2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Guccifer News (Warning: from FOX) [View all]leveymg
(36,418 posts)view of the contents long before Guccifer reportedly got there in February 2013, at the time Hillary had left the State Department, and that window was no longer of much interest to Russian intelligence. Exposing it through a hacker all strikes me as Russian intel's way of thumbing their nose at what what they may have concluded was a disinformation program.
To a rational person, it makes no sense that the US Secretary of State would have opened this window to the world without US intelligence knowing about it, as well, unless the same US agencies wanted that to happen. I would agree that seems on its face to be a plausible explanation, except I can't believe that the entire USG would be going through such an elaborate charade to maintain such a fiction so long after it was made public.
None of it makes sense, in the larger view, even the theory that it was originally some sort of a disinformation program. The only plausible explanation at this point is that this was indeed an unauthorized system set up by Hillary and her small circle and that they did this despite the obvious dangers of exposure of the contents of the server, and that the NSA would pick up on it. Amateur recklessness and arrogance rather than professional cloak and dagger. All the time, NSA was watching until it all got blown sky-high in September, 2012.