Hillary Clinton Violating Spirit Of The Law
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
Instead of using the government email system for her official correspondences as Secretary of State, Clinton used a private email account.
She had an email server set up at her house and all her emails were stored there.
There were guidelines that said she shouldn’t do that. And she had to know about those guidelines because she signed an order admonishing anyone at the State Department from using private email accounts. The idea is private accounts aren’t as secure as the government accounts.
At the time she was Secretary of State, the Federal Records Act didn’t require federal employees to use government email accounts.
The FRA did, however, require that all federal employees had to preserve records of their communications on government servers. Hillary didn’t do that. But Hillary supporters argue that’s OK because since Clinton’s work emails were sent to State Department people, they would have been preserved on a government server on the receiving end.
Fair enough, but what about emails sent to foreign leaders or other people outside the State Department?
Other Hillary supporters cite a gray area in the FRA – that it only requires the employee preserve the emails, not necessarily preserve them on a government server, which Hillary seems to have done on her server at home.
Well, maybe she did. There’s really no way to know what she may or may not have deleted from that server. Even so, deleted material probably could be resurrected by government technosleuths if needed.
So was this illegal? Who knows? But I know this. Even if it is determined she didn’t break the letter of the law, she sure broke the spirt of the law. The whole idea is transparency of and accessibility to the communications of public servants. Her emails sitting on a private server in her house certainly fails on both counts.
Even more bizarre was President Obama’s assertion that he found out about the email problem at “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”
Soooo, the President and his Secretary of State either never exchanged any emails or when they did, the President didn’t notice that Hillary’s email addresses:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
weren’t on government servers?
Press Secretary Josh Ernest cleared it up though:
“The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state. I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email each other.
“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address, he did. But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act. The point is the president did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back to.”
Yeah he did. And apparently he didn’t care that – at a minimum – she was in violation of her own State Department’s rules.
Hillary held a press conference Tuesday to clear things up, but it only made things worse.
She said she broke no rules – which pretty clearly is a stretch – and said the private server at her residence was secure:
“The server contains personal communications from my husband and me. The system we used was set up for President Clinton's office. So, I think that the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.”
That’s weird because Bill’s spokesman, Mark McKenna, told the Wall Street Journal just one day earlier that Bill never uses email. McKenna said the former president has only sent two email messages – ever – and both were while he was president.
The first email was a message to John Glenn, the former senator and astronaut who in 1998 was making a return trip to space. The other email was to U.S. troops serving in the Adriatic, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Shockingly, somebody here isn’t telling the truth.
Beyond that, Hillary said she turned over everything that could even remotely be considered related to her State Department job.
The rest was private – and would remain private. And the server would remain private, too, by the way.
You know, “Trust me.”
I think that sets a pretty troubling precedent. Elected officials get to sift through their stuff to decide what the public gets to see? That’s no good.
I think she should just turn the server over to the FBI or the NSA or some other trusted third party and let them have their way with it. They could strip out all the State Department stuff and leave all the private stuff.
They would decide what was public and what wasn’t, not Hillary.
A day after Hillary’s strained press conference, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state.
The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013, the AP reported Wednesday.
‘‘After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time. The press is a proxy for the people, and AP will continue its pursuit of vital information that’s in the public interest through this action and future open records requests,’’ said Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel.
Maybe not, but this seems to have the potential to get interesting.
*****
Last week I wrote about the .223 M855 ball ammunition ban and what a farce it was.
Note I said “was.”
Tuesday afternoon, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives decided to abandon the proposal.
This follows a letter from 52 U.S. Senators and 238 members of the U.S. House of Representatives demanding the ATF do just that. It also follows, apparently, an outcry by the public, according to a statement posted on the ATF’s website:
“Although ATF endeavored to create a proposal that reflected a good faith interpretation of the law and balanced the interests of law enforcement, industry, and sportsmen, the vast majority of the comments received to date are critical of the framework, and include issues that deserve further study.”
It also said it will “further evaluate the issues raised” and provide “an additional open and transparent process” before proceeding with any further action.
Not sure I like that “further action” part but at least this is a step in the right direction.
Stay tuned.[[In-content Ad]]
Instead of using the government email system for her official correspondences as Secretary of State, Clinton used a private email account.
She had an email server set up at her house and all her emails were stored there.
There were guidelines that said she shouldn’t do that. And she had to know about those guidelines because she signed an order admonishing anyone at the State Department from using private email accounts. The idea is private accounts aren’t as secure as the government accounts.
At the time she was Secretary of State, the Federal Records Act didn’t require federal employees to use government email accounts.
The FRA did, however, require that all federal employees had to preserve records of their communications on government servers. Hillary didn’t do that. But Hillary supporters argue that’s OK because since Clinton’s work emails were sent to State Department people, they would have been preserved on a government server on the receiving end.
Fair enough, but what about emails sent to foreign leaders or other people outside the State Department?
Other Hillary supporters cite a gray area in the FRA – that it only requires the employee preserve the emails, not necessarily preserve them on a government server, which Hillary seems to have done on her server at home.
Well, maybe she did. There’s really no way to know what she may or may not have deleted from that server. Even so, deleted material probably could be resurrected by government technosleuths if needed.
So was this illegal? Who knows? But I know this. Even if it is determined she didn’t break the letter of the law, she sure broke the spirt of the law. The whole idea is transparency of and accessibility to the communications of public servants. Her emails sitting on a private server in her house certainly fails on both counts.
Even more bizarre was President Obama’s assertion that he found out about the email problem at “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”
Soooo, the President and his Secretary of State either never exchanged any emails or when they did, the President didn’t notice that Hillary’s email addresses:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
weren’t on government servers?
Press Secretary Josh Ernest cleared it up though:
“The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state. I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email each other.
“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address, he did. But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act. The point is the president did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back to.”
Yeah he did. And apparently he didn’t care that – at a minimum – she was in violation of her own State Department’s rules.
Hillary held a press conference Tuesday to clear things up, but it only made things worse.
She said she broke no rules – which pretty clearly is a stretch – and said the private server at her residence was secure:
“The server contains personal communications from my husband and me. The system we used was set up for President Clinton's office. So, I think that the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.”
That’s weird because Bill’s spokesman, Mark McKenna, told the Wall Street Journal just one day earlier that Bill never uses email. McKenna said the former president has only sent two email messages – ever – and both were while he was president.
The first email was a message to John Glenn, the former senator and astronaut who in 1998 was making a return trip to space. The other email was to U.S. troops serving in the Adriatic, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Shockingly, somebody here isn’t telling the truth.
Beyond that, Hillary said she turned over everything that could even remotely be considered related to her State Department job.
The rest was private – and would remain private. And the server would remain private, too, by the way.
You know, “Trust me.”
I think that sets a pretty troubling precedent. Elected officials get to sift through their stuff to decide what the public gets to see? That’s no good.
I think she should just turn the server over to the FBI or the NSA or some other trusted third party and let them have their way with it. They could strip out all the State Department stuff and leave all the private stuff.
They would decide what was public and what wasn’t, not Hillary.
A day after Hillary’s strained press conference, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state.
The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013, the AP reported Wednesday.
‘‘After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time. The press is a proxy for the people, and AP will continue its pursuit of vital information that’s in the public interest through this action and future open records requests,’’ said Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel.
Maybe not, but this seems to have the potential to get interesting.
*****
Last week I wrote about the .223 M855 ball ammunition ban and what a farce it was.
Note I said “was.”
Tuesday afternoon, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives decided to abandon the proposal.
This follows a letter from 52 U.S. Senators and 238 members of the U.S. House of Representatives demanding the ATF do just that. It also follows, apparently, an outcry by the public, according to a statement posted on the ATF’s website:
“Although ATF endeavored to create a proposal that reflected a good faith interpretation of the law and balanced the interests of law enforcement, industry, and sportsmen, the vast majority of the comments received to date are critical of the framework, and include issues that deserve further study.”
It also said it will “further evaluate the issues raised” and provide “an additional open and transparent process” before proceeding with any further action.
Not sure I like that “further action” part but at least this is a step in the right direction.
Stay tuned.[[In-content Ad]]
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