JK on Clinton emails

[karynnj]

22. My perception was not based on anything "phony" or "RW"

Last edited Sun Mar 8, 2015, 12:10 PM - Edit history (1)

My basic reaction has not changed since I read the NYT article. It is not helpful to HRC to claim that anyone who does not think her every action was kosher is believing either phony or RW perceptions.

When I said that what she did dwarfed what others did, I was referring to setting up her own private server, which I think was wrong (not legal, but from as far as transparent government is concerned). and then not bothering to set up a process that would in a routine, timely manner manner transfer copies of emails to the State Department. Note that President Obama said that everything from his blackberry gets archived.

The main factors that drove my perception were partly based (as all our perceptions tend to be) on my person experience and my own views on what is reasonable. I did not work for the government, but I did work for Bell Labs (AT&T), then highly regulated by the FCC and some work that I did was on government contracts that AT&T won. Our email was subject to being subpoenaed and there were strict guidelines whenever there was a possibility of that.

I assume that the State Department will find that they already have a copy of a high percent of the 55000 page PAPER dump that Clinton gave them - as they will have all of them that were sent to even one State.Gov account. (Had Clinton given them data files, it would likely have been much easier to split out those that had no state.gov addressee and process them first. All they would need to do for the remainder is verify that they have the email saved from the recipient side.) However, it would seem that there is a likelihood that there will be some emails in the 55000 that were not sent to a State.gov account and which should have been subject to one of the many FOIA or Congressional inquiries.

One question is how the SD on an ongoing basis deals with having not included what they didn't have. Do they require new inquiries on ones that the SD already sent what they have? Should the State Department make a commitment that they will look at whether any of this email falls under any inquiries-- and proactively submit them. That however could mean a steady stream of claims (as inaccurate as many already made) of various smoking guns. Did Clinton PROACTIVELY make the SD an unwitting participant in stonewalling or a coverup -- even when there was nothing to cover up?

It is troubling to read that last summer the State Department had to negotiate with her to get those emails and that it took several meetings to get agreement. It is easy to speculate why it was that difficult. It was a Democratic administration asking something of the likely next Democratic President. I assume that is why this could not be handled routinely at a low level, but was pushed up to David Wade signing the request. It could not have been an easy decision for them to push to get her emails given the political dynamic -- but if they didn't, once they understood what she did, wouldn't they have been guilty of stonewalling if they did not either demand the emails or make the situation public? Wouldn't not doing one of those two things compromise the current Secretary of State?

So, a second factor that drove my reactions is the view that this coming out hurts the reputation of the Obama administration and has created a possible ethics issue for the State Department. Not to mention, it is the State Department that will bear the burden of processing all these emails under pressure to get it done immediately. Given the political calendar, I would not be surprised if the Clinton people might be the ones offering more criticism on the slowness than the Republican committees. (Even more so with the call to make them all public - which means every single email needs to be carefully looked at to avoid Jeb Bush like incidents of putting out people's private information - for which the current SD will be blamed, not Clinton.

More and more, while it doesn't fit perfectly, I think of the Clintons in terms of the Great Gatsby passage about careless people:

they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made

A third factor is that I think HRC will be our nominee and I worry about this - even though the Republicans do not appear to have anyone decent to run. However, I think this has horrible political ramifications in that it does play into a few negative Hillary Clinton memes. It has always been said that the most damaging things are things that fit into the public's perception of the person -- the most famous example was that it was written in 1992, that had Bill Clinton misspelled potato -- it would not been a story. More importantly, it suggests that she will be a President, who will at some point be tripped up by this flaw - that we have seen since 1992.


As to the past, it is entirely likely that email has gradually replaced some phone calls/cables. The fact that HRC sent 55000 pages of emails shows that she extensively used email for correspondence. I have never defended her predecessors, but their practices really do not change the fact that Clinton extensively used email and ignored that it should have been subject to the various inquiries. While having the email on her own server may have been legal, she should have assumed responsibility for getting the email to the SD.