Unfortunately, Clinton’s own political calculation and desire for secrecy, as evidenced by her exclusive use of personal email accounts while at State, is preventing an open process and full, fair review of her time there,” said Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for America Rising.

Another FOIA request directed at Hillary, from Veterans For A Strong America in 2012, specifically requested information on any personal accounts Clinton might have been using.

Of course, as Obama’s damage-control teams have always understood, timing is everything; any story can be deflated, defused, and discarded if vital details are kept hidden for long enough. The scandal that would sweep a politician away on a tide of public outrage, if full disclosure was achieved quickly, becomes “old news” and is eventually interred in the mausoleum of footnotes if disclosure can be stretched out for long enough. The media is well aware of this, which is why they produce white-hot wall-to-wall coverage and keep stories bubbling with the “breaking news” discovery of dubious facts or trivial anecdotes when a Republican is the target.

Is that tactic going to work in this case?

We’re back to the same old lawless narrative of the Obama years: the press is ultimately judge and jury when high Democrat officials break the law, because the legal mechanisms that should restrain executive power and hold the ruling class accountable have been completely disabled. All the bluffs and gentlemen’s agreements that kept power in check have been called and discarded. Obviously those who were given false answers to their FOIA requests are angry (or, in the case of Democrat media organizations, querulous), but in the end, it’s not clear what they can do about it, other than complain… and eventually the Clinton-friendly media will stop relaying their complaints. What are the odds that liberal royalty like Hillary Clinton would actually be held accountable and punished for a deliberate, elaborate effort to evade federal law? Wouldn’t Obama halt any investigation before it did real damage to her, the way his agencies have acted to thwart investigation of the IRS targeting scandal?

Maybe not.

While White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest did try to peddle some flim-flam about how both federal law and the Obama Administration’s much-touted transparency requirements are really kinda sorta optional for important people like Hillary Clinton, he also admitted that “very specific guidance has been given to agencies all across the government, which is specifically that employees in the Obama administration should use their official email accounts when they’re conducting official government business.” In the unusual situations where personal accounts could be used, “it is important for those records to be preserved, consistent with the Federal Records Act.”

This could be Team Obama backing off to a safe distance before the Hillary email scandal detonates in a cloud of career-shredding shrapnel. Maybe some people on the Obama team are not entirely sad to see Hillary go down. Some of those people might be named “Obama.”

The bottom line is that our federal transparency laws are not trifles to be settled by soap-opera personal conflicts, spin teams, or the troubled consciences of Democrats in the media. It’s also not good enough to tell voters to sit on their complaints until they get a chance to vent at the ballot box in a couple of years. That goes double if Hillary’s scheme compromised national security. We can’t be comfortable about that issue until we know more technical details about all of the servers she and her inner circle were using.
Hillary Clinton’s Off-the-Books Mail Server Was in Her House, Registered to a Non-Existent Man

Could be.
I'll accept this stuff as fact when reported by a legitimate news organization.
If Ms. Clinton is in fact a "bad actor", it won't shake the world.
The Democratic party has deep talent: With Ms. Warren in the wings we still have a chance to have the first female president.
And looking at the prospects from the GOP, I think Alfred E. Newman could run as a democrat and win. Razz
Reply
#20
(03-04-2015, 10:52 AM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(03-04-2015, 10:24 AM)SFLiberal Wrote: The latest. The server Hillary used was registered to a non-existent man and was housed in her house at mansion in Chappaqua. The lies and deceit continue but what do you expect.. she's is a Clinton.

Quote:Hillary Clinton’s Off-the-Books Mail Server Was in Her House, Registered to a Non-Existent Man

by John Hayward4 Mar 2015633
Stage 2 of the Hillary email scandal has been achieved, as yesterday’s “confused old lady who didn’t understand how email works” defense utterly collapsed with the Associated Press’ discovery that Clinton’s mail server was located in her house (her estate in Chappaqua, to be exact — the one she had to settle for because she was “dead broke” after Bill left office) and was registered under the name of a man who does not appear to exist.

To their credit, liberal media figures quickly realized this wasn’t a story that could be waved away with a laugh, some standard Obama Administration pabulum about how much this furtive crew values transparency, and a few whiny stories about how Republicans were known to use private email, too. (ABC News didn’t get the message, so they launched an abortive attempt to protect Hillary by taking a poorly-researched swing at the Gmail address on the business card of Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, completely missing the point that Hillary routed all of her correspondence through her personal email address, and Chaffetz isn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act laws that govern the Secretary of State. Five minutes of Google time would have saved these Democrat-operatives-with-bylines a ton of embarrassment.)

Chaffetz also isn’t running a questionably secure secret mail server out of his basement. Yesterday we learned that Hillary registered her off-the-books mail domain on the very day her Senate confirmation hearings began, which is a rather significant clue that she knew exactly what she was doing. This morning the AP brings us more details:

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton’s emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton’s secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account — hdr22@clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym — for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

But homemade email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.

“Well-protected from theft or a physical hacking?” None of the big hacking crimes of the last few years have involved the miscreant actually slipping into the server room wearing Groucho glasses and escaping with a huge mail server tucked under his jacket. As the AP goes on to concede, we still don’t know much about how truly secure Clinton’s mail server was, or exactly what she was sending through it. And it will be tough to ask the man nominally in charge of it, because he apparently doesn’t exist:

It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton’s $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.

The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton’s email server. The former president’s full name is William Jefferson Clinton.

In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton’s private email account was reconfigured to use Google’s servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google’s accusations in June 2011 that China’s government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.

Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton’s private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.

We’ve learned one thing this morning about the enigmatic Mr. Hoteham: he uses the same P.O. Box as the Clinton Foundation — subject of the other big Hillary scandal concerning foreign money donated while she was Secretary of State.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) of the House Benghazi Committee revealed yesterday that Hillary was using more than one personal account. Were they all running off her Chappaqua server? If not, how secure were the other servers she used? As for the early Clinton spin that everyone she communicated with inside the Administration was using a proper email account that would be captured by the legally required archive systems, it turns out two of her top aides had off-the-books personal accounts too — one of them the aforementioned Huma Abedin.

Even if the server was 100 percent secure, with protection equivalent to the State Department system Hillary was required by federal law to use, there’s still the matter of how her off-the-books setup allowed her to easily evade FOIA requests. The Associated Press mentions that it’s been waiting for more than a year to get some State Department emails it requested.

The New York Times, which broke the Clinton email story based on information from the House Benghazi Committee, today listed some other FOIA requests that appear to have been thwarted by Hillary’s secret email system, including more details about the AP request than the Associated Press saw fit to mention in its own story:

In 2013, Nitasha Tiku, then a reporter for Gawker, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking all correspondence on Mrs. Clinton’s private email account between her and Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser and onetime staff member in the Clinton White House. Some of those emails had already spilled into public view and been reported in the news media. But the State Department told Gawker that it could find no records responsive to the request, Gawker reported.

[…] In December, The Associated Press said its FOIA requests for records related to Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, the oldest of which was submitted in March 2010, were not answered. In addition to requesting Mrs. Clinton’s schedules, The A.P. asked for correspondence related to Huma Abedin’s special arrangement to serve as a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton and consult for private clients. “We have not received any documents yet, despite the promised deadlines, and we are evaluating the situation,” said Erin Madigan White, spokeswoman for The A.P.

Conservative groups have filed numerous requests for information about Mrs. Clinton as she prepares for a possible presidential run. Citizens United is expecting a court ruling on Friday about a lawsuit the group filed last year after the State Department would not disclose flight records that would have shown who accompanied Mrs. Clinton on overseas trips. The group had intended to cross reference the agency’s flight manifests with the donors who contributed to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The FOIA request was just one of 16 appeals the group has made to the State Department since May that have gone unfulfilled. Those requests also included specific correspondence from Mrs. Clinton and her closest aides, including Cheryl D. Mills and Ms. Abedin.

America Rising, an anti-Clinton “super PAC,” has submitted a dozen FOIA requests for State Department records beginning last June.

Requests included correspondence between Ms. Mills and Clinton Foundation leadership and Ms. Abedin’s communication with members of Teneo, a private consultancy partly run by Doug Band, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton. Ms. Abedin had a special arrangement that allowed her to work at the State Department and be paid by Teneo, which offers strategic advice to major global corporations. America Rising also requested Mrs. Clinton’s schedule during the annual Clinton Global Initiative gatherings in New York.

In all cases, the State Department acknowledged receipt of the FOIA requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents. “Unfortunately, Clinton’s own political calculation and desire for secrecy, as evidenced by her exclusive use of personal email accounts while at State, is preventing an open process and full, fair review of her time there,” said Jeff Bechdel, a spokesman for America Rising.

Another FOIA request directed at Hillary, from Veterans For A Strong America in 2012, specifically requested information on any personal accounts Clinton might have been using.

Of course, as Obama’s damage-control teams have always understood, timing is everything; any story can be deflated, defused, and discarded if vital details are kept hidden for long enough. The scandal that would sweep a politician away on a tide of public outrage, if full disclosure was achieved quickly, becomes “old news” and is eventually interred in the mausoleum of footnotes if disclosure can be stretched out for long enough. The media is well aware of this, which is why they produce white-hot wall-to-wall coverage and keep stories bubbling with the “breaking news” discovery of dubious facts or trivial anecdotes when a Republican is the target.

Is that tactic going to work in this case?

We’re back to the same old lawless narrative of the Obama years: the press is ultimately judge and jury when high Democrat officials break the law, because the legal mechanisms that should restrain executive power and hold the ruling class accountable have been completely disabled. All the bluffs and gentlemen’s agreements that kept power in check have been called and discarded. Obviously those who were given false answers to their FOIA requests are angry (or, in the case of Democrat media organizations, querulous), but in the end, it’s not clear what they can do about it, other than complain… and eventually the Clinton-friendly media will stop relaying their complaints. What are the odds that liberal royalty like Hillary Clinton would actually be held accountable and punished for a deliberate, elaborate effort to evade federal law? Wouldn’t Obama halt any investigation before it did real damage to her, the way his agencies have acted to thwart investigation of the IRS targeting scandal?

Maybe not.

While White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest did try to peddle some flim-flam about how both federal law and the Obama Administration’s much-touted transparency requirements are really kinda sorta optional for important people like Hillary Clinton, he also admitted that “very specific guidance has been given to agencies all across the government, which is specifically that employees in the Obama administration should use their official email accounts when they’re conducting official government business.” In the unusual situations where personal accounts could be used, “it is important for those records to be preserved, consistent with the Federal Records Act.”

This could be Team Obama backing off to a safe distance before the Hillary email scandal detonates in a cloud of career-shredding shrapnel. Maybe some people on the Obama team are not entirely sad to see Hillary go down. Some of those people might be named “Obama.”

The bottom line is that our federal transparency laws are not trifles to be settled by soap-opera personal conflicts, spin teams, or the troubled consciences of Democrats in the media. It’s also not good enough to tell voters to sit on their complaints until they get a chance to vent at the ballot box in a couple of years. That goes double if Hillary’s scheme compromised national security. We can’t be comfortable about that issue until we know more technical details about all of the servers she and her inner circle were using.
Hillary Clinton’s Off-the-Books Mail Server Was in Her House, Registered to a Non-Existent Man

Could be.
I'll accept this stuff as fact when reported by a legitimate news organization.
If Ms. Clinton is in fact a "bad actor", it won't shake the world.
The Democratic party has deep talent: With Ms. Warren in the wings we still have a chance to have the first female president.
And looking at the prospects from the GOP, I think Alfred E. Newman could run as a democrat and win. Razz

Warren? Ha. You guys want Karl Marx in 2016

Obama Supporters Endorse Communist Karl Marx for President in 2016 Election
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