I work at the State Dept. Let's talk email.

[RiverNoord]

150. This is a matter of point-blank common sense.

Trivial things? There are apparently some 40,000 email communications that have actually been turned over, and thousands more unnacounted for. Do you honestly believe that, for 4 years, the Secretary of State of the United States of America confined all of her email to trivial things?

Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. She was the Secretary of State of the United States for 4 years. She was a United States Senator for the State of New York for one full 6-year term and was elected for a second term, which she did not serve out due to becoming the Secretary of State. Her husband was a two-term President of the United States.

There is no way on this planet that she was not clearly aware of the archival requirements for her position as Secretary of State. There is also no way that she did not receive a crystal-clear briefing on the nature of this requirement as it applies to email communications. It's irrelevant if the poster's experience with weak technology in the State Department is accurate. If the Department of State of the United States has lousy IT capabilities, and if Mrs. Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email account to conduct State business is purely a consequence of that, it indicates that she's OK both with permitting the State Department to hobble along with crappy IT and that she was comfortable violating very clear rules of archival of official communications in order to be comfortable with the ease of use of her emails. And that's the most conceivably benign interpretation of the situation.

I cannot possibly imagine that she didn't have tech-savvy staffers, interns, ambassadors, consuls, and their staffs, who would indicate to her, if the IT capabilities of her department were poor, that this was the case and that they considered it a problem. I mean, this is the cabinet-level department responsible for the management of diplomatic communications with 174 countries around the world - 168 embassies and 6 consulates, 'interest sections' in other countries' embassies, and one quasi-embassy in Taiwan. Is this a Department that can afford to have crappy email and poor Internet capabilities? So somehow she opted for a personal email account, which we could almost guarantee was monitored by the NSA, and conducted State business on it?

That's really bad, on so many levels. If it was a Republican Secretary of State, every commentor here would be calling it both irresponsible, almost certainly for the purposes of concealment, and the fact that it broke a very, very clear rule of executive branch communications would not be ignored. I don't know if it was concealment, incompetence, or some mix of both, but it was pretty amazingly bad.