http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...
But I could see this as a result of incompetency, that is, the IT person didn't realize that it's not up to him to redact addresses, the State Dept. could do it. I know that sounds naive but we're talking about an IT person who posted this question on Reddit using an account easily connected to him, so, incompetency is inherent in the scenario.
edit: Apparently, there is a Slashdot user named "StoneTear" who has been posting since 2002 and has made reference about working in government and knows about their data retention policies. So that mostly rules out the possibility of IT-guy-is-just-the-Senator's-nephew-in-law-who-got-asked-because-to-do-IT-because-no-one-else-was-around:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/19/2239234/computer-sp...
2 years ago it wasn't even clear that HRC would run, let alone that her emails would become such a large and specifically scrutinized aspect of the campaign. Yes, it would've been better if Combetta had the foresight to avoid this sticky situation, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim he's incompetent because of this quite unusual confluence of events.
His two mistakes were using a known username and calling attention to how "VIP" his VIP was. Some people will say the only purpose for the latter is to brag, but I disagree. People on online forums are frequently both hostile and caustic. A likely response to his question would be "Tell them you can't do that". Combetta's emphasis on the VIP's stature was a pre-emptive attempt to get the help he needed without bickering about whether or not he had authority to shut down the request. Since that was obviously not on the table for a sysadmin trying to earn a living, he needed to make it clear that he was dealing with orders originating from well above his pay grade.
People will also say Combetta should've known this was illegal, which I think is silly too. HRC is a laywer. Everyone in politics is a lawyer. There is no intrinsic moral compass around email retention policies, and even if you say "Hmm, that doesn't sound fair", well, we all know that the law isn't perfect -- unfair doesn't make it illegal per se, and none of us would be employed if we had the full moral latitude we'd like to decline employer requests (for example, there's a good argument that modern marketing as an industry has deep moral flaws, but how many companies can afford not to market themselves? There's a lowest-common-denominator factor that drags everyone down. The option becomes indigence or compromise, accepting that everything is not necessarily as we'd like it to be).
If your client is a bunch of lawyers, and you're an IT guy (not a lawyer), and you work for a contracting firm that treats this like a legit request, you're going to assume that what they're asking is legal. Unless something is fundamentally and blatantly immoral (and I don't believe specific sniggles over email retention laws are), I don't think he should be blamed for complying with the directives issued by his clients and allowed by his firm.
This is an embarrassing time for Combetta, to be sure. Let's not unjustifiably heap it on. As far as I'm concerned, he should be fully covered by respondeat superior.
I say all this as someone who is probably going to vote for Trump and thinks that HRC should be prosecuted.
I can't help but fret, however, over how lame Congress has become in the last few decades. Congress is a separate but equal part of the government. In fact, if push came to shove, they're the ones who are supposed to have all the power. Congress can pick and fire a president under extreme circumstances. The president can't do the same with Congress.
But whether it's this fishing expedition or oversight of the intelligence community, Congress is missing in action and/or impotent. They serve subpoenas. Sometimes the people show up, sometimes they don't. They request evidence. Sometimes they get it, sometimes not. Sometime it takes years and they only get a little bit. Nothing happens.
If the Congress is conducting an investigation, even the idiotic political investigations they seem so good at, this is the government that is asking questions. People should be going to jail and/or disbarred for the types of shenanigans that regularly go on. But nope. It seems all too easy to say, well, it's just Congress, you know? Nobody takes any of that stuff seriously, right?
In the 1970s the Church Committee took apart the national intelligence apparatus and tried to fix a lot of problems. I don't see this Congress or any future ones being able to investigate and improve their own parking garage, much less anything of any national significance.
If your Congressperson is doing silly political stuff? Fire them and elect somebody else. But don't make the institution itself a politically powerless charade of a legislative body. That destroys a much-needed error-correcting mechanism.
Only for her work email account.
This is her personal email account that they requested to release, but it isn't under their control.
Employers aren't supposed to be able to control one's private email account.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/sidney-blumenthal/hacker...
In an unrelated tangent, when the Secretary of State's original search found few emails involving Clinton's ostensible state.gov address, a Tumblr meme (which was in support of Clinton) caught someone's eye who then inquired how Clinton was sending messages if they weren't showing up on her state.gov account: http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/06/hillar...
No, it didn't.
It's still her private email account. They can request nicely to see them, but they can't forcibly see them without a warrant.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0801b24d47274f0fac60beedc5f2e...
^ Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday...The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails.
The State Department did not get a warrant before asking Clinton and her staff to turn over emails that went through Clinton's server.
Only emails related to official business. The distinction is crucial to these questions of law, but is consistently forgotten or elided, even by this Hill article.
It's not forgotten. No one believes her. (Except maybe you.)
She deleted the personal emails. Who does that? At most you don't turn them over, and then store them somewhere. Hard disks are cheap.
But no, she deleted them, making 100% sure no one could ever dispute her.
And I seem to remember an official email she did not disclose being discovered when the other person in the email disclosed it. So she is known to have withheld official emails.
You're essentially arguing that a person who desires privacy is therefore suspicious. I would hope that folks here on HN recognize that's a bullshit argument.
His argument is that she had the option to achieve privacy (by complying with the request and simply keeping her private emails). Instead they decided to not let anyone ever have the possibility to verify if she complied.
She chose to achieve privacy by making any future investigation impossible.
Is it legal? I guess, assuming she told the truth (and made no mistakes) about which emails were relevant. But personally I would like to hold people in office to a higher transparency and ethics standard than "strictly legal".
If a piece of information is stored so that it can be given to someone else later, that's not really very private. Privacy means the right to keep things away from others, and it includes the right to delete things.
Now maybe you want to argue that certain public officials should not permitted to have privacy while they are in office. That's fine, make that argument, but it's not the state of things now, legally or culturally.
And consider that there might be unintended consequences. It might deter some great people from considering public service. And it might put a hole in the legal concept of privacy that others will try to widen later.
I would argue that if we're going to be serious about legally protecting privacy, we need to be consistent. "Protect privacy, except for politicians I don't like" is not a particularly strong legal framework.
I don't even need to argue that certain public officials should not be permitted to have privacy while in office. She has a right to privacy. I am not arguing she doesn't.
I am arguing she made a series of poor choices that led to a situation where the only way she can live up to the standards we should expect from a public official (a verifiable paper trail for business pertaining to office) is by keeping a record of her private communications as well.
This is why you don't use your private email address for official business. If you want privacy while in office you don't use your private email server for official business. You aren't supposed to anyway. It's very simple and very reasonable.
I do NOT demand she hand over personal email! No. Only that she make it possible for a 3rd party to sort her emails into private/public.
She has the right to delete personal email - but only if it's actually personal, and I don't trust her to be the one to decide that.
She brought this on herself by mixing them in the first place. Want to maintain your privacy when you know you job requires publicity? Keep your public and private lives separate. She chose not to.
No one really cares about this issue except the House Republicans. They really are trying their hardest to figure out something here, but are obviously coming up empty. It just makes them look foolish.
But not personal emails.
Read the Hill article very carefully and see if it identifies whether we're talking about official business or personal. It doesn't.
The House GOP is careful to avoid making that distinction, because their goal is to feed a sense of impropriety--a goal which seems to be well-met here on HN, judging by the comments.
But the distinction matters, it does exist in law, and it is based on content and parties, not servers. Sending official State business email from a server does not automatically expose the full content of that server to federal record-keeping laws.
That's true.
>The House GOP is careful to avoid making that distinction, because their goal is to feed a sense of impropriety--a goal which seems to be well-met here on HN, judging by the comments.
No, the sense of impropriety was fed by Hillary Clinton herself when she turned over a tiny fraction of emails relating to official business and then destroyed the rest so nobody could ever retrieve them.
Honestly, that people can't see, by now, after the cattle futures, after the Rose Law documents, after the Clinton Foundation, after the destroyed emails, that this woman is crooked... I can't help but be amazed.
It is nonsensical to say that following the law implies impropriety.
On top of this, the FBI recovered and reviewed many of the emails that she deleted, and did not find anything damning. They declined to recommend a prosecution.
Setting aside the politics of "it's Hillary Clinton and she's running for president," there is no evidence that she tried to break the law, or succeeded in doing so.
The evidence shows that she wanted some privacy, and even Hillary Clinton is entitled to that under the law.
Again, to make this perfectly clear: she was required to turn over official business emails and she omitted thousands of them. She deleted the ones she didn't turn over and had the server purged.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to set up a server such that your personal email is intermingled with official government communications and then claim you're the only person who can go through that server looking for official email that shouldn't have been there.
>The evidence shows that she wanted some privacy, and even Hillary Clinton is entitled to that under the law.
People try to use privacy rights to cover criminal activity on a regular basis. That's why we have subpoenas and laws against destruction of evidence.
He could delete all her private emails here if he wished.
My understanding: Combetta's post comes 1 day after Hillary had reached an agreement about turning them over.
So was she dealing in bad faith with the govt? To be determined I guess?
"Bad faith" is trying to expose personal email addresses to spammers.
The House Republicans would love it if they could publicize her private personal email address. It would render it useless.
The IT guy's job here is to make sure that doesn't happen.
I honestly can't tell if you're being serious or not.
Its is the job of the FBI to redact information they choose to (or are required to) release in accordance with any legal, operational, etc., concerns applicable to the FBI.
OTOH, its quite possible that the Clinton camp anticipated that they might have reason to directly release some or all of the emails to entities other than the FBI.
Similarly, yes, he could delete the emails after being told they were part of an investigation, but that would lead to unwanted consequences. Could he have deleted them before any investigation started? Sure, then it would just be a cloud of suspicion, but no legal ramifications.
My original point was that as soon as Clinton agreed to turn over the emails, it was in the State Department's ballpark to determine which were eligible for disclosure, as the emails were written during her time at State and ostensibly dealt with State business. Not sure why you felt you had to argue that she had the capability of just destroying her servers. If she had done that, we wouldn't be having this discussion because she likely wouldn't be in the race.
With no work email account ever setup.
It's a matter of law that any and all work related emails on a personal email address are to be handed over for future FOIA requests, etc. upon leaving office.
If I used my personal email address for all communication with my companies clients for work, they'd demand all of those emails when I left the company.
But they wouldn't be able to get them, no matter how hard they demanded.
Personal email addresses exist. Companies have to deal with that fact.
I work in securities. My work emails must be archived. If I send work email from my personal email (a) that is potentially illegal and (b) I must promptly turn them over to my archives. If I refuse b, I face civil and potentially criminal censure.
Blows me away how finance has stricter controls than the people conducting bombing raids.
If your employer tried to force Gmail to turn over to them all your emails with your spouse and friends, no matter the subject or content, you and Google would fight it. And rightly so.
The House GOP members of the Benghazi committee are trying their hardest to get their hands on Clinton's personal emails, to dig for embarrassing messages to release. They already have her official business emails; they have had them for years. And they have openly admitted that the entire purpose of the committee is to undercut her presidential campaign.
No, they have the emails she claims are official. Big difference.
And she has zero credibility here. Negative credibility even, if she claims they have all the official emails you can be 100% sure they do not.
Your standard is that any time someone claims something, we can all act like the opposite of that claim is true, even if there is no actual evidence. By that standard, everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Again, thankfully, the law does not work that way.
That would help the Republicans gain back some credibility if they did. Right now everyone considers this a colossal waste of time, exemplary of Republican waste.
Republicans are quickly finding that there are limits to their political powers.
The public needs to be forceful in telling the House to stop wasting government money on Hillary emails.
How would that help? She deleted them.
> The public needs to be forceful in telling the House to stop wasting government money on Hillary emails.
No, they need to tell the House that Hillary should be indited, that she is not above the rules.
Sucks for them, then. Perhaps the House Republicans should have been quicker on their feet, instead of clowning around?
The public is in support of Clinton, and want House Republican members impeached and jailed.
The easiest route would simply be to refuse me referrals. If I had a golden parachute deal, it would be invalidated by such an action. Any vested stocks I had would be in jeopardy. They can try to blackball me. They can cut off insurance benefits unexpectedly.
And all that before lawyers get involved...
If you do work on a personal email, your employer may later demand access to those emails. So don't do it.
Who cares? "But the other guys are corrupt too!" is not a great argument for your candidate.
> I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
We can all agree this is a problem.
Funny how nobody seemed to think so until now.
Dude, do you think this is a football game? That scoring a point against your opponent negates points scored against you?
I suspect a big chunk of the people complaining about this would have complained even harder when Bush did it (if what you say is true), if they had been old enough to be aware what was going on, and had social media like we do now.
So, what is your point? How does Bush doing it matter literally at all to whether Clinton should get in trouble?
In a fast paced environment, procedures and expectations can be expected to evolve accordingly.
The point I'm making is that I don't think you, or anybody else actually cares about the emails—they care it's something they can criticize Clinton for. Before her, nobody gave a shit. After her, nobody will give a shit. They don't matter, except that they can be used to criticize Clinton. So of course nobody complained about it with Bush, because nobody cares about them.
> I suspect a big chunk of the people complaining about this would have complained even harder when Bush did it (if what you say is true), if they had been old enough to be aware what was going on
They wouldn't have. The rest of us had much bigger complaints to make, that complaining about deleting emails would have been a laughable waste of time.
Hillary Clinton is a grown ass woman. She knows what she'd doing. She held a position of high responsibility, that deals with highly sensitive intel that impacts many facets of national security, and had an obligation to keep her correspondence secure as well as open to FOIA requests.
That she didn't, and has repeatedly lied about it, should concern everyone. That she was willing to leave her server open to possible hacking simply for personal convenience and gain, should concern everyone. It does me.
How is it just deleting emails? She's literally hiding her tracks and doesn't want people to see what she's talking about. And when caught, she lies and deletes the evidence. I honestly do not understand how someone like you, who ostensibly is lecturing us about simply being rah rah for "our team" can NOT care about this. Honestly how can't you? You are literally telling us not to look at it through the lens of our favored political party. So then don't. How is this defensible?
I'm a little less familiar about previous instances, but if you're referring to Colin Powell's actions.. from what I've read they are no where near the extent to which she used private server for gov't communication.. BUT! I absolutely do not support him doing it either! If he broke a law, he should be prosecuted. I'd be ok with it happening even now.
Do laws and regulations have any meaning anymore if they don't apply to those at the top? We all have our favorites, and surely there is hypocrisy when we like to look the other way when it's "our guy/gal"... next time something like this happens I'll definitely care then too. A big part of it is about what kind of precedent it sets for future politicians. How much more will they hide from the public with no threat of consequences?
None of them broke any law, as laid out by Comey, who is famous for bashing heads with politicians. The law was executed by Comey faithfully and there was no crime to prosecute.
Yea that's terrible. If there was evidence of a (possibly) compromised, unsecured personal server, with high level officials talking about national security on it (including Bush) then I would think it would be even worse. But it is bad as is.
Also, I think Bush was a pretty terrible president in many respects and overall I'm not a fan of his.
If he used, or personally signed off on the use of, then he should have been held responsible. As well as others that did so themselves.
And Powell's recommendation that Clinton use a personal server is a perfect example of an arrogant, entitled, self-interested "leader" who only cares about political expediency and convenience for themselves at the expense of destroying government transparency and risking security leaks and hacks.
As a General who above all should know this better than anyone, he's a disgrace for recommending this, in my opinion.
If watching the pundit shows has taught me anything, it's that there are few classes of public figures more venal, hawkish, shameless, or blatantly self-serving than the military brass. It's a miracle they can convince anyone to follow their orders.
Based on what evidence?
> they care it's something they can criticize Clinton for.
I'm no fan of Trump either. I wish Clinton were a good candidate so she would wipe the floor with him.
> So of course nobody complained about it with Bush, because nobody cares about them.
I was 12 years old when Bush was elected. That's why I didn't care about whatever he may or may not have done.
You know absolutely nothing about me or anyone else and you are presuming people's motives without any evidence or justification.
Sure, if it was just one or two that's one thing, but A email is public in the first place and B when your the fifth person in a row to do something you generally assume that's just how it's done.
No, we complained constantly. But we had more important things to complain about then where his email server was.
Politifact tells the truth of it: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
Mcphage is trolling. Let's not feed him anymore.
It's actually exactly what it is.
If Trump[1] is even worse, then sure, vote for Hillary. But that doesn't mean that she's good or that people have to like her.
As an aside: if that were the argument Hillary fans had been making the whole time: "Yeah, we know Hillary is bad and corrupt, but at least she's way better than Trump, so you should vote for her", then I would respect them a lot more.
Instead, it's mostly been a chorus of "OMG, why are you dragging up conspiracy theories about her e-mails! You right-wing simpleton! Go back to Breitbart and argue about lizard people!"
Nothing is more annoying than people being smug when they're actually wrong.
[1]: Trump is Hillary's competition, in case anyone didn't know. Not sure why anyone is still talking about Bush.
Therefore, no there are NOT just two teams. Voting for the lesser evil is so much of what is wrong with the direction of this country today.
This is true, and baffling. I try to vote as if the process matters, although I'll be the first to admit it's largely a waste of my time. Meanwhile, the morons who loudly declaim the fundamental importance of voting, care only about being "right". SMH.
Given all the contention over the HRC email thing and specifically over this reddit revelation, I'm not so sure that the situation we have is clearly defined within the laws (otherwise why wouldn't everything be clear cut and decided already?).
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
What is clear however, is that judging Clinton's mishandling of emails as a crime, when only one person in a hundred years in completely different circumstances has been prosecuted for the same crime, would be unprecedented.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/07/heres-...
Snowden wrote in wired, though the article doesn't cover the latest news https://www.wired.com/2015/09/snowden-people-get-fired-prose...
There are several distinctions between the Clinton case and the Petraeus case.
* The Clinton case revolved around an unclassified context while the Petraeus case revolved around information taken from a classified context.
* The Clinton case involved data not marked classified (keep in mind emailing New York Times links to someone about about Snowden would be highly classified information), while the Petraeus case involved books that were clearly classified.
* The Clinton case showed no intent while the Petraeus case involved clear intent.
* The Clinton case involved an internal server while the Petraeus case involved open books given to his mistress.
* Clinton cooperated with the FBI while Petraeus intentionally misled the FBI.
Also, reminder that Snowden is a wanted criminal asking for a pardon for leaking 200,000 classified documents to the press, while taking refuge in the state of a geopolitical enemy. He will make scripted media appearances on behalf of Putin [1]. He is not a reliable source.
Unfortunately, every single person that I know, that has a security clearance, can easily punch holes in almost all your points.
My views are based on what I have read and what I have been told by people with, collectively, 100+ years of security clearance holding.
* The Clinton private email server was not cleared for handling classified info. Yet classified information went through it as we now know.
* Some things were marked classified and some were not. This has no bearing on anything however. The onus is on the person who has the clearance to treat and handle all classified information properly regardless of whether it is marked properly or not.
* Clinton's intent: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure."
i.e. take classified info, put into email form and strip the classified markings from it, then send to me.
Source: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12605
I'll stop there. Basically your points are garbage.
What you cannot reasonably do, is take the legal opinion of the Director of the FBI, that the Clinton case is different from the Petraeus case, and disagree based on the fact that you have 100+ years of security clearance holding.
I have explained to you key points in James Comey's legal opinion that the Petraeus situation is not applicable to Clinton. I'm sure you're more knowledgeable than I in some area or another, however that doesn't change the fact that the legal position of the FBI has already decided. You can disagree if you want, in the same way people from the internet disagree that climate change exists. I am not interested your vague insinuations.
Petraeus vs Clinton is a red herring, I didn't mention Petraeus. I was referring to the case of Brian Nishimura.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-05/peak-fbi-corruption...
Seriously? "Oh, man, we sure left a loophole you can drive a truck through! Better update the training materials to make sure clearance holders know this is kosher..."
Sorry, but my prior on this claim is just way too low to casually accept that the analysis, as given in the first link, is plugging the relevant laws into the facts. Classified-material law just doesn't make sense if something like that is legal.
I did. This was just one of many mini-scandals under Bush that never really seemed to boil over.
I thought it was a problem then, still think it's a problem now, but now know why nobody held him to the fire: they were doing that shit too.
You don't redact email addresses when you are subpoenaed by the f'ing FBI.
edit: My bad, it was the House Select Committee on Benghazi (July 2014). The FBI didn't take custody of the server until August 2015.
Edit: small mistake. The initial request did come from Congress and went through the State Department. It was not a subpoena though, that came later.
Edit 2: Since it was clear to some, the reddit post was dated July 24th, 2014. That's 7 months, prior to the first subpoena.
“I’ve done quite a bit already in the last few months related to this. Her team had me do a bunch of exports and email filters and cleanup to provide a PST [personal storage file] of all of HRC’s emails to/from any .gov addresses,” Combetta wrote. [0]
Exporting email and filtering it, but only for .gov addresses(?).. I would imagine that whoever subpoenaed those mails was requesting not just .gov communication, and I can't help but think that these sort of actions are suggestive of some deeper cleanup activity.
[0] http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/19/computer-tech-who-asked-ho...
I think noting Bush's similar actions does not make Hillary's actions right. The old 'Two wrongs don't make a right' bit here.
There was plenty of anti-Bush press during his term too, so I can't answer to the lack of public outcry specifically on his email doings; perhaps, there was just too much other low-hanging fruit. Although, suspicions were raised blaming the Bush administration for the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and Thailand, and other earthquakes [1,2]. Sure a lot of them are flat-earther types, but you'd be surprised how some of the links I googled on this were just political forums.
[1] http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/03-17-05/discussion.cgi.81....
Overall this sort of redaction smells like legal advice.
You define the record as the body of the message and archive messages without the headers, or at least without the sender and recipient headers in them. This might even be a valid interpretation of the US records act.
When asked why you can say this was the archiving policy and you stored the messages as a document and the headers were irrelevant since they did not hold any information.
When asked about who sent or received a specific email that has been redacted you can 'honestly' claim "I do not recall".
Overall this is pretty much exactly the borderline illegal narrative that a good legal counselor would provide in this case.
Of Course that advice was granted based on the premise that there would not be a trail that would make this look premeditated and suspicious.
Open government is silly? It has been a core aspect of democracy for a long time, and dates back at least to the time of the Enlightenment. People are allowed to have private conversations, but government are held accountable for decisions and the decision process. Transparency allows citizens of a democracy to control their government, reducing government corruption, bribery and other malfeasance. Is that what we are calling silly?
What it should do is encourage public officials to act lawfully and within the trust than citizens has given them. The idea of sealing emails "X years after leaving office" goes directly against the idea of classified documents, since that seal should only be added to information which will harm society and the public that elected the government. Embarrassing or corrupting showing information is not that.
That's what I'm trying to understand here. Was it the case that they were just going to hand over the whole DB regardless, and are trying to keep personal info private (but still, e.g., leave the name so it's clear who's in the conversation)? That's, I suppose, kind of reasonable.
On the other hand, I'm vaguely aware that at least in some cases there's a legal discovery process, where you don't just hand over everything, but do certain searches for "relevant" info and hand over that [0]. Is that true or at all relevant here? That would be quite a bit more nefarious if they were trying to avoid the discovery mining process by changing the email addresses (without flat out deleting the emails). But it seems like instead of doing that why not just delete them?
[0] http://enterpriseit.co/microsoft-exchange/search-all-users-m...
According to Wikipedia, they turned over 30,000 pieces of paper.
I'm amazed that it isn't a requirement that documents be turned over in an electronically searchable format in most legal scenarios.
I agree it should be a matter of contempt of court when clearly used as a delaying tactic.
> Instead, as Clinton revealed Tuesday, her attorneys searched the trove of emails for certain email addresses and subjects. Baron argued that raises the possibility that they missed some emails that should have been saved for the public record.
> First, the lawyers searched all emails with a “.gov” email address in any address field, which yielded 27,500 emails—more than 90% of the total correspondence ultimately provided to State.
Those matching emails were turned over on Dec. 5, 2015 and Combetta posted on July 24, 2015. The optics of trying to change the email addresses ahead of a search by her lawyers for certain email addresses to decide what to turn over are certainly not great.
> The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over.
Citation needed if you're going to "correct the record."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
There were just so many things wrong with the Bush administration. I have mad respect for George W, he's a nice guy, and talks a little funny (to a northerner), but some of the things he did just... I don't even know.
From the way it reads it looks like he is asking how to bulk remove an email address from the archived messages so when they are turned over they don't contain the redacted email address.
I assume it would be embarrassing and/or problematic to share the email addresses of various ambassadors and other government officials in public records. You could also read something nefarious into it if you want.
This whole fishing expedition is hilarious and transparently political. The Bush administration ran private email servers to avoid FOIA requests, then nuked millions of saved emails when his term was up to avoid handing them over. I didn't see any huge circus or massive outcry about that.
The idea that we should be able to immediately read all the correspondence written by any public official also seems silly... it just encourages public officials not to use email. People are allowed to have private conversations. A reasonable compromise might be a time limit... say emails are held sealed for X years after leaving office, then made public?