back to article FBI Clinton email dossier

The FBI has published online a thorough report of its investigation into US presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. It was feared the system would be ransacked by hackers – government and private – looking for juicy sensitive files. According to the Washington Post …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    That won't stop the calls for her

    to be thrown in Jail for the rest of her life. These are mostly coming from the right, more Trump leaning voters. If she gets elected then I forsee a move to get her impeached just like the President of Brail was this week.

    1. Stuart Castle Silver badge

      Re: That won't stop the calls for her

      It's actually quite scary how easily some have been duped by Trump's campaign..

      I have an old school friend who moved the US a few years back. He lives in Alabama. He is quite intelligent and one thing we both learned at school is to question everything we are told. He was also extremely liberal, apparently believing that we are all created equal regardless of colour, gender or sexuality.

      He is now regularly posting things from right wing blogs saying that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group, and that Hillary is evil, and possibly in league with ISIS and/or the devil. He is also posting stuff that tries to persuade the reader that Hillary will win the election because the Clintons are in charge of a secret organisation that makes the Kennedys look like small fry..

      Most of the stuff he posts takes me about 5 to 10 minutes to disprove, but I have given up because it's not worth the effort, as I could produce the most compelling evidence ever, but because it probably wouldn't agree with his position, he would never agree.

      We did agree on one thing though. Neither candidate is particularly good.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: That won't stop the calls for her

        The big difference with this year's election is that the left is almost as scared of the republican candidate as the right is scared of the left's. The right always demonizes the democratic candidate, to drive voters away from the democratic candidate to their own. They've always had a particular hatred for the Clintons but did the same with Obama, with Kerry, with Gore... The left does it too but not to the point that the average democrat actually feared what would happen if Romney or McCain become president. At least not until this year, with Trump.

        It is too bad no republicans imitated McCain's challenge to a woman at one of his campaign rallies who call Obama a Muslim, correcting her and saying that's a decent man who he just happens to disagree with on a lot of issues. I saw a poll a few days ago that said 80% of Trump voters fear for the future if Hillary becomes president, and 62% of Hillary voters fear for the future if Trump becomes president. So instead of "vote for me because I'll make this country better" it is "vote for me because if the other one wins it will be hell on Earth".

        Presidential campaigns shouldn't be conducted by trying to make people think that if the other side wins, life as you know it is over. Trump inciting his supporters into thinking elections are rigged is even worse. I guess doesn't care if he tears down people's faith in the electoral process, just so long as he doesn't have to admit he's a loser if Hillary wins! I can only wonder whether he'll make a concession speech at all, or if he does he'll say something like "the results of the election were that Hillary won, I don't agree with those results and I think I should have won, but I can't change the results".

  2. Bruce Ordway

    FBI records

    The FBI record is an interesting read and has some hardware/software details I'd been wondering about.

    Now I can see how Hillary might have started down this path. I mean doesn't an @clintonemail.com address look a lot cooler than her old @blackberry.net? Since Bill already had the server, all she had to do was ask for her own account? Once she had used for a while didn't want to give it up. Who does want to change email addresses? Unfortunately for Hillary, public officials don't get a pass. And probably shouldn't?

    At least now I can imagine this as human nature and less sinister.

    From my own experience of running an email server out of my bedroom I know that family and friends will want personal accounts too. Lucky for me that none of the accounts under my control were ever used by the secretary of state. (as far as I know).

    1. tom dial Silver badge

      Re: FBI records

      My cursory and as yet incomplete read of the FBI report has it that (a) she (through her minion) applied for the clintonemail.com domain about the time the Senate was interviewing her for the position, and (b) she did, in fact, change her email address to use the new domain very shortly after confirmation to the position. Couple that with the fact that there aren't a lot of email addresses that would be cooler than, e. g., secretary@state.gov, "cool address," "used for a while and don't want to give it up,'" or "didn't want to change email addresses" simply won't do.

      Add the fact that the servers were seriously non-compliant with longstanding federal law, and with FIPS and State Department standards; apparently were quite insecure in their configuration; and were known within the first two years to hackers and probably foreign intelligence services, and you get quite a mess.

      i put it down to a sense of personal entitlement, combined with a disturbing casualness about following established laws and rules, that we should be very leery of in choosing a President, even if, should she be elected, she chooses "president@whitehouse.gov" for her email address.

  3. Tony W

    Rules are for other people

    I see this belief in action on the roads every day, and I've no doubt it's common at the top of all organisations including governments. Those at the top probably got there by ignoring some rules anyway. Clinton will rightly never be allowed to forget this, but any further penalty is probably disproportionate.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Something from Trumps side now?

    How about those tax returns Donald? You seem so big on OTHER PEOPLE'S transparency..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Something from Trumps side now?

      Who voted this down? Melania??

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Try looking at the FBI records of her interview. It leaves one with two alternatives;

    1. Hillary Clinton is really, really stupid, incompetent, and suffering now from mental deterioration from her stroke;

    2. Hillary Clinton is downright utterly fraudulent and dishonest; deliberately lying in a very transparent way about not knowing about "C" meaning classified, about not knowing about document security, about deleting emails, about damn near anything.

    Either way she is totally unsuited to the role of POTUS.

    More than 17,000 State Department related emails were deleted and subsequently recovered giving the absolute lie about handing over all relevant communications. Another 17,000 or so can't be recovered and i wonder what is in those that they took extra care to delete thoroughly ? They used "Bleachbit" to wipe as thoroughly as possible so there was something that they needed to conceal. There WAS classified material including some top secret items in the recovered emails, another lie exposed.

    It certainly is true that there appears to be one set of rules for the elite; but there is no such thing in the law it is just an "elite" privilege; you poor rubes just have to put up with it. And if Clinton is elected as seems probable, that just rubs that in your face as she will exploit that over and over again, suckers.

    1. tom dial Silver badge

      Also heavily implicated are both Security and IT staff at State. The FBI report makes it quite clear that they knew pretty well what was going on and did nothing to stop it and forcefully discouraged those who questioned it (described more fully in the State IG report a few months back). It also makes clear the general sloppiness at State, and to a somewhat smaller degree at some other government agencies, in handling classified material. The DoD component that employed me for a number of years handled only sensitive-but-unclassified data (Personally Identifiable Information) yet was far better by about 2004 than State five full years later, both in technical protection and employee behavior. They clearly could use a good purge, although if, as many suppose, Clinton is elected President we might expect to see distribution of performance awards instead.

    2. tom dial Silver badge

      I've been out of touch with federal data security standards for a few years, but as of 2011, BleachBit would not have met the standard for handling disks containing Sensitive but Uncalssified data such as Social Security Number, let alone disks that ever had held any data with a secret or higher classification. The agency for which I worked handled no data classified higher than SBU, but the disposal requirement was degaussing followed by physical destruction (the agency had a shredder for the purpose. This despite the hefty additional charge for failure to return dead disks to the vendor, which we mitigated by purchasing new disks at retail to hand the CE instead of the failed disk. I an fairly sure the standard has not been relaxed.

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