Hillary’s scandal woes aren’t disappearing any time soon. In fact, they’re only ballooning.
Monday, Dvorak Uncensored pointed out that a spam filtering service had access to Hillary’s classified emails. Longtime Clinton supporter, Mark Perkel runs a competing spam filtering service. Amidst the tech talk, Perkel makes two things abundantly clear: 1) Clinton’s system has serious security implications, and 2) none of this would have happened if she had just played by the rules.
Thursday, TIME published a damning long form article revealing an incredibly unsettling fact — no one read Hillary’s emails before they were presumably destroyed:
“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.’”
That no one sifted through Hillary’s emails is bad enough. But as we discussed, this revelation is further complicated by the fact that the Department of State has terrible record keeping practices (as noted in a troubling OIG report) nor were any top State official emails automatically archived before February… of THIS YEAR. Add to this nasty cocktail Hillary’s initial claim that all emails sent to .gov accounts were captured by the State Department system, and the result is non-potable.
Late Sunday evening, Hillary’s story changed… again.
Three days after the Time Magazine story rankled Team Clinton’s attempts to kill EmailGate, a Clinton spokesman finally issued a statement indicating Hillary’s emails were in fact read. ABC News reported:
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill has released a statement saying that “in wanting the public to understand how robust of a search was conducted, the fact sheet laid out several examples of the methods used by the reviewers to double and triple check they were capturing everything.”The “fact sheet” refers to a question-and-answer document given out after the news conference last week.The statement continues: “It was not meant to be taken as a list of every approach performed to ensure thoroughness. Those subsequent steps were in addition to reading them all, not in lieu of reading them all. (No different than our explaining such terms were used but not listing every search term used.) We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed. The fact sheet should have been clearer every email was read, which we are doing now.”…Today, however, Clinton’s team said that all the emails were opened and read.According to that document from the earlier news conference, here is a summary of how Clinton’s attorneys, whom she tasked with the job, said they sorted through, but it specifically did not say each e mail was read. • First, a search was done of all emails Clinton received from a .gov or state.gov account during the period she was secretary of state — from 2009 to 2013. • Then, with the remaining emails, a search was done for names of 100 State Department and other U.S. government officials who Clinton may have had correspondence with during her tenure. • Next, the emails were organized and reviewed by sender and recipient to “account for non-obvious or non-recognizable email addresses or misspellings or other idiosyncrasies.” • Lastly, of the emails still left over, a “number of terms” were searched, including “Benghazi” and “Libya.”The results of the searching were that Clinton’s attorneys found 30,490 work-related emails and 31,830 emails that were deemed “private and personal.”
Placing surrounding circumstances aside momentarily, there’s another bit of this story that’s concerning. Half of all emails Hillary sent while serving as Secretary of State were deemed ‘personal or private.’ So for every work related email, she sent one personal email, which begs the question — what the hell was she doing with her time?
Regardless, Boehner and company are flirting with the idea of investigating EmailGate, though no specifics were given as to whether an investigation separate from the House Oversight Committee’s ongoing probe would be necessary.
CNN polling data sampled just over 1,000 individuals (and about 4% more Democrats than Republicans) and found Hillary’s unfavorability rating at 44%, the highest it’s been since around April of 2008. Further, 51% of respondents believe Hillary has not done enough to explain why she opted for private email accounts and servers as Secretary of State. Interestingly though, 57% of those polled believe Clinton is someone they could proudly call ‘President.’
Document retention isn’t exactly the Clinton family’s strongest suit. Flashback to 2004 when federal investigators tangled with a Clinton aide who just happened to ‘accidentally discard’ documents from Bill’s Presidency. But that was after he stole them from the National Archives.
Muffled obfuscation has worked wonders for the Clinton’s in the past, but this is a different era. Whether Hillary gets out of this one unscathed remains to be seen, but we’ll keep you posted along the way.
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