I DON’T CARE and neither does a majority of americans. the rest will never believe in climate change, evolution, or ANYTHING hillary says.
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I think the fact that she’s getting pilloried is going to send a message for the future. It’s just too bad Bush was made of Teflon.
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The problem for me is the people she hired to set up the server, especially this Bryan Pagliano. If setting up a personal server was so important (for privacy, for efficiency, for paranoia, for whatever reason), don’t just hire some incompetent arse-kissing clown that your arse-kisser-in-chief (Abedin) recommends to you.
That’s how you end up with a Microsoft server full of classified information with default RDP and VNC ports left open and running on a consumer-grade Internet connection. A motivated script kiddie with a port scanner, let alone Putin’s (indirect) hacker-for-hire, could get in there and have a look. I don’t blame Pagliano for taking the 5th, because every sysadmin in the country would want to burn him at the stake for doing such a crappy job securing an important server.
Not that he’s the first idiot Clinton hired because she values loyalty over competence (her 2008 primary campaign was packed with them). Doing that isn’t illegal, of course, and her opponent is even worse in that regard. She should not lose the election over this. But let’s not bend ourselves into pretzels pretending that there’s not a serious problem with her priorities in these situations.
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The other problem with the HRC emails is how she has told an ever changing series of lies about it. That’s where most of the damage comes from. She makes unequivocal statements about it only to have to modify it when new information comes to light. ‘No classified’ information mutates into ‘nothing marked classified’ mutates into ‘nothing clearly marked classified’ and finally we know that there was both classified information and information marked classified on her server.
As far as her sever being hacked ask yourself the first question - did foreign governments know about her server at the time? If the answer is Yes -> Did the they try and hack it? Of course they would. Which leads to -> Were they successful ? Well, we are talking about people with the ability to hack into far more secure servers than HRC’s. So I think one can safely assume they did hack into it if they knew about it. Which I’m sure they did since they have thousands of people working on spying on us.
If they have damning information from the deleted emails they would’t use it to stop her becoming president. It’s more valuable if she becomes president. So imagine a scenario where China and the US get involved in a dispute in the South China Sea. High tension, high stakes stuff. In the middle of that, China dumps some emails from HRC’s server that create a domestic scandal for HRC. The presidency is crippled right at the moment when it needs to be the strongest to deal with a foreign crisis. This is why I think any foreign government would be sitting on this information until after the election.
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There’s an important difference between what she did and what GWB did: she did her best to help the State Department to retain the records they needed. GWB just trashed all the hard drives and left in a whirlwind, with no thought to compliance. The only thing Hilary did that was out of compliance was to have some classified stuff on the server. I see no reason to think that this was intentional.
I think you believe in this idea that there are people in the world who are not like you, who think through every action and know the outcome of every plan. This is TV script-writer thinking. That is the only place where this kind of thing ever happens. In real life, it’s always the situation on the ground, and there is never a perfect plan perfectly executed.
What you want in an executive is somebody who understands that and works with it, not somebody who maintains a fantasy of total control. I wouldn’t say Hilary is my perfect candidate, because I don’t think she is anywhere near progressive enough, but of the two candidates, she is the really obvious best choice, by way more than a mile.
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She herself is not a technophile. But the Senate and State department have rules, and a staff whose job is to help officials comply with those rules. The rules are about accountability and national security. And there are strict penalties for violating those rules, which exist because of the seriousness of those concerns.
I have spent most of my life dealing with classified operations and documents. I take those rules for handling such information very seriously. It is like working with pathogens. It gets worked with on separate computers, and stored in special places. You don’t get to stick a flash drive into the computer used for classified material. Even if you have benign reasons. Just like you don’t put your lunch in the lab fridge with the ebola in it. Because of the potential danger of doing such things, the penalties are draconian and severe.
The higher up you are in the system, the greater the potential for damage. Besides which, there is a matter of leadership. A top manager who does not take the rules of opsec seriously, will inevitably pass that attitude to the mid-level people working for them, and onto the staff below. And it matters more now than ever in the past. Admiral Yamamoto died because of the discussion of his schedule on a compromised “secure” system. We developed our current opsec procedures after watching our enemies learn the hard way the price to be paid for not doing so.
I can promise you that some of the people cooperating with the home server/unauthorized device system knew absolutely that they were committing serious felonies when they did it. I don’t pretend to know what exchanges took place between those tasked with maintaining State Department security procedures and the Clinton staffers or managers who convinced them to break those laws. It must have been something to see.
I know analogies are tiring, but I want to go back to mine. If I am in charge of safety procedures at the ebola lab, and the new bosses assistant tells me that the boss wants to pass back and forth through the airlock in her street clothes, and keep her lunch in the pathogen freezer, or have me put a regular door in the isolation room, because the boss finds that more convenient, I am going to be a pretty troubled person. I use the ebola thing to convey the sort of primal, visceral feeling that careless handling of classified information brings up in a trained, professional person charged with complying with and enforcing opsec rules.
This cannot be a “mistake”. Somewhere in this process are people who participated in this, and knew that they were committing serious crimes when they did so. It is expected for people new to the system to need training and instruction on how it works. There are people whose primary job function is to introduce new top level people and their underlings on the opsec rules. And reams of paper documenting that training process. And people who check those documents. It does not just get overlooked or forgotten. And it is an ongoing process.
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And then the Obama administration probably did.
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I think you should read the whole article. Same with the next commenter.
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Except she held on to the e-mails, and turned them over to State when asked. In addition, the vast majority of the messages were sent to State addresses meaning they were on someone else’s computer and recoverable.
The RNC e-mails were sent only between RNC addresses by government officials, and then deleted so that could not be recovered.
Equating the two is ridiculous.
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She hasn’t paid any legal penalty, but I think having the FBI director go on national TV and call you extremely careless with classified information in the middle of a presidential campaign has been a pretty heavy price.
And if you read the whole article (and many others over time, and the FBI reports, and the State Department report on this) you would know that the vast majority of people at State and in the federal government use personal e-mail accounts to conduct business. You would also know that she was careful to use secure methods for communicating when discussing classified information, and that almost all of the classified bits on her server were either not classified at the time and/or were sent to her and not written by her.
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The GOP playbook for the Clintons is to find anything to be investigated, no matter how pointless, and use that as a launching point to dig as deep as possible in the hopes of finding dirt elsewhere. The Whitewater investigations were looking into land deal the Clintons lost money on, but got Ken Starr all the power he needed to look into whatever seemed suspicious, and eventually through the fake sandal he found a real scandal. The Benghazi investigations were more of the same, except whether the mail server is a “real scandal” depends. “Conducted some State business with the wrong mail client” doesn’t really get normal people up in arms as much as “BJ in Oval Office,” and I’m sure if they have the opportunity they’ll use the mail server to keep digging in the hope of finding something.
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Exactly what was proscribed for the law they broke.
Um, what law? Wait, it must be around here…um…where could it be?
Fine, I’ll settle for an apology.
I’ve got Clintons. Where is Bush’s, Powell’s, and Rove’s?
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Totally. Except when I make them, I go to jail for the rest of my life.
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“It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
Is this your lived experience? Are you in jail now? Have you never made any mistakes in life?
Suppose that it were your lived experience. Would that be okay? Is that how things should be, that whenever someone makes a mistake, they are put in jail for the rest of their life?
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No, No, Yes, Ok, No, No.
But it’s the rules on the books. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
Insert Animal Farm Quote here.
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Clinton’s e-mail is far from the worst thing, she’s obviously the best candidate among those we have this year. Still, the way you excuse this e-mail situation… I work in healthcare. People are routinely fired for making mistakes like this. You are required to know this to do your job. This isn’t top secret intel, but it is regarding patient records, regulations and procedures surrounding HIPAA, patient data. If someone sends an unencrypted mail containing patient health information, if you take patient records home with you or leave them unattended in your car, if you look up your own health record but accessing that information isn’t part of your formal job… that can get you fired. I personally know people that have been fired for HIPAA breach situations. Every year we receive training and must take a test to verify that we understand this. We are a local rural hospital, not part of the intelligence apparatus of the United States of America. They shouldn’t be messing up like this.
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Yes, it is my experience, but I have never made this so-called mistake because I realize it’s not just a simple mistake.
When one obtains a clearance, this stuff is drilled into their head and beaten to death. Knowing the regulations is day-to-day stuff. I don’t buy any claims of ignorance from her side.
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While his comment had hyperbole, the point is the powerful and elite are often above the law.
Yes yes, you can site examples, such as Martha Stewart. But waaaaayyyyy too often the wealthy get off with wrist slaps from plea deal (it helps if you can get a good lawyer to grease the wheels), and the people in power get even less. Some animals are more special.
I don’t know if she should necessarily be locked up, but at the same time zero consequences other than bad press isn’t going to deter the next person from doing it - whether that reason was for naive convenience, or for nefarious purposes.
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