Hey, Don't Blame Me - I Know Nuthin'...
(State Department; CIA; GOP, Fox, Pundits; HILLARY; and Media — hell everyone)
Hillary Clinton recent seen in Iowa while campaigning
Quick reminder about why we are at this point re: the flap over HILL’s emails that were send under “Clinton email.com” which is the domain name she used and that was run out of a server in or near Chappaqua, NY (her and Bill Clinton’s home). It is also the place where she lived all the while she was Secretary of State. Now we see a whole lot of GOPers and their Rightwing minions involved in this firestorm ever since. The want her head on a platter or worse.
This is a major update and it shores up part of her case.
WASHINGTON (NY Times) — The Justice Department said in a court filing (September 11, 2015) that Hillary Clinton had the authority to delete emails that she did not believe were government records from the personal account that she exclusively used while she was Secretary of State.
The statement was made in connection with a lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch – the group bent on forcing the government to search the server that housed Clinton’s account for messages related to a video Ad the State Department aired in Pakistan. Judicial Watch contends the Ad was an apology for the Internet video that the administration initially blamed for inciting the 2012 attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Continue reading that story here
Related Coverage
- Hillary Clinton’s Long Road to ‘Sorry’ Over Email Use: Dated Sep 11, 2015
- Hillary Clinton Urges Cooperation on Inquiry into Her Emails, as She Finds Joy Elsewhere: Dated Sep 5, 2015
- Insights and Redactions in Latest Release of Hillary Clinton’s Emails: Dated Aug 31, 2015
Mrs. Clinton
has given the State Department roughly 30,000 emails from the account that she
determined were government records. She has said that she deleted about 31,000
other emails that she said were personal, and Justice said that those are not
government records.
Under federal
record-keeping guidelines, government employees are “required to review each
message, identify its value, and either delete it or move it to a
record-keeping system,” the Justice Department said, and “There is no question
that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without
agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were
working on a government server.
Under policies issue both by the National
Archives and Records Administration and the State Department, individual
officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to
determine what constitutes a federal record.”
Let’s face it,
the GOP is scared shitless of HILL and her possible win to gain the White House
– in short, they will do, say, pay, try, lie, imply, or deny anything to that
end. Their pursuit to damage her are shameful yet they remain shameless.
To me, the only key and complex and yet unanswered question in all this might be: “Who is at fault and who do we blame; what damage, if any, has been done; and, what is the real goal here?”
Background on the Subject: Is the nasty flap over “Clinton email.com” the domain name used by Mrs. Clinton that was run out of a server in or near Chappaqua, NY - where she and Bill Clinton own a home – all the while when she was Secretary of State and recently disclosed has been a firestorm since.
My four major concerns are annotated below in RED.
WASHINGTON (NY Times) — A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — has endorsed (1) a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.
(2) Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the IG's finding last month and questioned whether the emails had been “over classified by an arbitrary process.
But the special review — by the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were “Top Secret,” the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011.
(3) The Clinton campaign disagreed with the conclusion of the intelligence review and noted that agencies within the government often have different views of what should be considered classified.
My final analysis: When the emails were sent were they properly marked with any classification or have they since been determined to have been classified, and if so, (1) did she send them to herself w/o State security markings? or (2) did State label them and send them to her before they were labeled, in other words as draft reports and “raw” data undetermined at the time to be or not highly classified?
(4) THESE ARE CRITICAL QUESTIONS THAT DEMAND DEFINITIVE ANSWERS – the sooner the better and BTW: not for partisan gain on either side – in short: were the rules and law broken and if so, by whom?
Related: What is at stake? Mostly a campaign to smear and damage her before she even announces yes or no about a run for the White House. Boils down to nasty, ugly, and petty politics. But, what is new about that? Yawn.
Right up front keep in focus that she was under no legal requirement during her time in office to use a government email account – under regulations put in place in 2009 – the State Department was obligated to preserve her email records and when they were asked for them in late 2013, after she left office, they in fact turned over 55,000 pages. She has since told them to provide all of them. What about the heart of the matter – that should count?
Now about a bigger past story that is if you want a really big, huge, awesome email scandal from the White House – look no further than 2007: the Bush administration email controversy that involved Karl Rove and others and some 22 million emails – most missing that dealt with the U.S. Attorney firings and Rove couldn’t remember being involved – but Rove can recall every past congressional race in every district in the country in livid details with charts on FOX over the past 30 years, but yet he could not recall the firing scandal that he was deep in. Why is that? BTW: All those emails were were the RNC and on their SERVER AT THEIR HQ and not a secure location. Not politics as usual, right? Yeah, right. Oops moment for sure…!!!
Related – from other sources:
This practice about those kinds of emails raises questions about transparency, the adequacy of her record preservation and about how much of her correspondence as secretary of state could be accessed by open records requests. They also raise security questions at a time when computer intrusions are in the news. The inbox of the U.S.’s top diplomat would be a treasure trove for foreign spies and mischievous hackers. Federal agencies deploy teams to try to keep these people out of government email accounts.
Cyber security experts were mixed in their assessment of the security risks raised by a private email system by raising some fears that such risks had been overblown, given the security lapses in some government systems.
Those include a recent breach of the State Department system by hackers last year and internal leaks from government officials, such as former Army private Bradley Manning, and former NSA employee Edward Snowden.
We have a long way to go … stay tuned – it might get darn nasty and bumpy. But, this latest from the DOJ is encouraging.
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