Yup. Hillary Chose to Delete Consequential E-Mails
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Morning Jolt March 13, 2015
Hey, Virginia Republicans, were you looking forward to voting in the 2016 presidential primary? Eh, we may not have one. Read all about the big decision facing the Old Dominion GOP. Yup. Hillary Chose to Delete Consequential E-MailsA lot of folks in Right-world think this is an extremely consequential revelation about the Clintons: The Clintons play by their own set of rules. And in this case, the former Secretary of State explained, those rules bless her decision to erase some 30,000 emails from the family server despite knowing that the emails had become a subject of intense interest to congressional investigators. These were merely "private personal emails," Clinton averred, "emails about planning Chelsea's wedding or my mother's funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes." After she finished taking questions, Clinton's staff disclosed that no one actually read through those 30,000-odd documents before she "chose not to keep" them. As for why this might "seem like an issue," the answer is not complicated. All federal employees have a legal obligation to preserve their work-related email–and the White House advises appointees to accomplish this by using official government addresses. Email sent to and from .gov accounts is generally archived. In this way, a consistent level of security is maintained. The nation's history is preserved. Open-records laws are honored. And transparency gets a leg up on "Trust me." All this once made sense to Clinton. As a candidate for President in 2008, she included "secret White House email accounts" as part of her critique of the Bush Administration's "stunning record of secrecy and corruption." Now, however, Clinton is leaning heavily on "Trust me." For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton's lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton's staff, so they were deemed to be "private, personal records." This strikes experts as a haphazard way of analyzing documents. Jason R. Baron, a former lawyer at the National Archives and Records Administration who is now an attorney in the Washington office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, says, "I would question why lawyers for Secretary Clinton would use keyword searching, a method known to be fraught with limitations, to determine which of the emails with a non-.gov address pertained to government business. Any and all State Department activities–not just communications involving the keywords Benghazi or Libya–would potentially make an email a federal record. Given the high stakes involved, I would have imagined staff could have simply conducted a manual review of every document. Using keywords as a shortcut unfortunately leaves the process open to being second-guessed." Wait, there's more, as Allahpundit explains: Until last year, if you wanted to access State Department e-mail remotely, you needed a secure Blackberry issued by State for that purpose. And that Blackberry only handled department e-mail, i.e. State e-mail accounts actually did require a dedicated device. Apparently Hillary was right in thinking that, if she wanted to read private e-mail too, she really would have had to carry a second device. But rather than do that and endure the hardship of fitting two four-ounce smartphones in her purse instead of one, she chose to defy security protocols and conduct all of her business, work and personal, from her unsecured private device. She didn't care enough about security to have an official State e-mail account created for her in the first place so why would she care enough to read sensitive messages on an official, secured State Blackberry? That adds a whole new level of risk to her e-mail habits, actually, since she was presumably using her personal Blackberry for work during overseas trips, when she was at greater risk from foreign surveillance. Between that and the fact that State IT techs warned her about the vulnerability of her private server, there's really no question that she knowingly, willingly created a major hole in national security simply because her selfish political desire to keep her messages away from the voting public was more important to her. Yes, this blatantly violates the legal requirements. I want to believe this will have serious consequences. But I don't. Who will run a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton over this? Our incoming attorney general? The confirmation vote is next week. Has any GOP senator even questioned Loretta Lynch whether she thinks this is a serious violation of the law and if, or how, the Department of Justice would investigate? Do you think there's a single U.S. Attorney -- all of whom were appointed by President Obama -- who wants to prosecute the Democratic presidential frontrunner? Do you think there's a jury that would convict her?
The Hewitt Primary: Maybe the Toughest Contest for GOP Contenders! Finally, a genuine successor to "The Russert Primary": The Hewitt Primary: When radio host Hugh Hewitt questions Republican candidates at CNN's first primary debate this fall, he says, viewers will be "much more likely to hear about the Ohio-class submarine than contraceptives." What, you ask at this point, is the Ohio-class submarine? "The Ohio-class nuclear submarine is the biggest line item debate that will be held in the next 15 years," Hewitt said in a Wednesday interview with The Huffington Post. "Presidential candidates ought to know about it. They ought to be up to speed on it. That tells me seriousness." Hewitt, 59, has carved out a niche in the conservative talk radio world as Mr. Serious, an unapologetic wonk in an industry full of bombast. And he's ridden that reputation to fairly prominent heights lately, becoming perhaps the most important conservative media figure of the still-early 2016 election cycle. Virtually all the prospective candidates have sat down for an interview with Hewitt. And Hewitt, in turn, has set intellectual bars that they must clear. Guests can expect to get into the nitty-gritty of foreign and domestic policy issues -- and they know to come prepared, lest they be embarrassed on air. Often, they leave with homework. "There's something of a Hewitt primary that all these candidates are going to try to win," CNN host Jake Tapper, an occasional Hewitt guest himself, told HuffPost. For years, Hewitt has asked guests -- whether politicians, journalists or think-tank fellows -- if they've read Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. Lately, he's also been asking about The Atlantic's recent cover story on the roots of the Islamic State, as well as Robert Putnam's just-published book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. An obvious observation: Hillary Clinton will never subject herself to questioning from Hugh Hewitt. And I contend there is no equivalent to Hugh on the Left. (I'd put Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd somewhere in the center region.) There is not a single liberal media personality who enjoys interviewing prominent Democratic officials, offering them tough, challenging questions, tough follow-ups, and making his interview subjects sweat the details. Members of the progressive aristocracy don't treat each other that way. Hey, Anybody Seen Putin Lately? Er . . . "good" news? Or just strange news? Everyone has their off days, but when you're the proudly virile and uncontested leader of one of the most-watched countries in the world, your days off make people nervous. Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn't been seen for days, and now people are beginning to wonder why. On Thursday, Putin's spokesman announced that the president would not attend a meeting with the Federal Security Service (FSB), which he usually attends. But no, Putin was "absolutely" healthy, Dmitry Peskov told Russia's Ekho Moskvy, before adding that the president's handshake was so strong it could "break your hand." Putin's absence at the FSB meeting comes just a day after he unexpectedly canceled a trip to Kazakhstan. "The visit has been canceled. It looks like he [Putin] has fallen ill," an anonymous Kazakh official told Reuters afterward, prompting a flurry of speculation. To make matters more confusing, on Wednesday the Kremlin released an image of Putin meeting with the regional governor of Karelia. But local Web site Vesti Karelii reported that Putin actually had met with the head of the Republic of Karelia, Alexander Khudilainen, on March 4. In fact, RBC.ru reports that a number of events posted by the Kremlin appeared to have been recycled from earlier events. If this is correct, the last time Putin was seen in public may have been March 5, when he met the Italian prime minister in Moscow. Maybe he's meeting with Carmen Sandiego. Has anybody seen his gymnast girlfriend lately?
[Insert off-color "advance of Russian forces" joke here.] ADDENDA: Topics of this week's pop-culture podcast, hitting the net around 9:30 a.m. Eastern or so: Who do you trust on the Internet? Can musical competition shows still generate stars? Why Saint Patrick's Day and March Madness are drastically underrated holidays and traditions, and how the National Football League has come to dominate the sports world year-round. Our show is now available on iTunes through the 405 Media. If you see me Tweeting about "#TJAMS," this is it.
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