Stoddard: Clinton supporters tripping over email spin
The report destroyed much of Clinton’s oft-repeated rationale for housing government records — all of her business emails as secretary— on a secret server she neither sought approval for nor secured to protect against hacking. We already knew: that Clinton is the only Cabinet secretary to use a private server, that she deleted more emails than she turned over, that she provided emails in paper form that couldn’t be electronically searched, that she did not in fact turn over all of her work emails, and that more than 2,000 of them contained classified information.
But the new findings reveal Clinton had not likely hidden everything on her own server for convenience, as she had claimed, but in order to shield her communications from the Freedom of Information Act. In a new email from the report — mysteriously never before released — Clinton tells an aide she didn’t want to use the State Department email system because she didn’t want her personal emails to be accessible.
The report also shows her own staff believed the system had been hacked several times, contradicting her claims there had never once been a security breach. Though she has insisted this was all “above board” and “allowed,” she never sought permission for her server, nor would she have received it had she done so, according to the report. Though the report showed some former secretaries of State had used personal email for work occasionally, none had used an unsecured private server. As head of the department, Clinton had also signed a policy statement requiring employees to avoid using their personal email system for all work email in order to comply with the Federal Records Act.
…
Surreal testimony in a sworn deposition may result from Mills’s legal exposure, as the Federal Records Act describes “whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
http://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/282153-stoddard-clinton-supporters-tripping-over-email-spin
= new reply since forum marked as read
