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by _cudgel 4127 days ago
The reporting on this story has been pretty terrible. Wired just running with the AP story without spending the couple of minutes it takes to verify the details is shameful.

Agreed.

But, in my opinion, the point of the story isn't to prove factually one way or the other whether or not Clinton did anything at all. The point is to put yet another seed of doubt in the collective subconscious of the voting public in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election.

Performing this simple feat simply requires a small group of the right people to parrot the same lines ad nauseam. Then it becomes "fact" in the world of punditry.

2 comments

This story was only about security, others have been about the legal issues. On Hacker News the security angle is interesting, but the bigger picture is that only using her personal email for State Department business almost inevitably broke the law.
I wonder if Clinton was such a "rock star" that she had a non-standard employment agreement? My gut tells me she didn't take the job using "standard docs" but who knows.
There is no non-standard employment agreement here. The 'docs' that we are referring to her ignoring are federal law; Specifically, the Federal Records Act, which classifies her e-mails as federal records (the latest update clarifies this, but there's a reasonable argument that it was still the case before the explicit callout), and therefore subject to FOIA requests and other forms of review.
White house said this behaviour broke specific policy guidance, but the NY Times reports that setup was well known and a "status symbol"for the SOS. Those two things don't add up.

How can it be that breaking policy was a status symbol?

It would be more normal that having a policy waiver is a status symbol. Flagarantly breaking a rule/law otherwise just allows you to be blackmailed[1]. (you're basically a dead man walking subject to prosecutorial discretion...).

Since that is a common disqualifier for having top-secret security clearance...

none of this makes any sense whatsoever.

Secretaries and senior officials are required by federal law to keep records pertinent to the operation of their departments. It's not really something you can cross out in your offer letter...
These articles are always political, it even says in the article that it's not uncommon for reps to role their own mail solutions. Are anyone else's names listed?
I'm waiting for the staging of "Benghazi: The Musical".