Obama may have a very difficult decision to make re: Hillary

[karynnj]

50. Not necessarily - we don't know how his email worked

Most email packages create address books. I would not be surprised if the President's blackberry's address book was maintained by his staff. In that case - if he personally typed the email .. and it is not clear that someone on his staff didn't do that with him dictating .. he likely just had to type "Hillary Clinton" and the To line would be filled.

In addition, even if he noticed, it is not clear that he would know that she had ALL her email there and that she was not, in real time, archiving it. He did after all have more to thing of than that. As to the various people who worked in the State Department consider that they likely worked for at least one political person reporting to Clinton. Even if they understood completely what was happening - who could they go to? No one higher in the State Department - she controlled the top of that pyramid. The position of State Department IG was unfilled for 5 1/2 years starting in 2008 - so that path was not as effective as possible. Could someone troubled enough have contacted someone in the White House?

We know that John Kerry got a state.gov account day one. That suggests that someone on that transition either asked it be set up (maybe Kerry's chief of staff) or the career SD people created it and gave it to him. That's how things normally work so it is totally unremarkable that he did this. Just as every Senator has a .gov address, you would expect anyone working at the SD .. all the way up to the Secretary.. would routinely be given an email.

The bigger question is why this utterly normal process not happen with HRC. There is a big question as to why she was never given a SD account -- even if she never then used it.

At some point the Obama administration had to learn that HRC did this. There is a story here we don't know. I doubt they were happy, but knew politically they could not force her to change. Politically, Obama could not demand HRC resign. There is a good question to be asked of when Obama was told of the extraordinary decision of Clinton running the SD on her own server. Another question is whether - as she told the public - Clinton assured high level Obama people that the email was captured by the SD system. It does seem that it took almost a year before the fact that stuff was missing went to a high enough level that they could "negotiate" with HRC to get them back. (Note the word "negotiate" suggests again that she had unusual power.)

This has been why I have been intensely angry at Clinton on this issue, that her supporters want to make go away by putting their fingers in their ears - calling everyone concerned as pushing RW talking points. The fact is that this is a mess created out of Clinton's paranoia that has the potential of raising questions about the State Department and the WH - all the way up to the top.