Report raises questions about Hillary's email defense

[alp227]

Source: politico

A report released Wednesday by the State Department’s internal watchdog raises questions about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim that a large proportion of her emails were formally archived because they involved State employees using official email.

The State Department Inspector General review highlights that State staffers using an email system known as SMART did not have their emails automatically saved for federal record keeping purposes. Staffers using that system had to formally designate individual emails for archiving and rarely did so, the watchdog found.

In 2011, “Department employees created 61,156 record emails out of more than a billion emails sent,” the report says. In 2013, even fewer emails — 41,749 — were designated for preservation.

At a news conference Tuesday, the likely presidential candidate argued that her decision to use a personal email account “for convenience” did not interfere with the department’s ability to retrieve those messages in response to Freedom of Information Act requests or for the historical record.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-email-state-internal-watchdog-report-115993.html

[BeyondGeography]

1. Wake me up when it's over

[Polly Hennessey]

5. I'm with you.

It pains me to say this but we will probably be taking a long nap. Heard "The Cycle" on the radio going back to work ---- my goodness, Hillary is not popular with Cycle "airheads".

[riversedge]

28. just hope it is a short snooze but with the benghazi thugs, we might oversleep

[Purveyor]

2. Can we really endure scandal after scandal that comes with the 'Clintons' and really

expect to keep the White House come Jan. 2017?

I was all but ready to reluctantly accept the coronation of Hillary as our nominee but after this week I'm working as hard as I can to find a viable alternative.

[SoapBox]

9. + a bazzilion!

Even if this is a nothing story...it's the PukeBaggers wet dream. They will NEVER give up on it...ever.

And this is one of many "baggage" reasons (true or not) that she can NOT win the White House.

Dems need to get serious about getting a candidate that will not be brought down by such silliness.

[RiverNoord]

29. The worst thing is this...

She actually said that she used a personal email account - which was actually on a personal server under a personal registered domain name - 'for convenience.'

Now that, sadly, is arrogance. I'm not a Hillary fan, but I don't care about this whole business from an archiving perspective. It's the security perspective that really stunned me as a lawyer and IT professional. I'm just amazed that the Secretary of State of the United States would, in this day and age, use a personal email server to communicate on matters of official business.

She wasn't the Secretary of Agriculture - not a whole lot of extremely sensitive email communications going on there. At least, very little that might cause countries to, say, go to war. The Secretary of State is the nation's chief diplomat, and deals in extremely sensitive information on a constant basis.

If she'd actually had concerns that the Department of State email system was operating with inadequate security or encryption, she wouldn't have said it was 'for convenience.'

I hear something like callous disregard in that statement, and I've heard it before. Which is why I'm not a Hillary fan..

[Android3.14]

14. You have that so right

Back in the first Obama election, when she was such a strong contender for the nomination, I decided I would hold my nose and vote for her if she were the nominee.

I'll probably still do that, even though I will complain the whole way.

Yet only a deluded ass cannot recognize that this is a mortal wound to her campaign for the Presidency.

If she is woven of any true thread of a stateswoman, she will announce her intention to back out, and give the party a chance to find a competent leader.

At the very least this incident opens up the primaries so that she will face a stronger challenge. Madame Clueless R. Suspicious has given Democratic challengers a serious and powerful hammer to knock her off of the catbird seat.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

17. Apparently, you must not only pledge allegiance to Hillary, but must do so without complaining. No "nose holding" allowed.

[pnwmom]

16. The Rethugs will manufacture scandals with every Democratic candidate.

This is all they've ever done, ever since Nixon. It's all payback.

[NYC_SKP]

18. She apparently doesn't mind taking the entire party down with her.

I'm sick to death of her.

[lewebley3]

3. No it doesn't Raise Questions, Hillary emails are dumb a story , Treason raises question about GOP!

This is a corporation media story, verily like manufactured my Koch
and Fox production company.
Politico, losses respect by talking about this, we all know this started
with the New York times, leaving facts out, so it could be created

I believe Hillary, not fools helping GOP, this is not important '

The GOP plotting to send are to War boys, get some priorities
Value human's before emails, Hillary did the right thing in protecting
her emails form getting hacked.

The Koch have enough money to bribe every writter in American, that should concern
you. Maybe you on Koch pay packet too!

[hopemountain]

22. yes - the gop throwing sand in our eyes

and smoke and mirrors to get us off the letter bullshit and the fast track tpp. and of course, hillary is a woman - the gop love scandalizing strong women legislators and government leaders.

while dems are all arguing about emails amongst themselves, rest assured, the gop are up to no good.

i will vote for her if she makes it through the primary. otherwise...

[lewebley3]

31. You, would be doing the right thing, by supporting whatever Democrats Wins

Last edited Fri Mar 13, 2015, 12:43 PM - Edit history (1)

The election 2016 will be very clear, Democrats care about American Lives and don't want War:

The GOP wants war, and would kill Americans to line their pockets.

I didn't want Obama, but I voted for him, I thought he was just too young!

However, he has been right on almost every foreign decision, even ones

I initically did not like. Also I wanted a public options with the ACA, I didn't like all

the deals he made, however as times has gone by, Obama's wisdom has proved right:

the ACA is a wonderful improvement. Democrats need to stick together, I will support

all Democrats in 2016, (as long as their not crazy crimmials)

[hopemountain]

34. agree with you regarding issues

i also did not agree upon completely - but we got closer, he is the master of compromise, and, frankly, i like is strategy of stringing the gop and corporations along by not endorsing their cockamamie projects (keystone xl pipeline)...he gives us - the public the time to respond via letters, calls, petitions, and our grassroots efforts. this i appreciate more than anything.

now that we do have the aca - it is a good base for the next step: single payer.

[MBS]

4. Oy. n/t

[NYC_SKP]

6. She needs to hang it up and spare us years of this shit.

[roguevalley]

8. yeah they both have an amazing way to fuck themselves up and then expect no one to care

I hate incompetent buffoonery. Bill still messes up and so does she even when they are scrutinized to the nth degree. If for nothing else, they should have toed the line to avoid this.

[SoapBox]

10. NYC_SKP...

Yup!

[840high]

32. yes

[rickford66]

7. Use the Bush defense. "Mistakes were made." That worked for them.

[SoapBox]

11. Unfortunately...

We don't have Fuks News, Hate Radio, Religious Right Wackos in their Pulpits nor even the likes of impotent ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC OR PBS to cry and whimper and plead her case, like they always did for poor, poor innocent "Mission Accomplished" Bush.

They will paint this stupid email thing as White Water and never stop hammering.

[greatlaurel]

12. Boy, is tiger beat on the Potomic getting desperate. They look like a bunch of fools.

Then it just goes to show that HRC went far beyond what was required at the State Department and preserved the emails on her own server. It is going to be very amusing when those emails are made public.

HRC looked and sounded great at that press conference. It must have the GOP in a real snit after the Traitor Tots made fools of themselves in the Senate.

[NYC_SKP]

19. She looked a mess, a wreck, desperate and overwhelmed. She did us no favors with this secret email

Your reply is amazing, you actually think she was going above and beyond the call of duty by creating her own little government email system.

Wow.

[PSPS]

13. So says Politico

Politico is very right-leaning to begin with. This is such a silly thing, yet the media, now more accurately referred to as "the outrage industry," must have its outrage to report. I can't remember what the "official DU position" on Clinton is supposed to be now but, whether you like Clinton or not, this whole "email scandal" is nothing but the latest echoing of the 24/7 Wurlitzer.

[pnwmom]

15. It actually supports her defense. The scandal-mongers are witch-hunting

Hillary for her emails although even today, according to this report, the State Department isn't preserving most of its messages.

She, OTOH, preserved all of her work related messages and forwarded them to State.

[NYC_SKP]

20. We'll never know what was saved, what was buried, what was deleted, and she said as much.

She was the decider, she determined what the government should see instead of letting the government do it's job.

It might not have been against any laws, but it sure was despicable, suggestive of treachery, and not at all becoming an elected official.

And the more she tries to explain her way out of it, the worse it looks.

It's over man, I know that she's going to implode before election day and if she doesn't and carries the primary, she will lose.

If we end up with a Republican, it will be because Hillary Clinton couldn't do the right thing and get out of politics.

Mark my words.

[pnwmom]

23. And that was all within the law, and the head of the Archives testified to that.

Congress changed the law in 2014 but apparently the details are still hard to carry out.

It wasn't despicable or suggestive of treachery, just suggestive of sloppiness.

No reasonable person thinks she put anything important in those nonclassified emails. Anything that needed to be hidden, she would have hidden.

[candelista]

36. Was it?

You said, "No reasonable person thinks she put anything important in those non-classified emails."

Some reasonable think that she might have done so.

How do we know that she didn't trade diplomatic favors for contributions to the Clinton Foundation from foreign businessmen?

Do you believe that Hillary is incorruptible? And what makes you think that?

After all, we will never be able to settle the matter, will we? Because she has erased all possible evidence.

[pnwmom]

37. And you are treating her as if she's been accused or convicted of a crime.

She hasn't. Using a personal account was not a crime.

And suppose she had had a personal account AND a work-related account. Before she sent any email, she would have had to decide which account to send it on. If she didn't want a record in the automatically archived .gov account, then she could have sent it on her personal account. There was nothing in the law to stop her. Then or now.

Why is it that you would trust her to divide her emails between her personal and .gov accounts before hitting the send button -- but you wouldn't trust her to divide her emails into personal and work-related after the fact?

Or are you suggesting that they should have access to all her personal AND work-related emails, no matter what devices they are on?

[candelista]

38. It just looks suspicious.

And Presidential candidates should not "look suspicious."

[pnwmom]

39. Only to those who are determined to attack her. And if it wasn't this,

it will be something else. That's what they do.

[candelista]

40. So any criticism of Hillary is necessarily biased and unfair?

That's what you seem to be saying. Only blind loyalty could prompt such a remark.

[NewEnglandGirl]

21. Easy Solution

All she has to do is turn over the server and let them see that there is nothing wrong on it.

[pnwmom]

24. You must have missed the whole Clinton administration and Ken Starr's

investigation.

There is never an end to this.

[NewEnglandGirl]

25. Just thinking

this could be the only way to short circuit it.

[pnwmom]

27. They could cull through a million emails in a hundred subcommittees

and it will never, ever be enough.

[leftofcool]

26. Yawn!

[guss]

30. emails

During the Gwb administration they destroyed thousands of GOV emails of what was sent on the Iraq war. and the CIA lost hard drives of thier emails during the same period. The same people are going after Hillary for a Email technically really? wtf?

[NYC_SKP]

33. This time, fortunately, we've caught it BEFORE the individual is elected into office. It's good!

It's time we stop behaviors that apparently have become "business as usual".

[candelista]

35. Apparently unarchived emails were rampant at the State Department

From the article:

"State staffers using an email system known as SMART did not have their emails automatically saved for federal record keeping purposes. Staffers using that system had to formally designate individual emails for archiving and rarely did so, the watchdog found."

Only a tiny fraction of their emails were designated for saving.

So there was an epidemic of loose oversight over communications at State. It wasn't just Hillary. But Hillary was the boss. She had plenty of time to clean this up, and she didn't.

There is a kind of blindness or carelessness here that does not speak well for her as an executive.

[NewEnglandGirl]

41. What everyone has to face and remember...

Re - "There is a kind of blindness or carelessness here that does not speak well for her as an executive."

You are right but I have learned that I don't trust politicians from either side of the aisle anymore. It's sad but true. When there is an election you are usually dealing with the lesser of two evils when it is time to vote. You have to say to yourself do I want A or do I want B because those are my choices, that is our system. Usually one will be way worse/harder for you to stomach than the other one. It's a disappointing process in most cases.