Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday March 30 2015, @09:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the of-course-there-are-no-backups dept.

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?

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Monday March 30 2015, @06:31PM

    by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Monday March 30 2015, @06:31PM (#164410) Journal

    However I also think that's a perfect demonstration of why government email records should be archived out of the control of the people generating them.

    Government email records, as a rule, are archived out of the control of the people generating them. Hillary Clinton's use of a private server for official correspondence appears to be a direct circumvention of the already-established records archival process.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @07:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @07:23PM (#164434)

    Hillary Clinton's use of a private server for official correspondence appears to be a direct circumvention of the already-established records archival process.

    Which, as I understand it, was perfectly legal at the time. Ex post facto laws and punishments are unconstitutional in the US - people cannot be punished for something that was only made illegal after they did it.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday March 30 2015, @08:06PM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Monday March 30 2015, @08:06PM (#164454) Journal

      Congrats -- you have effectively shifted the topic away from the fact that destroying potential evidence, where ever it may be stored, is not the way you respond to a subpoena. If you recall, that was the topic of this thread. The law on preservation is irrelevant in a subpoena situation.

      I also note you never answered my direct question, burying your response in what looks to be a formatting error and while I might be able to guess your answer, you evasively never gave a plain "yes" or "no".

      Anyway, you clearly have an extremely bright future if you choose to go into astroturfing. You're good at it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @09:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @09:15PM (#164488)

        That AC is not me - the one you asked the question of. If you had been paying attention to the thread you would have seen that I already answered your question. I was simply re-quoting it back at you to make it explicit with indentation to show that it was a requote. The fact that you were asking me an insinuating question that I had already answered pissed me off. If you won't pay attention to the words I've already written I don't feel the need to write new ones.

        • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:57AM

          by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:57AM (#164637) Journal

          That AC is not me - the one you asked the question of. If you had been paying attention to the thread you would have seen that I already answered your question.

          Where exactly. I've gone up and down this thread and do not see the answer to my question:

          Should a person under investigation be the same person who decides which documents subject to subpoena should be turned over?

          ___ Yes

          ___ No

          if you have already answered, please link to the specific post. If you have answered it, I apologize for missing it.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:49PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:49PM (#165003)

            Should a person under investigation be the same person who decides which documents subject to subpoena should be turned over?

            Its irrelevant. If the law allows them to do that, then its legal. What we think of it doesn't matter. I don't think police should be the ones in charge of making sure the police follow all the laws, nor do I think corporations should be the ones in charge of ensuring they comply with all the laws, but what I think doesn't matter, I'm not the one who write the laws nor the one writing new laws, and even if I was, it still wouldn't change the fact that laws created after the act was committed cannot be used to punish those past acts.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2015, @09:28PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2015, @09:28PM (#166216)

              Its irrelevant. If the law allows them to do that, then its legal

              Agreed as far as law/legal is concerned, but history has repeatedly proven that just because the law allows something, it does not make that thing morally right.