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Comment by Wissmania | Hacker News Reader

How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly?

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.

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The accusation is she deliberately used only a private account so that her emails wouldn't have to be produced upon committee requests:

"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 is this supposed to be a scandal exactly?

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?

Well yes, if we are discussing why it's illegal to use personal email for this kind of communication, you can't make the assumption that it's legal to use the personal email for hiding stuff and arrive at the conclusion there is no scandal.

That's circular logic.

This "it could have been worse" is weird. The point of requirements to use official channels is two-fold:

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.

> How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly?

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.

How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly?

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.

"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."

Are you saying that she setup a non-gov email so she could make benghazi emails un-searchable before benghazi even happend? CT much?

This is payback for 2 things

- 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.

Payback? So this issue is made up? Shouldn't all presidential hopefuls and public officials be subject to the same scrutiny? As far as Palin, there's no Republican that I know that cares one bit about Palin anymore. She's a pundit but she's hardly a front-runner for Republican thought leadership. She's all but irrelevant.

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.

That you for confirming everything I said.

As a politically motivated Hillary Clinton specific scandal, I agree that it's pretty thin, but it's definitely making me think more than I previously have about how much of officials' correspondence should be subject to freedom of information requests.

Maybe, maybe not. The point is we should audit this. And if they do governmental jobs over a private email they should be punished for it, so others don't do the same in the future.

>How is this supposed to be a scandal exactly?

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.

You really don't get why? Read some of the comments on here and catch a clue.

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