Let's put our heads together on the Clinton e-mail scandal

[Punkingal]

24. Here you go....UPDATED.

Last edited Sun Mar 27, 2016, 01:21 PM - Edit history (9)

Most of these are older ones...I found it interesting how the tone has changed over time...people are not nearly as critical as they were in the beginning. Some of the sites I am not crazy about, but I think in order to see the whole picture one should read it all, and treat it accordingly.

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clinton-email-scandal-she-knew-the-security-risk-but-took-it-anyway/

"This former NSA official wonders just what it was that Clinton did not want “put on a government system, where security people might see it.” As well he should. It’s quite clear she wanted to conduct business in the dark.

The NSA also has to be upset with Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal sending sensitive information to Clinton’s personal account. Schindler said the contents of a June 2011 message that Blumenthal emailed to Clinton were “indeed derived from NSA intelligence.” Somehow he got his hands on material he should not have had access to.

“This information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified top secret/special intelligence,” and at least one of the reports was “extraordinarily sensitive,” writes Schindler.

And it was out there for just about anyone with even modest hacking skills to look at — and sell to foreign spies — since it was sent to Clinton’s nonsecure personal email account."

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/mercedes-schlapp/2015/03/06/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-is-self-inflicted-and-not-going-away

The Clinton e-mail scandal raises serious questions: Did she attempt to break the law about public records? Did she use the private server to withhold information to congressional investigations? Did she have the server purged after Benghazi tragedy, or did she erase any email that should have been saved for the archives? In the wake of the Sony hack, did she make national security information more vulnerable to the leering eyes of terrorists and other American enemies online?

The mainstream media is squarely focused on Clinton and openly upset about how Clinton decided to bypass her government email account and instead use her personal server for government use. The Associated Press may be moving forward on pursuing legal action over Clinton’s State Department documents under the Freedom of Information Act. NBC News stated, “the Clintons and their supporters haven’t changed their ways. In fact, they’ve played into every negative stereotype.” The Washington Post editorial argued that Clinton’s action was “a mistake that reflects poor judgment about a public trust.” The media are equally concerned about repeated behavior when it comes to a lack of transparency from the Clinton machinery.

And trust is the key word. Can the American people trust a presidential candidate who decided to play by a different set of rules? Is Clinton above these standards? Is there a sense of entitlement? With absolute control of her emails, did Clinton withhold government related materials that dealt with Benghazi and other sensitive national security issues?

In addition to the email scandal, Clinton faces serious questions surrounding the funneling of large sums of foreign government money to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. Many questions remain unanswered, and the media will not subside. While gossip site TMZ followed Clinton and asked her for a response, she smiled and walked away. Sending a weak tweet will not resolve her problems, and remaining silent will only aggravate the media’s desire for answers. Plus, the State Department could take months to release her emails, which means that the Clinton email scandal is not going away anytime soon.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/10/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-flashback/index.html

The latest episode is the tempest this past week over Hillary Clinton's decision to use a private email account -- and a personal server located in her home -- instead of an official State Department account. From her first days at Foggy Bottom, Secretary Clinton said she did not want the hassle of multiple email accounts, and told her staff to figure it out.
That decision was made despite direction from her boss - President Obama - that administration officials should use official email accounts. It also came despite his - and her - promises of improved government transparency. And despite her 2007 criticism of Bush administration use of "secret White House email accounts."

Why didn't someone on her team push back, and insist Secretary Clinton reconsider?

Flashback to January 1996. Writing in The New York Times, reporter David Johnston wrote of Mrs. Clinton's secretive role in the firings of White House travel office staffers and, significantly, "a climate of fear in which officials did not dare question Mrs. Clinton's wishes."
What is past is prologue.

Then, and now, Clinton loyalists describe shortcuts taken on her behalf as inadvertent and innocent. For convenience, they say, not protection. Clinton critics, then and now, see cutthroat use of power and a trademark penchant for control and secrecy.
Her camp's response to the email controversy so far is textbook Clinton crisis management: say -- and do -- as little as possible, just enough to keep inevitable controversy from ballooning into unpredictable crisis.

The White House is annoyed because the President was forced to answer questions about the issue before Secretary Clinton said anything, and several Democrats over the weekend suggesting silence was not a wise strategy.

Most loyalists expect Secretary Clinton to offer a public explanation soon, and believe this will soon pass. But these loyalists are watching closely to see if the old playbook still works. Times and technology have changed considerably in the fifteen years since the Clintons lived in the White House.

"Transparency and authenticity matter more now," one Clinton confidante said.

GOP veterans of the 1990s warn against Republican overreach. Yes, there are now several legitimate avenues for congressional oversight in which the presumptive 2016 Democratic nominee as Exhibit A. There are new subpoenas issued by the select committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks to a likely broader GOP review of government record-keeping and email practices.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clinton-email-scandal-why-it-might-be-time-for-democrats-to-draft-joe-biden/2016/02/05/cd69dfea-cc18-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.htmlv

The important nonpolitical question: Did the nation’s top diplomat or her State Department staff improperly handle extremely sensitive, top-secret information and do so in a manner in which the information could be compromised?

State Department rules are quite clear.

Top-secret information must not be placed on any unclassified systems. It must be accounted for and controlled. And no copy of a top-secret document can be made without the permission of the office or agency in which it originated.

In addition, any State Department employee who causes the compromise of top-secret information or makes a copy of a top-secret document or any portion of it without the originator’s permission is subject to administrative action.


There are also limited ways in which top-secret information can be transmitted. Sending top-secret information via a private, unsecured email server is not one of them. Transmitting top-secret information with the classification removed is also forbidden.

That makes it critical to establish whether Clinton’s private server contained information that was classified at the time it was sent or received.

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said , “She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified.” In other words, Clinton is an innocent victim of bureaucratic infighting. If so, how did it happen?

That’s what makes this a Washington whodunit.

Someone inside the State Department transmitted the information to Clinton’s personal email account through a private server. That employee — or employees, as the case may be — knows or should know whether the material was drawn from, was based on or included top-secret information.

Given that the information on the server has been upgraded to top-secret, another fear arises: Have unauthorized individuals, even foreign governments, gained access to highly classified information, to the detriment of the United States?

It’s not as though clandestine attempts to penetrate government agencies have not been made.

In fall 2014, the State Department shut down and shored up its unclassified email system after detecting a possible hacker attack. A hacker also attacked the White House’s unclassified computer system around the same time.

Last year, Iranian hackers broke into the email and social media accounts of State Department officials who focused on Iran and the Middle East, according to the New York Times.

In July, The Post reported that hackers who attacked the Office of Personnel Management got the personnel and security files of at least 22 million people, including federal employees and contractors, as well as their families and friends.

The U.S. Postal Service was hacked in 2014. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s computer system was compromised the same year.

The nongovernment personal accounts of CIA Director John Brennan and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson reportedly have been hacked.

It’s chilling to think of what a breach of Clinton’s email account might mean to national security.

Presidential election year or not, the Clinton email issue must be resolved.


http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8140103/hillary-clinton-emails-explained

In early March, an investigation by the New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt found that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as Secretary of State. She didn't even set up an official address. She wasn't using Gmail, either; she was "homebrewing" her emails with a server that "traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York," according to the AP.

As a result, records of her work-related email correspondence weren't appropriately kept while she was there, instead only being turned over last year. We have no way of verifying that they've been properly turned over now, except for Clinton's word. President Obama said he learned about her email practices at "the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports."

1) Why is Clinton's email use controversial?

Exclusively using a personal account is a highly unusual practice for modern officials — and it meant many of Clinton's emails wouldn't become part of the State Department's records, or subject to Freedom of Information Act disclosure requests. "Very specific guidance has been given to agencies all across the government, which is specifically that employees in the Obama administration should use their official email accounts when they're conducting official government business," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

The New York Times' Schmidt also quotes several watchdogs and record-keeping experts harshly criticizing Clinton for her heavy reliance on private email.

The specific legal issue at play here, however, doesn't appear to be Clinton's use of her personal email — but rather the failure of Clinton and her aides to properly keep records of her work-related communications from that email account on State Department servers. Clinton said on March 10 that she "fully complied with every rule that I was governed by."

In 2014 (well after Clinton stepped down), in response to a query from the State Department (initiated by a House committee investigation into Benghazi), she turned over 55,000 pages of emails from her personal account that the department didn't previously have.

Clinton's team says she gave them all the ones relating to State Department business, but we basically have to take her word for that — she got to pick and choose which to give the government. And that makes some people wonder what Clinton might have left out.

2) So what was she using, Gmail or Yahoo?

Neither — instead, Clinton's personal email account instead appears to have been hosted at a domain called, appropriately, "Clintonemail.com." The AP's Jack Gillum and Ted Bridis reported that she used a "homebrew" system for maintaining the servers, and that her address was [e-mail].

This domain, revealed in a 2013 Gawker post, was registered on January 13, 2009 — the day Clinton's Senate confirmation hearings began, writes Philip Bump of the Washington Post.

3) Is Clinton the only top-level official to avoid using a government email?

There was no requirement that Clinton set up a government email. Indeed, several recent Cabinet officials — including former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano — have opted not do so. In fact, the State Department says its current secretary, John Kerry, is the first ever "to use a standard government email address ending in 'state.gov'," according to the Washington Post's Anne Gearan. So it's certainly not odd for Clinton not to have an official email.

Some of these officials, however, just chose not to use emails for work at all, and rather to communicate through other means. For instance, Condoleezza Rice, who was secretary before Clinton, "generally did not use email during her tenure but when she did it was through the State Department system," a Rice aide told Steve Holland of Reuters.

Clinton, by contrast, emailed frequently, but always from her personal account. The closest comparison to what she did appears to be Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state between 2001 and 2005. Powell then "used personal email to communicate with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders," Schmidt writes.

But during Powell's tenure, rules about retaining records of personal emails were somewhat more ambiguous. In 2009, though — the year Clinton took office — the National Archives and Records Administration said that "agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system," Dylan Byers reports. Clinton argues that the use of personal emails for work was permitted, so long as records were kept.

4) So which emails from Clinton does the government have?

Emails from Clinton to US officials using their own government accounts should already have been in the system. In a statement, Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill said that when Clinton emailed State employees, she used their State Department email addresses — so the government should have records of all those emails already, from the recipients' end. Emails by Clinton to White House officials or members of other departments are also likely to have been preserved by those agencies. That is, unless those aides also used personal accounts to correspond with Clinton.

On March 10, the State Department announced that, after a review that could take months, it would post the text of many of Clinton's emails on a public website. But when it comes to emails sent to people outside the government, the US apparently only has what Clinton and her aides chose to turn over in December 2014.

Clinton said on March 10 that there were 60,000 emails in total she had sent or received while Secretary. According to a review conducted by her team, half of these, she said, were work-related and given to the State Department. The rest were personal and have since been deleted.

However, the people with the strongest incentives to keep unflattering things secret — Clinton and her aides — got to decide what to withhold.

5) Was Jeb Bush much more transparent about his emails?

When the news broke, likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush immediately took a shot at Clinton on Twitter. Schmidt's Times story also mentions Jeb Bush as "stressing a different approach," and says he "released a trove of emails" from his tenure as governor of Florida.

But Bush also used a personal email account for work during that time — [e-mail] — and decided which of those emails to turn over to the state. Mary Ellen Klas of the Tampa Bay Times writes:

"The former governor conducted all his communication on his private [e-mail] account and turned over the hand-selected batch to the state archives when he left office. Absent from the stash are emails the governor deemed not relevant to the public record: those relating to politics, fundraising and personal matters while he was governor."

Furthermore, Bush did post those emails publicly — after Florida law guaranteed they would become public anyway, and after they had already been posted on other sites. (Bush still gets points for making a good-looking website to browse through the emails, though it's lacking a search function.) A spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that Bush also owns the server where his emails are hosted, according to MSNBC's Kasie Hunt.

There are differences between Bush and Clinton's situations. Foreign governments would likely be much more interested in the emails of the US Secretary of State than the governor or Florida. Also, email was much newer when Bush took office in 1999, and different laws and regulations about email use apply to Florida and the federal government.

It does appear that Clinton didn't hand over any of her emails until the State Department asked for them nearly two years after she had stepped down. Then again, Bush stepped down as governor in 2007, and didn't finish handing over his emails to the state of Florida until 2014, according to Michael Bender of Bloomberg Politics.

6) We don't know what is missing from the record

One of the most pressing questions here has an unknowable answer. We do not know if Clinton sent and withheld emails to foreign leaders or businessmen. We can only go on what her staff assures us.

In an email, Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill says that classified information was "never" sent from the Clintonemail.com domain. As to whether Clinton emailed foreign or leaders and foreign officials, Merrill writes, "Except on only the rarest of occasions, for instance with a UK official, that was simply not her practice." And, he says, emails such as those would have been turned over to State.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-emails-dem-debate_us_561db516e4b0c5a1ce610f86

When asked about the matter at Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate, Clinton called the House Select Committee on Benghazi “basically an arm of the Republican National Committee.” As evidence, she cited House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s boast last week that the committee succeeded in driving down Clinton’s poll numbers.

“Big surprise. I’m still standing,” she said, garnering a round of applause.

Pressed again by CNN host Anderson Cooper, who noted even President Barack Obama had called her private email use improper, Clinton admitted she did err but that she had apologized for it.

“I never said it wasn’t legitimate,” she said of the investigation. “I said I have answered all the questions.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/madeleine-albright-hillary-clinton-emails_us_560930a0e4b0768126fe00f8

The former secretary of state argued that Clinton, whom she has already endorsed for president in 2016, faced difficulties because “every agency has a somewhat different definition of what’s classified and under what circumstances and is it ex post facto classified.”

Asked whether she would have approved a private email server for one of her underlings at the State Department, however, Albright said she “would not.”

Later on Monday however, Albright said she meant she wouldn’t authorize such a server were she the secretary of state today.