If they were republicans you’d call it ‘just standing there minding their own business’ and you know it.
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Judicial Watch only exists to launder private money into investigating Democratic candidates, and even then it has mostly been funded to investigate the Clintons for the past 22 years. To even pretend that this has any sort of noble aspirations is ridiculous when it is part of the political machine for the Republicans when they can not risk spending even more public money on their investigations.
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Did you mean a personal “you” or a collective “ye?” Because I’m pretty sure I, personally, would not call it that.
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The Clintons take the exact proper legal response to these controversies, which is typically contrary to the correct PR response. Think about what the common advice to dealing with the police is; shut up, don’t resist but don’t cooperate, don’t invite unnecessary searches, listen to your legal representation. This is the version for a far more public case, with a far more powerful legal authority, and a far more powerful target.
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All this yapping about Clinton, Powell, and Rice using outside email, wouldn’t you think somebody would figure out how to fix the State Dept email servers so the Secretaries would want to use them?
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Make them have to properly admin it themselves? Hell I do sysadmin work for a day job and there is no way I would wan’t to do it for myself if there are guys already willing and they probably know all the rules, how lock down the email upside down, etc. I got enough headache with the day job to want to add more of it.
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Oh yeah. But it’s really easy to make that look bad to the public, and they don’t seem to handle it too well PR wise. It could be spun a little better. Which wouldn’t necessarily stall any of the attacks out. In the end these things are working exactly as they’re supposed to. The mere existence of investigations, massive press attention, conspiracy theories. And the constant rehashing the whole thing, for so long. Has created the impression that there’s constant wrong doing, and something legitimate going on. Even if the Clintons were squeeky clean even if they were masterful in spinning it. The same approach would still be just as effective. No single scandal or attack needs to succeed, or even make sense.
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“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” -Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
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It’s only OK to break the law if you’re appointed by a Republican President.
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She didn’t dismiss the lives lost, only the obnoxious way her opponents have handled the entire affair, which at this point is unquestionably tiresome.
Note: saying that does not mean I don’t think it was a tragedy which could have been avoided with better security (possibly even the security that had been cut by a Republican-controlled Congress).
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My understanding is that a new phone here would have meant a dumb phone usable only for phone calls, so in actuality she would have been forced to switch from a Blackberry to a laptop for sending email. This wouldn’t just have meant a change in workflow, it would also meant she had a lug a laptop with her everywhere, and given that as SoS she spent more time traveling than she did in her office in DC I can see why she would have preferred to stick with a handheld device.
Exempt them from FOIA requests. If you’re SoS you probably want to be able to bounce ideas off your subordinates - who are all over the world, so asynchronous methods like email are better than conference calls - without fear of everything you discuss being scrutinized by your enemies or quoted out of context.
Clinton and her predecessors skirted or broke a law, but it is a stupid law.
I really hope you’re kidding. That would be a s**t show for government transparency.
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I’m not. While I think implemented policy needs to be subject to scrutiny, someone in her position needs to be able to have completely candid conversations with subordinates. Conversations where you float ideas which would sound nuts out of context. You can do that face-to-face without having to provide a transcript, some asynchronous analogue should be made available.
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It’s what makes them so special.
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I’m not sure it should. Conversations like that should be face to face for multiple reasons. This is part of the problem of transitioning from laws that came before digital communication, and where we stand now.
These sorts of private communications between power brokers should be hard, and held in private, under the sorts of circumstances where we all know everybody went into a room to talk.
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But if you’re trying to deal with a crisis in time zone X, you’re in time zone Y, and your best troubleshooter is in time zone Z, there might not be time to get together for a f2f meeting. I imagine that a very large fraction, possibly even a majority, of the SoS’s decisions have such components.
The decisions that finally get made, the directives, the postmortems, these should all be available for scrutiny, if not immediately then eventually. Instructions and reports belong on official, subpoenable channels. Informal conversations and brainstorming don’t need to be available for Roger Ailes and Tea Party congresspeople to mine for political ammunition.
Or by not stirring up trouble in Libya in the first place.
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I’m sorry for not adding much but this
just needed to be emphasized.
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