Sorry it's early. But would Senator emails be considered the same priority and Federal government property? And then the question is what email did she use as Senator; and does that matter as much?
I'm sure it was just as important in the Senate. But @ruppertpenny would know more.
I bet plenty of senators don't have a senate.gov address. If you need to talk to them you have to go through their scheduler anyway. I'm sure this breed is dying out, but I guarantee a few old fogies are holding strong
ETA: I didn't answer the question. Any records originating in the personal office are personal property of the member of congress. If the email was to/from committee staff or regarding committee work it would be senate property. But the line there can be very, very blurry.
Post by Velar Fricative on Mar 3, 2015 9:14:39 GMT -5
This is not good and I cannot think of a good explanation for this besides cookiemdough's explanation. But come on, if HRC is unhappy with the government's email client, I don't think the answer is just to let her use her personal email.
I'm sure it was just as important in the Senate. But @ruppertpenny would know more.
I bet plenty of senators don't have a senate.gov address. If you need to talk to them you have to go through their scheduler anyway. I'm sure this breed is dying out, but I guarantee a few old fogies are holding strong
ETA: I didn't answer the question. Any records originating in the personal office are personal property of the member of congress. If the email was to/from committee staff or regarding committee work it would be senate property. But the line there can be very, very blurry.
It's not good. Even if there is an innocent explanation and even if she ultimately turns over all her email it still feeds into the "Clintons are shady" narrative that all but died down at this point. She knew she was going to run so this was also just a stupid stupid move on her part to open herself up to this potential issue.
I'm not surprised she didn't have an email address either. My former boss, a senator, didn't use a computer. He's only a few years older than HRC. It just isn't a given that people in that age range use email, especially if they you have been in high ranking positions long enough that they've had other people doing their admin stuff for decades. Obviously she does know how to use email, but I doubt anyone was hounding her to set one up like any other new hire.
I was going to say... This is a problem of the oldz. Not recognizing the importance of separating personal email, or using an official email address.
I don't know. I think it potentially opens her up to a bigger threat from someone else on the left (not sure who, though). One of the things that appealed to people about Obama was his pledges of transparency. Now, those haven't really come true, but that may be all the more reason people will not like this.
OTOH, the right is kind of looking like the boy who cried wolf at this point, IMO. They've tried to make so many ridiculous things stick to Hillary, and now that they may have one, it just feels like, Yawn, another day. Another conservative attack on Hillary.
My question is more relating to how she sent sensitive information via emails through those personal email addresses?
Little person example. My husband has a compartmentalized top secret clearance for his job, as do my BIL and SIL. When my husband is deployed, they email on siprnet - which is the "secret Internet". My BIL and my husband can talk more freely about where they are, what they're up to, etc than he can with me to my gmail account on the regular internet. For my husband to get on sipr he needs his government email and his CAC card. Because I don't have sipr, I have to get all of the information on his whereabouts though in-person channels (no phone or Internet). If little old me has to go to those lengths, it stuns me that HRC would do any official business so sloppily.
So was HRC conducting her very sensitive business on an email address that is as encrypted and protected as my gmail account? That just sounds outrageous.
It's not good. Even if there is an innocent explanation and even if she ultimately turns over all her email it still feeds into the "Clintons are shady" narrative that all but died down at this point. She knew she was going to run so this was also just a stupid stupid move on her part to open herself up to this potential issue.
Absolutely agree.
And the lack of a government email address is MIND BOGGLING. She is not someone who is 95 and doesn't have an email address at all. She clearly knows email and just chose not to use the government email. NO BUENO.
Post by tacoflavoredkisses on Mar 3, 2015 9:22:13 GMT -5
I cannot believe that she didn't have a gov email address. When creating your entire technological profile, IT creates a .gov email account to attach to computers, phones, etc. All employees in my experience, high or low level, are issued a .gov email.
I just find it so weird that no one checked her on this. It isn't a brand new regulation- I've been a contractor for a number of years now and from the get-go it's been made explicitly clear that you have to preserve records including emails and sometimes voicemails depending on their nature.
I have to agree with others. This is pretty bad. Years and years and a billion e-mails on a personal account! WTF?!?
I don't get it. I imagine tons of those were Secret level security and not going through the proper channels. It's a security nightmare.
I guarantee either someone raised the flag about this and she blew them off or she insisted from the very beginning. Her not having a .gov e-mail address is just BS. I mean it is easy as hell to get one especially for a higher up. Her not having one was deliberate probably because she wasn't planning on ever using it.
Although I did see couched in the article that Colin Powell apparently did this too.
The idea that this is NBD because "old people don't understand the internets" is a mind boggling bad way to defend someone* who wants to be President.
*(A person BTW who is an expert at Twitter and smartphones.)
If this is directed at me I want to clarify that I think it is a big deal. A very big deal. Just not surprising based on my (limited) experience working in government archives.
Believe me, I wish more people understood and respected the importance of good record keeping practices.
The New York Times report that Hillary Clinton used a personal rather than governmental email account during her four years at the State Department looks bad. In addition to creating a security risk, this practice circumvented (though may or may not have outright violated) federal record-keeping regulations that are meant to keep government business transparent.
But this story looks even worse if you transport yourself back to early 2009, when Clinton first became of Secretary of State and, according to this story, initially refused to use a governmental account. The Bush administration had just left office weeks earlier under the shadow of, among other things, a major ongoing scandal concerning officials who used personal email addresses to conduct business, and thus avoid scrutiny.
The scandal began in June 2007, as part of a Congressional oversight committee investigation into allegations that the White House had fired US Attorneys for political reasons. The oversight committee asked for Bush administration officials to turn over relevant emails, but it turned out the administration had conducted millions of emails' worth of business on private email addresses, the archives of which had been deleted.
The effect was that investigators couldn't access millions of internal messages that might have incriminated the White House. The practice, used by White House officials as senior as Karl Rove, certainly seemed designed to avoid federal oversight requirements and make investigation into any shady dealings more difficult. Oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman accused the Bush administration of "using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications."
That scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush's presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama's first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as Secretary of State, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same.
That she decided to use her personal address anyway showed a stunning disregard for governmental transparency requirements. Indeed, Clinton did not even bother with the empty gesture of using her official address for more formal business, as Bush officials did.
The most generous interpretation is that she just preferred her personal email. A less generous one is that, like many politicians before her, using a personal email was a deliberate ploy to avoid transparency (Clinton took some hits when she released her private emails as first lady, so transparency had hurt her in the past) and perhaps even hamper potential investigations.
Perhaps even more stunning is that the Obama White House, whose top officials were presumably exchanging frequent emails with Clinton, apparently did not insist she adopt an official email account. At some point during Obama's first year, there must have been at least one senior official who dealt with the political fallout of Karl Rove using a personal address, then turned around and fired off an email to the personal address that Hillary Clinton used exclusively. That this continued for four years is baffling.
I bet plenty of senators don't have a senate.gov address. If you need to talk to them you have to go through their scheduler anyway. I'm sure this breed is dying out, but I guarantee a few old fogies are holding strong
ETA: I didn't answer the question. Any records originating in the personal office are personal property of the member of congress. If the email was to/from committee staff or regarding committee work it would be senate property. But the line there can be very, very blurry.
Even records relating to legislation?
Yes, anything that happens before its submitted to the clerk anyway. Everything that happens in committee is property of the house or senate. Lots of committee records are published almost immediately, anything not published is closed for a certain time period (20 years for senate, 30 for house) then available for anyone who wants to see them.
The idea that this is NBD because "old people don't understand the internets" is a mind boggling bad way to defend someone* who wants to be President.
*(A person BTW who is an expert at Twitter and smartphones.)
If this is directed at me I want to clarify that I think it is a big deal. A very big deal. Just not surprising based on my (limited) experience working in government archives.
Believe me, I wish more people understood and respected the importance of good record keeping practices.
1. Let's all reflect on the HRC Blackberry "Hey Guuurrl" meme before anyone else starts with the "But the computers and the oldz!" argument.
2. I love HRC. But this was really fucking dumb of her. There's just no other way to say it. You have a work email, you use it, especially if what your emailing about has high security potential. You don't hand over your card to a leader of a foreign nation with the email "HilGal123@yahoo.com." I can't think of any explanation for this that would make any logical sense to me.
The irony is that of all the dirt the GOP has tried to get on Hillary, this is probably the most legit and simultaneously the least likely to get people giving a shit. "Hillary Clinton used the wrong email address!!" doesn't quite have the ring of "she let American soldiers die!!!"
i really want to like Hillary. And I do like her muchmore now than when she ran against Obama and a million times more than when she was first lady, but I just think she's trouble. Drama & scandals (big and small) seem to follow her around.
If you thought the R's were flipping out now & being big babies about GOVERNING and being total dick heads, can you imagine how ape shit they would get if HRC became POTUS?
I'm also assuming she wanted to be able to use her Blackberry and they couldn't set it up for her to do so efficiently. Maybe she thought if she cc'd an admin on every email she would be prserving the records? I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt but HRC is really intelligent so I'm not buying the "oh golly technology is hard" angle either.
2. I love HRC. But this was really fucking dumb of her. There's just no other way to say it. You have a work email, you use it, especially if what your emailing about has high security potential. You don't hand over your card to a leader of a foreign nation with the email "HilGal123@yahoo.com." I can't think of any explanation for this that would make any logical sense to me.
I guess what I don't understand about this is why her coworkers didn't say anything about it. Even in my super informal, breezy 6-person company, if I were sending out emails to them for YEARS from my gmail account, I am 100% positive someone would've asked or made a comment about it, ya know?
I am not saying she isn't responsible for the problem - she definitely is - but why were all her coworkers silent on this matter?
Just failing ot comprehend that this may be a problem should send off alarm bells to those who think she would be a great leader (** yes, I agree with many of her positions) but she's just generally failed to show good judgement on a range of issue & good leadership/management (see her last campaign) I'll admit that perhaps she's got a better track record of leadership/management from her SOS of years and I'm open to being proven wrong.
2. I love HRC. But this was really fucking dumb of her. There's just no other way to say it. You have a work email, you use it, especially if what your emailing about has high security potential. You don't hand over your card to a leader of a foreign nation with the email "HilGal123@yahoo.com." I can't think of any explanation for this that would make any logical sense to me.
I guess what I don't understand about this is why her coworkers didn't say anything about it. Even in my super informal, breezy 6-person company, if I were sending out emails to them for YEARS from my gmail account, I am 100% positive someone would've asked or made a comment about it, ya know?
I am not saying she isn't responsible for the problem - she definitely is - but why were all her coworkers silent on this matter?
Because she's the Secretary of State and one of the most powerful people in the country, possibly the world. Who's going to give her a hard time about it???
This is bizarre. I don't understand how on earth she didn't have a .gov email address. I mean, isn't everyone just basically issued one on their first day of work? Either she fought back and people gave up or there was an email address for her and she ignored it.
I know it's not a case of her age because she clearly uses computers, email and social media. And I highly doubt she didn't understand what she was doing in not using work email for professional purposes. She's way too smart for that (and if she isn't she honestly has no business being president even though I love her).
I guess what I don't understand about this is why her coworkers didn't say anything about it. Even in my super informal, breezy 6-person company, if I were sending out emails to them for YEARS from my gmail account, I am 100% positive someone would've asked or made a comment about it, ya know?
I am not saying she isn't responsible for the problem - she definitely is - but why were all her coworkers silent on this matter?
Because she's the Secretary of State and one of the most powerful people in the country, possibly the world. Who's going to give her a hard time about it???
Fair point.
But Barack or Joe couldn't have said anything?
Perhaps I'm putting too much stock into the relationships between our country's leaders.