Who's your money on?Follow

That, and his noodlely arms. Seriously, watch them when he's waving them around. Not sure what to think of the state of the primary. You've got Captain Combover Trump, No Neck Cruz, and Noodle Arms Kasich. WTF is up with that? And the other side isn't any better. Crazy Uncle Bernie, and "No Indictments Yet!" Clinton. I'm starting to think the whole thing is a plot for 4 more years for Obama.

Well, "the right" is a pretty broad definition there. I'm sure that many will think that. Many more will just assume that the FBI is going to be overly cautious suggesting indictment against the Democratic Party presidential frontrunner. Frankly, any result will be assumed by some to be politically motivated. I could similarly argue that if the FBI does recommend indictment, that "the left" will claim that it's just a politically motivated dirty trick to discredit their nominee.

And then there are those who might suggest that the Administration has it in for the Clintons, and that's why it happened. Or why it didn't happen. Heck. Pick your conspiracy. It's why I made the comment about "too prominent to indict". It does seem that as the degree of political fallout resulting from a potential indictment increases, the odds of indictment tends to decrease. Law enforcement really doesn't like getting into those sorts of things. It's far less dangerous to your career to simply end an investigation with some vague sounding bits about "not enough evidence", "burden of proof not met", "odds of conviction too low", etc, than to go forward with it, knowing the political ramifications, and knowing that no matter the outcome, your career is probably over.

And frankly, and here's where I put on my tin foil hat, I suspect that the Clinton's have been more or less banking on this kind of thing for decades now (hah! Banking! I kill myself). There's a certain logic to going all in on something, to such a degree that the only way to counter it is to actually charge the politician with a crime, counting on no one being willing to take that step. If Clinton had merely engaged in some of her work conversations via non-work means, she might have been subject to some questioning of her handling of potentially sensitive information, but which might be politically damaging. She did something that wasn't exactly correct, but could be discounted as a mistake (but would only harm her to the degree that we expect politicians to not make these kinds of mistakes). But by going an extra several steps and actually operating her own server, deliberately using it for all of her work communications, while very clearly knowing this was a violation of a silly number of regulations and laws, she ups the ante to the point where you have to either look the other way and excuse it, or charge her with what may be a host of crimes.

And that's exactly what we're seeing happening. Tons of people popping out of the woodwork trying to claim that what she did was perfectly ok, and twisting the facts around to make it seem like others did the same thing in the past, and even attempting to make the absurd argument that since she had access to information prior to it being classified, it somehow doesn't count, and there's no need for her to make efforts to handle said information in a secure internal manner. This degree of fact twisting tends to only occur when the consequences of *not* doing so are super high. Like say "my party's nominee will get indicted" high. Again, I suspect the Clinton's know this and take advantage of it.


The reality is that anyone else doing what she did would have already been charged with multiple crimes by now. The only reason she hasn't been is because of her prominent political position.

That would be a stupid thing to say. Not to say that no one would say or have said that, but that wouldn't even make sense.

You mean like the FBI finding classified information on General Powell's personal email and top aids for Condelezza Rice? Funny how the right likes to dismiss that. I wonder why?

Why would she handle unclassified information in a secure manner if it weren't classified until the FOIA requests were made?

The reality is, if Sec. Clinton weren't running for president, no one would be talking about this.


Edited, Mar 29th 2016 1:46am by Almalieque

By all means, break out the Reddit Crowd Source Detective Squad and let us know.

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

Huh... So you'd say it's a politically motivated "dirty trick"?

You're not differentiating the FBI from the GOP.

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

There's a world of difference between having a private email account on an licensed and regulated email service provider, and operating your own private email server. Additionally, there's a massive difference between a few private emails on said account that were later classified for FOIA purposes and virtually *all* work related communications being routed through the aforementioned private email server, many of which were clearly sensitive.

At the end of the day, when someone is briefed into the job, they are instructed on how to handle sensitive information. They are allowed to exercise judgement with regard to their handling of information and communications and can absolutely be judged after the fact for how well they did so. There is no evidence that either Powell or Rice mishandled sensitive information they had access to, regardless of nit-picking of emails after the fact. There is a landslide of evidence that Clinton showed a complete disregard for the sensitive nature of any and all information she handled as part of her job as Secretary of State.

And also at the end of the day, if the FBI decides that Powell or Rice committed a crime in their handling of sensitive information, they are free to charge them with crimes. No one's preventing them from doing so. So at best your argument consists of "two wrongs make a right", and at worst (and more likely) "two completely different things should be treated the same".

Gbaji wrote:

You're misunderstanding the issue. The Powell and Rice emails were classified by FOIA. The Clinton emails, not so much. Here's an article that does a decent job explaining this. It's not as simple as just FOIA classifications. Here's just the section on the emails themselves (leaving out the possible other issues with regard to the Clinton Foundation):

Gbaji wrote:

This is not remotely similar to merely having a few emails that were on a public email account that were later classified by FOIA. She certainly *also* did that (well, excepting the inability of FOIA to even know about them in the first place) and additionally, a whole list of other problems. Handling of data that is later classified is one thing. Mishandling of sensitive data that was known to be sensitive at the time (or should have been known) is a whole different ball game. There's data on Clinton's email server that falls into the second category. And that's before getting into the whole difference between an email account and an email server. The former is normal. Everyone does this. Using your own private email server, for a public official, especially for a Clinton (with their long history of document hiding and destruction), it suggests an intent from the start to obscure the record of her public service from day one. Which is a serious problem. Not just from a "she had sensitive stuff on there" point of view, but from a "public officials are supposed to be accountable to the public" perspective as well.

As a person who is read-on at a SCIF and deals with IA, I can say that you are completely clueless on what you're talking about. We have labels for a reason, to prevent people from guessing how to handle material. Retroactively marking information classified has absolutely no effect on how the information was handled when it was unclassified. "Sensitive" is not classified.

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

Huh? That's irrelevant. If you believe that the FBI would not be engaged in an investigation if Clinton were not running for president, then it's a politically motivated "dirty trick". Why they're doing it, and for whom, isn't the issue. You are claiming that it's being done for political reasons, right? So you just made the same argument you earlier said would be stupid to make. Just thought that was funny, is all.

The FBI probe is not being done for political reasons. It is a result from the congressional hearings, which are done for political reasons. It doesn't make sense to argue that the FBI is playing dirty tricks. It makes absolute common sense to argue that the GOP put together the Benghazi committee to hinder Hillary poll numbers, because that's exactly what they said on national T.V.

Spoiler

Gbaji wrote:

You also don't get to handle information before its classification is determined, so pretending that the rules you follow are the only rules in place is a lack of understanding on your part. How do you think classifications are determined? Read the article. It's quite clear that there was information on her email server that should not have been there, not because it was retroactively classified, but because it was either classified prior to being transferred there, or was information that was "classified at birth" (their words). What that means is that this is information handled at a level far far above your own, where those who are handling such information are taught (in theory anyway) to treat *everything* as though it's classified. She was operating at that level, was trained in how to handle these materials, yet placed them on an outside and insecure server anyway.

Which, um... Is a massive violation of the law. Surely you get this?

As a person who is read-on at a SCIF and deals with IA, I can say that you are completely clueless on what you're talking about. I literally deal with this as part of my job and you're pulling from an article. Look, I can do the same thing also. This article was written just hours ago on the front page of Yahoo. Opinionated articles are just that.

gbaji knows literally 200x more about classified documents than on officer in the military.

Next he'll tell us that he knows more than I do about homelessness or more that niobia about the dominatrix business.












Ok, he might know a lot about submission stuff, who's to say?

Edited, Mar 30th 2016 8:17pm by Bijou

It's possible, at this point, that he knows 200x more about imaginary people to shore up a losing argument than Niobia.

I"m not even talking from an Army Officer point of view, but as a contractor point of view. Even though I work in the same area, the actual jobs are different.

I am. My contractor is directly related to the topic. I have experience within the Army also.

That Vizzini, he can fuss.

Paul Ryan keeps getting floated as the "consensus candidate" in case convention voting goes into the 3rd+ round. Nothing would be better in an anti-establishment primary than for the convention chairman getting the nomination with zero popular votes and the RNC defending it by saying that the rules (which they wrote) make it okay to ignore the will of the voters.

Ryan keeps saying he doesn't want the job but, well, he kept saying he didn't want to be Speaker of the House either.