If Hillary Can't Manage Two Email Accounts, Is She Smart Enough to Be President?

If Hillary Clinton thought her 20-minute press conference would put to rest her email troubles, she was very wrong. Her office has since issued a 9-page Q&A to the media, and her staff are reaching out to congressional leaders and influential progressive groups, to try to allay concerns following her UN effort to explain her email system.The outreach is being led by a longtime senior aide and her press secretary. Clinton does not appear to have spoken directly to top Democratic lawmakers. The troubles are just beginning for Mrs. Clinton. ~~~~~ The Associated Press has filed a lawsuit against the Department of State to get access to emails, personal calendars, agendas, personal notes and other communications related to Clinton's time as Secretary of State. The lawsuit follows repeated unfulfilled requests filed by the AP under the US Freedom of Information Act, including one request made five years ago and others pending since mid-2013. State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach refused to comment. He had previously cited State's heavy annual load of FOIA requests - 19,000 last year - in saying that the department "does its best to meet its FOIA responsibilities." The AP decided to file additional requests using FOIA and other means after Mrs. Clinton said she had used a private email account exclusively and that all her emails were sent, received and stored in a private server at her property outside New York while she was at State. Clinton said she received about 60,000 emails from her personal email address in her four years as Secretary of State. She said half were work-related, which she turned over to the State Department, while deleting tens of thousands of emails that were personal in nature. She has refused to make her server available to the State Department, the National Archives or congressional investigating committees. The State Department has said the emails in their possession will be posted online once a multiple-month review of their contents is completed. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said this process makes it unnecessary "for new FOIA requests to be filed or old FOIA requests to be reconsidered in order to get access to those records." AP's lawsuit charges that the State Department failed to enforce rules concerning the capture and preserving of Clinton's work-related emails and that its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP's requests indicate at the least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires." Specifically, AP has asked for access to documents and emails relating to the Clinton State Department granting a special position for longtime aide Huma Abedin; related correspondence from advisers Philippe Reines and Cheryl Mills, who, like Abedin, will have central roles in a Clinton presidential campaign; documents related to Clinton's and the agency's roles in the bin Laden raid and NSA surveillance practices; and documents related to her role overseeing a major Defense contractor. ~~~~~ In addition, Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House panel investigating the terrorist attack in Benghazi, says Hillary Clinton should hand her email server over to an independent party. Gowdy said Clinton shouldn’t get to decide which of her emails are private and which should be turned over : “One thing that’s clear is that we don’t get to grade our own papers in life. We don’t get to call penalties on ourselves. She doesn’t get to determine what is a public record and what is a personal record. Someone else needs to do that.” Gowdy said he doesn’t have the power to force Clinton to turn over the server but urged her to do so voluntarily. “Frankly, we shouldn’t have to compel it. I think it’s eminently reasonable to ask someone to turn over this server to an independent, neutral third party " - a retired judge, an archivist, an inspector general - "so that we can have some assurance that the ‘we’ that separated the public from the private did a good job.” Gowdy added that it's an “open constitutional question” as to whether the House of Representatives as a whole can compel her to hand over the server. While he said his committee is interested in potentially deleted emails concerning the 2012 Benghazi attacks, other committees could be interested in other deleted emails that could have been considered public.  Clinton told reporters at the Tuesday press conference that her team (the 'we' Gowdy referred to) turned over to State all emails they believed could have been considered official. She said she deleted other emails that she and her advisers deemed personal, increasing GOP concern that she could have deleted important information. Clinton told reporters that she has “absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department,” and that there had been no security breaches into the server, which was on property guarded by the Secret Service. She said she would not allow an outside party to examine the server to access the deleted emails. ~~~~~ The AP released today a Fact Check showing that Clinton's statements about her exclusive use of private email instead of a government account as Secretary of State do not fit the known facts. ~~ CLINTON: "Others had done it." THE FACTS: Email practices varied among her predecessors, but Clinton is the only Secretary of State known to have conducted all official unclassified government business on a private email address. It's a striking departure from the norm for top officials to rely exclusively on private email for official business. ~~ CLINTON: "I fully complied with every rule I was governed by." THE FACTS: At the very least, Clinton appears to have violated what the White House has called "very specific guidance" that officials should use government email to conduct business. Clinton gave no details about whether she had consulted with the department or other government officials to seek clearance before using the private email system exclusively. Federal officials are allowed to use private email and are generally allowed to conduct government business that way, but that ability is constrained by federal regulations and by their supervisors. Federal law during Clinton's tenure called for the archiving of such private email records when used for government work, but did not set out clear rules or punishments for violations until last November. In 2011, when Clinton was Secretary, a cable from her office sent to all employees advised them to avoid conducting any official business on their private email accounts because of targeting by unspecified "online adversaries." ~~ CLINTON: "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material." THE FACTS: The assertion fits with the facts as known but skirts the issue of exchanging information in a private account that, while not classified, is still "Sensitive." The State Department and other national security agencies have specified rules for the handling of such sensitive material which could affect national security, diplomatic and privacy concerns, and may include personnel, medical and law enforcement data. material that may have been disclosed. ~~ CLINTON: "It had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches." THE FACTS: While Clinton's server was physically guarded by the Secret Service, she provided no evidence it hadn't been compromised by hackers or foreign adversaries. She also didn't detail who administered the email system, if it received software security updates, or if it was monitored routinely for unauthorized access. Clinton also didn't answer whether her homebrew computer system had the same safeguards provided at professional data facilities, such as offsite backups, generators in case of power outages and fire-suppression systems, or whether the server had encryption software used to communicate with US government officials. ~~ CLINTON: "I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought t would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two. Looking back, it would've been better if I'd simply used a second email account and carried a second phone but at the time, this didn't seem like an ssue." THE FACTS: If multiple devices were an inconvenience - she said she started out in Washington with a BlackBerry but her devices grew in number - smartphones were capable of multiple emails when she became secretary; it's not clear whether the particular phone she used then was permitted to do so under State Department rules. ~~~~~ Dear readers, to quote one reader, if she was not smart enough to use one smartphone with two email accounts, she is not smart enough to be President.