"Recently sworn in as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton decided to move from her AT&T account to the family server, which honestly, makes a lot of sense. If you had access to email that worked on whatever device you wanted to check it on, had near-perfect uptime, was siloed, and had support you knew personally (and could contact at any time), wouldn’t you consider using your own server too? When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, the server was in the process of being updated by Bryan Pagliano, who was recommended by Huma Abedin (Clinton’s longtime aide who many consider her closest). Within a few months (from January, to March 2009), Clinton and her staff were migrated to this server (clintonemail.com), doing work for the State Department...
While some classified information passed through Clinton’s servers, email isn’t generally the place where state secrets and strategies are talked about. For that, Clinton used secure methods like SCIFs, couriers, and other approved forms of transmission. And while classified messages did go through her private server, the hard truth is that the vast majority of them were classified after the fact...
Does this forgive Clinton for having anyclassified data on her server? No. But she also wasn’t actively trying to use her email for that purpose, and she followed proper state guidelines with information she knew was sensitive...
Clinton wasn’t even close to being alone. The Washington Post reported in 2015 that one in three government employees were using personal email addresses to conduct business...
Clinton was under the impression that as long as she was emailing people with “.gov” addresses for official business, record keeping would take care of itself. Obviously this doesn’t quite hold water, since emails solely written between clintonemail.com addresses wouldn’t fall under that umbrella, and therefore wouldn’t be automatically captured.
However, after her term did end, Clinton and her team did make a substantial effort to get her messages into the public record. The State Department, noticing gaps in their files, actually sent official letters to former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton, asking for additional records. In response, Clinton and her team released 55,000 pages of emails that were related to her time at State. After separating her personal from her work emails, and complying with FOIA, the team asked what she wanted to do with the personal ones. Not surprisingly, she said she didn’t need them anymore, and they were deleted...
This controversy has been so damaging because it amplifies everything we already don’t like about the Clintons. In the 30-plus years that Bill and Hillary have been in the public eye, we’ve bristled at the way transparency always seems to be an inconvenience to them. They constantly want to work for the public, yet lose their shit when that same public wants accountability. We’re well beyond “right-wing conspiracy theory” now. The Republicans are successful at branding Hillary Clinton as an insider because, quite frankly, her approach with the public has been to effectively shut them out. Sometimes you have a reputation because you’ve earned it."
So, I've always felt like this was some clearly manufactured rage. At its worst, she was being a little bit irresponsible for the sake of convenience. It's relevant to bring up, but just small and tertiary to the general question of whether or not she is best candidate. It's remarkable to me that it took on such a big role in the campaign at all, especially given the incredible and Very central flaws of her opponent. How can we talk about Hillary's emails as though they are in any way parallel to the level of Donald Trump’s irresponsibility?
I think there are two reasons the emails became a thing: (1) Donald Trump has been very good at spinning us all into his realities and he realized that he could attach all kinds of stakes and vitriol to the emails without being questioned, and (2) We often feel the need to establish parallel narratives in competitions and this was a sufficiently concrete and apolitical critique that writers and commentators could slip it into the second clause of their sentences. There are a lot of legitimate critiques of Hillary Clinton and her politics, but many of remember only appeal to people on certain parts of the political spectrum, and they require a deeper amount of background education on her political history and historical/social contexts.
So the emails became somehow symbolic of a general uncertainty and distrust, a feeling of "I'm sure she's doing something wrong, I just can't easily articulate it" .
FB: OMG, read this explainer. Not so kuxh because I think it would ~change anyone's mind~ but because it made this ubiquitous news issue so much clearer to me.
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The dirty secret in government? Their email isn’t always reliable, and as we learned from above, one in three employees will conduct at least some business from their own accounts. While it’s for sure different that Clinton had her own set-up, is it truly any worse? There’s been a concerted effort to paint her private server as something more nefarious than using Yahoo, but is it really? Both are mistakes, and frankly, classified information appearing on either is a disaster waiting to happen.
But yet government employees are constantly doing this, with no end in sight. People want to use their own devices. People want something they’re familiar with. People want something that works anywhere and everywhere. The fact that people use their own solutions means the government isn’t providing an adequate version of their own."
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