whembly wrote:
But man... that ought to be a gloriously entertaining primary... eh?

A "it's my turn" Hillary coronation is boring.

Teflon dude.

It's reported that Bill Clinton flew with Phil Epstein, a convicted pedophile, to Epstein's private island where he reportedly kept sex slaves.

 dogma wrote:
And if not misappropriation, then simple mismanagement. When it seems you can raise money at will there is less incentive to be discerning in how its spent, particularly if your endowment is very large.

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:

It's reported that Bill Clinton flew with Phil Epstein, a convicted pedophile, to Epstein's private island where he reportedly kept sex slaves.

Jeffery Epstein, Phil Epstein was the guy who wrote Casablanca.

Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.

“I can recall no instance in my time at the National Archives when a high-ranking official at an executive branch agency solely used a personal email account for the transaction of government business,” said Mr. Baron, who worked at the agency from 2000 to 2013.

Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.

But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.

“It’s a shame it didn’t take place automatically when she was secretary of state as it should have,” said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a group based at George Washington University that advocates government transparency. “Someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment.”

Mr. Blanton said high-level officials should operate as President Obama does, emailing from a secure government account, with every record preserved for historical purposes.

“Personal emails are not secure,” he said. “Senior officials should not be using them.”

Penalties for not complying with federal record-keeping requirements are rare, because the National Archives has few enforcement abilities.

Mr. Merrill, the spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, declined to detail why she had chosen to conduct State Department business from her personal account.

Mr. Merrill said that because Mrs. Clinton had been sending emails to other State Department officials at their government accounts, she had “every expectation they would be retained.” Mr. Merrill declined to answer questions about any emails that Mrs. Clinton may have sent to foreign leaders, people in the private sector or government officials outside the State Department.

The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.

And others who, like Mrs. Clinton, are eyeing a candidacy for the White House are stressing a very different approach. Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, released a trove of emails in December from his eight years as governor of Florida.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton’s private email account included encryption or other security measures, given the sensitivity of her diplomatic activity.

Mrs. Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, has used a government email account since taking over the role, and his correspondence is being preserved contemporaneously as part of State Department records, according to his aides.

Before the current regulations went into effect, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, used personal email to communicate with American officials and ambassadors and foreign leaders.

Last October, the State Department, as part of the effort to improve its record keeping, asked all previous secretaries of state dating back to Madeleine K. Albright to provide it with any records, like emails, from their time in office for preservation.

“These steps include regularly archiving all of Secretary Kerry’s emails to ensure that we are capturing all federal records,” said a department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.

The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered as a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides about the attack.

Two weeks ago, Mrs. Clinton provided the committee with about 300 emails — amounting to roughly 900 pages — about the Benghazi attacks that Mrs. Clinton’s aides had found among her personal emails.

Mrs. Clinton and the committee declined to comment on the contents of the emails or whether they will be made public.

The State Department, Ms. Psaki said, “has been proactively and consistently engaged in responding to the committee’s many requests in a timely manner, providing more than 40,000 pages of documents, scheduling more than 20 transcribed interviews and participating in several briefings and each of the committee’s hearings.”

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
I don't really get the importance.

The New York Times reported Monday night that, during her tenure at the State Department, Hillary Clinton never used her official email account to conduct communications, relying instead on a private email account. As the Times notes, only official accounts are automatically retained under the Federal Records Act, meaning that none of Clinton's email communication was preserved.

In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his email hacked by "Guccifer" -- the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush's paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the "clintonemail.com" domain. The content of some of those emails was published by RT.com.

Examining the registry information for "clintonemail.com" reveals that the domain was first created on January 13, 2009 -- one week before President Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton's confirmation hearings began before the Senate.


As the Times notes, others have used private email accounts for official business, including former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. The extent of Clinton's hidden communication, part of her work in a much more significant capacity, is unknown.

Republicans in the House longing to defund the agency in order to prevent President Obama from enforcing his executive order freeing millions of undocumented aliens from the threat of deportation.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
When do you not?

 whembly wrote:
I blame the Democrats and Obama.

The House passed a fully funded DHS budget and it's the Democrats who's filibustering it in the Senate.

I'd make a change to the Filibuster rule... and that is, you'd have to do it in person 24/7 in order to keep it going.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Fair enough, it was just too good of a chance to pass up.

Although it seems to be them wanting to go after Obama's executive actions.
1. What does that have to do with the DHS? I hate it when people put irrelevant gak like that in bills.

2. The R's control both houses of congress. Just pass the DHS funding and hake the anti-executive action stuff in a different bill. Then you don't get stupid gak like this.

sirlynchmob wrote:

 whembly wrote:
I blame the Democrats and Obama.

The House passed a fully funded DHS budget and it's the Democrats who's filibustering it in the Senate.

I'd make a change to the Filibuster rule... and that is, you'd have to do it in person 24/7 in order to keep it going.

so you didn't read the article, nor my quote.
The filibuster rules got changed fyi. The democrats are not filibustering it, they voted on it.

And when they're in the minority if the republicans could agree on it, it should have passed.

 d-usa wrote:
So going back to 2013: Senate passes bills to keep government funded, House refuses to pass those bills. House Republicans say "it's the Senate's fault, get rid of the Democrats and the government would run just fine and we wouldn't have situations like this".

Now it's 2015. The Senate passes bills to keep government funded, House refuses to pass those bills. House Republicans still say "it's the Senate's fault".

The GOP controls both houses. They ran on a platform of "crap like this won't happen if we control both houses". But the more things change the more they stay the same.

The GOP will once again manage to piss away whatever advantage they have by 2016.

 d-usa wrote:
So the senate didn't pass a bill funding the department for the rest of the year?

A bill that was voted down by house republicans?

 whembly wrote:

The problem... is that GOP didn't get the 60th Senate seat.

 Ouze wrote:
She is required to preserve them, but she is not required to use a government-based email service to do so. Each agency is responsible for the mechanics of their own record classification and archival.

It probably shouldn't be that way, but that is a different argument.

Nothing significant will come of it because "unreliable email" is in the best interests of both parties.

It probably shouldn't be that way, but that is a different argument.

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:

The problem... is that GOP didn't get the 60th Senate seat.

The problem is that neither side will compromise.

 whembly wrote:

They did when they're couldn't get a quorum to actually vote for a bill+prohibition on O's EO.

 whembly wrote:

Looks like GOP caved.

 whembly wrote:

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:

The problem... is that GOP didn't get the 60th Senate seat.

The problem is that neither side will compromise.

Very, very true.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
EDIT: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/homeland-security-funding_n_6791502.html?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000016

Looks like GOP caved.

*shrugs*

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) released a statement Tuesday morning urging Boehner to hold a vote on the clean bill as soon as possible, and reiterating that Democrats will support it.

 whembly wrote:
I guess my issue is that... it'd makes sense that she's not the only one doing that.

Knowwhatimean?

I mean, someone would notice within the States Dept recieving an email from "clintonemail.com"... right? Someone may pipe up and ask wassup....

This seems like an orchastrated policy to subvert transparency.

But, eh... not sure if anything will come out of this.

*shrugs*

Unless... Clinton can't produce emails from a certain time period for the Select Committee... that ends in "azi".



Then... things might get interesting.

Prestor Jon wrote:

 whembly wrote:
I guess my issue is that... it'd makes sense that she's not the only one doing that.

Knowwhatimean?

I mean, someone would notice within the States Dept recieving an email from "clintonemail.com"... right? Someone may pipe up and ask wassup....

This seems like an orchastrated policy to subvert transparency.

But, eh... not sure if anything will come out of this.

*shrugs*

Unless... Clinton can't produce emails from a certain time period for the Select Committee... that ends in "azi".



Then... things might get interesting.

I agree that using a private email account to circumvent transparency in governance is wrong, but I think it only really achieves the goal of avoiding transparency if Hillary used her private email account to discuss official govt buisness with another person via that other person's private email account. If say, Hillary wrote an email on her private account to the Secretary of Defense's official govt email account then that email would be saved on the govt server and be available for public record from the Secretary of Defense's govt account.

Govt officials doing the people's business off the record is bad for a whole host of reasons but it's also niave to believe that it hasn't always happened since the dawn of time. Backroom deals happened all the time long before there was email or phones or any media reports beyond a few newpapers and pamphlets.

Personally, the only aspect of this that bothers me is the blatant arrogance of it. If a politician wants to have a private email address to use however they see fit, even to do backroom govt deals then that politician should at least have the decency to keep that email address private. In this instance Hillary used her private email for both official and unofficial emails which basically lets her decide which emails she gets from foreign leaders, other US politicians, donors, special interest groups, whomever, on that account are official and need to be saved and disclosed to the public record and which are personal and can be kept private. She's basically putting herself above the law which casts her in a haughty and unpleasant light.

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:

They did when they're couldn't get a quorum to actually vote for a bill+prohibition on O's EO.

The GOP won't honestly debate any Democrat Amendments to the DHS bill, despite what McConnell says, because the GOP is more interested in the riders going against Obama's EO than funding DHS.

 whembly wrote:

Looks like GOP caved.

As they should have, the argument many of its members promulgated was crap.

 whembly wrote:

Prestor Jon wrote:

 whembly wrote:
I guess my issue is that... it'd makes sense that she's not the only one doing that.

Knowwhatimean?

I mean, someone would notice within the States Dept recieving an email from "clintonemail.com"... right? Someone may pipe up and ask wassup....

This seems like an orchastrated policy to subvert transparency.

But, eh... not sure if anything will come out of this.

*shrugs*

Unless... Clinton can't produce emails from a certain time period for the Select Committee... that ends in "azi".



Then... things might get interesting.

I agree that using a private email account to circumvent transparency in governance is wrong, but I think it only really achieves the goal of avoiding transparency if Hillary used her private email account to discuss official govt buisness with another person via that other person's private email account. If say, Hillary wrote an email on her private account to the Secretary of Defense's official govt email account then that email would be saved on the govt server and be available for public record from the Secretary of Defense's govt account.

Govt officials doing the people's business off the record is bad for a whole host of reasons but it's also niave to believe that it hasn't always happened since the dawn of time. Backroom deals happened all the time long before there was email or phones or any media reports beyond a few newpapers and pamphlets.

Personally, the only aspect of this that bothers me is the blatant arrogance of it. If a politician wants to have a private email address to use however they see fit, even to do backroom govt deals then that politician should at least have the decency to keep that email address private. In this instance Hillary used her private email for both official and unofficial emails which basically lets her decide which emails she gets from foreign leaders, other US politicians, donors, special interest groups, whomever, on that account are official and need to be saved and disclosed to the public record and which are personal and can be kept private. She's basically putting herself above the law which casts her in a haughty and unpleasant light.

There's also an aspect many folks are missing.

If I were a foreign operative, I'd be very interested in *if* HRC@yahoo.com is hackable.

It's a huge security risk.

Frankly, the laws need to be updated that ALL high-level government personnel are forbidden to use private emails while in office/employed. Not just to forcibly make the users comply with Archive laws, but to ensure security as well.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:

They did when they're couldn't get a quorum to actually vote for a bill+prohibition on O's EO.

The GOP won't honestly debate any Democrat Amendments to the DHS bill, despite what McConnell says, because the GOP is more interested in the riders going against Obama's EO than funding DHS.

Nothing wrong with imo... that's the battleground Congress can choose to combat against executive over-reach.

 whembly wrote:

Looks like GOP caved.

As they should have, the argument many of its members promulgated was crap.

Nah... it simply says:

GOP to conservative: Feth You!

Conservative: That's okay, we'll keep on voting for you.