Most of Hillary's quotes that I've heard do have that "marked" qualification but a couple did not. So she's on record as saying nothing "marked" classified was sent or received by her (untrue) and nothing classified was sent or received by her (also untrue).
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.
He wasn't just talking about servers:
Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.
I recently bought a new smart phone and stopped using my old one
I would imagine that she probably used more than one device at a time (smart phone and laptop, for instance) but I'm still not seeing something here that suggests some terrible prosecutable lie
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.
If official State department servers are less secure than a personal email server that didn't even have 24 hour monitoring going on I'm going to get even more depressed.
I don't think it is necessarily "less" secure, but it is still vulnerable to hacking and likely a better (and better known) target for hacking. On the other hand, the more people using a particular "secure" system, the more likelihood of stupid people behavior creating vulnerabilities even if the system as designed is more secure.
This is not to excuse HRC. I think she should have used the state department system, if only to cover her own ass from exactly this sort of witch-hunt. I just don't think it would have made the 110 emails any more or less secure.
I also think that we are looking at something (email) that has gone from limited military use in the early 1970's to a general public novelty in the late 1980's to the ubiquitous usage of today. There is a reason we don't even discuss email usage of Madeleine Albright and those before her - they did not use it (or have it) while in office. Colin Powell was the first Secretary of State to habitually used an AOL email account for Department of State business, and the security protocol has been evolving ever since. I would have to go back and double-check, but if I recall correctly some of the rules partisans are screaming about didn't even exist until a few months before or after HRC left her state department position.
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.
Director Comey said the 110 classified emails were sent
and received so at least some portion of them were sent by Hillary.
And I will say again - he didn't say who initiated any of the 110 emails. Did HRC receive information in emails initiated by others that she recognized as classified, and reply that so and so should call her on the secure phone? (As noted, 110 emails in 52 email chains means an average of 2 per chain - not much of a discussion.)
Did HRC
initiate an email that was marked as "classified"? If so, that is something that would have presumably been caught and stopped by the state department system. We don't actually know. Maybe. Maybe not. Same as for Colin Powell, btw, who in fact destroyed ALL of his emails without turning over copies but no one is investigating him.
The more important question here is did HRC send classified information to anyone who should not have received it? The answer to that is apparently "no". The outrage seems to be all over the system she
may have sent classified information on - the same way Colin Powell and Condi Rice did.
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.
There doesn't have to be nefarious intent. She said they were all turned over. It turns out thousands were not. Again, she's either lying or incompetent.
Or believed they were because who the fuck remembers every email they have ever deleted years ago.
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.
I agree, but, to use a phrase I hate, the optics don't look good.
Perhaps. Especially when Republicans are using those carnival fun house mirrors to look at everything.
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.
Here:
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.
He didn't say that a different person might be
prosecuted. He said that said person could face administrative sanctions. A similar situation to whether someone is criminally prosecuted for rape vs being expelled for code of conduct violations.
Were HRC still the Secretary of State, she could face security and/or administrative sanctions. But she's not, so the State Department can't do anything to her at this point.
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)
It'd have to be more than just her memory that is imperfect. It'd have to be all her advisors and associates that sent and received classified information that would also have to have forgotten it happened. Because if they remembered I'm sure at least one of them would have taken her to the side and reminded her that it actually did happen. Otherwise they're pretty shitty advisors.
Who? There were only 110 total emails that were (after the fact) deemed "classified at the time". Which of her advisers were privy to those emails at any point, and had the knowledge that the information in them were "classified at the time".
And yes, I am going to emphasize this point a little bit. According to FBI Director Comey, the various agencies were ask
now, in the present time, if various emails contained information that was then, at the date of the email, classified. (I am not talking about the "up-classified" emails, just the 110). Since it seems pretty clear from Comey's statements that most of these emails were not actually marked as classified, how do we know that they actually were, and how do we know that HRC and/or the other person(s) in the email chain actually knew that at the time of the email?
I don't really know how this stuff is handled internally, but I doubt that everyone one of hundreds of agencies sends a daily updated list to the Secretary of State with what topics are or are not classified. And I will again go back to the stated fact that there was only 110 emails and only 52 email chains - which means the average "chain" was 2 emails. Topic >>> reply >>> off email to a more secure channel?
And zero evidence that HRC discussed classified information with anyone not having security clearance. Zero evidence that HRC's server was breached.
I'm just not seeing a security breach.
Also I don't feel that bad for Bill and Hillary because a lot of this they bring down on their own heads by doing stupid stuff,
They aren't perfect people, that is for certain. Since when does being practically perfect protect someone from partisan attacks? President Obama has about as perfect a family as it is possible to have. Not even the slightest whiff of a personal scandal from either parent, either child, or any extended family member. Has that stopped vicious partisan attacks on them as a family and as individual people? No.
Bill slutting around certainly harmed their reputation, yes. Both of them trying to dance around the meaning of "is" makes them look less than honest, yes. But frankly, the level of attacks against them since forever would likely make you and me rather paranoid and squirmy too.
Bill having a secret meeting with AG Lynch just days before his wife is scheduled to meet with investigators and Director Comey makes his announcement.
Secret? What was "secret" about it? I am sure that if Bill Clinton wanted a "secret" meeting with Loretta Lynch, he would have gotten it and none of us would know about it.
Seems to me that him hopping across a public airport tarmac to say hello to Lynch really shows how un-paranoid he's gotten since he's left office. Who on earth would have thought that this, of all things, would be a hair-on-fire thing? He clearly needs to be more paranoid and secretive, like his wife.
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.
:fistbump:
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