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Tweet of the Day
The best excuse Hillary Clinton can come up with: it was more convenient not using her government email account? http://t.co/hPGeuHSZ6U
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 10, 2015
Now Hillary Clinton Is Insulting Our IntelligenceOn its face it seems reasonable: "At the end, I chose not to keep my private, personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolences, notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you’d typically find in inboxes." [Except for the vast majority of federal employees, they work within the parameters of government email systems, which discourage personal use and explicitly note no expectation of privacy--and it was Hillary's decision to fold her government emails into a private account, which she claims was allowed. This is a sophistic attempt to find some loophole in policy] But before we proceed further, let's look at the tally: "According to a nine-page document provided by Clinton aides, the personal account once contained 62,320 emails that were sent and received between March 2009 and February 2013, when she left President Obama’s Cabinet. Of those emails, Clinton’s team determined that 30,490 were work-related, in part by searching for the names of top officials and for emails ending in “.gov.” Those records were provided to the State Department two months ago; the other 31,830 were apparently deleted." "The New York Times reported she relied solely on a personal email account as secretary of State, effectively preventing the documents from being released to the public for nearly two years." "No outside parties, she declared, will be allowed to examine her personal server or look for the deleted emails. “I went above and beyond what I was requested to do.”"
There's no delicate way to put this: Hillary Clinton is lying and/or purposefully misleading the American people. But before proceeding further consider, the very arrogance of the highlighted quote, which is positively Nixonian in nature. By her own admission, nearly half the emails in the account were government. She deleted nearly 32,000 messages, claiming that they were personal. Any REASONABLE person would, at minimum, have an independent source verify any deleted emails were non-government. All we have is Ms. Clinton's word--and she has a vested interest in the outcome of any investigation. How do we know she did not delete politically inconvenient emails? Going "above and beyond"? Only in her mind, not reality.
Second, she goes out of the way to say none of the emails involved classified information. There's an obvious reason why she wants us to believe that, including the likely vulnerability of her server to foreign hackers. But we are to be believe that the Secretary of State over 4 years never received a work email of a sensitive nature?
Third, she is lamely using an excuse of convenience for NOT using government email accounts. Since when did she think she was entitled to private copies of government messages? Almost any employer contract I ever signed said what I do at work is their property. I have never done what Clinton has done with any former employer. (I occasionally got configured email alerts on server/database status exceptions also copied to to my core personal account.) I will simply say (I cannot discuss specifics because of contractual obligations) that in the past I have done work tasks involving processing sensitive data sent via government email and I've never had anywhere near Clinton's access to classified data. While the government can monitor email flows in its system, we only have Clinton's word that she never forwarded government emails to individuals who have not been properly cleared--or worse, we don't know if some nefarious hackers got access to Clinton's copies of government emails.
This merits yet another Hillary Clinton nomination to my annual JOTY contest. She now may have taken the blog lead in total nominations.
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