I was thinking about this more yesterday and here are some things that bother me about this whole situation:
1) Hillary said she sent no emails that were classified at the time she sent them.
The FBI found 110 emails that were properly classified at the time they were sent.
HRC said there were no emails
marked as classified. Coney said that whether or not they were marked as such, HRC knew or should have known.
I think HRC is engaged in a bit of verbal slight-of-hand, and it does not reflect well on her, but at the same time - 110 emails (in 52 email chains) out of nearly 4,000 over several years... I am not going to assume lying when an imperfect memory is a more likely explanation.
I also find it telling that it was 110 emails in 52 email chains, approximately 2 per chain... enough for someone to send something sensitive and the other person to say "get thee to a secure communications device". Not enough for a lengthy/detailed discussion. (Do we have any 2 post threads around here?
)
2) Hillary said she only used one device.
Director Comey said she used multiple devices.
He also said she used the servers sequentially, retiring one as the next was brought on line.
3) Hillary said her system was never hacked.
Director Comey said her system was very open to be hacked even though they didn't find any evidence and other people that Hillary had been emailing with had been hacked.
The bolded supports what HRC said. The bit in italics is what bothers me. It is my understanding (from various news reports) is that if she had been using state department equipment, it would not have allowed properly marked classified material to be sent to an unsecured recipient.
There are still a lot of loopholes in there. First and foremost being that government servers are just as vulnerable to hacking (and perhaps better known targets than a mystery bathroom server). Her using the state department system would have been more of a CYA move than any genuine increase in security, I think.
Second, I haven't read whether someone can send classified information TO the state department email addresses, only that it couldn't be sent out. Since we don't know whether HRC initiated or received the 110 emails in question, we really don't know if a state department system would have made a difference.
4) Hillary said her team turned over all work related emails.
Director Comey said there were thousands of work related emails that were not turned over and instead were deleted and her lawyers even made sure they were not forensically recoverable.
You are conflating unrelated parts of what Director Comey said. It is true that thousands of work-related emails were not turned over, but the FBI knows that because they DID recover them from HRC's servers. He also said directly and clearly that he does not believe the existence of undisclosed emails indicated any sort of a cover-up as the email headers did not appear to be work-related. He also said that of the recovered emails there was only 1 or 2 that were sensitive, the vast majority were the types of emails that would be routinely deleted over time with no nefarious intent.
As to her lawyers, it was their OWN law office servers they wiped. That would be SOP for most lawyers, not just hers. Some of my clients are attorneys, and from my (admittedly limited) experience, law offices take email security very seriously - clearly more so than HRC did while she was in the state department.
5) Director Comey said they had evidence that statutes were violated (i.e. that the law was broken) but didn't think that was prosecutable and then said if similar evidence was found in a different case involving a different person they might recommend prosecution which sounds to me like a gross unfair system where it might matter who you are than what you may have done.
Please quote where he said that, as I don't remember anything like it.
Taken all together Hillary either lied to us when she made these statements or she's incompetent.
Or, more likely, her memory is imperfect (as is normal for all humans) while her instinct to secrecy and self-preservation is beyond what is normal (though perhaps understandable given what she and her husband have endured at the hands of the Republicans for almost their entire political lives)
Either option makes me depressed that this was the best the Democratic Party thought they could do and she should thank her lucky stars that it's Trump she's facing because any other Republican nominee would probably have beat her.
On this we agree unequivocally.
