What difference does it make?
Hillary stonewalled and has now outsourced her problem to attack-dog subordinates and Democratic stalwarts who, she believes, have Hillary—or no one—for 2016. I guess the message is “I’m lying, so what?”
Remember Richard Nixon’s vain attempt to keep Watergate tapes because he alone had determined that some were only private in nature and did not relate to government business or subpoenas—and the subsequent reaction to his “gaps.” That is Hillary Clinton’s absurd line of something like “secretary of state privilege,” and thus her press conference could only end in disaster. After all the obfuscation, the only thing that one can take away from this embarrassing performance is that Hillary Clinton envisioned her own personal server for just such contingencies: to trash a large percentage of her incoming and outgoing e-mails after becoming the sole arbitrator of what constituted her own, and her government’s, business, and thus the preserver or destroyer of all her communications.
arresting image nice work
I think you have captured her true nature. It’s more real than the persona she has created for public consumption.
And more like the original than what Disney drew.
I gotta say something. In real life I’m an “e-discovery and information governance” professional. All that means is that for the past twenty years I’ve either been managing corporate compliance, performing forensic examination of electronic communications or selling email compliance services and electronic records management tools. Since 2004, part of my area has been selling these services to the federal government. Here’s my take on this bullshit.
Hillary Clinton was not out of compliance. The deadline for federal agencies and institutions to implement records management of emails that are federal records is December 31, 2016. Even then the standard guidance on managing email that is determined to be a record (the user declares the record), is “print and file”. The Clintons, for everything else they may be, are FABULOUS lawyers. She knows exactly what she was doing and that she could get away with it. Congress can fume and sputter and snort, but they ALL are doing the same thing. So is EVERY PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTEE. Holder, Clinton, Kerry, etc…
It’s been this way since 2008. The Bush Whitehouse learned VERY quickly to put the burden of retention on the vendor who deployed the solution, that worked for a while, but they got bit HARD by the courts. This new group tried the same strategy, lost again, and learned to just work around it. (buy me a beer someday, ask me how I know)
My feeling is that Clinton was using her own email server for the same reason she had the Rose Law firm billing records. Knowledge is power. If she chose to write a book about her time as Sec State, she’d have all the material local. If anyone else wanted that info, they’d have to go through the Clinton library and she could control what was approved. As long as the material that was declared a record was transferred to the Archives at the end of the retention period set (usually 2-4 years), she’s fine. These could be paper copies of paper copies. There is no requirement for any government agency to produce electronic copies of records until 2019.
Just so we are clear, even the IRS is TECHNICALLY in compliance until 2016. You can blame the Archivist for publishing guidance in 2008 that specifically told government agencies that email archive software is not a replacement for records management, (print and file or ECM) so many agencies, including the IRS, decided to no longer maintain their email archive infrastructure, which is very expensive. Remember, the END USER can decide what is and what is not a record. This means that whoever last looks at the email to be produced in a record request can remove messages that they think don’t belong in the Archives.
If you work for a public company, all of your email is being archived. Sarbox and Dodd-Frank have made sure of that. The FRCP specifically say that electronic communications (not phone calls though) are discoverable. The only interpretation allowed is the retention policy, how long those records are kept. Your laws are different than theirs. State sunshine laws are different from Federal FIA statutes. The sausage-makers don’t want you to see what’s in the sausage, but they DO want to see your dick pics.
Now, if she sent and received Secret email on this sever and it was not part of SIPRNET, her IT dept is in trouble. Spills are bad, but it happens literally every day. There’s no such thing as a secure network connected to the internet. But that’s another story.
So will Obama, at some time where it becomes necessary, blame all his foreign policy failures on Hillary’s emails being hacked by various foreign nations? It seems a ready made excuse.
Greetings:
While I certainly appreciate the Nixon comparison, I am still underwhelmed by the paucity of references to “Richard Windsor”, Environmentalist Protection Agency Administratrix Lisa Jackson’s “nom de e-mail plume” and the post-Benghazi document purge supervised by the State Department’s, and Hero of the Maidan, Victoria Nuland.
Of course, in the afterglow of our galactic “Women’s Day”, I have decided to mention Sandy Berger’s shenannigans only tangentially.
Hillary’s Checkers Speech
Hillary Clinton answers her own question . . .
. . . and laughs.
outrage fatigue…
Hillary Clinton was not out of compliance.
Then that’s her press-conference statement, right?
It is. These rules were written the way that they were written so that these people can get away with doing exactly what Clinton did. There’s an awful lot of bullshit in the news.
I’ll bet my car that there’s no legal fallout to this. It looks ugly, but nothing will happen to her. Maybe a shouting match in front of Congressmen who are doing the same thing.
Now, it may be possible to catch her out by digging into every other mailbox in the Government looking for classified material that was sent or received by the clintonemail domain. Or, if there’s someone under surveillance who may have sent or received classified email to or from that mailbox you could just look there, that’s how they got Patreus. That’s how I would proceed. BTW, if you want to know which officials have their own email look for the iPhones.