And Judicial Watch was a player back in Whitewater. The group’s main reason for existing is to sue the Clintons in an attempt to dredge up something to attack them with.
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It was largely the media that pushed the blame it on a video idea. Either running with that early idea entirely, and mixing it in with emerging information. Or as a way to attack Clinton and Obama. There was some early confusion about what was happening, whether there was a protest near the embassy. Whether it was connected in some way to the protests in Cairo (and other places IIRC) that were about the video in question. None the less the State Department and the White house attributed it to a terror attack pretty quickly, even as there was some confusion as to whether the was any connection to those protests and that video that were an issue elsewhere. So they did keep the protest/video thing going.
Thing is that this was all covered in those same endless Benghazi investigations. They connected it to the video and protests because that was a valid possibility based on the limited information available at the time. Acknowledged the terror attack as soon as it was clear that’s what was happening, and got off the video and protest train as soon as they could firmly establish there wasn’t a connection. In either direction. There was speculation (and apparently was a legit concern in government) that the protests could have been an organized smoke screen with the video as an excuse/prop. Just as much as the attack may have been an outgrowth of a legitimate protest. The 24 hours news cycle, and opponents looking for an easy smear kept on with that story line though. Creating the impression that the Obama administration was pushing the video idea for days, or weeks when evidence to the contrary was clear.
Like I said what happened was already pretty clear after the first investigation (or seven, around when I stopped bothering to read up on the identical results that kept getting released). We know what happened. The idea that there was an attempt to deny a terror attack, to keep blame on the video, that there’s something left to find. Is all just the lingering stink from right wing politicking and the press cycle. There’s no there there. And if you want the answers everyone says we need, well you can pull the official documents up in seconds and read them. And remember this was all originally about going after Obama. Attention shifted to Clinton as she became a potential source for information (EMAILS!) and it became clear she was moving towards a presidential run.
She weren’t lying about that vast right wing conspiracy.
ETA: The relatively frustrating thing about this whole repetitive bullshit edifice is that there are things to be concerned about here. Distressing information has been uncovered. But none of it will be addressed or fixed. Only things that are potentially damaging to Clinton, and whoever she’s working with at the time, will ever be pulled out of this. They’ll be floated for their potential success in sandbagging her. Warped into easy snippets for campaigning. And discarded as soon as they loose their shock factor or utility. The rest are drowned out, pigeon holed, or deliberately ignored. Never to be mentioned or addressed. So the Benghazi investigations identified legitimate problems in terms of how our embassy’s are staffed, secured, and protected. Largely created by congressionally dictated funding shortages, and our government’s increased reliance on PMCs. Has that been fixed? Or even acknowledged? NO. Even the distressing things about Clinton’s actual conduct often don’t get addressed. Because they’re too complex, or too common in our system to make a good attack ad.
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I have to at least tentatively agree. I have never been a Hillary fan, but the whole Benghazi thing seems like the least of it, and I did not watch any of the stupid hearings.
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Oh, well, as long as they maybe, possibly, might be related to, you know, something, well by all means burn her at the stake.
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It got old fast. Just as the email thing has. It’d be nice if Clinton and the DNC could be better at redirecting, defusing, or avoiding this shit. But given the unique level of scrutiny (Judicial Watch isn’t the only right wing group that exists exclusively to muck rake the Clintons) I tend to think anyone would look as sketchy as the Clintons. And any attempt to respond or deal with it will make things look sketchier. Its become relatively impossible to tell how much is legitimately suspicious and how much is reality distortion field.
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No, but she’d be hounded over some other nonsense that nobody normally cares about. Using a private server is pretty banal as top-level political scandals go. I’m almost positive that a lot of the Trump supporters calling for her arrest don’t even have a clear idea of what a server is.
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I’m not sure how reliable the senate report is (ie were Republicans looking to indict Clinton) but I’m not sure I really see the scandal.
Hindsight is easy, lots of places are flagged as “increasingly dangerous and unstable” and most of them don’t result in a serious attack.
Security resources are finite and embassies are one of the tools you use to mange a region that is unstable, even if you do things right you’ll sometimes get attacked.
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Explain again how Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell managed to also use a private email server, and then wipe the servers clean and turn over exactly ZERO of his emails?
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Woop. Dee. Doo. I think not since Kerry’s SWIFT BOAT SCANDAL has there been a more BSed uproar to derail something. It definitely sounds shady and no doubt there were people that MAY have knew things were coming and who knows what, but to pin it any or all on HC, i mean i think anyone in high gov positions undrstands the games theyre playing. Goddamn Clinton’s are some kind of Spanish Fly for repubs i swear
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It’s banal. The classified info on a private server is not. It’s a debate outside the scope of this thread, but it does bother me how cavalier someone acting as Secretary of State can be with such things.
I’m viewing this outside of the realm of politics, and in a Security / Bell-LaPadula classification framework. People lower down the food chain who did the same would have lost their jobs at best.
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Um, she did. In fact, she used the official server more than Powell or Rice did, as they relied more on their private servers. Her private server was set up for non confidential office management stuff.
What strikes me is that they only found thirty mails, and we have not been told what the contents were, if they are duplicates, mere forwarded mails, or whatnot. I smell another nothingburger.
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Giant Hogweed sounds horrible.
I think it is probably a bit more than just devotion to a phone.
I imagine Hilary was a busy lady. She did not want to learn the controls of a new phone when she has got used to the one she has. She asks the NSA to make it secure, and they wouldn’t, so she asked a private contractor to make it secure, and they did a lot of security-looking things that gave the illusion of security but they didn’t actually secure it.
There is no absolute security, but I think what Hilary was asking for as good a solution as any for reasonable expense at the time. The State Department could have set up a set of ‘one time pad’ keys on their server, and a unique copy set of keys within her mail encryption application. It should then be very hard to do a ‘man in the middle attack’ for the link between the phone and the State Department server. The Blackberry is not a complicated modern phone with a random set of apps that run themselves and each other, which might let someone invisibly replace parts of the mail app with something that forked the data path. It is a phone she knew, so she might know if it was tampered with or swapped for a similar one.
Hacking a phone is a lot like a magic trick. You do not necessarily crack the code, or leak the keys, or intercept the message. The actual trick may be done before you think it has started. The message may have been copied by a key logger before it even got to the mail app, or any of the hundred other good tricks. But the trick is more impressive if they can do it on your own familiar and unprepared phone.
They may be hundreds of smarter or better things she could have done. But I might have done the same as her under the circumstances.
(a beat)
Actually, after a bit of heart-searching, I confess I probably would have gone with the advice of the security advisers, but that’s probably due to a lack of backbone rather than a better policy.
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There are multiple things to look at with the security aspect, again better discussed elsewhere. One is the fact that when you restrict people too much in their ability to do work their way, they will find workarounds. These workarounds are almost always going to be less secure than what you are trying to get them to use.
The second is the classification model I mentioned up thread. That would have been a reasonable deterrent in a lot of cases for anyone who took it seriously.
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I guess my frustration is more that in 2008, we were still outraged that the Republicans had used outside email servers, and for us it was a slam dunk that they were doing it so that they could engage in shady behavior and conceal or destroy the evidence. The Clintons are a family that draws intense scrutiny for all kinds of things. Why would Hillary Clinton, knowing she would run again for president, and knowing that it was perceived negatively when Karl Rove did it, decide to do exactly the same thing as Karl Rove? Could she not foresee that the Republicans would latch onto this? It seems foreseeable.
It would have been easy for Clinton to avoid any potential damage from this particular new incident.
All she would have had to do would be to say over the past months, “Yes, I deleted thousands of emails that dealt only with personal matters, but in the crunch, it’s possible that a couple of dozen State-related emails got sent to the bit bucket too.”
Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Ba Ba Ba Benghazi…
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review the response to every single thing that HRC does, and tell me if you really truly think that would have improved anything.
If she had said “it’s possible that a couple of dozen State-related emails got sent to the bit bucket too” it would have been treated as an admission of guilt. Hillary was the one who coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy”, and IMO she wasn’t wrong. No matter what action she takes, she will be heavily criticized for it.
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