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State Dept. posts Clinton aide's documents found on Weiner's laptop
The State Department on Friday released portions of 2,800 emails and other documents belonging to former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were recovered by the FBI last year on Abedin's estranged husband Anthony Weiner's computer last year.
While the newly released emails have been seized on by conservative activists who have long been critical of Clinton's treatment of classified emails as secretary of State, the FBI already said in 2016 that a review of the emails didn't change the bureau's opinion that Clinton shouldn't face charges over email handling.
The Friday release came after a 2015 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative group Judicial Watch against the State Department seeking the release of emails containing "official State Department business" sent or received from Abedin from January 2009 to February 2013 using a non-State Department email address.
Also at Judicial Watch and CNN.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @02:10AM (30 children)
People saying a lot of stuff, yet no substance so far: Of the thousands of emails: what specifically, is a problem?
What specifically did the FBI find she did, that rises to the level of prosecuting a presidential candidate?
Easy to say a lot of vague, scary sounding stuff, but what are the specific, illegal, actionable items? (And no, she did not run an illegal operation from a pizza parlor.)
Get real, guys. Can you?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @02:56AM (4 children)
No, they cannot. But there is hope, for there is another! Another woman, owner of a gun range (indoor, for woosies), in Arkansas, who has thrown her brazziere into the ring for the Governor Race.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/gun-range-owner-who-declared-her-facility-a-muslim-free-zone-enters-arkansas-governors-race/ [rawstory.com]
Another Woman from Arkansas, who could be the governor, not just the Governor of Arkansas's wife, or daughter and presidential press secretary, but the Governess her own self, another, more better Hilary! A white, conservative, ammosexual Woman! She will make these right-wing nut jobs forget all about the damn emails.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:21AM (2 children)
I like her values. She has run a real business, which is better than we can say for most presidential candidates. Seriously, I'm with her.
As a bonus, we can call the haters "sexist". If some SJW complains about the guns or the Muslim stance, we can just dismiss the SJW as a sexist who stands in the way of our first female president.
Also, if you want to break the glass ceiling, shouldn't you have a gun? I think so. She has a whole store full of guns!
She's going for governor at about the right time. Trump will be leaving office in 2025. For the 2024 election, she should declare candidacy in the first half of 2023. That gives her 4 to 4.5 years as governor I think, and then maybe another 1 or 2 if she doesn't resign to concentrate on the presidential campaign.
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:39AM (1 child)
That's not true at all. She's still white. At the very least, she's gonna need to identify as transracial.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:29PM
what do you mean she isn't sexist?
she married a man named Mr. Weiner! I mean talk about a dick move
(posting anonymously because I am at work...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:22PM
Ah, so she's to the left of Hillary.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Some call me Tim on Tuesday January 02 2018, @03:06AM (6 children)
The fact that many of those emails were classified and sent to an unsecured server, run by a 'mom&pop' hosting company.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/8/28/1416309/-Hillary-Clinton-s-Felony-The-federal-laws-violated-by-the-private-server [dailykos.com]
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:30AM (1 child)
There is no evidence she intentionally forwarded any classified material. As far as "gross negligence", here's a fun little simulated trial:
http://econ-ecoff.blogspot.com/2017/01/mock-trial-of-hillary-clinton-regarding.html [blogspot.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:06AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:49AM (3 children)
Simplify. Classified information was emailed to a system not under the control of the United States government, that had not been certified for handling classified information, had no hardening, was in point of fact a goddamned Microsoft Exchange Server, including information marked such that it was illegal for any but a U.S. national with a clearance to view it. Show me a hosting company, other than one explicitly created for secure government work, that has no foreigners working for it. So information so secret it would require paperwork and debate within our government before disclosing it to the British Prime Minister was sitting on a machine any H1B had access to. Mrs. Clinton had been in and out and around government and classified information for most of her adult life so she can make no claim of ignorance. She knowingly, and with malice in her black heart, created the clintonmail.com domain while in the process of confirmation for Secretary of State.
Now pile on. She allowed all or most of her work related email to find its way to the laptop of a pervert. Do you think it likely a porn site's malware got onto a bog standard Windows PC with no special protection while a pervert was browsing on it? Again, this probably would not have happened had she been using a state.gov address. This makes her criminally liable for the consequence of her first crime. It also means Huma should be in jail btw, especially if the unconfirmed rumor that these mails were in a folder named "life insurance" are true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
That is some weak shit, but hey 1+ year later you still have nothing better to distract away from Trump's massive failure. You are #sad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:15PM
It's not weak shit. Many have been prosecuted and served jail time for the same kind of mishandling of classified information. Hillary and Huma did it, so why aren't they being prosecuted for it? I said the same thing when Karl Rove did the same thing, running government business off personal email accounts, and he too skated. But at least in that case Scooter Libby went to jail for it.
Either we have the rule of law, which applies equally to all, or we don't. If we don't, then why are any of us still paying taxes or toeing the line to further such a system?
If you ask me, Hillary ran her own email server because she wanted to control the narrative about her time in State as she was preparing to run for president again. Nevertheless, it does not matter what her intent was. She broke the law. She must go to jail.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:47PM
This would be all well and good if the practice of home servers stopped when it was deemed bad.
However, now the members of the administration that got voted in based on the failure of their opponent to use the proper server, are themselves making the same failure.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:06AM (7 children)
Why should that be special?
Why should a person get a pass if they are a presidential candidate? Are crimes supposed to be excused as long as you immediately file candidacy paperwork with the federal election commission?
This, fundamentally, is what "rule of law" is all about. Fair treatment under the law means that people like Hillary Clinton must be prosecuted. If she can get away with stuff, but I can't get away with stuff, then why would I have any respect for the justice system and the laws of the country?
I'll tell you what rises to the level of prosecuting a presidential candidate: jaywalking, littering, etc.
FWIW, my job involves working with classified information. If I did half the shit Hillary Clinton did, I'd be looking at decades in prison. All my coworkers agree. The same goes for Huma and Weiner. Rule of law requires that we prosecute.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:35AM (5 children)
> If I did half the shit Hillary Clinton did, I'd be looking at decades in prison.
Also, half the shit Trump did, half the shit Roy Moore did, half the shit Al Franken did, half the shit Bill O'Reilly did, half the shit Harvey Weinstein did...
It's not a "Clinton" thing, it's a "rich and powerful" thing, Trump is at least as bad. If you want to lock one of them up, you need to lock both of them up -- selective prosecution is way, way worse than no prosecution. And for Trump, there's, like, actual tape and public confessions...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:42AM (4 children)
Lock Trump up for what? You do realize there has to be a crime first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:07PM (3 children)
I'll take the easy win on this one: all the millions he defrauded from his investors and all the discriminatory practices from employment to hotel patronage. Sadly there is no criminal statute for hypocrisy or he'd get a life sentence, but combined with the thousands of cases against him we could probably lock him up for the rest of his natural life.
Rich people won't let that happen though, otherwise the plebes (you) would be calling for every corrupt asshole to be put away. That would mean a lot of them, and so they are very scared.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:20PM (2 children)
Prove it's a crime first, bud. Amazing how you can call it "the easy win" without actually doing anything to support your claim.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:20PM (1 child)
I have to side with khallow on this one. Not liking Trump is not enough reason to prosecute him.
If, however, we indict Trump for what you're claiming and prosecute him, I say great, as long as we're doing the Clintons and Wall Street and the whole rest of the power-elite at the same time. One question, though--given that judges are all political hacks and all prosecutors are too, who are we going to trust to conduct said trials? Asking them to do it is basically asking one department of the Deep State to prosecute another department of the Deep State. It simply won't happen, or if it does happen, they'll magically find a way to exonerate all but a couple of sacrificial lambs to placate the plebes and get them off their backs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:30PM
Political enemies. They still have a need to appear impartial because they could be on the other end of a trial at some point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @05:29AM
The GOP-lead DOJ can still put her on trial. In my opinion the laws as written are too vague to survive her powerful lawyers, but nothing is stopping GOP from doing a trial.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:40AM (9 children)
Fortunately, I have about four journal articles which go through this very thing. My first journal discusses [soylentnews.org] an article which describes various "red flags", signs of trouble (such as employees of the company that did the backups discussing how to protect themselves from "shaddy (sic) s**t"; multiple Clinton staff in the case coordinating their defenses by using the same lawyers; and an IT person bragging about stopping a hack of the email server by turning the server off for a few minutes).
The next two journals (here [soylentnews.org] and here [soylentnews.org]) link to articles discussing the actual crimes committed. We have classified information on unauthorized servers (some such as satellite imagery or names of CIA operatives which aren't classified by the State Department and hence for which Clinton can't declassify); we have Clinton repeatedly ignoring State Department IT; we have destruction of evidence after announcement of the probe (and quite a bit of destruction of stuff before); and indirect evidence that the whole exercise was to conceal Clinton's communications from both the Obama administration as a whole and FOIA requests from elsewhere (with communications about the Clinton Foundation business being a key thing hidden). There are numerous felonies described in these two journals.
Then in the last journal [soylentnews.org], we find out that FBI Director Comey came out with a draft of his findings which used the legally relevant phrase "gross negligence" (it is a felony in US law to handle classified information in a grossly negligent manner). After review by the respective congressional committee (with no word on why they got to review it), that phrase had morphed to "extremely careless" which means the same thing, but isn't legally relevant. It appears that the draft changed before the FBI had finished interviewing witnesses. So Comey said Clinton committed a felony before he didn't say that, and for some reason members of Congress got the chance to review Comey's conclusions before they were made public.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:27AM (6 children)
As someone who is not from the USA, and therefore independent to some degree, I would say that it is pretty clear that Hillary did many of the things which she is accused of. However, in the scale of things, you probably won't find any politician who will not do things like this. They are all useless incompetents, otherwise they would not be politicians.
In short, the failure is not (particularly) with Hillary - the whole system is completely defective. But as Winston Churchill said "democracy is the worst possible system of government - except for all the others".
Or, as Fela Kuti said: democracy comes from "dem are crazy".
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by chromas on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:46AM (1 child)
What exactly does the pimp do? Hold her assailants hostage on the bus until they pay up?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:14PM
A sheltered life you have lived, or you need more coffee. The pimp will PIMP OUT the daughter to every rich fucker in town.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:16PM (3 children)
So it's ok because an imaginary "everyone" does this? I don't agree with your assertion and I certainly don't agree with your conclusion. Failing to provide negative consequences for bad behavior is how you create corruption in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:20PM (2 children)
That is what we've been saying every time "her emails!" comes up in a Trump story! No it is not OK, but you have to deal with reality. Right now the reality is that we're saturated with corrupt politicians, and it has been this way since the beginning of the USA to varying degrees. Harping on Clinton's emails is like harping on Trump's excessive visits to his own resorts and general waste of tax payer dollars. It achieves nothing except giving your "enemies" a black eye.
Redirect your energy to fixing the system instead of hunting for every bit of partisan ammunition you can find. The FBI did an investigation, she didn't go to prison, Trump lied yet again. Get over it and at least change your narrative to something more constructive to political reform.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:50PM
No, it's not. The former is a crime.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:28PM
A system that is so morally bankrupt it cannot enforce its laws when they are so publicly and obviously broken, cannot be fixed. It cannot be reformed. It has to be decommissioned and we have to start all over.
I do agree, though, that partisan mud-slinging is a complete waste of energy. We must direct our money and time and efforts away from the divisive frame the power-elites use to divide the citizenry and frustrate progress.
Personally I am convinced we should stop talking about the trainwreck the First American Republic has become and start scoping out the framework of the Second American Republic. It's more positive, more hopeful, than infinitely beating the dead horse that is the former.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @03:11AM (1 child)
To be fair about the foreign hacking, State Department email servers were hacked at the same time. It's hard to say that Clinton's server was less secure. I think she was worried about FOIA requests and evidence of wrong doing. In the end she was able to delete half of her messages. Nixon seems to have been her role model.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 03 2018, @11:42PM
Why? For example, Huma Abedin's emails didn't stay on that server. One would just need to hack her ex-husband's laptop to get access to that stuff. Keeping the email in-house would have prevented that since State Department IT would have control over the PDAs and the backup procedures.