Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Outrage Mounts Over Hillary Clinton’s Use Of Private Email @ State

by JASmius



A Clinton engaging in an act of blatant public opacity in flagrant violation of federal law?  The hell you say!

Or, "Another day at the office for HRC":

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Should we be outraged by this?  Technically, yes, I suppose.  It was the sitting Commissar of State holding herself completely above the law, in the classic Clinton tradition that long predates the Obama carrying on of that tradition, and the response of her and her minions isn't even really damage control - just a bland counter-factual assertion that she complied with both the letter and spirit of the law, as if the Federal Records Act didn't exist.  Figure in how the so-called "Clinton Global Initiative" has been raking in foreign campaign contributions like dead leaves in a New England November, and this has all the markings and ingredients of what at one time in this country would have been a candidacy-destroying scandal.

But this is Hillary Clinton we're talking about.  Under the auspices of a Donk dictatorship.  Not a damn thing is going to happen to the Empress, and everybody knows it, because the law only applies to Republicans, and not to Democrats.  Period.  So it isn't a question of whether we should be outraged, but whether any of us can muster such a depleted commodity.

And, being somebody who maintains that Her Nib has about as much of a shot at the 2016 Democrat nomination as a rookie sportswriter prying even a grunt out of Marshawn Lynch during Super Bowl week, it was all I could do to trouble myself to put up a post about it.

And the aforementioned "outrage" statements didn't exactly help:

Republicans quickly pounced on Clinton's use of the personal email account, arguing that she failed to comply with the law while serving in the State Department. Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is considering a 2016 presidential campaign, said Clinton "should release her emails. Hopefully she hasn't already destroyed them. Governor Bush believes transparency is a critical part of public service and of governing." She noted that Bush recently released personal emails from his two terms as governor.

"Hopefully" she hasn't destroyed all her emails?  She "should" release all of them?  Ooooh, THEM's fightin' words, huh?  Please.  She will release, if any, precisely the ones she wants to release, and there'll be no way of verifying if they're genuine or if they were fabricated after the fact.  And any real ones she were to release would be heavily redacted.  And no amount of Darrell Issa subpoenas or whining or "She can't DO that!!!!" will make the slightest bit of difference, because Congress has no power anymore, and everybody knows it.

Former technology executive Carly Fiorina, another potential GOP presidential candidate, said the report "once again raises serious questions as to Hillary Clinton's definition of leadership. Does she believe that leadership means acting outside the law? Does she believe that leadership can exist without transparency?"

Yes and yes, Miss Fiorina.  Any more questions?

Frankly the only thing that would be genuinely interesting about this story is if Sick Willie had been using this email account to distribute pics of his willie.

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