Using Private Email, Hillary Clinton Thwarted Record Requests
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The disclosure that Hillary Clinton used a non-governmental e-mail address while she was Secretary of State originally came courtesy of “Guccifer,” the Romanian hacker now serving time in a Bucharest prison for his online attacks against scores of public figures.
As TSG first reported in March 2013, “Guccifer” illegally accessed the AOL e-mail account of Sidney Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, and later became a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
When “Guccifer” (who was later identified as Marcel Lazar Lehel) breached Blumenthal’s account, he discovered an assortment of correspondence sent to Hillary Clinton at the e-mail address hdr22@clintonemail.com. The “clintonemail.com” domain was registered in 2009, shortly after her nomination to become Secretary of State.[1]
They host with MX Logic[2], some McAfee's enterprise-y mail service. At least it wasn't statedeptsugarycake22@gmail.com.
[1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary...
It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010.
The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton.
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company.
- Sarah Palin
- Mitt Romney
- Karl Rove
- Andrew Cuomo
- Chris Christie aide Bridget Anne Kelly
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-examples-lawmaker...
It definitely seems less than ideal for these rules to be abused like this.
The problem is, how do you stop it?
It's unreasonable to expect all private communications to be on public record, and if you write a note to your babysitter during office hours, why should the wider world have to know about it?
It's a difficult balance.
"The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities. (44 U.S. Code § 3101)"
The only relevant question is, "are emails 'records'?", and according to the State Department, the answer is yes:
"All employees must be aware that some of the variety of the messages being exchanged on E-mail are important to the Department and must be preserved; such messages are considered Federal records under the law. (5 FAM [Foreign Affairs Manual] "
And I might add that the accusation here is not that she had a personal account in addition to her official one, it's that she didn't have an official one at all.
I don't know, I see other relevant questions. For instance, nothing in the quoted law says anything about how they shall "make and preserve" the records, only what purposes those records must be adequate to serve. So, using private email alone doesn't seem to be a violation, it seems to be something that might be the starting point for an inquiry as to whether she made and preserved "ontaining adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities", but it doesn't alone provide an answer to that question whether or not you consider emails as records.
In the corporate world, if there were a legal requirement for compliance, the auditor would verify that all work email is going over work servers, and then review the policies in place on those servers. You could technically let a special employee run their own server, but then that server would need to be audited, and the policies in place there reviewed. "Nah, you can trust Joe" wouldn't cut it.
Otherwise the entire point of compliance laws just goes out the window.
Legal compliance audits that I have been involved in tend to go beyond what is unquestionably prohibited by the law and also seek to identify and eliminate activities which might arguably violate the law (and thus create legal risk) including, but not limited to, those which violate organizations internal guidelines which are based on the applicable law but whose requirements may be (generally, should be) more strict than the law itself.
There are three different, but related, categories into which this might fall, in decreasing order of breadth:
1) Behavior that would be of concern to a compliance audit focused on the law in question,
2) Behavior that would violate administration guidance related to achieving compliance with the law in question,
3) Behavior that actually violates the law in question.
You are arguing, and I agree, that it is #1. There are reports that administration sources have indicated that it is #2 (I see no reason to doubt them, though I haven't seen the actual guidance, so I don't have an informed opinion.)
Neither of those, however, is the same thing as it being #3.
> agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.
How did they ensure this? As a few news stories, including the linked article, have reported, they would have been immune from FOIA requests.
Here's another from http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-used-p...
> The fact that Clinton’s emails were not a part of official State Department records until recently means many of them would not have been located in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenas or other document searches conducted over the past six years
Yes, that's exactly the question this raises.
> As a few news stories, including the linked article, have reported, they would have been immune from FOIA requests.
They would not have been immune. They may have been overlooked in the course of handling such requests, although assuming anyone in the State Department offices responsible for conducting document searches in response to FOIA requests (or subpoenas, etc.) was aware of the practice, they quite probably wouldn't have been, there just would have been an extra step involved in handling the requests.
"Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have operated in violation of what the White House said Tuesday was “very specific guidance” that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business."
Saying "email is not a system of record" is lot like saying "RAID is not a backup". Just because you don't use reliable a long term storage medium doesn't mean you don't have and use those records.
It doesn't even fly contrary to e-discovery, it's just a difference in multiple contextual definitions of "record."
The fact is this, Palin matters because she's not a Democrat. Democrats have Stockholm Syndrome. When a Republican is corrupt, much of the time, they resign. When a Democrat is corrupt, they get reelected. Re: Marion Berry, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel, Chris Dodd. Tom Delay was another bad one, however he was actually charged with a crime and he resigned.
Palin is nothing more than a proxy to rationalize bad behavior.
Democrats most definitely don't have a monopoly on corruption; however how Democrat voters deal with the corruption is markedly telling.
And was then vindicated in the courts.
Texas has a weird arrangement where the very Blue Austin area prosecutor has a remit for political corruption in the entire state. The same officer recently indicted (now former) Governor Perry for threatening a veto, a rather unique take on a constitutionally enshrined executive action.
The advocates for full disclosure imo are biting their nose to spite their face. Normal people running everything from little leagues to major corporations use email for strategy development, information delivery, deliberative functions and other normal business processes.
Known figures in government cannot do that, because the second they do, that information is available to the universe. The consequence is that officials don't use email, and either go through couriers, use some grey area communications mechanism, or do something else that is lost to the public record. It's ridiculous that President Obama or any smart governor cannot have a computer on this desk because of this stuff.
I think the current law was designed for paper memos and letters and works counter to its intended goal. Leaders cannot lead if everything they write needs to be staged for this evening's news. There should be a long aging process for this type of material.
Clinton did not claim executive privilege. She set up a secret email account in order to avoid disclosure laws. This criminal and corrupt action should disqualify her for presidential office.
18 U.S. Code § 2071 - Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally
(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, 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, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
I also work for an organization where FOIA laws mean anything I produce is available to anyone who asks (and knows what to ask for). The purpose of laws like this is to prevent your elected and/or unelected officials from doing things that are detrimental to society. Those "couriers... grey area communications mechanism, or... something else that is lost to the public record"? Yeah, you're fucked if someone can figure out how to request those, because they're subject to the same laws, and it sure looks like you're trying to hide something.
Leaders cannot lead if they're working against the public interest. If they're not working against the public interest, then they can justify why they're doing what they do. Period.
Government policymakers deal with issues that involve organized labor, various special interests, and business interests.
By making things operate in a such a way that people cannot function in a modern manner, you're pushing much of the deliberative process away from written mediums to telephone and in-person meetings. By doing this, you're empowering people who have access to power (lobbyists, etc), in the name of transparency that is almost meaningless.
Second, "cannot function in a modern manner"? If you're creating a public record, it's subject to FOIA. End of discussion. The point of FOIA is that you, as a creator of public records, cannot hide your work product from the people you serve. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, or so I've been told.
http://www.ibtimes.com/amid-federal-corruption-probe-andrew-...
You can have and create a document-deletion policy, no problem. But -- and I've had this drilled into me at multiple employers, because it's really important -- once you are told by legal that an investigation is under way, you don't delete them, no matter what, until legal tells you otherwise. You take active steps to preserve them if need be.
Cuomo's optics suck, but unless you think he's criminally insane, he wouldn't delete emails while investigators wanted emails preserved. There's some part of the story we haven't heard.
Did you know that people flush drugs down the toilet when cops knock on the door, in clear violation of the law?
I've also only seen this story in IBT, not elsewhere, and they carefully don't say that these records are part of the investigation, just that an investigation is happening and that emails are being deleted -- leaving it to the reader to connect the dots that don't necessarily exist.
None of those even begin to reach the level of Clinton's conduct. She conducted ALL communications through the private email. None of the above used private emails exclusive. Most of them don't even sound like they used the private emails the majority of the time.
This is just an attempt at associating a larger issue with a bunch of smaller ones so people will think of it as a minor one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/using-private-...
I can't think of a lot of reasons of do this other than to attempt to hide things
I don't think that a public figure, even in higher ranks, should be exposed to that kind of scrutiny. Privacy is a privilege which everyone should enjoy. Even those who are trying to literally kill it.
You can start by using your work email for all work-related purposes.
If someone on Wall Street refused to use work email -- which can be monitored by their employer -- for communicating with clients, it would stink to high heaven.
Your phrasing is very apropos, since if the law is applied to her (which I believe is the question you are asking), it will almost certainly be applied to her "the way it has been applied to Petraeus", as opposed to the way it's applied to someone lower down the totem pole:
"[Former State Dept. official Stephen] Kim did not hand over a copy of the [classified North Korea] report — he just discussed it, and nothing else — and the report was subsequently described in court documents as a “nothing burger” in terms of its sensitivity. Kim is currently in prison on a 13-month sentence."[0]
For context, Petraeus "gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it."[0]
[0]https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/03/petraeus-plea-...
2. I don't know, do you? My guess is that, yes, she did.
3. It depends on whether shared classified information with anybody who did not have clearance. My guess is that, no, she didn't, or this would already be a much bigger story.
Using a personal email address is not the same as sharing classified information.
But this issue isn't (yet) about handling of classified material; it's about government oversight.
I don't think it is. I do it every day at work.
Use your personal email to communicate with your babysitter, and your official work email only for work stuff.
One problem with that. I have an official work (.edu) email that is practically useless. Constantly full of spam, both from outside, and from clueless employees. Domain gets blocked from sending to popular domains occasionally for mass spamming. Can't accept attachments (or rarely accepts them). High and unpredictable inbox latency. Goofy, insecure, obsolete pa55woRD! rules. etc. The .gov email addresses I have had from past jobs weren't always much better.
So I have an official work email, an unofficial work gmail, and a private email account for personal business.
But the larger point is that Clinton should have had some procedure to regularly archive her work-related comms (no matter what the method was).
You stop it by holding people accountable for their actions. I manage to keep my work e-mail separate from my private e-mail, it's not hard.
[...]
"Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking."
Source: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
You mean the WHOIS records?
If so, I'm not sure it's so easy to simply dismiss "traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York" as referring to the WHOIS record. It sounds like they're looking at the IP address, in which case I guess it's technically possible that the actual mailserver isn't physically located at her home, but for the purposes of the article it'd be reasonable to say that she ran [part of] the service from her home.
I agree that it'd be preferable if they could explain what evidence they're actually basing this on, but it doesn't read to me like they're talking about the WHOIS.
The key words are "registered to", which means nobody was able to trace the actual traffic to the home. Not that that would necessarily be easy, but in absence of that I think it's far more likely that she's not administering running mail servers from her home.
Registrant Name: PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: 12808 Gran Bay Parkway West
Registrant City: Jacksonville
Registrant State/Province: FL
Registrant Postal Code: 32258
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.5707088780
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: kr5a95v468n@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net.
10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net.Note that MXLogic is a managed email service provided by McAfee.
Given that and what you say, the most likely scenario IMO is that she was getting too much spam and asked whoever was taking care of her IT to do something. They decided to front-end her email with MXLogic and it's still going to Google (but of course, we don't know for sure).
If so, the whole premise of the article (Some people use Google, but Clinton built her own server) is false.
Meanwhile, the AP thinks that Clinton's MX choices have to do with her feelings about China.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking.
You know what other email server is protected by the Secret Service? whitehouse.gov
Having stuff go through two email servers makes security strictly worse: any security flaws on either server exposes mail.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/b78ba433af3a45209668f745158d9...
This is another case where I wish they would just get some IT expert to look at the evidence and explain it technically (not dumbed down, not for a layperson). Maybe only technical people would understand, but at least the media record would be accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_P._Jackson#EPA_Administrat...
>It's a difficult balance.
No it's not, and you know it. If you're discussing job-related matters, use your work email, not the system you had set up so that you could evade your workplace data-retention policies. Who knows; maybe Clinton and Blumenthal send all their "re: re: re: funny" cat pictures to each other through this, but I doubt it.
Any maybe your parents never taught you, but just because other people break the rules doesn't give you an excuse to break the rules. If only our politicians had any sense of right and wrong...
However, the answer is not to bring your personal equipment onto the corporate network. Which sucks because if you need to get something taken care of between 8 and 5, how are you going to manage that? Your options are limited if you don't have a guest network at work.
Your personal, private, and confidential dealings while using employer provided equipment, networks, and time are anything but those things.
So let's be clear about the root of the problem: government regulations demand that public officials have recordable conversations as part of their duties. This allows openness and inspection. (It also allows political shenanigans)
It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens. The government, for whatever reason, has decided it wants to record everything you do of type X. As a subject of the government, you are not given a choice. To record some information in some contexts might be reasonable, in other contexts it might not, but all we're given is blanket requirements.
What we're seeing with Hillary -- and probably with anybody else that has any common sense -- is just blowing off the law and "making things work" without regards to whether it is legal or not. For what it's worth, and I am a member of neither political party, I'd do the same thing.
You can try to make this into an election-year deal about Hillary, or stand on a soapbox and talk about government accountability, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But the real issue here is that the freaking government is trying to collect too much information about everybody. It's not just limited to public servants. And the proper response to a government that refuses to act in a reasonable manner is non-violent non-participation.
Having said all of that, I fully expect that point to be completely lost by folks on both sides of this issue.
It's a very, very similar situation to where we are with government spying on the citizens.
I don't find those cases to be similar at all. Government officials are public servants granted a public trust. While there are certainly circumstances and topics that require confidentiality for some period of time, those officials' conduct of government business has to be subject to oversight, whether by Congress or the public.
There's a case to be made that record-keeping requirements are overly onerous, and encourage difficult-to-monitor, potentially insecure side channels like this one. But that government communications of our top officials should be private? I don't think so.
I couldn't agree more.
It seemingly has been in the past, but for some reason isn't now.
But what do you think would happen if 100,000 people made a public commitment online to report their taxes but not pay them? What about 500K? A million? Remember: using the net, it would be possible not to disclose any of those people until all of them made the commitment.
Would the government throw all of those people out on the street? Put them all in jail?
Because this is where we're headed. I doubt you'll see mass protests about the NSA tracking cell phones, but at some point in the next 50 years the tax burden will become high enough that people will openly revolt. Future generations will protest the idea that the majority of their taxes are going for debt service on money borrowed by people who aren't even still alive. That's a great "taxation without representation" argument.
Non-participation is always a matter of degree. As the government closes its fist, more and more people will slip through, either openly or not.
> Mrs. Clinton’s aides have said her use of private email was not out of the ordinary, pointing to the fact that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal email account, before the current regulations went into effect. But since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.”
Given that retention of email was a scandal in 2007 [1], there is no way someone plugged into Washington was unaware of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...
I suppose the power elites are freaking out right now because neither of those bluebloods should be allowed anywhere near the white house.
Will status quo go out the window with the next president, or will we continue with the endless war, bailout, QE, and surveillance policies of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obama?
So what happens to these people during election season? Candidates are hidden from them, some candidates are given more time to speak during debates, and some major candidates aren't even discussed. Someone who doesn't pay attention to politics and is looking for a quick answer just simply will not get an honest view of the situation from the press.
Jon Stewart had a good piece about an example of this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtDJ6Ay4QMw
You can claim Reagan was that backlash, but he was just another big government guy. Tea party is interesting, but it seems like it has too many social conservative cranks to breakthrough.
Also, that video was hilarious.
In nerdy terms, if there are N dimensions to public policy and individuals are represented as N dimensional vectors, the ideologies of our current parties do a terrible job of dimensional reduction.
Everything is terrible, because there is no other side. Neither party represents my interests adequately, and both parties are sclerotic and resistant to change because of symbiotic relationships with rent-seeking interest groups.
What should I do?
I don't know what you should do, but current my strategy (as you can see) is to call out what I see as unhelpfully hyperbolic rhetoric (both negative and positive, though that's rare these days) when I talk to people and point out good things about our society while not papering over things I'd like to see improved.
There are quite a few axes on which to measure how well things are going, and the adequate representation of your (and my) interests is just one of them. I totally agree the system doesn't do a great job of that, but it does a good job of lots of more important things.
To continue with your specific example, people I talk to seem largely unaware that the economy of the US has pretty much recovered from the crash. A lot of times this unawareness manifests in the thought that everything we've done since then and are still doing has been utterly and catastrophically wrong and we need to scrap it entirely and figure something else out. I don't think that's very useful. The other perspective is to say, that's great that the high level economic indicators have improved, but shouldn't we be seeing wage growth along with it? How can we tweak the system to see the gains spread more equitably? That is, it's not totally wrong, but it's not totally right either. What can we do to get closer to "totally right"? That's the sort of rhetoric I'd prefer to hear.
If you have acess to capital at 0% interest rates, you are doing fine.
I've never been one to say, "I'm only voting for this particular party." I simply don't understand that mentality. It makes zero sense to me.
Edit: As my original post indicated, I believe we are on a downward slope towards things becoming terrible. Just not there yet.
If either Clinton or Bush win and get re-elected to a second term it would mean, ten years from now we would have had either a Clinton or Bush as President for 28 of the previous 36 years...and yet people will wonder why nothing ever changes.
The issue seems to be that she could of hid something in her personal emails by not turning everything over. But couldn't any official have just used their gov email for "official business" and use their personal email for stuff they want to hide? Doesn't every politician actually do this?
The fact that Clinton is letting personal correspondence mix with government correspondence indicates to me she has less to hide, not more.
The only issue that has the possibility of being legitimate in is the Benghazi stuff. Technically, it could have been a deliberate move to make emails related to Benghazi un-searchable during the investigation. Of course, this only actually matters if those emails contain anything significant/damning, and they probably don't.
"The State Department had not searched the email account of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton because she had maintained a private account, which shielded it from such searches, department officials acknowledged on Tuesday."
How about the release of proprietary and sensitive data into an unverified third-party system? Potentially traversing the Internet unencrypted in the process.
I've seen people dismissed from companies for that. Shouldn't Government be even more rigorous?
That's circular logic.
1. It maintains an archive that can be used for accountability.
2. Anyone communicating with not-that-account can potentially flip to the watchdogs, making it harder to use unofficial communications.
I'm not so naive to think that those unofficial communications don't happen. I expect that most campaigns have used them for dirty laundry. It doesn't mean we get rid of the channels we can see.
Classified information security, for one thing. Exposing highly sensitive information via an infrastructure run by unknown persons, presumably without clearances, or acting against the conditions of their clearances if they have them.
One specific law about document retention is mentioned in connection with this case, but this is also a big security issue, with laws and regulations that apply, as well.
There are probably other ethics, regulatory, and legal issues once you get into who she was corresponding with on what topics and how those people used the information they obtained.
Refusing to use the email server that is under your employer's control is a giant red flag. Document retention, document deletion, FOIA requests, a zillion other compliance requirements: those all need to be handled by a dedicated compliance officer, not a Clinton aide.
Are you saying that she setup a non-gov email so she could make benghazi emails un-searchable before benghazi even happend? CT much?
- The exposure of Palin's email shenanigans
- A continuation of the Benghazi conspiracy
They want to keep Benghazi on the radar in case of a potential presidential run, and they're still mad about how easy it was to shatter Palin as a VP candidate, a mistake that is widely believed to have cost them the presidency and locked the U.S. in for 8 years of centrist non-ideologue successes that just happened to be accomplished by a half-black man with an informed global view.
As far as Benghazi, it's a legitimate issue for a Presidential candidate. They claimed a video sparked the attack. That was the official word despite evidence that Hillary knew almost immediately that a video had nothing to do with it. That false narrative whose water was carried by Susan Rice resulted in Rice getting promoted to UN Ambassador. All of this stuff is far more relevant than those stupid stories about Mitt Romney and his family dog.
Look! A squirrel. If Benghazi is a non issue, what was the need for the obfuscation of the truth? Why did the admin insist that YouTube caused the attack? Why not just play it straight? It isn't Benghazi that's the issue; it's the culture of corruption and deceit that voters don't seem to care about.
We should demand better.
Everything with the Clintons is a scandal, even when it isn't. She's known this for the past 20+ years. She should have known better.
So you mean to tell me that all of these are from a Gmail account?
What happens to her because of this obvious effort to conceal is the most important aspect of the case. Will she get the wrist slap like Pretraeis and other friends of Washington get? Likely. Whereas everyday citizens are hounded to death by AGs and the like.
To be honest, government officials taking actions like this need to be treated like the criminals they are, they are purposefully betraying the public trust and hiding behind the power of their office and names to do it. The real one percent in Washington
The article says "Secretary of State John Kerry uses a government email account, and his correspondence is preserved as part of the department’s record-keeping system."
> Clinton was not the first secretary of state to use a private account. The State Department said Clinton’s successor as top diplomat, John F. Kerry, is the first secretary to use a standard government e-mail address ending in “state.gov.”
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-used-...
The agency must make sure that emails are being retained according to law. In any private enterprise that must retain records, there is exactly one way to do this: you use your employer's email server, which has a long audit trail and dedicated compliance officers.
How did she possibly discuss classified materials?
But if you want to be an optimist about humanity, you could assume that the timing of or level of attention given to this reveal is unrelated to election cycles and merely the natural pace of a crime being revealed and prosecuted.
Of course, it's also 2014, there is no reason a high-level official should be this ignorance, but it wouldn't hurt for aides to make sure they are using the correct email account.