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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading stories about US Gov agency dirs/mgmnt using private email for Gov business. Ostensibly because it went a long way dodge FOIA. The practice was widespread in every admin, from W until at least 2020.

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That’s what the whole “Hillary’s emails” thing was about. Not that she had any damning emails, but that she was using a personal email account as Secretary of State to dodge FOIA requests.

>Not that she had any damning emails

Hard to say this since tons that were under subpeona were deleted

Edit: the best part is Hillary claiming the emails weren't work related and the press just mindlessly repeating that claim. No way to tell if the claim is true or not since they were, y'know, deleted: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-deleted-3300...

She's such a nice and reputable person, it makes sense to take her claims at face value.

Trump and co. had four years of full power to get to the bottom of it, and yet they didn't.

How does "getting to the bottom of it" directly benefit Donald Trump ?

Why would Trump want to get to the bottom of anything?

Email is a two way street. If she sent a damning email, the recipient would have it. If she received a damning email, the sender would have a copy. Yet somehow no example of such an email has ever surfaced, despite it being something that would have carried a lot of weight when Trump was president.

Why would the counterparties surface emails they’d think were damning publically?

Damning of Hillary, not necessarily the recipient, after she lost the election and was pushed out of politics, and wanted by the new President Trump (their boss) who had an ego desperate for vindication. Doesn't the question answer itself?

If we posit the existence of emails indicative of a criminal conspiracy, maybe many of them were damning of both parties and it's reasonable to assume we never saw them. But every single email? That is incredibly unlikely.

More likely solution: Hillary did turn over all the emails having to do with her job when it was requested that she do so, and the ones she held back and deleted were conversations with family, online shopping, etc. that she didn't want distributed all over the public media. No criminal conspiracy emails have since shown up because there aren't any.

Ah. Well,

1) A criminal conspiracy would necessarily also indict the counterparty, since conspiracy is a crime and they’d just be as culpable. So they’d need to not delete their emails and let them out too, despite knowing this.

2) Yeah, I don’t expect she was doing anything actually very nefarious. Certainly not like the things that have been actively admitted to by Trump in full view of the Public.

I’ve personally always taken everything Trump has been ranting about as projection. It certainly holds up well to reality testing, eh?

What I don't understand is that the state agency I work for was VERY clear that if we use personal devices for work, they are immediately able to be subpoenaed in the event that happens.

Why would feds be different?

In theory they’re not above the law. In practice, they are.

Also says every gov employee and soldier who would get thrown in a cell in a hot minute for doing any of the things Trump has done re: government secret materiel.

Answer: you know why.

Also Biden right, storing them in his garage?

Ah, here we go. Poisoning the well of civil discussion, one thread at a time.

Compare the facts of the situations side by side, I’ll wait.

This is the only poison-ey comment. If you want to compare them, do so. Don't just name-call.

I didn’t start the comparison, you should note. I merely asked for them to be DIRECT about it, instead of ‘whattaboutism’.

Is everyone really this easy to manipulate?

It's pretty simple - Biden wasn't president when it stored his records, Trump was. All classification authority emanates from the President, not senators or vice presidents.

To do so, Trump would have had to have done said declassification. Something he notably did not do. In fact, he also didn’t turn them over when explicitly asked when he left office.

He also lied repeatedly about keeping them, and kept them (and handled them) well after he was out of office and no longer president. He also explicitly directed employees of his which were not cleared for the material to move and handle those records.

He also kept them in a place easily accessible to folks who were paying him money (personally) at Mar-a-lago and went to some trouble it seems to destroy evidence related to who may have seen them (security tapes, etc) when the FBI came looking.

And that is ignoring the issues like a huge (and unprecedented) spike in CIA assets being killed/disappeared related to this material once he was in office, the Kushner loans from the Saudis that seems related to this material and other information, Kashoggi’s murder (right around the time of the Kushner loans from the Saudi’s BTw), and the whole fiasco with Flynn (appointed national security advisor by Trump) with Russian ties. And Trump’s repeated statements trying to shake down the Ukraine gov’t and explicit statements that he would direct US foreign policy against what are clear US interests and towards widely stated Russian interests. Like withdrawing from NATO, or removing US support for Ukraine.

In contrast, Biden appears to have kept some records at home in a location that was not widely accessible, and he returned them when asked, and as part of normal processes common to transitions. Not ideal.

But I’ve heard no accusations (not even flimsy ones), let alone seen any statements or actions from him, that even imply he is working against US national interests, or the nation has suffered any actual harm related to those actions.

So not even on the same planet as what Trump has admitted to doing, let alone what seems to be quite apparent that he has been doing flagrantly.

If Biden committed a meaningful crime? Impeach him, remove him from office, and lock him up.

Trump has been convicted of numerous felonies, not even counting Jan 6th and numerous other acts committed in full view of the public, and is still rattling around free as a bird and undermining US public interests.

Why is he not in jail? Why is he still out on bail, especially after making clear statements (before and after trial) that he has plans to flee the country?

Oh, and Biden, being president later, could have even gone back and declassified those records he had in his garage to cover his ass - but didn’t.

And more specifically that she unilaterally decided which emails were “official” and which were personal rather than deferring that decision to a third party. And then she had whatever she considered personal deleted, after being served with a subpoena for all the emails on their server.

Since SCOTUS just recently said that POTUS gets to make this decision, there's a good chance they think that the SoS does too.

Hillary's emails was more about the Presidential Records Act than FOIA. PRA requires documents of the president, vice president and their staff to be kept forever. It was enacted because of efforts by Nixon to destroy information.

Using private email services to avoid the PRA was only outlawed in 2014, which is after Hillary was no longer in the administration. However, it was obviously a pretty scummy thing to do before it was illegal.

Can we dive into this further?

Is the noncompliance with the presidential records Act, an illegal act?

Because that's what is suggested was true ,until 2014. Is that correct?

There were a lot of problems with Hillary’s email server. The major criminal liability was the fact that classified information had been sent and received in many of those emails, though Comey ultimately decided that this was not intentional on Hillary’s part.

There was also concerns about security and email retention. The retention issues were kind of funny; the official sequence of events was:

1. Hillary’s chief of staff and lawyers go through her emails and send all the work related ones to the State Department for archiving.

2. Hillary’s chief of staff then asks PRN (the company managing the server) to set a 60 day retention policy.

3. Months pass.

4. The server comes to public attention, and a Congressional committee investigating the Benghazi fiasco subpoenas Hillary’s emails.

5. The guy at PRN realizes he never actually turned on the retention policy so he panics and starts deleting emails with BleachBit.

This always shocked me because of how big of a red flag this would be at any private business larger than 10-100 employees.

> That’s what the whole “Hillary’s emails” thing was about.

You're not wrong but Hillary was 1 of 1000. Nearly everyone angry about Hillary cared nothing about all the other agency mgmt doing the same.

Because ~0% cared about the the issue in a meaningful way, nothing got done and the practice carried on after she went away.

If I recall correctly, FOIA says "in the course of government business." Doesnt matter what system you use unless that system is destroying emails...which is illegal.

Sure but someone has to care enough to pursue action. Whoever that is, their boss and their boss' boss are doing it too.

One of the top aides for Fauci admitted that Fauci and he used private email addresses to do government business. He even admitted ways he would use to avoid detection from FOIA.

Who? When?

I'm actually shocked that you don't know this. It was big news a few months ago.

https://www.nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/fauci-advisor-b...

https://oversight.house.gov/release/new-covid-select-memo-de...

https://thehill.com/video/top-fauci-aide-david-morens-caught...

Let say that's true. If someone is angry about Fauci but give a pass to the many, many other agency directors doing the same thing - that someone isn't really angry about the issue are they? It's just something to exploit and then forget about.

https://www.nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/fauci-advisor-b...

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