Why didn’t Clinton set up two email addresses for herself, one for her personal emails, the other for her work emails, on @clintonemail.com? Just wondering.*
In many ways, [Clinton] did a good job at her press conference on Tuesday. The part of her speech talking about her daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral arrangements being off limits, that certainly resonated. She absolutely was right when she said, “No one wants their personal e-mails made public.”
— Hillary Clinton Is Turning Into Richard Nixon and Bill Belichick, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, today
One thing that surprises me about analyses of Clinton’s press conference is the apparent consensus among pundits, including some liberal ones who are not supportive of her, that she was effective in gaining empathy for her desire to keep her personal emails from public view, so that no one wonders why, then, she (unlike most people who work for organizations) chose to commingle her personal and work emails not just on one server but in a single email account. She was, after all, absolutely right when she said, “No one wants their personal e-mails made public.” Ergo, ….
No dispute whatsoever: No one wants their personal e-mails made public. Which is why (presumably) most people who work for organizations—private or government—take pains to separate their private correspondence from their work correspondence, by using their work email account mostly* for work-related correspondence, and their personal account entirely or almost entirely for personal emails.
They do this, of course, simply by using two separate email accounts. Which Clinton had the option to do while still conveniently not having to carry two phones with her. She couldn’t use a State Department-ssued phone for a private account. And she couldn’t use her private phone for @state.gov emails. But she could have set up two private email addresses for herself on her family’s private server.
Say: hillarypersonal@clintonemail.com, and hclintonstate@clintonemail.com.
I keep expecting someone to point this out, but to my knowledge no one in the media has.
I doubt, though, that it has escaped anyone but political pundits that it was Clinton herself who chose to commingle her personal and work emails in a single account. Did it not occur to her that all she had to do in order to use only one phone while keeping her personal and work emails in separate accounts was to use two separate @clintonemail.com addresses?
I’ve never thought that Hillary Clinton, unlike her husband, is exceptionally bright. But neither did I think she was stupid. And I still don’t think so. I think she just thinks everyone else is. And some people who aren’t stupid do seem to be accommodating her, at least on this point.
—-
UPDATE:
If you, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are willing to cite your mother’s funeral to get sympathy for illadvisedly deleting 30,000 emails, it just makes us want to sigh: O.K., just take it. If you want it that bad, go ahead and be president and leave us in peace. (Or war, if you have your hawkish way.) You’re still idling on the runway, but we’re already jetlagged. It’s all so drearily familiar that I know we’re only moments away from James Carville writing a column in David Brock’s Media Matters, headlined, “In Private, Hillary’s Really a Hoot.” …
None of what you said made any sense. Keeping a single account mingling business and personal with your own server wasn’t about “convenience.” It was about expedience. You became judge and jury on what’s relevant because you didn’t want to leave digital fingerprints for others to retrace. You could have had Huma carry two devices if you really couldn’t hoist an extra few ounces. You insisted on piggybacking on Bill’s server, even though his aides were worried about hackers, because you were gaming the system for 2016. (Or even 2012.)
— An Open Letter to hdr22@clintonemail.com, Maureen Dowd, New York Times, tonight
As I said here a few days ago, I myself don’t really care about Clinton’s emails. I do care that we’re apparently never going to gain any traction on the issues that I, and most economic-progressives, do care about, because our nominee is someone whose life—whose silly personal controversies—will always suck the air from any discussion of actual substantive policy.
It is not Clinton’s fault that we now have a zillionaires-determine-the-presidential-nominees system. But she has aggressively mastered that system, albeit with the acquiescence of virtually the entire party apparatus and certainly of the zillionaire queenmakers. Even just a single gutsy zillionaire could signal the party’s openness to someone who would be terrific: Sherrod Brown or Jeff Merkley, maybe. But there are no gutsy Democratic zillionaires; they’re all already in Clinton’s “camp.”
Whatever. …
Updated 3/14 at 9:39 p.m.
—-
*In light of the following exchange between reader Thornton Hall and me in the comments thread to this post, I changed the word “only” to “mostly”:
Thornton Hall March 15, 2015 5:52 pm
Oh goodness. Has no one else been consigned to the hell known as “doc review”? Among legal temps who have gone through the inboxes of every corporate executive of every private company that’s ever been sued or tried to merge with another private company, this question is just dumb. It is characteristic of the human species that they use their work email for personal emails. Asking why is like asking why beavers build dams. It’s just the natural order of things, no matter how many times the general counsel tries to stop it.
Me March 15, 2015 8:30 pm
Well, OKAY, Thornton. But THEY’RE not subject to National Records Act and FOIA provisions REQUIRING THEM, if they choose not to use the agency’s email system, to place their work-related emails from their private accounts onto the agency’s server for the very purpose of enabling much of the emails to become public, either in the National Archives or through a FOIA request.
Wayyyy harder to comply with those requirements if you have tens of thousands of private and work-related emails commingled in a single account. And presumably, the private-company executives recognize that they are the ones who risked their own loss of privacy regarding their private emails, by using the company’s email server and the executive’s work email account.
Clinton apparently doesn’t recognize that she herself was the one who created the privacy issue for herself. Clinton used her private email account for all her work emails; she didn’t use her work email account for private emails.
3/16 at 1:01 p.m.
Presumably, all these emails had recipients. Does anyone really believe that if there were any incriminating emails, at least one recipient won’t leak them? That the NSA doesn’t have them?
Sorry, this is a nothingburger and a distraction.
This country has serious problems. Unemployment, under-employment, flat wages, global warming, a major political party hankering for another US military invasion and occupation. We don’t really have the luxury of yet another faux Clinton scandal.
Not only the NSA but also the intelligence agencies of several countries probably have them. Perhaps those agencies could supply the State Department with a complete set. Presumably, Mrs.Clinton wasn’t just a figure head. She must have received or communicated secret or sensitive information.
Why, of course, Joel! If someone (say, from the Clinton foundation, or her aide-of-twenty-years Huma Abedin) exchanged problematic emails with Clinton, that person—at least one such person—would absolutely want the world to know about it! Not only that; that person would somehow have hacked into others’ email accounts and would know of other problematic email exchanges. Or maybe there’s a quota of one set of problematic emails that the National Archives (or whatever) is entitled to.
Look. I myself don’t give a damn about her damn emails. This country has serious problems. Unemployment, under-employment, flat wages, global warming, a major political party hankering for another US military invasion and occupation. None of which Clinton seems interested in discussing any time soon. And none of which we’ll ever gain any traction on, I suspect, because our party’s certain nominee is someone whose life—whose silly personal controversies— will always suck the air from any discussion of actual substantive policy.
We don’t really have the luxury of yet another faux Clinton scandal. But a succession of faux Clinton scandals is what she’s forcing on us by her decision to run and her orchestrated clearing of the Dem field, thanks to our zillionaires-determine-the-presidential-nominees system we now have, and her mastery of that.
Bev:
Seriously, both Hillary and I discussed Benghazi at great length before and after it happened. I gave her the advice to ignore the staffing of at least one Marine Company at the diplomatic headquarters and also afterwards with the unbeknownst to all of the attack. It was the least I could do since she knew little of diplomatic needs in various countries taking into consideration my extensive travels. Such a relief, no one has laid eyes upon our emails. Maybe she did not include them? snicker, snicker
Why, of course, Peter! Mrs. Clinton wasn’t a figurehead. Ergo, she must have received or communicated secret or sensitive information via unsecured email.
Yup. All that’s necessary to create the presumption that a secretary of state communicated secret or sensitive information via unsecured email is that she wasn’t a figurehead. Got it!
Condoleeza Rice says she didn’t use email at all in her work when she was secretary of state. But she wasn’t a figurehead, so she’s obviously lying and must have received or communicated secret or sensitive information via email.
Ewwwe. I’m getting the feeling that I’m not gonna be happy with the readership that this post will draw.
OMG! Joel’s right! At least a few of those emails did have a recipient—run75441! And all Rep. Trey Goudy, chair of the Benghazi-investigation committee, has to do is subpoena run75441’s yahoo account contents.
Whew! Now we can move on to other things.
Or maybe listen to Gene Lyons, someone with well-established progressive credentials, who points out that no Secretary of State ever used a dot-gov email account, the state department’s official email was like butter for Wikileaks hackers so the alleged security differential is bogus, and, as she said, nothing sensitive should ever be put into an email in the first place. Of course, any emails she sent to State Department personnel would be perfectly accessible through the recipient.
When the right-wing boiler rooms find something to throw up against a wall, enough of the Big Media will regurgitate the same point of view to put something “out there.” Once it’s “out there,” it’s “out there.” Did we learn nothing whatsoever from what the press did to drum up phony “scandals” during the Bill Clinton years or in the 2000 election to hand the Presidency to Bush?
Democrats who either quake in their boots any time Maureen Dowd or Politico thunders or don’t like Clinton in the first place — and are incapable of burying differences in the larger interest of Democrats regaining control of government and at least doing the not-insignificant progressive things that even so-called “centrist” Democrats will do and Republicans will not do under any circumstances — will react in predictable ways. Generally, that will take the form of nodding knowingly that she should have “known better” or anticipated everything those boiler rooms will dream up.
The smarter course — as with the sham IRS/Benghazi/Susan Rice (and countless other) attempts to draw blood from either Obama or Clinton — is to wait until all the facts are in before effectively taking the side of those trying to damage the prospects of Democratic victories in the next election.
Hmmm. I’m involved with a very stupid lawsuit. A property matter. As part of this the other side asked for many personal emails between myself and family members.
I fought this request, and lost.
Bottom line on the law – THERE IS NO PRIVACY GRANTED TO ANY EMAIL. Period, full stop. If you send/receive an email, you have to disclose it.
Now we know who was behind the Email leak, Valerie Jarrett (& Obama?)
“But a succession of faux Clinton scandals is what she’s forcing on us by having the last name Clinton and being a Democrat . . .”
Fixed it for you.
Treating these faux scandals as suitable topics of adult discussion is enabling. If you really didn’t give a damn about E-GHAZI!!!!!!!1!1, you wouldn’t make a post here about it.
It was the worst of times, and it is yet worse still. It has not been the best of times in a long time. The result is an increasingly rapid slide to the lowest common denominator of the political class. Yes, Clinton looks better than the Republican several ring circus that is masquerading as a presidential campaign process. But that is only a relative assessment. She is what was at one time described as a moderate Republican. The big money people like moderate Republican ideology. That was the entire purpose of the Democratic Leadership Council, to move the party away from the left side of the ideological continuum.
So we are left with finance aggregators not just to support a candidate, but as the candidates themselves. These are not people schooled in state craft, but instead a large group that is intent on its own rewards through the process of sycophancy and aggrandizement of the financial and corporate sectors of our society. They control the Congress, the congressional process as well as all that goes into the selection of our government(s) both federal and state. And they control the message through their control of the media. What we are witnessing are rabid dogs fighting amongst themselves for their scraps of meat. The country will suffer the results of their incompetence.
Stories like this make me angry. When instead of the whole nation doing a “stand down” to fully discuss the Ferguson Report and understand its implications we do this “Hey! Look Over Here” diversion.
To answer the question these are the possibilities that HRC did not use separate e-mails:
1) She is stupid
2) She is lazy
3) She wanted to hide something
4) All of the above
5) Some combination of the above
I think it is safe to assume that at this point anything she tired to hide will be discovered(and I expect it will be nothing to all of those outside of Fox News).
I think it is also safe to assume that life after the election in 2016 will be an endless soap opera that might actually be more aggravating than the life defined by the blatant racism faced by the Obama administration.
The stuff she wanted to hide, she did face to face.
What Jerry said.
All you need to know about protecting communications can be found in the book version of The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
In the book the Godfather Vito Corleone NEVER talks business on the phone. And mostly NEVER communicates ANYTHING except through his Consigliare. On very very rare occasions the Dons get together face to face (in real life this almost ended in a catastrophe) but it is not like they have a voice recorder going. Everything is done through cut-outs. And as Mario Puzo reminded us in the case of the old time Mafia you could cut out the cut-out by eliminating the one link. As long as the number 2 was either loyal or in fear of the number 1 you had total message control.
None of this is new or dependent on modern e-mail or social media, hell USENET was confined to academic researchers when the Godfather came out on screen and in book form. Because phone wiretaps had been around for decades and everyone knew that at any given time the FBI or the NYPD Gang Squad could be listening in, and if you were a Mafia Don probably were.
Switching gears a little this is why everyone of my generation was gob-smacked to find out that Nixon had taped everything that happened in his office. WTF was he THINKING? And how well did THAT turn out for him? The lesson was clear: keep key meetings face to face and wherever possible use trusted intermediaries to do the phone and mail messaging.
Or short version: What Jerry Said.
Everyone should just make sure to be ready for another edition of Climategate.
Out of context sound bites of e-mails that will make HRC responsible for every foreign policy disaster over the past three decades.
You know what, all? The purpose of my post was to highlight that Clinton is a REALLY TERRIBLE CANDIDATE. She can’t possibly think that people will not realize that she could have had two separate @clintonemail.com accounts, one for personal emails and one for State Dept.-related work, and been able therefore to segregate her personal and work-related emails while still carrying only one phone. This, of course, would have let her simply turn over the entire contents of the work-related account to the State Dept. for placement on its servers and for possible FIOA and National Archives purposes.
It’s not her decision not to do that, but instead her decision to claim—not on the spur of the moment, but instead after eight days of controversy—that she needed to have only a single email account on her private phone in order to not have to use two phones. Everyone who’s even slightly tech-savvy knows that that’s just false, and was false in 2009. So why did she say it?
One thing that strikes me as really strange is the conventional wisdom that, had Clinton already announced her candidacy and had a full campaign operation in place, the story would have died after a few days because the campaign’s communications staff would have done … what, exactly? I have no idea.
But even if the conventional wisdom is right, the fact remains that Clinton herself is the candidate. If she’s too inept to recognize, for example, that most people know that she could have had two private email accounts, from the same server, on her single private phone—and that while everyone understands the desire to keep personal emails private, they recognize that she herself made the decision to commingle her personal and work-related emails in a single account—then no campaign communications director, however talented, is going to turn this candidate into an attractive rather than an unremittlngly bungling candidate.
I am pretty confident that Clinton did not use email to discuss classified information or issues, or discuss anything that was sensitive regarding diplomatic, foreign policy, defense, or security issues. I would be shocked if it turned out that she did. And I don’t expect to be shocked.
But we badly need this campaign to be about major substantive-policy issues. And if she is the anointed nominee, it may very well never will be.
And no, Joel, I actually can, and do, care about the effect of this issue and probable similar ones on the outcome of the election, while not caring one whit about the substance of the controversy.
And, Urban Legend, it is not too late—but soon will be—for a real quality candidate to challenge Clinton in the primaries. Including the most important primary: the zillionaire-funders one.
Dilbert, I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised at the broad coverage of, and public response to, the Justice Dept.’s Ferguson Report. I’ve wondered for YEARS when the outrageous, widespread policy of funding local government largely through outlandish traffic fines and court fees would become a real public issue. That now has happened.
I would assume that many town and county operations that have been working that way since this kind of thing became all-the-rage beginning, I guess, about 20 years ago, are quietly cutting back on this and beginning to quietly look for other ways to fund their governments. And there’s actually a new bill in Congress that, if I recall correctly, has a Republican co-sponsor (James Sensenbrenner, unless I’m confusing this bill with a bill about something else) that would treat this issue as a civil rights issue (which it already would be, of course, except that a panoply of Supreme Court-created “jurisdictional”, “quasi-jurisdictional”, and other pro-states’-rights-to-violate-individual-rights-in-the-name-of-freedom!, and pro-law-enforcement doctrines have precluded access to federal court in order to enforce most constitutional rights of any type that don’t concern the three or four constitutional rights that wingers care about.
I actually think that this will be a full-fledged issue in the 2016 elections. Hurray!!
Bev:
MSC caused Livingston County to revise their collection of penalties (fees) from defendants declaring it to not be constitutional. They just wrote it another way. In another matter, it appears Craig “may” be coming home.
Oh goodness. Has no one else been consigned to the hell known as “doc review”? Among legal temps who have gone through the inboxes of every corporate executive of every private company that’s ever been sued or tried to merge with another private company, this question is just dumb. It is characteristic of the human species that they use their work email for personal emails. Asking why is like asking why beavers build dams. It’s just the natural order of things, no matter how many times the general counsel tries to stop it.
Bill,
And considering that five of the seven MSC justices are REPUBLICAN, that indicates how very much–finally–the times, they are a-changin’.
Re Craig: !!!!!!
AWESOME.
Well, OKAY, Thornton. But THEY’RE not subject to National Records Act and FOIA provisions REQUIRING THEM, if they choose not to use the agency’s email system, to place their work-related emails from their private accounts onto the agency’s server for the very purpose of enabling much of the emails to become public, either in the National Archives or through a FOIA request.
Wayyyy harder to comply with those requirements if you have tens of thousands of private and work-related emails commingled in a single account. And presumably, the private-company executives recognize that they are the ones who risked their own loss of privacy regarding their private emails, by using the company’s email server and the executive’s work email account. Clinton apparently doesn’t recognize that she herself was the one who created the privacy issue for herself.
Clinton used her private email account for all her work emails; she didn’t use her work email account for private emails.
Bill,
That is great news! Let us know when it happens.
I don’t know who Craig is. Anything like John Walker Lindh?
as for Hillary, I wonder if she is any more “tech savvy” than I am (not at all). We are about the same age, and I have been unable to become tech savvy. Partly hardening of the arteries, and partly not giving a damn.
It seems to me she would not have done it if she thought about it. But hard to believe she would be hiding anything… for reasons given above by mostly Bruce Webb.
Meanwhile, don’t expect much from Jeff Merkely. I think he is a good guy, but like everyone else in politics is too busy to actually understand anything, and limited by political realities. And if he has a chance of winning…
I am trying really hard to convince myself that Hillary Clinton might be worthy of occupying the Oval Office. I do not think that her use of a private email account in any way is disqualifying, but her press conference performance trying to explain it away left me hoping that someone will challenge her.
The moment I heard that her claiming she didn’t want to have to carry two devices, I knew I was being fed a fabricated story. Who does she have working for her that makes this stuff up, and what does it say about their opinion of the American voter that they assumed this lame story would be accepted? The Democratic “base” is not the FOX News crowd… sometimes we think about what we are being told.
The Clinton Spin Machine is beginning to backfire… At least in my case.
Linus:
SCOTUS discourages carrying two phones as I explained here:
I have my own personal phone and also a business phone. I am also a straight up guy, former Marine Sergeant, Scout Leader, VP on a Planning Commission for the Township, etc. etc. etc. I travel a lot and I do get out and walk the streets of the cities I visit for exercise and out of sheer boredom from being cooped-up. More than likely I will carry both of my phones as someone could call me from overseas and my family may want to get a hold of me urgently. I separate business from family as the company already knows too much about my life. For a person to carry two phones on your belt, in your purse, or in your brief case; here is an interesting take on carrying them:
I am sure Hillary is worried of being accused of being a drug dealer by the Repubs as determined by “Roberts.” See more at: http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/05/dont-get-caught-with-two-phones-on-your-person.html#sthash.zsN7d0Ci.dpuf
The question will not be If Clinton is worthy of occupying the Oval Office. It is whether she will be better for the country than her republican opponent. The next president will be either a democrat or a republican, so those are the only two candidates that matter.
Jerry
i am inclined to agree with you. but i also would like to see candidates who can bend the “national dialogue” to issues of substance, and perhaps introduce a few facts into a debate that has been largely fact free for decades.
Whether the Democrat is better than the Republican would seem obvious, given that the Republicans are insane. But Democrats have been strangely ineffective, or when it comes down to it, actually hostile to policies that would improve the lives of Americans and maybe even make democracy meaningful.
That said, I’m voting for the yellow dog.
“i am inclined to agree with you. but i also would like to see candidates who can bend the ‘national dialogue’ to issues of substance, and perhaps introduce a few facts into a debate that has been largely fact free for decades.”
Yeah, Dale. Yeah.
In the interest of having a “serious” debate, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and a few others (Al Gore?) should be encouraged by the Party to throw their hats into the ring. It would provide a sharp contrast to the spectacle the Republicans are bound to present, and force Hillary to make serious committments to progressive principles. Of course if Sanders and Warren did step up, Hillary could probably label them non-serious candidates and refuse to debate them, but it would be a show worth watching if it happened. Chances of it happening…zero.
Agreed . . .
Linus
and the chances of any of them making sense about Social Security is zero zero. Bernie Sanders just wrote a bill giving Orrin Hatch all the talking points he needs.
Run75441,
I can understand why having two phones (business and personal) may be required in some situations. But in the case of email, it is not necessary to have two devices to support two email accounts. The argument Hillary made just doesn’t hold water from the start… Whoever conjured up the argument may have hoped we would conflate having two phone lines with having two email addresses, and that is what pisses me off. I repeat, we are not the FOX News audience.
Linus:
Read it again. When I wrote this on Angry Bear, it was quite humorous as it showed the lack of awareness the SCOTUS justices have when it comes to the general public. By the way, the Dems are just as unaware as the Repubs. Your argument falls flat on this point.
Coberly,
I concede every voter who takes their direction from my senior senator, Hatch. Those folks aside, I think that Sander’s and Warren’s message may find resonance.
Linus
yes, but it’s the Hatch audience that counts. of course “make the rich pay” will have resonance with some people. but it won’t win any elections, and it would destroy social security if it did. worst: it won’t help people understand Social Security:
Social Security is NOT welfare. It is insurance for workers paid for by workers. It is the best Deal workers ever had. It would cost the workers an extra eighty cents per week per year while their wages are going up an extra eight dollars per week per year to avoid turning it into welfare, and to save it from the Liars. Is it worth the risk for eighty cents?
“rabid dogs fighting amongst themselves for their scraps of meat”
Hurrah. government competition.. for the favors of the oligarchy
“not necessary to have two devices to support two email accounts”
to reduce confusion, switch desktops and use different email software. proxy each email software through different vpn. (not that i bother, but i don’t communicate with lawyers or government)
I usually carry no phone. I must be a ‘negative drug dealer’.
But sometimes I have carried an old phone with no carrier, as a camera. Then less often I might carry a working phone to report to the mothership.
So sometimes I must be a drug dealer. Has a Roberts5 ruling commanded congress to enact “forced drug dealing for freedom act of 2015” act yet? Because as McConnell, says “the will of the people”
related to spying: the junk at end of url is sharehis tracking junk.
I didn’t read carefully, but
en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/copying-text-on-my-site-adds-this-see-more-at-urlsthash3h02zndtdpuf
stackoverflow.com/questions/21825611/what-are-dpuf-extension-files
I think facebook has similar.
to obtain a sense of how few characters are usable for tracking, do a search for 3h02zndt
Correction: sometimes I must be two drug dealers.