Kevin Drum points out that emalgate has proved to be a nothingburger.
“When she took office in 2009, with ever more people doing government business through email, the State Department allowed the use of home computers as long as they were secure...There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server.”
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/08/emailgate-continues-be-nothingburger
But even so, Drum insists on saying she is guilty at the very least of bad judgment in using her private email.
"I'm perfectly willing to believe that Clinton's use of a private server was unwise. It probably was, something that I think even she's acknowledged. And Clinton has certainly provided some dodgy answers about what she did, which naturally raises suspicions that she might have something to hide. This kind of chary parsing on her part may be due to nothing more than her longstanding distrust of the press, but that only makes it understandable, not sensible."
"That said, even when I do my best to take off my tribal hat and look at this affair dispassionately, I just don't see anything,"
Drum has failed to take off his tribal hat but the hat in question is not as a liberal but as a Beltway journalist. I have yet to hear a single such insider not at the very least say she should have known better about using private email.
In a way this is strange. I mean I thought the GOP thinks the government does nothing but screw everything up. So is cyber security the one thing the government does better than the private sector?
It's not as if we don't have enough stories of government websites getting hacked.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/no-hillarys-emails-are-not-smoking-gun.html
But in the comment section I love this by vkg123:\
"You're too harsh Kevin. Hillary (and Bill) have used private email servers since at least 2001. What do you expect a former first lady and ex-president to do? Use Gmail? Their communications, by necessity, were going to be private and secured (both by the SS and FBI)."
"You can ask why didn't she use .gov account upon joining the State Dept in 2009 (her personal email was known at time, several Republicans used to email her on it). That's ultimately irrelevant, since even if she had held two email accounts the GOP witch hunters would have demanded access to both in anycase. As such using only one was the smart. Otherwise she would be a Sarah Palin situation (who had a AK state email and also used her yahoo! mail account for government business)."
"Hillary's problem is that she has been too open. Turning over ALL her work emails and demanding they be released? Turing the actual physical server to the FBI? That's unprecedented... what other government official or SoS has done anything similar? She should have just been like Colin Powell or Susan Rice and turned over only those emails specifically asked for as relevant to an investigation (or deleted everything like they did and said tough luck)."
That makes a lot of sense. She should have done a Colin Powell or Susan Rice-have either of them been accused of holding back some lurid emails?
You can pry my emails out of my cold dead hands.
(Is what Clinton should have said)
Never complain, never explain. Hillary should not have explained so much.
Even now, it's not too late. What she should do is point out how much more open she has been than Powell and Rice, et. al and say that her openness has been abused which shows that this is just politics.
“When she took office in 2009, with ever more people doing government business through email, the State Department allowed the use of home computers as long as they were secure...There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server.”
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/08/emailgate-continues-be-nothingburger
But even so, Drum insists on saying she is guilty at the very least of bad judgment in using her private email.
"I'm perfectly willing to believe that Clinton's use of a private server was unwise. It probably was, something that I think even she's acknowledged. And Clinton has certainly provided some dodgy answers about what she did, which naturally raises suspicions that she might have something to hide. This kind of chary parsing on her part may be due to nothing more than her longstanding distrust of the press, but that only makes it understandable, not sensible."
"That said, even when I do my best to take off my tribal hat and look at this affair dispassionately, I just don't see anything,"
Drum has failed to take off his tribal hat but the hat in question is not as a liberal but as a Beltway journalist. I have yet to hear a single such insider not at the very least say she should have known better about using private email.
In a way this is strange. I mean I thought the GOP thinks the government does nothing but screw everything up. So is cyber security the one thing the government does better than the private sector?
It's not as if we don't have enough stories of government websites getting hacked.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/no-hillarys-emails-are-not-smoking-gun.html
But in the comment section I love this by vkg123:\
"You're too harsh Kevin. Hillary (and Bill) have used private email servers since at least 2001. What do you expect a former first lady and ex-president to do? Use Gmail? Their communications, by necessity, were going to be private and secured (both by the SS and FBI)."
"You can ask why didn't she use .gov account upon joining the State Dept in 2009 (her personal email was known at time, several Republicans used to email her on it). That's ultimately irrelevant, since even if she had held two email accounts the GOP witch hunters would have demanded access to both in anycase. As such using only one was the smart. Otherwise she would be a Sarah Palin situation (who had a AK state email and also used her yahoo! mail account for government business)."
"Hillary's problem is that she has been too open. Turning over ALL her work emails and demanding they be released? Turing the actual physical server to the FBI? That's unprecedented... what other government official or SoS has done anything similar? She should have just been like Colin Powell or Susan Rice and turned over only those emails specifically asked for as relevant to an investigation (or deleted everything like they did and said tough luck)."
That makes a lot of sense. She should have done a Colin Powell or Susan Rice-have either of them been accused of holding back some lurid emails?
You can pry my emails out of my cold dead hands.
(Is what Clinton should have said)
Never complain, never explain. Hillary should not have explained so much.
Even now, it's not too late. What she should do is point out how much more open she has been than Powell and Rice, et. al and say that her openness has been abused which shows that this is just politics.
No comments:
Post a Comment