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.
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...