Personally, I wish Weinergate never happened.
But, if I was an investigator…yes, I’d use every means at my disposal.
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This is an ostensibly reasonable argument, but it’s valid only if we ignore recent history. Comey walked all over the rules about FBI discussion of investigations earlier this year, when he (effectively) exonerated Hillary Clinton in a strikingly public, publicized announcement. He breached decades of practice when he did so, and he gave her significant boost in the process.
It’s disingenuous to pretend that politicization of this matter started this past week, that it has been only to her detriment, or that it is in any way separable from the impending election.
Everyone now opposed to Comey’s grandstanding should have pointed to the Hatch Act many weeks ago if rule of law was of more interest than the success of a preferred candidate. However, complaints about Comey’s behavior at that time were thin on the ground here.
Hillary Clinton will win – and she is going to win – because her opponent is a petulant, obscene, defective human being. However, Trump’s flaws do not magickally make her a good candidate. And they in no way excuse her partisans’ sneering aggression and duplicity. She is ahead in the polls ~80:20 even after this disclosure. Ultra-vigorous, multi-party “defenses” of her in public forums like this one ceased to be anything better than in-group self-admiration exercises… quite a few weeks ago.
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Point of order: she is ahead in the polls roughly 47:41 at this juncture. Don’t confuse that with estimates on her chances of winning, which vary between ~75% (FiveThirtyEight) and ~98% (HuffPo).
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Then someone accessed the documents on the secure system, transferred them to another device, stripped the classification information off, then transmitted them via insecure internet. That person has committed a serious felony. If that person did it on the instructions of someone, Then it is a conspiracy. If anyone involved knew it was happening, but did not report it, they become part of it.
Then, for those of us who deal with security issues, there is the issue of things which involve national security, and which contain information which is of a nature that would ordinarily be classified. For instance, I might know about troop deployment or patrol schedules. If I discuss those on the internet, it is irrelevant that I am not sending an actual copy of the classified schedule. I might have made the schedule myself. If I send it out via secure fax to those authorized to receive it, I am fine. If I email it to Huma Abedin, I have committed a felony. That is how things get retroactively classified. I do not have the authority to classify documents. But I do have the duty to keep national security information secure. Some person archiving my message at the Pentagon will have to make the decision about classification. It is admittedly a complicated issue, but it matters. Lives depend on it.
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That’s incorrect. It may have been true of the original Hatch Act, but that was substantially amended in 1993, which, as far as I can tell, is why there’s confusion about it.
(Ah, here we are – there’s a note on 5 U.S.C. 7324 that says: “a prior section 7324, Pub. L. 89–554, Sept. 6, 1966, 80 Stat. 525; Pub. L. 93–268, §4(a), Apr. 17, 1974, 88 Stat. 87, prohibited Executive agency employees and employees of the District of Columbia from influencing elections or taking part in political campaigns, prior to the general revision of this subchapter by Pub. L. 103–94.”)
18 U.S.C. 595 (it moved to title 18 in 1948, I think?) prohibits using ones “official authority” to affect an election outcome. This law applies to anyone “employed in any administrative position by the United States, or by any department or agency thereof.” 18 U.S. Code § 595 - Interference by administrative employees of Federal, State, or Territorial Governments | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
The FBI is an agency within the Justice Department.
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You are absolutely correct. I must have been looking at outdated information.
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Really? What advantage has she gained by politicisation of this matter?
It is definitely relevant to her fitness for office and a reasonable subject of scrutiny. But it’s had it’s fair share of attention and consideration.
What disclosure? That there are some emails on someone’s PC that she might have sent? What do you think is a reasonable slide in the polls for that shocking revelation?
Seriously, what is your point? Somewhere in the italics and bold text your outrage seems to be that “people here” aren’t critical enough or aware enough of Hilary’s flaws.
She’s been savaged here! I don’t know what you’ve been reading?
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You “know” this, or just suspect it?
A lot of people are saying “a regular person would be in prison for doing what Hillary did!” but I can’t find any evidence that anyone has ever served prison time for similar behavior. Stripped of security clearance, maybe.
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It’s like gettin mad at the fish you can’t catch on your lil expedition.
Being taught about the penalties is part of the clearance process. As is acknowledging in writing that you understand those penalties.
John Deutch, pardoned by WJC, during his prosecution for having classified info on his computer at home.
Kristian Saucier, USN, took a photo of a classified space on his ship, Sub sailor's photo case draws comparisons to Clinton emails - POLITICO
Maj. Jason Brezler, USMC, discharged for using a personal email account to reply to a document request from the USMC.
Guilty Plea in Los Alamos Security Breach - ABC News
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/ex-nsa-manager-has-reportedly-twice-rejected-plea-bargains-in-espionage-act-case/2011/06/09/AG89ZHNH_story.html
Ex-Department of State Official Donald Keyser Sentenced in Classified Info Case
CNN.com - Sandy Berger fined $50,000 for taking documents - Sep 8, 2005
Folsom Naval Reservist is Sentenced After Pleading Guilty to Unauthorized Removal and Retention of Classified Materials — FBI
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Guess we should set up an intelligence voucher system and privatize it.
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Calling anything our government does “intelligence” in the private sector would be considered fraud.
I only know a few of these off the top of my head, but here’s a review:
John Deutch had classified information that had the labeled changed so it didn’t appear classified. He retained these classified documents after leaving office.
Kristian Saucier was charged with espionage and obstruction, not just espionage. He also took photos by sneaking a camera phone onto a sub and then left the phone next to a dumpster he could access in private, and retained the documents on his private laptop. He then tried to destroy the several storage media the data was stored in.
Jason Brezier used gmail to transfer documents - that he retained on an personal computer.
Jessica Lynn Quintana literally stole computer hardware with classified information on them that wound up being discovered in a drug bust.
Thomas Drake was not charged with a violating of the espionage act, and treated very nicely in his plea deal. He was guilty, but also a whistle blower which is a whole other issue entirely.
Chuck Rosenberg stored documents marked classified on a mix of storage media in his home.
Sandy Berger stored documents marked classified on a mix of storage media in several locations. Also never served jail time because they cooperated and showed no ill will in the handling of the documents.
Bryan H. Nishimura stored “a large amount” of classified data on at least one storage media in his private home.
None of these are even close to using an approved private email server. All of them involve storing data secretly on non-approved personal devices, and several even shared data with other people.
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He strikes me as the type of person while the other one is on the bed he is in the bathroom doorway, twirling it like a helicopter saying, “Hey, Huma. Huma. Look at this. Huma. Huma, look. Hey, look at this!”
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I think people are getting confused about the difference between the private server, which was by strict definition legal at the time, and classified information. We could go down a deep rabbit hole regarding overclassification, which is a thing, and is a problem.
None of us get to know what the classified info is that Clinton supposedly handled in her email, by the very nature of it being classified. This makes the topic difficult to discuss. I will say that Clinton has said that she left it up to her staff to determine what was classified and what was not. That is rather disturbing for a Secretary of State, given that outside contractors get briefings on how to handle and label such information on a yearly basis. I can’t imagine State department employees don’t get the same briefings.
I’m going to use an anecdote from someone else who was in his first Top Secret briefing, but it basically went something like this: He walked into a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), all personal devices / phones were left outside. He pulled out a notepad, and the person next to him asked: “You’re taking notes?” When he replied that he was, the person next to him grabbed his note pad and a pen, and wrote “TOP SECRET” across the top of the page in bold letters.
That crap you talk about in secured environments, you don’t email on anything but the “High Side” network, that is completely isolated from the Internet. For a Secretary of State to not understand this, or to pass it off to subordinates, is shocking.
With all that said, we’d be in far worse shape with Trump in office. He’d probably spew such info during a press conference.
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And, in your opinion, was the FBI part of this conspiracy when they said there was no grounds for charges against Clinton? Or were they just negligent in their investigation? Or maybe we are dealing with criminal masterminds who pulled off this classified email switcheroo conspiracy right under the FBI’s nose. For reasons.
Or, maybe there’s another, more benign, explanation for a small handful of misclassified emails over the course of several years?
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They said there was no precedent. Yes, it sounds like splitting hairs, but in legal areas it’s important. I’d also like to point out that Clinton is very open about saying her handling of the classified info / the server were “a mistake”, and she’s open to the FBI looking into these other emails. I suspect it won’t keep her from the presidency, or result in any fines or jail time. It is still techinically the FBIs job to look into, but the timing couldn’t be any worse.
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well…
“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it,” he writes to Clinton. She responds, “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”
The key here is “nonpaper”. It’s a term of art.
The November 1978 State Department “non-paper” is an example of this method of diplomatic communication. An instructive and entertaining piece by Guy Gugliotta, published in The Washington Post in 1994, explained that a “non-paper” was a form of diplomatic “evasion” because it enabled a government to pass along a position paper with no direct attribution–that is no “embassy fingerprints”–on it. Edward L. Peck, a retired U.S. diplomat, told Gugliotta that a demarche was a highly formal means of “conveying information to a foreign government from your government.” The U.S. government, Peck puckishly asserted, “is the world’s leading practitioner of demarches, probably by a ratio of 1 to 10 … because the United States loves to tell other nations how to behave.” (Note 1)
A lot of what the State Department classifies is classified because of attribution concerns. To take an innocuous example, suppose some head of state is really sensitive about his weight. This may be common knowledge, but if the US State Department publicly acknowledged this sensitivity, it might offend this head of state. So, if it’s mentioned (in the context of a “heads up, tread lightly memo”), it’s classified.
The state department also takes pains to conceal its sources of information. So while the information is non-sensitive, the identity of the source is classified.
Both types of information can quite easily be sanitized-- the first by removing official attribution; the second by deleting the paragraphs identifying the source. And the state department has procedures in place for doing so.
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I don’t disagree with any of that. The FBI should investigate thoroughly, and any crimes should be prosecuted. And even if no crimes were committed, if any improprieties, or attempts at a coverup, are found, the voting public deserves to know.
But @Max_Blancke and others suggested that Clinton should be “locked up” for violating the espionage act. To come to that conclusion, I think you would need to either believe that you are in a better position to judge the facts of the case than the FBI investigators, or else that they are part of the same conspiracy. I find both of those to be unlikely.
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That is a bit over the top. People who deal with classified info have these sorts of “Sword of Damoclese” threats to think about. If you have access to classified info, you aren’t even allowed to leave the country without letting government officials know why, for how long, where you’re going, who you might talk to, etc. I don’t think Clinton should be jailed, but I think those of us further down the food chain might have received harsher punishment for similar.
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