Had it not been for the trail of bread crumbs the various
committees investigating the Benghazi tragedy followed, we likely would have
never learned about Hillary Clinton’s unique email arrangement she had with
herself, an arrangement she set up at the start of her tenure as Secretary of
State. But we did learn about her
private email account and server and since that time the Clinton Email Scandal has
been in the news cycle almost 24/7.
At the very least, Hillary is responsible for doing some very stupid and possibly even illegal acts pertaining to the handling of her emails and the use of a private server, but should Hillary be the one to bare the burden of her email indiscretions?
Sworn in as the 67th Unite States Secretary of State on Jan 21, 2009, Hillary on that same day began to use her newly installed email server and account to conduct all of her official government business on. Senior officials inside the State Department were most certainly aware of her unique email arrangement, it would have been impossible for them not to be.
At no point during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State did she use a government email account to conduct State Department business, in fact, she was never even issued a state.gov email account, the issuance of which is assumed to be normal protocol for any new staff members joining the State Department. Normal protocol was likely to also include someone responsible for distributing Hillary’s email address to the appropriate officials and aids inside the State Department and other individuals who would be in the Secretary’s normal chain of communication, including the President, Vice President and the president’s Chief of Staff just to name a few. Distribution of her email address may have included foreign officials as well. The email that would have been distributed would of course have been Hillary’s clintonemail.com email account.
Not long after Hillary’s arrival to the State Department the National Archives and Records Administration issue regulations requiring agencies which allowed employees to conduct official business on nonofficial email accounts to ensure those records were preserved “in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” Certainly the appropriate department within the State Department received notice of this new regulation however, no record of Hillary’s email correspondence, outside of her private server, was ever preserved. Someone within the State Department made the conscious decision keep the Secretary’s emails out of the department’s archives. Even if it were Hillary Clinton herself that made this decision, others within the State Department would have been well aware of this fact. Hillary did not do her own secretive IT work, heck, according to her, she can hardly manage two portable electronic devices at once.
Then there are the FOIA requests. Throughout Hillary Clinton’s time served in the State Department, and beyond, there have been countless FOIA requests pertaining to email records of the Secretary’s, that have all gone unanswered. These requests have come from a number of news agencies including one from the Associated Press which dates back over 4 years and the subject of a pending lawsuit. As it turns out, these FOIA request were ignored by the State Department due to the simple fact that they did not have any of the requested documents in their possession. Officials within the Stated Department knew exactly where they were however.
Congressional oversight faced a similar fate as many news agencies did, in collection emails from the former Secretary. One such account was that of the House Oversight Committee's Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations which after failing to receive any requested documents pertaining to Benghazi and linked to Hillary, the chairman of the committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, sent a letter directly to Secretary Clinton asking for "all information” related to the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. At the time of her departure from the State Department on February 1, 2013, Secretary Clinton had not responded to the chairman’s request. And in the final reports released by three of the congressional oversite committees tasked with investigating certain aspect of the Benghazi tragedy, they each included harsh criticism of the State Department for their lack of cooperation in providing requested documents.
As Hillary neared the end of her tenure as Secretary of State, the National Archives and Records Administration took a second shot a preserving her email record. Officials from the National Archive were in communication with the State Department discussing a plan on how they were going to go about obtaining a copy of the Secretary’s email record, so that they could be preserved in the archive. The evolution of preserving the former Secretary’s email records never came to fruition.
And nearly two years after Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State ended, on October 28, 2014, the State Department finally requested that Hillary turn over her email records pertaining to her time served as Secretary of State. However, this request came only after facing legal action, against the State Department, for failing to respond to a number of FOIA request.
Not intending to suggest any lack of culpability on the part of Hillary Clinton but it seems as though the major cuprite in this email scandal is actually the State Department. Judging from the department’s willingness to ignore countless FOIA requests and demands from congressional oversight for documents pertaining to Benghazi, the State Department has been less than forthcoming with the fact that they never possessed the Clinton record nor is there any indication that they ever attempted to collect the record prior to the October 2014 request to which Hillary Clinton complied.
This also raises the question as to whose idea it was to turn over hard copies of the email record rather than electronic copies. Providing electronic copies of her emails would have been a simpler evolution. As well, electronic copies of her mails it would have made the efforts to “key word” search documents much simpler. Keyword searches of Hillary’s emails is now a manual and incredibly timely process. Just imagine the effort it would take to search through 50,000 pages of email document to weed out a particular key word or phrase. The difficulty created by providing hard copies of the record seems almost intentional and falls in line with the past history of the State Departments efforts to make compliance to requests of the former Secretary’s records as difficult as humanly possible.
We should also keep in mind that this obstructionist behavior of the State Department continued on after the changing of the guard. Secretary of State John Kerry is fully aware of the accusations of feet dragging and obstructionism made against his State Department, in regards to the Clinton emails, and has done absolutely nothing to remedy the situation.
It still remains uncertain as to why Hillary
Clinton chose to operate her own private email system but it certainly was not
done without the knowledge and consent of the State Department. This is not to suggest some type of grand
conspiracy exists and certainly there is no link to the private server and
Benghazi other than the existence of the server may have providing both Hillary
and the State Department the ability to keep the Secretary’s record of the Benghazi
incident out of public record. At the very least, Hillary is responsible for doing some very stupid and possibly even illegal acts pertaining to the handling of her emails and the use of a private server, but should Hillary be the one to bare the burden of her email indiscretions?
Sworn in as the 67th Unite States Secretary of State on Jan 21, 2009, Hillary on that same day began to use her newly installed email server and account to conduct all of her official government business on. Senior officials inside the State Department were most certainly aware of her unique email arrangement, it would have been impossible for them not to be.
At no point during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State did she use a government email account to conduct State Department business, in fact, she was never even issued a state.gov email account, the issuance of which is assumed to be normal protocol for any new staff members joining the State Department. Normal protocol was likely to also include someone responsible for distributing Hillary’s email address to the appropriate officials and aids inside the State Department and other individuals who would be in the Secretary’s normal chain of communication, including the President, Vice President and the president’s Chief of Staff just to name a few. Distribution of her email address may have included foreign officials as well. The email that would have been distributed would of course have been Hillary’s clintonemail.com email account.
Not long after Hillary’s arrival to the State Department the National Archives and Records Administration issue regulations requiring agencies which allowed employees to conduct official business on nonofficial email accounts to ensure those records were preserved “in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” Certainly the appropriate department within the State Department received notice of this new regulation however, no record of Hillary’s email correspondence, outside of her private server, was ever preserved. Someone within the State Department made the conscious decision keep the Secretary’s emails out of the department’s archives. Even if it were Hillary Clinton herself that made this decision, others within the State Department would have been well aware of this fact. Hillary did not do her own secretive IT work, heck, according to her, she can hardly manage two portable electronic devices at once.
Then there are the FOIA requests. Throughout Hillary Clinton’s time served in the State Department, and beyond, there have been countless FOIA requests pertaining to email records of the Secretary’s, that have all gone unanswered. These requests have come from a number of news agencies including one from the Associated Press which dates back over 4 years and the subject of a pending lawsuit. As it turns out, these FOIA request were ignored by the State Department due to the simple fact that they did not have any of the requested documents in their possession. Officials within the Stated Department knew exactly where they were however.
Congressional oversight faced a similar fate as many news agencies did, in collection emails from the former Secretary. One such account was that of the House Oversight Committee's Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations which after failing to receive any requested documents pertaining to Benghazi and linked to Hillary, the chairman of the committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, sent a letter directly to Secretary Clinton asking for "all information” related to the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. At the time of her departure from the State Department on February 1, 2013, Secretary Clinton had not responded to the chairman’s request. And in the final reports released by three of the congressional oversite committees tasked with investigating certain aspect of the Benghazi tragedy, they each included harsh criticism of the State Department for their lack of cooperation in providing requested documents.
As Hillary neared the end of her tenure as Secretary of State, the National Archives and Records Administration took a second shot a preserving her email record. Officials from the National Archive were in communication with the State Department discussing a plan on how they were going to go about obtaining a copy of the Secretary’s email record, so that they could be preserved in the archive. The evolution of preserving the former Secretary’s email records never came to fruition.
And nearly two years after Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State ended, on October 28, 2014, the State Department finally requested that Hillary turn over her email records pertaining to her time served as Secretary of State. However, this request came only after facing legal action, against the State Department, for failing to respond to a number of FOIA request.
Not intending to suggest any lack of culpability on the part of Hillary Clinton but it seems as though the major cuprite in this email scandal is actually the State Department. Judging from the department’s willingness to ignore countless FOIA requests and demands from congressional oversight for documents pertaining to Benghazi, the State Department has been less than forthcoming with the fact that they never possessed the Clinton record nor is there any indication that they ever attempted to collect the record prior to the October 2014 request to which Hillary Clinton complied.
This also raises the question as to whose idea it was to turn over hard copies of the email record rather than electronic copies. Providing electronic copies of her emails would have been a simpler evolution. As well, electronic copies of her mails it would have made the efforts to “key word” search documents much simpler. Keyword searches of Hillary’s emails is now a manual and incredibly timely process. Just imagine the effort it would take to search through 50,000 pages of email document to weed out a particular key word or phrase. The difficulty created by providing hard copies of the record seems almost intentional and falls in line with the past history of the State Departments efforts to make compliance to requests of the former Secretary’s records as difficult as humanly possible.
We should also keep in mind that this obstructionist behavior of the State Department continued on after the changing of the guard. Secretary of State John Kerry is fully aware of the accusations of feet dragging and obstructionism made against his State Department, in regards to the Clinton emails, and has done absolutely nothing to remedy the situation.
All this begs that question, “Has Hillary Clinton become the media’s sacrificial lamb?”
Has the purpose which prompted Hillary to install a private email system grown in to something much more sinister? Has the main stream media thrown Hillary under the bus in order to keep a lid on the greater failures from within the State Department? It was in fact the media who originally named Hillary’s email woes the “Clinton” Email Scandal. But as we learn more, it is clear that the State Department is deeply entrenched in whatever has and is going on with Hillary’s emails making it seem more fitting to be calling this mess the “State Department Email Scandal”.
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