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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: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 30 2015, @02:46PM
But here you're getting to the heart of the matter: "flavor of the decade" is in fact part of the strategy of the Deep State. They figure by giving the rubes a President from the flavor du jour they're buying themselves more time to cheat, steal, & murder in 8 yr increments. It's because what a candidate says are his or her policies are totally irrelevant to what the Deep State ensures will happen. Bush Jr promised "compassionate conservatism." What we got was the Total Information Awareness program. Obama promised transparent government. What we got was the most secretive government in history.
It's obvious to the regular citizen who's paying attention to the news (ie., not news about celebrities) that there's an unbroken continuity in policy between Republican and Democratic administrations. In the last 15 years we have literally switched back and forth from total Republican control of the federal government in the US to total Democratic control of the federal government, and nothing has substantially changed in terms of policy outcomes. There remain some extreme denialists and shills who will argue up and down that "elections matter," but 99% of the rest of us trust our lying eyes and ears and know that they don't.
The conclusion is obvious, though timorous souls will shrink from it: in the United States democracy 1.0 has failed; it has been totally captured and subverted by nefarious forces. It must be broken down and re-made.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Monday March 30 2015, @05:34PM
the president is basically just a figurehead anyway. all they can do is give suggestions to congress, have the option to veto any extremely bad laws, and appoint some federal judges (if the seats are empty), thats about it. he can send out some of the military but that mostly falls to congress too. treaties are supposed to be a presidential thing but i think congress has mostly been taking care of that lately as well. executive orders are an option but can't congress easily veto or override those?
so presidential powers - appointments and suggestions, and limited warfare options. did i miss anything? the president is who matters the least and is more of a "check and balance" than anyone with power.
people who want to affect change in the US need to worry about their congressmen and not the president. congress has been bought pretty much in its entirety too, but thats because the same idiots keep getting re-elected (and now that its already been bought, swapping in new people probably won't change that).
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 30 2015, @09:11PM
You know, tathra, I worked for a President of the United States. The top of the hierarchy under him was not, the "Know how to do stuff and get stuff done" department, but the press department. That is, they don't know how to actually do anything, nor do they know anyone who knows how to do anything. What they think constitutes "doing something" is talking about stuff, and getting the press to talk about the stuff you want them to. That's it, and that's all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:51AM
You should come up to Canada if you want to see a secretive government. At least you know Hillary uses email, our government doesn't write anything down, little well use email in such a way that we'd know that they deleted stuff.
Things have got so bad that even America looks better.