The 30,000 deleted emails

[Bob41213]

There's been a lot of talk about the emails that have been released and the classified info that's in them, but it seems like to me what may be more important are those 30,000 "personal" emails that were deleted. I see the potential that those can be more damaging.

First, even assuming team clintonemail was fully competent in erasing those emails from the server, it sounds like there were backups they didn't know about so one would presume that the FBI got at least a decent portion of them. I suspect the wiping of the server was less than perfect and many were recovered that way as well.

I see at least 3 problems that can arise from these assuming they weren't all "personal."

First, obstruction of justice. The timeline of the deleting was fairly fishy to me. They contacted their people and had them cut the backups down to 30 days (the emails regarding "shady shit&quot then waited something like 60 days to turn over the server.

Second, those emails emails may now be subpoenaed in I think 2 FOIA lawsuits which already have pissed off judges. My guess is at least some of these contain some politically damaging comments that can be used against her. If a significant portion are not personal, I can see some more honestly issues popping up. I just see this part as being even if she is not indicted, there are going to be many more drips coming out on this. What's the penalty if she withheld info in FOIA?

Third, there may be more classified info in there. These deleted emails aren't in the released emails and it could add to the 22 top secret classified email chains we know about. Hell, if a few of these are classified, I can see that making the obstruction of justice airtight.

And I'm sure there are other things I haven't thought of. I also heard recently (for the first time) that the emails were deleted by keyword when I thought originally it was said that people read each email. That already sounds like posturing to me to cover their butts.

[krawhitham]

1. But they were personal

She stated they were private personal emails, the emails "contains personal communications from my husband and me".


Problem is Bill does not use Email and he let the world know it. He has only used email twice and neither time was it with his wife

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/11463113/Hillary-Clinton-I-sent-personal-emails-to-my-husband.-Bill-I-dont-use-email.html

[Lucinda]

7. She said "communications" - you can text via email. n/t

[global1]

10. Even If He Did Use E-mail - 30,000 E-Mails Between The Two Of Them?......

When would either of them be doing their job. They'd be tied to a computer most of the time. That's just unrealistic that they would be communicating so much via e-mail or any other form of communication.

[iAZZZo]

11. everyone forgets about the "yoga classes", and the wedding emails

everyone forgets about the "yoga classes", and the wedding emails. these would certainly make up the remainder of that 30k bulk, right?

[CorporatistNation]

23. Figure It Out... Is Hillary REALLY Telling The TRUTH On THIS?

One has to wonder?

[amborin]

2. there are reports that the FBI has already discovered that some/many of them were work-related; plus

separate issue is: what gave her and her personal attny the right to decide what gets deleted? it violates FOIA, and hides potentially incriminating emails that might pertain to the Clinton Foundation

[Bob41213]

3. What's the penalty for FOAI though?

Honest question. Is there a legal statute that says what it is? It seems like FOIA is a marginally enforced law.

Edit: As far as the Clinton Foundation, I think those would effectively be "personal" emails though. Granted there is speculation that there may be damning info in regards to favors for donations, but that's purely speculation so far as I know.

[Gwhittey]

5. Well one penalty should be

forfeiture of the right to run for POTUS nomination.

[paulthompson]

4. Indeed

I'm working on a timeline of the whole e-mail scandal. It's 20,000 words long already and growing. Here's one entry you might find interesting:

August 10, 2015: Clinton writes in a statement under oath that she has provided to the State Department all of her work related e-mails that were on her personal e-mail account she used while secretary of state. That statement is a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch against the State Department. Additionally, Clinton mentions in her statement that her top aide Huma Abedin also had an e-mail account on her clintonemail.com server that "was used at times for government business," but another top aide, Cheryl Mills, did not. (The New York Times, 8/10/2015)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/us/politics/all-emails-were-provided-hillary-clinton-says-in-statement.html
One month later, some more of Clinton's work e-mails from her time as secretary of state will be discovered by the Defense Department.
(The New York Times, 9/25/2015)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/us/politics/string-of-emails-raises-questions-about-when-hillary-clinton-began-using-personal-account.html


So she signed an oath saying that she turned over all work related e-mails, and then a month later more work related e-mails showed up! This is just one of many reasons why she's in trouble.

I've found about four different mentions of those 30,000 deleted e-mails later showing up and containing work related material. I suspect there's a lot of work related stuff in those deleted e-mails she just didn't want people to know.

[CorporatistNation]

25. I Mean Hillary Ahs Already PUBLICLY PERJURED Herself On Several Occassions!

What is she going to do in an FBI Interview? Will be interesting.... IMHO!

[snagglepuss]

6. Hi Bob41213 welcome to DU! I agree these are the important ones. What

was so personal that couldn't be saved. There is only one reason to delete under those circumstances and that is to get rid of evidence. Even though there may be a price to pay for deletion the penalty for whatever is on those emails must have been deemed worse than deleting emails - otherwise why do it.

Are you aware of the story of the two two tech guys at Platt RIver who received the emails instructing them to wipe specific emails? Rather than just wiping them, these guys saved copies of the emails in the Cloud because they were afraid of being involved in a coverup. If not for their actions, these emails would have been gone. It's really remarkable as I'm sure there would be a lot of techies who would've have just wiped them.

[Bob41213]

8. I was not, got a link?

[paulthompson]

9. I have a timeline entry about that too

Follow the links. I don't see anything about them making back-ups. However, there's various reasons to believe at least one copy of Clinton's server survived.

Mid-August 2015: An employee at Platte River Networks, the company managing Clinton's private e-mail server from June 2013 onwards, expresses concerns of a cover-up in a private e-mail later found by Senate investigators. According to a spokesperson for Platte River, Clinton Executive Service Corp., the Clinton associated company that hired Platte River in June 2013, from the very start the company had a 30-day deletion policy. That means that any deleted e-mail on Clinton's server would be permanently deleted after 30 days. However, a mid-August 2015 e-mail from one unnamed Platte River employee to another suggests the implementation of this policy actually happened later. The e-mail reads, "Any chance you found an old email with their directive to cut the backup back in Oct-Feb. ... I know they had you cut it once in Oct-Nov, then again to 30day in Feb-ish." (Presumably this refers to October 2014 through February 2015.) The employee adds that such evidence would be "golden" and would clear Platte River of criticism. "Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shady shit. I just think if we have it in writing that they [Clinton Executive Service Corp.] told us to cut the backups, and we can go public saying we have had backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30 days, it would make us look a WHOLE LOT better." The e-mail was sent shortly after it was publicly revealed that the FBI was looking into the security of Clinton's server. (Politico, 10/6/2015)
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/hillary-clinton-emails-server-214487
(McClatchy Newspapers, 10/6/2015)
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article37968711.html
It's not clear when the deletion policy was instituted or changed. But if the unnamed employee is correct, the change would have come just after Clinton was asked to hand over all her e-mails, which took place in October 2014.

[highprincipleswork]

12. This e-mail thing is absolutely unacceptable risk in a candidate.

[passy]

13. Why would delete your personal emails in the first place.

Seriously, why, if not to hide something. They should have handed in everything and then let the authorities decide which of these emails were government business related. I can guess which search words they used to delete the emails though, to start with "foundation", "sbwhoeop" (that's Sydney Blumenthal's email address; they missed one there though about Sudan), "Giustra Enterprise Partnership", "CGEP", to name a few.
All this trouble to be able to use her Blackberry to check her emails ...

[HereSince1628]

19. Under the US archiving guidelines, each dept sets its own specific rules for what's saved

and the head of an agency has ultimate authority on those rules. I suppose that's because the business of the agencies is so different it's hard to write a general policy that wouldn't result in over-archiving. I'm sure historians and lawyers would love all stuff to be saved, but I'm not sure the archives want to have to sort, maintain, and create accession identifiers for all that.

In some sense, HRC as SOS got to make her own decisions about her own stuff while she was secretary. It seems she felt she could carry that authority forward after she left office. I suppose she could argue that the decisions about what was work related was made during the time she wrote the email and she had that authority.

[passy]

20. It wasn't the point I was trying to make

The point being that it doesn't really make any sense to deliver work related e-mails and delete the personal ones. If she had used a government e-mail for work and a private one for other affairs there wouldn't a problem to determine what is work and what is personal.
But since she didn't we can only assume that she used the e-mail addresses for both purposes. Why would she feel the need to delete the personal ones, why couldn't she hand in the work related ones and keep the others for herself. If it was a friend or a relative wouldn't you ask them why their erased personal correspondance, isn't there information there which might have any sentimental value, or that you might need to have access to at a later date, like an address, a phone number, the time of a meeting you can't quite remember, some pictures someone sent you, your Goldman Sachs speeches which you asked someone to review etc... How about e-mails related to what you did on a particular day, who you met and what you talked about, quite important stuff if you're going to maybe write an autobiography at some point.

[HereSince1628]

24. My experience with computer records requests is limited

to compliance to 'discovery' process during a lawsuit over an alleged denial of due process in a tenure process at a university. The requests were limited by specific criteria of interest. People who had served on relevant university governance committees were directed by university council to submit documents that met the criteria. I always wondered how actual compliance could be demonstrated without make everything available for perusal.

I suspect that Clinton did the same with material her personal server with regard to Judicial Watches FOI, providing information that was limited to the details of the request. Then realizing that device which included various email accounts was about to become subject to right-wing fishing operations she went into 'risk management' mode.

The use of personal vs government computer certainly made a mess of things, but I think people are free to destroy there own property. You don't have to save emails in the same way that you must save tax records. What remains subject to doubt is how to verify that compliance to FOI requests was complete. But I think that's always a question. In this particular circumstance, because questions of proper classified information handling emerged, the private emails appear to be another rock under which items of interest might be found. That makes the destruction of the private emails look suspicious. If the FBI or other agencies have recovered the private emails, addressing suspicions might be possible. But currently what we know is some people have suspicions. But then, they often do.

With respect to what's saved as 'federal documents' for archiving, that really does appear to be up to the different government agencies with their agency heads as the final arbiter of rules for that agency. Clinton as sos was the head of an agency.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

14. I gave up on this story on day 1. Are Conde Rice and Powell under investigation?

If not, why not? Why would they go after Clinton but not BushCo?

[RiverLover]

16. They didn't have their own server stashed in their basement. They never used a private server.

Only someone with things to hide went to such lengths.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

17. Thank you for the quick reply! OK, gottit

[RiverLover]

15. Gucifer, the Romanian hacker, is in the US now for 18 months at the longest.

I've read speculation that when he hacked into Sidney Blumenthal's email, he found email exchanges between Sec Clinton & Sid that were not among the emails that Clinton turned over.

They'd been deleted as "personal".

The timing of his temporary extradition during the final stages of the FBI investigation is.......interesting

[Califonz]

18. If Clinton's server wasn't secure...

wouldn't foreign governments find it rather easy to hack into? Maybe they have copies of everything!

[Octafish]

21. NSA does.

Copies of everything from everyone.

[Califonz]

28. Cool! Free backup service!

And I thought my tax dollars were wasted!

[IdaBriggs]

31. That is one thing being investigated and yes, things appear to have been hacked.

The hacker is currently here. He did screen shots of Hillary email back in 2013 and posted them on the Internet.

[Darb]

22. Surprising tack for such a .............

shall we say...............new person. Suspicious at best.

But you knew that. Too bad the bernies cannot recognize when they are being played.

[RiverLover]

27. I don't care if this a genuinely new person here or not. The OP is the truth.

That -should- matter to Dems.

This is what the Clintons have turned us into, having to spin truth & attempt to paint it as RW talk, when its just the truth. And then defending the most purchased corrupt politician in my lifetime, a politician who is very RW herself, making the blind & faithful actually defend republican positions and outright corruption because a DINO is pushing them.

....The new person did good with this OP. For Hillary supporters though, they can't see it. They refuse to see it.



Really, who is being played?

Pro-wall street deregulation
Pro-monopolies
Pro-BigAg
Pro-insurance company profits over people
Pro-fracking & off shore drilling
Pro-charter schools & defunding public eduction
Pro-war for corporate profit
Pro-unfair free "trade" spreading low wages & no unions throughout the world. Lords & serfs....

Who is being played?

[Darb]

30. You are being played.

Any schmuck in the vrwc can ooze over here and post any ridiculous shit that they want and the bernies will eat it up with a spoon. Too bad.

[Jarqui]

26. I posted about some of this here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1280158157#post168
(link of items blow at this above link)
- Benghazi emails were missing
- missing email on the claim that the Saudis financed the Benghazi attack (Saudis also contributed to the Clinton Foundation after Clinton approved a weapons deal...)
- nine missing emails between Hillary and the President (good chances those dialogues are classified)
- missing emails between Clinton and Petraeus were found (and potentially classified)
- missing emails that the Dept of Defense had copies of (nearly everything there is classified ..)
- missing emails between Clinton and Cheryl were found
- reports of FBI agents finding work related emails in the emails that had been deleted and turning them over to investigators

Seven different reported instances of finding missing work related emails (many of them potentially classified or relating to Benghazi investigation).

A bit of an obstruction of justice concern .... on top of the classified concerns and quid pro quo of the Clinton Foundation

Huma Abedin gets interviewed this week and states she's "terrified" about what she might have said in her emails that are about to be published in another of the FOIA inquires (38 backed by lawsuits for Clinton info)

Two FOIA judges pretty upset with what has gone on in the FOIA cases with the second judge sniffing around "bad faith" and "wrong doing" as both approve open court discovery testimony.

And then the FBI asks the State Department to stand down on their investigation ... after it's reported they're going to start talking to Clinton's staff.

Clinton's staff go with the unusual defense of one lawyer representing all of them (so the lawyer can prep the subsequent witnesses after the first answers FBI questions).

There's a pretty strong odor building up with all of this ...

[geek tragedy]

29. Save us, Indictment Fairy, you're our only hope nt

[timmymoff]

32. Weren't we all supposed to be gone by Iowa?

Or was it Super Tuesday? Or was it march 15th? The goalposts change as often as Hillary's policy positions. Hard to keep up with those. We don't need an indictment, hell Bernie already owns the message. She has had to follow his lead, or in Hillaryspeak, evolve.

[geek tragedy]

33. no one expected Sanders to drop out.

he's quite obviously not going to win, but here he is