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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: 1) by HystericalLinguist on Monday March 30 2015, @01:57PM
It is less the "right-wingedness" of the post that bothered me, than its "drivel" aspects. [And the rather extensive drivel it got in the comments.] No Tech site should accept an argument of the form: (1) one is obligated to archive all official email by Federal law; (2) this law is clearly violated in this case because "the contents of the server itself were never provided to the government". (1) makes no reference to "the contents of" any "server".
The law as written, like most American laws, is pure theatre: pretend to require openness, while requiring nothing. My reading of Jon Stewart's complaint is that he was unhappy that THE LAW allowed Hillary to decide what emails were "official". But that's the law (because if it required an independent arbiter, it would actually have teeth, and no one wanted that), so all the discussion of "why isn't Hillary in jail" is absurd.
And sorry to what I know are perfectly reasonable people around here who left *that other site* to find a better home, but I won't wade through this kind of crap for my news. So, now, really "bye".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:14PM
There are two issues:
(1) Failure to archive according to an ambiguous law
(2) Failure to preserve in the face of a subpoena
WRT (1) it is outrage and publicity like this that get laws changed
WRT (2) wiping the server was utterly transparent but she'll probably get away with it
- however if (1) is fixed, then (2) won't be an issue the next time
(Score: 2) by TLA on Monday March 30 2015, @03:08PM
in the case of (2), failure to preserve in the face of a subpoena is destruction of evidence (AKA spoliation), which in the given case is one step below treason. We're talking official communications here, not Facebook posts. That server should be physically seized immediately; if the erasure was a simple MFT wipe, then the files will still be on the drive and intact. Even the attempt to erase that data should be seen as intent and punished as such. This isn't a shot-in-the-dark data grab in case something was amiss, we know what was amiss and we know the content of that data, that she tried to get rid AFTER being served shows intent to break the goddamn law and compound it by breaking it AGAIN.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:55PM
This is not a tech site. Glad you found out in the end.