Ok, I will simplify and clarify.
I have been told, repeatedly, what penalties I would face, should I intentionally or accidentally mishandle classified materials. The people who instructed me on those penalties were speaking for the government of the US. I do not believe that they were lying to me. I have no intention of testing the theory that perhaps it is all exaggeration.
Some of the things that I was explicitly forbidden to do, HRC and her minions have almost certainly done. For example, storage of material that is or should be classified on an unauthorized device, or transmitting that material over unencrypted networks. It is compounded when the devices containing that data are put under the control of any person not specifically authorized to handle that material, for instance the IT guy or the lawyers.
So far, HRC seems to not to have been prosecuted for any of that. That tells me that either she did not have any classified material on unapproved devices, or that she did, but is somehow above the law.
fackcheck.org
"Did Clinton seek government approval to use a private server for her personal email account? No. The IG report said Clinton “had an obligation” to discuss her
email system with the department, but it could find “no evidence” that
Clinton sought approval for her unusual email arrangement. If she did,
the report says her request would have been denied by the bureaus of
Diplomatic Security and Information Resource Management. Brian Fallon, a
Clinton campaign spokesman, has told us: “It did not occur to her that
having it on a personal server could be so distinct that it would be
unapproved.”
CBS news http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-misstates-key-facts-in-email-server-case/
"CLINTON: “What I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State
Department. The State Department has confirmed that.” - AP interview,
September.THE REPORT: “No evidence” that Clinton asked for or
received approval to conduct official government business on a personal
email account run through a private server in her New York home.
According to top State Department officials interviewed for the
investigation, the departments that oversee security “did not - and
would not - approve” her use of a personal account because of security
concerns.
I’ll admit I was wrong, I’m not sure when I got messed up there. It does recollect my opinion quite a bit, but it still leaves us knowing nothing about the details of the case. I trust that if anything that could be pursued to trial would have - or at least something that could have been used to take Clinton out of the race fairly and without aparant bias. Too many with too much power can effect that decision either way.
For example, what if a State employee received an email with classified information from another department and it ends up on the server? Clinton doesn’t know it is on a server she owns, the one that sent the message didn’t know they broke a rule, etc. This falls into the reckless behavior category without being something you could bring to trial. Even if the letter of the law says the other department shouldn’t have sent it, the State employee should have cleaned it properly, and HRC shouldn’t have enabled the issue - can you build a case against any of them?
At some point, you have to rely on the competence of the people involved. There really is a whole separate system for discussing sensitive and classified material. People sometimes talk about an “air gap”. In my case, there are three computers on my desk. One for personal use, one for work use, and one for secure use. I have to stick a special chip card into the secure one to log on, and a record of when I log on, and what I access there is kept and probably scrutinized. I can’t access the normal internet on the secure system. If I print something, it has to go to a special printer in a special place, and each page gets entered and noted in a file. If I want to keep a copy, I have to keep it at all times in a government supplied safe. When I am relieved at the end of a mission, all those pages are inventoried by myself and my relief. If a page becomes obsolete, I have to fill out a form attesting that I shredded it, and when, and it has to be a special shredder. There is a whole culture for taking this stuff seriously. The idea of losing documents, or accidentally forwarding them to the wrong people is really frustrating for me. That is why I use the ebola example. When someone talks about putting this stuff on a home server, it is very much like deciding to examine the virus at home, and taking some in an altoids tin, and working on it in a makeshift lab, that your cousin set up in the basement. It just is not done.
All of the trouble that everyone has to go through takes time and effort, but everyone has to learn the system, and agree to play by the rules, before you get a clearance. if there is even a hint that you are not following the rules, the first thing they do is pull everyone’s access while the investigation is happening. I have seen this happen.
But back to your hypothetical. You cannot just send a message from the secure system to an address in the regular world. The person writing the email has broken the law, just by discussing the material on an insecure system. The recipient also has a duty to report seeing such material, or face the same penalties as the sender.
If the hazmat team finds ebola in the makeshift lab, an investigator would probably want to find out who accessed the sample in the isolation room. That person would be out, as would their superiors. Because the ultimate responsibility for safe handling belongs to the manager, who has delegated some portion of authority to the employees. And all of the people tasked with training the proper procedures in the organization would be interrogated, and their training records carefully examined. In this way, secure document procedures are exactly like isolation lab procedures.
Sorry for another very long post.
I like the long posts, because the anecdotal evidence is really helpful in a sea of shitty media thanks to the politics involved.
I think it’s obvious (barring the conspiracy of Hillary threatening hits being true) that the classified data in question did not get hand delivered to the server, so there is some magic in how that happened that means the FBI grumpily announced they wouldn’t pursue charges. Would this be the hand transcribing of some information (locations for example) that relate to classified information, or is there a more obvious answer?
Hand transcription, or some crazy arrangement with flash drives or a scanner. I guess I need to read more of the leaked conversations for clues. I did read that Huma sent them to her yahoo account for printing. I am not sure of the logistics of how she did that.
It’s not Weiner’s emails that they are looking at. It is close Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s email archive that was inadvrrtly backed up on her husband, Weiner’s laptop when she attempted to sync her contacts. So it’s a large collection of direct Clinton correspondence that the FBI is able to examine without the Clinton camp having had the opportunity to doctor first (see Podesta leaks if your not pretending they are forged).
Rand only seems to have his tinfoil hat on an hour or two every month.
I think Weld would make a great Attorney General or SecTreas, based on his outstanding record of nailing corrupt pols to the wall. Not sure if I would vote for him for President.
Anyone who thinks that he will is just deluding themselves.
As for Clinton… as much as I agree she’s not the ideal choice and could be problematic in office, I DO think she’ll be far more responsive to popular opinion on various issues. But to imagine she’s somehow worse than Trump is missing a lot of problems with Trump and how he’s run this campaign, I think.
I’d be incredibly fucking surprised if anyone who was elected President of the United States, or, in fact, to the top job in any country in the world who didn’t come out of it significantly better off. It kind of goes with the territory, no?
