The NY Times essays a major survey of the Hillary email scandal. They offer plenty of winks, nods and reassurances for their Upper West side readers but can't elide the point that with this email problem, there is a there here. We do get a new (to me, anyway) rationalization for her decision to get a private server, but also a description of several instances where the Obama Administation took a hard line on people who were careless with classified info.
Hillary Clinton Emails Take Long Path to Controversy
Yeah, unraveling a cover-up's a bitch, especially when the Legacy Media has to be dragged kicking and screaming to it.
...
Whether Americans believe Mrs. Clinton’s decision to use only a private email account for her public business is a troubling scandal well worth an F.B.I. inquiry, a pragmatic move blown out of proportion by Republican enemies, or something in between, may depend more on their partisan leanings than the facts of the affair itself.
Facts won't matter. Sadly, they are probably right - reality won't be allowed to interfere with the coronation of the boss's wife.
Mrs. Clinton, who has said she now regrets her unorthodox decision to keep private control of her official messages, is not a target in the F.B.I.’s investigation, which is focused on assessing security breaches. Against the backdrop of other current government computer security lapses, notably the large-scale theft of files from the Office of Personnel Management, most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence.
But exempting herself from the practices imposed on the 24,000 Foreign Service officers and Civil Service workers she oversaw has led to resentment from some former subordinates. And by holding onto the official emails until the State Department was prompted by Congress to ask for them, and then deciding for herself which to preserve, Mrs. Clinton may have provoked mistrust even as she asks American voters to send her to the Oval Office.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this article.
Not everyone agrees that all these tedious rules and regulations regarding document preservation and the security of classified information are just partisan smoke:
Others say more than politics is at stake. “I was stunned to see that she didn’t use the State Department system for State Department business, as we were always told we had to do,” said William Johnson, a former Air Force officer who served at the department from 1999 to 2011.
Mr. Johnson said his concerns were only compounded by the discovery of classified information in the emails. “If I’d done that, I’d be out on bond right now,” he said. He said he believed that someone should be punished — if not Mrs. Clinton, then career employees whose job was to safeguard secrets and preserve public records.
“It’s not the end of the world; she didn’t give away the crown jewels,” Mr. Johnson said. “But this is not how things are supposed to be done.”
The Times breaks the story into three phases - her decision to use a private server, her personal discretion as to which emails were public and which could be destroyed as private, and the discovery of classified information on her non-government servers. Some highlights:
Mrs. Clinton has said she decided in 2009 to handle all her email, official and personal, on one account to avoid carrying multiple electronic devices. Yet early this year she joked that she was “two steps short of a hoarder. So I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a BlackBerry.”
So there may have been other reasons for using a private server. For an oft-attacked politician considering a presidential run, the server would give Mrs. Clinton some control over what would become public from her four years as the nation’s top diplomat. “I’ve been following it very carefully,” said Shiva Ayyadurai, an email pioneer who has designed email systems for both government and large corporations. A private system, he noted, “would make it possible to decide what would be disclosed and what would not.”
No kidding. The notion that she wanted protection from Congress, the media (by way of the FOIA) and Team Obama has been discussed. But I have not seen this next rationale before:
There is another factor that some former colleagues say puts Mrs. Clinton’s decision in a more reasonable light: the archaic, dysfunctional computer systems at the State Department. Only a tiny fraction of emails sent on the State.gov system in recent years have been permanently archived. And former State Department employees describe the unclassified email system in 2009 as frustratingly inadequate.
Using State Department email outside the building involved “incredibly unreliable software,” said one former senior official. “If you had to write a priority message that was more than a paragraph long, it could leave you streaming sweat and screaming at the screen. And that’s when people would turn to their private accounts out of desperation.”
Another official described landing in foreign capitals late at night and having to go to the American Embassy and wake people up simply to check his unclassified email. He called the situation “ludicrous,” though he said the system slowly improved, especially as more people got government BlackBerry devices.
At least Team Hillary is improving their spin, a bit anyway. Why this archaic system was tolerated by past Secretaries of State, not to mention most of Hillary's poor colleagues, is left unexamined.
On to "The Deletion"
...
After meeting with two of her closest aides, Ms. Mills and Philippe Reines, State Department officials decided last year to ask for any emails in the custody of Mrs. Clinton — and of her three predecessors as secretary of state, who said they had none. She turned over 30,490 emails last December, nearly two years after leaving office.
But it turned out that she had destroyed a slightly larger number of messages from her account — 31,830 — because she or her aides judged them to be personal in nature.
“At the end, I chose not to keep my private, personal emails,” she told reporters in March. “Emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements. Condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations — the other things you typically find in inboxes. No one wants their personal emails made public.”
That explanation might win public sympathy. But it did not take long for evidence to surface that the culling may have included some work-related emails as well.
In June, the State Department said that it had not been able to find in Mrs. Clinton’s emails some 15 messages from Sidney Blumenthal, an old friend and aide, who had independently turned them over to the House Benghazi committee. The messages involved Libya — Mr. Blumenthal was passing along analysis from a former C.I.A. officer — and they appeared to involve policy.
The Clinton campaign has not explained the discrepancy. In sorting through more than 60,000 emails, it is easy to imagine slip-ups. But this small window on the deletion process, carried out privately by Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers and aides, offered little assurance to skeptics that the work email collection was complete.
Hey, maybe Hillary had 10,000 emails from Sydney Blumenthal, the vast majority of which involved personal trivia, so the deletion of the rare work-related email was totally innocent. Yeah, that's the ticket!
The Times finally covers "Classified". After reviewing the inspector general's preliminary finding the Times adds this:
In the case of Mrs. Clinton’s email, the F.B.I. is conducting an investigation of just how the classified material was stored in Denver, as well as on a thumb drive kept by her lawyer, Mr. Kendall, and whether it might somehow have landed in the hands of adversaries. Officials say the bureau at this point has no target in mind and no evidence that a crime was committed.
But the investigation takes place in an administration that has taken an especially hard line on the handling of classified information.
Scott Gration, ambassador to Kenya, resigned after a 2012 inspector general’s report accused him of flouting government rules, including the requirement that he use State Department email. “He has willfully disregarded Department regulations on the use of commercial email for official government business,” the report said. [But the email thing was a minor point, says PolitFact, with a link to the IG report.]
A New York firefighter and decorated combat veteran who served in the Marines in Afghanistan, Jason Brezler, is currently fighting dismissal from the Marine Corps for sending, via his personal account, an email attachment the government says was classified [background here]. His lawyer, Kevin Carroll, says he sent the message in response to an emergency request from a base in Afghanistan.
Mrs. Clinton and her aides have noted that the material the inspectors general call classified was not labeled as such in the emails. But in 2010, Thomas Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, was indicted under the Espionage Act for keeping an agency email printout at home that was not marked as classified. (Mr. Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.)
J. William Leonard, a former director of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office, said that in Mrs. Clinton’s case, criminal charges like those against Mr. Drake are highly unlikely. But as a former security official, he said, he was dismayed by her exclusive use of private email. The State Department has an obligation to monitor unclassified email for exactly this kind of classified spillage, he said, as well as to protect computer systems and provide emails to Congress or the public when required by law.
“The agency can’t fulfill those legal responsibilities if it doesn’t have control over the server,” Mr. Leonard said.
Partisan blah blah - rules are for the little people.
Recent Comments