Look, she didn’t personally delete, she just asked her staff to maintain only the stuff that was relevant. The most she did was to tell them something along the lines of “hey, give them all the official mail. Just leave the personal stuff out.”
That’s it. There’s nothing more. She is not technically literate, and was in the position where she could return a Blackberry simply because it doesn’t work like she expected. The reason why people think she lied is because she herself didn’t know how it was done and wasn’t all that concerned about it, since her staff was dealing with it.
No, you didn’t use logic. At least not the kind of logic that relates to FOIA compliance.
In order for a government body to comply effectively with FOIA, people tasked with retrieving information need to be able to access it in a reasonable amount of time. Chasing down emails through the bureaucracies of ~6 other agencies does not make this easy, in fact it proabably makes it impossible in real terms.
One of the ways many federal agencies evade FOIA is by honestly claiming that they face excessive burdens in collating or retrieving the requested information. These burdens allow them to stall for months or more while still ‘technically’ complying with the act.
I doubt that Secretary Clinton maintained a private server with any specific intent to evade FOIA. I just doubt she gave a damn about doing so incidentally. She didn’t have to give a damn; she’s Hillary Clinton.
Libya, a country that was actually stabilizing, not threatening its neighbors, and whose asshole leader had pretty much stopped exporting assholery beyond his own borders.
Until Obama and Clinton decided it was time to kick over the applecart.
Some of us have been well aware of Trump’s garbage (and ACTUAL illegal dealings) for decades. Remember, he was running his dad’s corrupt real estate business before Hillary even finished law school.
She’s not a tech person, neither is HRC. That a non-tech person might recommend someone as an “IT genius” for setting up a mail server doesn’t surprise me in the least–a non-tech person would get lost at the command line, and would be entirely at sea in attempting to configure a server of any kind. HRC should have consulted with real experts, but she didn’t. Abedin made a bad call on that, but ultimately that decision lies with HRC.
Beyond that, Abedin’s reasons for staying married to Weiner are hers and hers alone–she gets no flack from me for that.
Tallying up all those investigations will probably take you, and a team of researchers, weeks or months to complete and will involve a dollar amount that makes all of us sad.
I know, right? I mean, it’s not like she was the Secretary of the State Department of the United States, because I’m sure that person gets a lot of email, given they’re in charge of like 65k people and they’re right near the top of the org chart for the United States Government.
Are you an FBI agent? If not, how would you know anything about partially-assed investigations at the FBI?
We have disagreed on plenty of issues in the past, but it is important to understand that for many of us, criticism of one candidate does not constitute endorsement of the other. So “but Trump…” is not really an answer to a discussion of HRC’s Machiavellian dealings. The same goes the other way. Both candidates are deeply flawed people, at a minimum.
I agree that neither are tech people. Nor are many executives or government officials responsible for hiring sysadmins, coders, etc. And yet somehow important servers with sensitive data get secured by competent techies, without the executives or officials knowing the first thing about the details of the technology. Identifying and hiring competent people with skills outside one’s personal range of knowledge is in itself a key management skill.
What you’re saying only emphasises my point about Clinton’s management style often prioritising loyalty over competence – a management style that her protege Abedin has internalised just as she internalised how to handle a high-profile horndog spouse in the most politically expedient way that makes for “good optics.”
Once she’s in office I hope that Clinton goes against her natural inclination and starts putting competence first. But I’m resigned to a future of WH Chief of Staff Abedin and Secretaries Podesta and Wasserman-Schultz.
The difference is that this HRC email thing is like Scientology. Once they’re in, they’re mostly in the Sticky Church of the Horribly Bad No-Good HRC Email Server for life. (Even if they’re voting for her, this is still probably going to be one of the top three things these people mention in any conversation which invokes HRC’s name.)
Those beating this drum still can’t seem to show any harm done beyond the imaginary or idealistic. Mens rea and all that still applies, right? No? It wasn’t actually illegal or against the rules. But let’s blame her anyway?
She’s about to enter the highest office in the land. So she’s dangerous. Who didn’t know this already? Am I supposed to be surprised by this obvious revelation?
Sure it is. So, how is this not actually an incredibly boring/exasperating cult?
Since censure has already been applied (like, a lot), you’d think most folk would just move on.
But not these people.
Usually I like to ask what evidence it would take to get someone to change their beliefs, but I now think a better question is what it would take for me to stop hearing about it, ideally forever. Because at this point, unless someone can pull an unequivocally clear-cut case out of Julian Assange’s leaky wiki, my reaction in the future is going to be, “no thanks, I gave at the office” while avoiding eye contact.
And whose asshole leader was trying to work together with other African leaders to push back against centuries-long and ongoing divide-and-conquer colonialism. How DARE he?!
While I won’t speak to the state dept handling of classified material, it is a fact that 3,000 of the emails on HIllary’s server were clearly marked with C for Classified. What bothers me more is the email that actually says to strip the classification from an message and send it openly. This would put you or me in jail for so ordering.
