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Anyone who follows American politics will have heard of Hillary Clinton's email server. Rather than using an official State Department address, she chose to use a private server for her official email. Federal law requires all official email to be archived on government servers. Armchair lawyers have pointed out that it doesn't require the use of government servers to send and receive the email, but the archival requirement is clear. This requirement was clearly violated in this case: in response to a subpoena, Hillary Clinton's private staff extracted emails from her private server and turned them over to the government. The contents of the server itself were never made available to the government, and now she has had the server erased:
Hillary Clinton wiped “clean” the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state, the chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi said Friday.
“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement.
As Popehat tweeted:
@Popehat
I ask you, who among us hasn't wiped a server clean after its contents were requested by subpoena?
I naively wonder why she isn't in jail, but that's just me. Comments and views from those interested in American politics?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @11:24AM
I, for one, feel like this is a big deal.
I feel like Hillary knew more than she was telling about Benghazi, and now I feel like she's covering up. People died in Benghazi, and it was preventable. People died in Benghazi, and it was on Hillary's watch.
I am appalled to live in a country that once would have demanded answers, but now just seems to think that people's deaths are politics as usual.
Hillary will not be getting my vote.
(Score: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Monday March 30 2015, @12:47PM
People died in Benghazi, and it was preventable
45,000 people a year die from lack of access to healthcare [harvard.edu]
Entirely preventable.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Sulla on Monday March 30 2015, @01:48PM
I really enjoy how this whole issue has all come back to her justifying bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior.
Private email? So did the governor of florida
Killing Americans? Doesn't matter anymore we have to fix healthcare deaths
Helicopter shot at? Lots of people forget about events, what about bill oreilly
Deleting emails? Why don't you go look at Sarah Palin stuff first
The biggest problem with everything Clinton has done is when she was campaigning for president against Obama she made herself out to be a vigilant watchguard of the people. Taking that 3am phone call and making the right decision.
A CIA director called to ask for authorization to relieve the embassy. Either she or one of her people gave the order to stand down. Four Americans (possibly only two could have been saved with relief) were killed, ambassador drug through the streets. Despite evidence showing contrary blamed it on a radical film maker who ended up in jail.
When a legislative group looks into this she dodges the questions, diverts blame, and when it finally comes down to the wire it is learned all of her emails were at her home. Then when pressed, she has them erased.
Although much more severe because he was president, this got Nixon impeached. If this had been anyone except hillary they would have been destroyed. Kerry would not have gotten this support, Reid would not have, Boner would not have, not even Jeb Bush. This is about Hillary and her lust for power, nothing else.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 30 2015, @04:39PM
She's a senior politician. Like everyone that's managed to get to that level, she's got masses of corruption in her closet. Same as Obama, Bush II, Clinton I, Bush I, the actor and the ones before. They are scum, it's the only way they get where they get. They also get immunity by being in that position (it's expensive to get a politician in place, you don't want something trivial like murdering a hooker to flush that money down the tubes)
Obama's fast rise from nobody probably caught some people out, but he ended up the same way pretty quickly (and while he was being brought under control there was plenty of distraction about birth certificates).
I find it amazing how people (or rather fox news) are complaining about a single decision which may have caused 2 deaths, but ignore the elephants in the room - for example the 1,000 americans a year who die because they (or their parents) didn't vaccinate them.
(Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Monday March 30 2015, @05:12PM
Your example is a wildly inappropriate comparison to government officials' behavior.
Parents almost never force their children's participation in association with them at gunpoint; in regards to governments and private individuals, government officials do.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 30 2015, @09:19PM
Hillary is much more legal and PR savvy than her husband. While Bill was ham-fistedly trying to figure out the Internet thing, she was on top of it. She got beaten by it, so she learned better than did Bill.
That said, Hillary and Bill understand gotcha politics. It is their life. If America and the rest of the world want another 8 years of that, then Hillary should be elected. If, however, everyone wants to depart from the tired past, much different candidates should be elected.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:41PM
Bill O'Reilly was in that war zone and saw the whole thing. He was the only news reporter out there, all the others were hiding back in their hotels.
Bill was afraid to tell his mother that he just witnessed Christian nuns being shot in the face. All hell was breaking lose! His cameraman was bleeding from the head and Bill had to drag him back into safety.
And he has IRONCLAD PROOF - he still has his reporter's notebooks.
Bill O'Reilly and Fox News - the NO-SPIN, IRONCLAD News organization where the right-wing SN posters get their news.
(Score: 2) by TK-421 on Monday March 30 2015, @02:42PM
You really need to stick with this one. [soylentnews.org]
The higher body count will serve you better in your quest to make it all about health care.
For everyone else, if I get mod'd troll so be it. This feels like a variant of cross-posting which I feel has, little to, no place in these discussions.
And now, back to you.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 30 2015, @04:42PM
OP said that a member of US Government being neglectful and leading 2 americans to die means not voting for them.
Presumably that logic therefore applies to any member of the US government who conspires to prevent access to healthcare?
(Score: 2) by TK-421 on Monday March 30 2015, @06:14PM
Don't confuse access to health care with access to health insurance.
Assuming a patient in the U.S. and you have no health insurance, you can absolutely get emergency care along with critical care (brain surgery, cancer care, heart surgery). You may be hopelessly in debt at the end of it, and it might not mean you got access to the absolute best of the best WRT doctors but you still have access. Even without health insurance you can negotiate through a lot of the costs of emergency care in the case of say a broken arm.
I agree, health insurance is a big deal. People need catastrophic coverage. How do we get it? I don't have a lot of ideas to be honest. Getting gainful employment is always helpful. I know a lot of folks on here complain about that, but to be honest my state is hiring and so is my company (software company). If you can code you can get a check here. In the event of unemployment well, to be honest that is the first time that many people have the chance to learn the true cost of their coverage. You have all kinds of people who run around with coverage and if you ask them the total cost of their policy they will give you the dollar amount they personally have to pay and they omit the portion paid by their employer (70-90%). They lose their job and they get hit with COBRA, the full cost, which is staggering at the worst time. If I lost my job I wouldn't care about keeping my old policy, I would only care about the catastrophic coverage. I suspect if the industry and employers worked together they could devise something like this.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Monday March 30 2015, @02:47PM
Phwew -- Now that have Nixon Care in place, albeit a less liberal one than Nixon promoted -- the world is ponies. No more Wall Street fraud, all wars ended, surveillance decreasing by the second -- fewest whistleblower prosecutions in DAYS. Days I tell you. You Democrats are superduperawsomeness!!!!!!!
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @01:23PM
You are fucking piece of Fox News brainwashed shit, and so are the fake mods who got SN accounts just so they could mod up political drivel like this one.
You people don't give a shit about science or technology, other than playing around with your Xbox and phones.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 30 2015, @02:53PM
What happened in Benghazi, in a nutshell: Like all foreign service members, Ambassador Stevens had a risky job. In countries where there are potential hostilities, ambassadors are experienced foreign service officers, and one of the expectations of those officers is that they may be called upon to engage in combat to protect their embassies (I hung out with a child of foreign service officers who described being in Moscow while the attempted coup against Yeltzin went down - everyone was in flak jackets and armed). Libya was in complete chaos at that point, because Muammar Gaddafi was the only thing keeping it together, and after his overthrow and death there was (and still largely is) anarchy. Stevens underestimated the degree to which he and his staff were targets of the many armed groups running around at the time and was caught by surprise, and went to a largely unprotected station without planning for his own security. In addition, his embassy security budget had been cut a few months before the attacks due to the deficit agreements passed earlier that year, so he didn't have as much to work with.
There has never been any evidence for any kind of conspiracy involving anything other than angry Libyans with guns who seized an opportunity. They may or may not have known the ambassador was in there at the time - they might have been targeting him because they hated the US (with good reason - we supported Gaddafi up until the day he started messing with oil prices), or they might have just attacked the embassy and happened to get the ambassador.
So yes, people died. It was bad. But Congress has spent a now hundreds of man-hours trying to find something that implicates Hillary Clinton, and the only thing they've found is that she deleted some emails.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Monday March 30 2015, @03:26PM
... that were under subpoena.
That qualifies her for an adverse inference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference [wikipedia.org]
The act of destroying the records means we should presume that there is damaging information contained in them. That's quite a bit more than just "deleting some emails." It's an Ollie North schtick, and although he didn't get much of a punishment, he also didn't get to be president.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday March 30 2015, @03:53PM
No, she responded to the subpoena by turning over all (according to her) emails responsive to the subpoena. Then she deleted the emails.
Still shady? Question of opinion, I guess. Certainly aggressive. But get it right.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday March 30 2015, @04:54PM
Tell you what -- you just try that someday in a lawsuit and get back to us on just how fucked you got.
This is like when the police find that all of their recording equipment failed, or even more like turning over edited video.We should all just believe they are telling the truth despite any gaps -- they'd never lie right? /sarc
In this context, there are apparently gaps in the emails produced: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0M40US20150308?irpc=932 [reuters.com]
If she really honestly believed that the information was not pertinent, she would have been completely comfortable with a neutral review of it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @06:50PM
So then why is nobody in comparison going after the police for doing exactly that? [soylentnews.org] The police getting off the hook for it is far more critical a matter, and within local control, yet everyone is only concerned with Hillary doing it.
Tell you what, once the people attacking Hillary start attacking the police for doing the same thing and worse, I'll believe that they're honest about their intentions instead of just trying to smear "the other team".
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:46AM
When the police do shit, one person at a time gets killed and yeah, the cops should be prosecuted and thrown to the wolves.
So here with HRC, we have a possibly dirty cop looking for promotion. You say she should get it. I say she shouldn't because in a couple years, when President Hillary decides to do shit, you can bet many thousands will die. Remember, she was as rabid as GWB for war in Iraq for no fucking reason. Her only beef with GWB on that score was cutting taxes at the same time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:41PM
Where the fuck did I say that? Oh right, I didn't, so its just a straw man. Do you have any non-fallicious arguments?
Like I said, I'll believe you're honest about your intentions in attacking her when you attack everyone doing this kind of shit equally and not just her. Your actions, along with everyone else in the Fox News-worshiping crowd, make it clear that the entire point of this circus is not to get justice or anything except to smear the "other team". When your actions are biased, its obvious as fuck, everyone sees it and everyone knows it, so stop with the theatric outage, straw men, and ad hominems when people call you out for it.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @09:42PM
I don't even watch TV and I'm since I'm a Green, I'd probably be watching something other than Fox. So check your presumption.
I already said every official who manipulates data for their own benefit should be thrown to the wolves. I don't have the power to do any of that throwing. HRC is manipulating data, in quite possibly illegal ways, for her own benefit. She should be thrown to the wolves too.
You are saying that unless every single other asshole gets busted, HRC should get off. That's idiotic and it basically means that anarchy reigns because never in history has it been possible to catch every law breaker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2015, @11:58PM
Again, where did I say that? You continue to ignore what I'm saying, and instead argue against what you wish I was saying; if you're not going to read what I type, there's no reason to say anything more.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday March 30 2015, @10:07PM
I said it was aggressive, but your comparison is deeply flawed.
The duty to preserve evidence requires that you should have reasonably believed a lawsuit was imminent. I don't think there was any reason for Clinton to think she was about to be sued. The subpoena was Congressional, not from a court. I don't think Congress can even enter sanctions for spoilation of evidence.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @04:22AM
Let me understand this.
1) She gets a subpoena for emails.
2) She prints off some emails in response to that subpoena.
3) She deletes all the emails.
4) After doing 1, 2, & 3, she had no idea they would want examine the mail server.
What more notice would she need? It sounds a lot more like an "oh shit, better get rid of this" than anything else.
Secondly, as I've been digging around, one of the things that Ollie North some jail time was this: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071 [cornell.edu]
Been the law for a long long time -- scrap the ex post facto BS. And the punishment is perfect: barred from holding public office (also fines and jail -- like she'd actually get jail, but the big one is bar from office which is not optional). Man, it would be so cool to see her convicted on that, she and Ollie North could drink whiskey together and bitch about things.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @06:46AM
That law doesn't seem relevant. Why would her personal emails fall under things "filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States". Not applicable.
Man, it would be so cool to see her convicted on that, she and Ollie North could drink whiskey together and bitch about things.
Fantasizing is healthy as long as you don't let it interfere with your perception of reality. Go to sleep, that's the only way you'll see her convicted on anything related to this.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:55AM
How do we know if they were personal emails? The person under investigation doesn't get to make that determination. THAT is the issue. If they were personal, they don't come in. Now we will never know if they were personal because she broke a law that was 100 years old back in the 80s when Ollie North went down for doing the same shit.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @02:57PM
In the absence of a judicial order stating otherwise, yes, that person does get to make that determination. A phone company doesn't have to hand over all phone records when it's subpoenaed for some subset of those, and it doesn't have to hold non-responsive phone records in case they're desired later. Hillary Clinton was under no obligation to preserve all her emails, just her job-related ones, and, as far as anyone will ever know, she turned all of those over.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 30 2015, @09:28PM
Personally I don't care one whit about members of the Foreign Service dying under any circumstance. They, more than any other, are the children of privilege in this country. Them dying in an unstable 3rd world country is the closest thing they'll ever experience to facing the consequences of their actions. So, fuck them, they died.
That said, Hillary Clinton campaigned for President last time on her "experience." She staged a famous commercial about what she'd do if an important call came in at 3am. In Benghazi, we rather have our answer: nothing. Now that she has a stint filling in as Sect. of State under Obama, how has that assessment changed? The answer: It hasn't. Not at all.
Hillary must never be President because she is incompetent, and evil. She would use the office to get even with her and Bill's personal enemies, and nothing else. If the rest of us were lucky, we might hope she would accelerate the Second American Revolution we all know is coming. That's it. There is nothing more.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday March 30 2015, @04:41PM
I feel like Hillary knew more than she was telling about Benghazi, and now I feel like she's covering up. People died in Benghazi, and it was preventable. People died in Benghazi, and it was on Hillary's watch.
The Republican chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disagrees with you.
Don't worry, I know you refuse to read this. [washingtonpost.com]