back to article Republicans want IT bloke to take fall for Clinton email brouhaha

US House Republicans are demanding prosecutors bring charges against the IT chap who hosted Hillary Clinton's private email service. The chairman of the House of Reps' Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Lamar Smith (R‑TX), today sent a formal letter [PDF] to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking that charges be filed …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    He should take the fall

    He decided not to respond to an investigation, that's on him. If he legally isn't compelled to respond, that will come out as well.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: He should take the fall

      Be sure and make some outrageous claims about how awful this has been on you personally, because in the end that's all you will have, as there was no wrong doing. No crimes committed. Just a lot of hot air from some other asshole politicians about one of their own, doing what another of their own told them was okay to do. The Republican token-black man General Colon Powel told Mrs. Clinton to setup the email server that way. Face it, your complaint is a weak assault of an action you already find reasonable, as long as it's a Republican doing government business using outside email services. Like president Furby Toupee does each day. Yet, THIS you have a problem with? What a dolt you are. But, leave it to the US Tories to beat a dead horse and claim it tried to kick them. Tell us, has anything NEW happened, or is this more of the same recycled garbage from your heroes in red ties? AKA conservative jerkoffs. I think bringing up old horseshit is the only "new" trick they have. Crooks complaining about the alleged crimes of other crooks. Colour me uninterested. Colour you busted.

      1. tom dial Silver badge

        Re: He should take the fall

        I haven't seen such a collection of alternative facts in a while.

        - Hillary's server did violate the law - FISMA 2002.

        - General Powell did not advise Secretary Clinton to set up a private server. One downvote for what appears to have been intentional and disparaging misspelling of General Powell's given name.

        - President Trump may use Twitter from an insecure device, but I have not seen it reported that he used an outside email service to conduct government business. It is not obvious that using Twitter from an insecure device is significantly worse than using it at all.

        It is quite understandable that you would post anonymously, however.

        1. Suricou Raven

          Re: He should take the fall

          Trump using twitter is government business now. He uses it to publicly announce policy positions.

          Imagine if someone hacked Trump's phone and got access to the twitter account. What fun could they have? They could swing the stock market however they wanted with ease. They could embarrass the country on a whim. Or just go all-out and announce the US was initiating an immediate invasion of North Korea, then sit back and eat popcorn as they watch NK immediately start shelling Seoul into a smoking crater.

          1. BillG
            Linux

            Re: He should take the fall

            Imagine if someone hacked Trump's phone and got access to the twitter account.

            Couldn't happen. Trump's Twitter account is on Twitter's select watch list. Tweets can only be made from specific devices like his phone and laptop. Even if Trump tried to use someone else's computer with his legitimate username and password, Twitter would flag it and suspend his account.

            If someone tried to hack Trump's twitter account there would be black helicopters outside their house in no time. Federal prison is no joke.

        2. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: He should take the fall

          Since he's practicing diplomacy in 140 character-sized chunks, it can be argued he's using an outside service to conduct government business.

          And that's before we look at the DMs.

        3. Joe Gurman

          Re: He should take the fall

          Sorry, pal, FISMA is not a law that carries penalties. It was meant to spell out normative behavior and enable federal agencies to put those behaviors into practice. So please don't go down to the hardware store and buy a length of rope just now.

          1. tom dial Silver badge

            Re: He should take the fall

            FISMA may not carry criminal penalties for violation, but employee violations certainly couldlead to adverse personnel action, and if repeated probably would. Adverse actions may vary from oral reprimand on upward to dismissal. An agency civil service executive who arranged a server like Clinton's almost certainly would be on the receiving end of upper end adverse action unless she discontinued its use pretty quickly.

            By maintaining her server as her (and her closest aides') only line of email communication, Clinton put her subordinates in the uncomfortable position of either putting themselves in position for disciplinary action or finding a different, authorized, and probably much less efficient means of communication.

            Clinton aside, there is plenty of blame to go around. The State Department IT staff identified the server as a problem at some point and were told to bugger off. Apparently they did, rather than either push the issue or report it to the IG or federal whistle blower contact. They also did not take the fairly obvious action of blocking communication between the State Department and clintonemail.com servers, which probably would have brought things to a head rather quickly.

        4. Geoffrey W

          Re: He should take the fall

          @Tom Dial RE: "General Powell did not advise Secretary Clinton to set up a private server"

          One can understand Powells reluctance to get drawn into the whole sorry mess by denying, but some doubt about your alternative claim he didn't advise her...

          https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/colin-powell-advised-hillary-clinton-on-private-emails-new-documents-show

          1. tom dial Silver badge

            Re: He should take the fall

            Sorry, but neither the US News article nor the USA Today article to which it links -

            https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/09/07/powell-email-advising-clinton-personal-email-released/89984698/

            even comes close to hinting that Gen. Powell advised Secretary Clinton to set up a private email server. There is a large difference, probably quite well understood by most who post on this site, between operating a collection of servers and using a commercial email account.

            That said, it really does not matter what General Powell might have told her. There were major changes to the law, federal information processing standards, and State Department regulations between his appointment as Secretary of State in 2001 and hers in 2009. The rules governing her actions were those effective in 2009 and the following years.

            The rules that applied to Secretary Clinton required that a server used to store and process government data - including email - had to be approved for the purpose by the department's certifying authority who, for the Department of State, was the CIO. The certification presumes verification of compliance with a long list of specific requirements that Secretary Clinton's servers plainly did not meet, and the CIO stated to the DoS IG that the server was not approved and would not have been if it had been requested.

            1. This post has been deleted by its author

            2. Kiwi
              Black Helicopters

              Re: He should take the fall

              The rules that applied to Secretary Clinton required that a server used to store and process government data - including email - had to be approved for the purpose by the department's certifying authority

              Would that include twitter since the orange twit uses it for diplomacy? or is it one rule for the orange-utan and another for shrillary?

              1. Adrian Midgley 1

                Those words may not mean what you think...

                and probably are not an accurate paraphrase.

                As written, you say that if Ms Clinton used a server, the dept had to approve it.

                I think you are trying to say there was a prohibition on operating, of using an operating, server before approval.

                And I'm not sure that would be true either - all candidates will have email systems.

        5. Ken Hagan Gold badge

          Re: He should take the fall

          "It is not obvious that using Twitter from an insecure device is significantly worse than using it at all."

          Perhaps not to you, but think less about "Twitter" and more about that "insecure device" that Mr Trump quite possibly carries with him for much of his life.

          If, perish the thought, there turned out to be a way to hack that device, the perpatrators would not plays schoolboy games with his Twitter account. They'd just turn on the microphone, feed it through some speech-to-phonemes software, and smuggle the now-greatly-reduced data stream off to their server when convenient. If the NSA can't do that, they aren't doing their job. I bet they can, and I bet that's why they were (*) worried that someone else could too.

          (* They probably aren't worried anymore. I assume that they've hacked into his device and installed some sort of rootkit of their own to keep it safe. Rather tedious that they have to use such techniques on their own man, but they probably had the tools lying about and it wouldn't have taken long to deploy them in this case.)

      2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: He should take the fall

        The Republican token-black man General Colon Powel told Mrs. Clinton to setup the email server that way.

        Thus madly influencing poor Hildebeast?

        "What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient). So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.... I have been interviewed by the State Department IG and the FBI about my actions and decisions. I stand by my decisions and I am fully accountable"

        Somebody who at least says he is "fully accountable". Must be from another generation.

        1. 404

          Re: He should take the fall

          Tis easy to claim to be 'fully accountable' when there is no accountability. There hasn't been a Federal politician since Nixon (and he got pardoned!) been held accountable for their bullshit.

          Average citizen facing the full wrath of the Feds? You won't even know their name, they'll be buried so far.

          Ya, know? Pitchforks and torches aren't *that* far off - how about getting ahead of the curve with a pitchfork and torch icon, El Reg?

          1. disgruntled yank

            Re: He should take the fall

            None since Nixon?

            Gee, ABSCAM comes to mind, and various members of congress have been busted for this or that since.

      3. Joe Gurman

        Re: He should take the fall

        Obstruction a federal investigation is a crime in the US, one of which Scooter Libby, an aide to Dick Cheney, was convicted. Whether what Mr Suazo did (some news stories claimed he wiped disks to avoid their being subpoenaed) constituted obstruction is up to the folks that understand that "subpoena" mean "under [the threat of] punishment" for failure to produce the desired testimony or evidence.

        I have no sympathy for the Republicans in any of their whacko forms, but the law does apply to everyone, which is one of its redeeming features.

        1. Potemkine Silver badge

          Re: He should take the fall

          but the law does apply to everyone

          Absolutely. "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

      4. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

        If you can spell the name right ...

        You can find links to epic failures. As a bonus it avoids people responding to your spelling error and avoiding any valid point you may have. [At the time, bio-weapons professionals were saying Colin Powell's mobile bio-weapons factories were ridiculous. To be fair to the man, he did apologise for being utterly wrong - a move that is almost unheard of in politics.]

  2. Stevie

    Bah!

    Irrespectiveless of whether the email thing is anyone's fault, I'm agin it because I don't like the congressman's wikipedia page content.

    According to it, he is a complete and utter bought-and-paid-for coalshill and has abused his office to bully those who dare to challenge his view that climate change is made up.

    I could forgive that (a lie; I couldn't) but it also says he retweeted a Breitbart article denying climate change and though I've never read a Breitbart article, everyone but Fox News says they are bad and that's good enough for me.

    LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bah!

      Stevie, deflect much?

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: Bah!

        Fox is putrid leftist crap.

        But this is all small fry. In the meantime, quite a few people who should get the swift pioneer town justice treatement are coming out of the woodwork and are planning on ruining the rest of the year: Shambolic Doings in Washington #MaybeNoThanksgivingTurkey

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Bah!

          Faux News is Leftist??? Just exactly how far right ARE you, anyway?

          1. Mark 85

            @Jake -- Re: Bah!

            Upvote for beating me to that.

          2. gnasher729 Silver badge

            Re: Bah!

            I think Fox News is extreme right wing, but still at least trying to keep with the facts, maybe adjusting a bit here and there, maybe interpreting a bit here and there, but not outright lying.

            So yes, by US government standards, Fox News is leftist.

            1. bombastic bob Silver badge
              WTF?

              Re: Bah!

              "I think Fox News is extreme right wing"

              eh, no. right of center is acceptable, but NOT extreme. They've got Juan Williams, after all...

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Bah!

              I think Fox News is extreme right wing, but still at least trying to keep with the facts, maybe adjusting a bit here and there, maybe interpreting a bit here and there, but not outright lying.

              Trying to keep up with facts???? maybe adjusting a bit here and there??

              This is Fox, who brought you the Tea Party.

              Half their "news" material is opinion, which is then repeated in the news because "people [Fox news commentators] are talking about it"

              1. tom dial Silver badge

                Re: Bah!

                "Fox ... brought you the Tea Party" credits them far beyond what is due. They probably reported on it more approvingly than most of the other major media, which generally lean leftward in their reporting, but the movement itself originated without media help from Fox or anyone else, largely as a result of some Republicans' perception that the government was not working as they thought proper.

                Nearly all news is delivered with a slant using a combination of selectivity about what is reported and which details, and use of loaded language. Many years ago the New York Times (before it had color pictures), the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal generally reported the news without notable bias. That has not been true of the NYT or Post for years. I no longer read the Journal and don't know what has happened to it under the Murdoch regime. TV news has long been better thought of as entertainment, and Fox is no worse, despite being differently slanted, than any other. The less said about the Internet the better.

            3. Suricou Raven

              Re: Bah!

              You are judging by European standards. To us, Fox is extreme right wing. But by American standards, it's merely right-wing, no extreme. Everything is shifted.

              The extreme right-wing are the ones upset that Trump isn't trying to expel all Muslims from the country like he promised, and stockpiling guns and ammo for the time when Obama's secret army rises up, overthrows the government and starts trying to round up Christians for the gas chambers. They are pretty nuts.

          3. Ken Hagan Gold badge

            Re: Bah!

            If you go far enough in either direction, you end up on the other side.

        2. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Bah!

          And Attila the Hun was a weak liberal.

    2. ratfox
      Meh

      Re: Bah!

      > Irrespectiveless

      You did this on purpose, didn't you?

  3. GrumpyKiwi

    Hey, it's only secret information, who cares

    If I'd been as incompetent and reckless with Her Majesty's top secret information while I was working for the MoD (on email servers no less) I'd still be in jail being traded for a handful of cigarettes.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hey, it's only secret information, who cares

      It wasn't reckless, it was deliberate, but you're right about Hillary being incompetent.

      1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

        Re: Hey, it's only secret information, who cares

        but you're right about Hillary being incompetent.

        But look on the bright side - she did win the popular vote.

        I dream of the day when Trump rises to being merely incompetent.

      2. Kiwi
        WTF?

        Re: Hey, it's only secret information, who cares

        you're right about Hillary being incompetent.

        Not a vote for shillarity's competence, or lack thereof but... You're a supporter of a president who cannot get his orders passed even with all the "houses of parliment" (can't recall the correct term for the US system at present), and you're criticising someone else's competence?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hey, it's only secret information, who cares

      however, if it was something dull like taxpayer info, health data, social services records - you could have just left those on a train, no-one would ever have bothered to name you or bring any action ....

  4. Someone Else Silver badge
    Big Brother

    Tell you what...

    Haul Suazo into court. But first (or at least at the same time)...haul Herr Lügenführer tRump into the same court for failing to release the Flynn Russia documents that Congress has requested.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Even better...

      Put Trump on the Rack and force him to admit he's Putin's butt boy. At least then you'll have some 'evidence.'

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Even better...

        "Put Trump on the Rack and ..."

        Waterboard him, surely. After all, he's in favour of that, isn't he?

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Tell you what...

      The President formerly known as Hitler a creature of Putin meme

      You haven't got the memo that now that Trump is on track with the globalist/bombstuff agenda and actually overdoing it a bit, the "russia angle" has disappeared and is dead as disco?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Tell you what...

        You haven't got the memo that now that Trump is on track with the globalist/bombstuff agenda and actually overdoing it a bit, the "russia angle" has disappeared and is dead as disco?

        What better way to take attention away from the Russia angle and the fact they were meddling with the election??

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What laws did he break?

    He set up a private email server for her, which was legal. Regardless of what you think or what the law says about what she did with it, he's not responsible for people sending her emails with classified content. Trump could set up a Gmail account and get classified info, if he did should Google be liable? Of course not.

    Congress wanted him to testify, but unless they serve him with a subpeona and he fails to appear, he hasn't broken any laws by not talking to them. He just hurt their feelings of self importance.

    They should give up on this. Given the stories about Trump administration officials using personal emails for official business, republicans might want to let up on the Clinton email thing lest some of their own get snared - and unlike when Clinton did it, it is now clearly illegal for them to use personal emails for official business, even if no classified info is exchanged.

    1. tom dial Silver badge

      Re: What laws did he break?

      "He set up a private server ... which was legal."

      That is untrue, on two counts. First, Platte River Systems did not set up the server, but took over administration at a later date which, I believe, followed Ms. Clinton's departure from the State Department. The server was set up by Brian Pagliano, who had worked for Ms. Clinton's 2008 presidential nomination campaign. He was hired, presumably at her request, as a political appointee at the State Department to advise on IT matters at a salary that probably exceeded $100,000 pa, and moonlighted as administrator of the clintonemail.com servers. According to the DoS IG report, he performed some of those duties from his office at the DoS. Second, the servers violated State Department regulations derived from National Institutes of Science and Technology standards that were written to tell federal agencies how to implement requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (44 U.S.C. Chapter 35). They were set up and operated in violation of the law.

      Platte River Systems was under contract to administer the systems during the period after Ms. Clinton left the State Department and before the systems were delivered to the FBI for analysis. During that period, at a time when it was common knowledge that the servers and their contents were the subject of an investigation, their administrator wiped the disk drives with multiple pass overwrites and destroyed all the backups. The administrator, and Brian Pagliano, were immunized in exchange for cooperation, but as far as I have seen that did not apply to either Platte River Systems or its officers.

      The analogy between Platte River Networks' responsibilities for Clinton's servers and Google's for an email account is both specious and irrelevant to the issue at hand.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

    I genuinely didn't keep up with the fuss about Hil's emails, I found the American election massively over-long, managing to be hyperbolic and dreary at the same time.

    Having said that, shit, she had to be the better of the two choices. Surely? There are hermit crabs who would make better leaders of the free world than the one that's in office at the mo.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

      Since you weren't following closely, know that Mrs. Clinton sold her influence as Secretary of State to many foreign leaders and organizations for world record sums, and pathetically attempted to claim they were 'donations' to her charity, the one that had 80-90% overhead costs. I suppose they also expected special treatment when she ascended to the most powerful office on the planet. We are incredibly lucky that didn't happen.

      1. localzuk Silver badge

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        That's quite a few accusations in one hyperbolic paragraph there @Big John. You got any evidence for any of what you've said?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          BigJohn posts on here occasionally.

          His right wing rapid utter crap is always nonsense. He normally posts something with a slight tinge of doubt to it and then he takes that point and stretches it into right wing shite. So he'll take an email server issue and make it into the worlds worst crime. It' always noticeable that he has no sense of irony (well he pretends to be American) that just about everything he says is applicable to the Nazis (yep I invoked Goodwins Law first, I lose) currently in the White House. It is quite amusing that everything he accuses the Democrats of, the Republicans did first and did 10x worse.

          I have often thought he was a bot that is designed purely for right wing trolling. It may well be, if it isn't a bot, he's a prime example of a racist, bigoted, redneck with low intelligence. I wish I knew who he was so I could forbid my daughters from ever having anything to do with him.

          For the UK readers, imagine a Katie Hopkins (though to be fair he/it writes better than her) but with an American slant.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

            "BigJohn posts on here occasionally...."

            Fair do's I wasn't aware. Just taken a look at some of his past posts. Wont be feeding in future, thanks for the heads up.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

              I feel thats my public duty done for the day now :)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        Big John : I honestly dont know what Hillary got up to, if anything. I'm guessing that you don't stay in american politics for that long without picking up a few brown stubborn under stains. I'm less than impressed with the current president though, struggling to see how she could have been worse. That must be one of the big negatives of a 2 party system. If both the candidates are twats, you end up with a fairly high probability that you are going to elect a twat. Over here, we seemingly have a one party system at the moment.

        1. Rich 11

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          Over here, we seemingly have a one party system at the moment.

          And we're still going to elect a twat.

      3. Version 1.0 Silver badge

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        Big John, you make Hillary sound like quite an improvement over what we ended up with.

        1. Kiwi

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          Big John, you make Hillary sound like quite an improvement over what we ended up with.

          Course not. If he did he'd pass it on to the feebs and in one of their many investigations into Clinton, using his wonderful trustworthy evidence, they would've arrested, charged, and seen her convicted.

          Strange how even with an all-refudlian government, none of this has happened. Guess that means bj's et al oft-repeated claims of illegal activity by HC are made of the same substance that Ol' McDonald's bull left on the ground.

          (And yet another broken campaign promise for CMIC - promises to have HC "locked up")

      4. Steve Knox

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        @Big John,

        If you're going to lie, at least pick some that aren't so easily falsifiable. For example:

        https://www.charitywatch.org/ratings-and-metrics/clinton-foundation/478

        See that? That's what we call evidence.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          > "If you're going to lie, at least pick some that aren't so easily falsifiable."

          I would give you the same advice. Your source (CharityWatch) certainly looks definitive at first glance, but I dug up this site which points out that not only does CharityWatch charge $50 just to see their ratings data, but the dude who seems to run it single-handedly has been banned by Wikipedia for lack of neutrality in responding to criticism of his little site.

          So I stand by my statements. Okay, maybe Hillary didn't get paid directly from her slush fund, but it sure made her financial health a lot better over the years of its operation, which BTW ended as soon as she lost the election.

          I guess those wealthy foreign potentates didn't feel like throwing good money after bad, eh? ;-/

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        Since you weren't following closely, know that Mrs. Clinton sold her influence as Secretary of State to many foreign leaders and organizations for world record sums, and pathetically attempted to claim they were 'donations' to her charity, the one that had 80-90% overhead costs.

        Complete BS. http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2013/311/580/2013-311580204-0b0083da-9.pdf

        Hillary received $0 from the foundation, and Let's not even compare that to Trump's fake charity that just passed on money other people put in it

        1. tom dial Silver badge

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          I doubt anyone seriously claimed that any of the Clintons made money on the Clinton Foundation other, possibly, than a trustee fee of the sort usually payable but sometimes declined.

          The question some people have raised is whether some of the gifts to the foundation were made anticipating possible benefits after Ms. Clinton's election to the presidency, especially gifts from foreign sources, some of which were governments or otherwise government-connected. Reports of significant declines in donations since the election, although mostly not from sources I think highly reputable, suggest some of them were so motivated,

    2. FuzzyTheBear
      FAIL

      Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

      Trump and Hillary .. there's 300 million Americans and the best they could find were these two boyos ?

      Really ? America is really THAT pathetic ? Guess so ..

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        "the best they could find were these two boyos ?"

        Sadly, the US does not have a monopoly on crap politicians.

    3. Suricou Raven

      Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

      Remember that even before the primary campaign starts, the majority of voters have already decided who to vote for: The D or the R. Party loyalties go back generations. They are part of cultural identity, and they are largely unshakable.

      That's why a key part of any campaign isn't just to win the undecided voters to your side, it's also to make sure those who already support your party are sufficiently enthused to actually go down to the polling station and do the vote thing.

      Plus, as should never be forgotten, Trump actually got fewer votes than Hillary. He won only because of the electoral collage, a system which was established for the sole purpose of ensuring that certain states (ie, mostly southern states with lower population density) would have an influence upon the election disproportionate to their number of voters. He won according to the rules that constitution lays out, but those rules are arcane relics from a time long-past.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        > "Trump actually got fewer votes than Hillary."

        That's a falsehood the Left constantly attempts to use to delegitimize President Trump. There was NO popular vote, only 50 separate state votes.

        Also the Left doesn't mention all the millions of Trump supporters residing in states like California and New York that didn't bother to vote, knowing their votes would have no effect against all the libs in those highly populated states. If there HAD been a true popular vote that meant something, the results would be very different. Sure Trump might have lost that way, but the point is we don't know, so saying "Trump lost the popular vote" is pure BS.

        Basically Hillary lost, period.

        Further, it seems likely that at least 1-2 million 'migrants' were able to illegally vote in those states, given how the Dems in control there made sure no picture ID was required to vote while at the same time providing driver's licenses to the illegals. Apparently having to prove you're a citizen to vote is racist or something...

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          I live in Califiornia, John. I travel, and have friends, all over the state. The only person I know who voted for the current idiot-in-chief is my FIL[0]. Of the people who didn't vote, not one claims they would have voted for Trump. I have no idea where all these supposed "Trump supporters from California who didn't bother to vote" are hiding. I've never met one. Perhaps it is ::whisper it:: FakeNews?

          If you have proof of illegal voting anywhere, post it or retract your statement. It just makes you sound like more of a sycophant than usual. And a paranoid one, to boot. It's unbecoming.

          As a side note, traditionally the "migrant" population, when naturalized, vote Republican here in California. It's a Catholic thing. So if there WAS any illegal voting on the kind of scale you are suggesting, it would have probably been in Trump's favo(u)r.

          [0] And he regrets it deeply.

        2. tom dial Silver badge

          Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

          BigJohn's hypotheticals are beside the point, as well as generally incorrect.

          - Trump did, indeed, get fewer votes than Clinton. There is no rational basis to doubt that. Yet Clinton won a majority of the vote in 13 states and the District of Columbia, and a plurality in 7 more. Trump won a majority of the votes in 23 states - nearly half - and a plurality in 7 more, and a clear majority of the presidential electors. That makes him the President. Legitimately, by the only standard that applies.

          - Any suggestion of discouraged Trump voters in California and New York (and a number of others) has to meet the opposing suggestion of discouraged Clinton voters in a number of other states. But in any case, hypothetical votes do not count.

          - The claim that more than a few handfuls of aliens or othewise unqualified people voted has no reliable support. It is pure fake news.

      2. JCitizen
        Headmaster

        Re: I'm ignorant! But I'm commenting anyway!

        @ S-Raven - The electoral college was sewn into the framework for US elections not only because in that day you actually had to pay taxes to vote, but because there were so many parties to choose from. The forefathers wisely came up with the college to prevent just what happened to the Weimar Republic when they had too many parties to make a quorum possible during a national election. This made Hitler's rise to power possible. The US wisely avoided that, even though you folks across the pond probably see Trump as just another Hitler. There is no saying Hillary could not have been just as powerful had she won, and she did have a penchant for going after enemies with more than just Tweets and riotous speech. So who is to say whether the college is obsolete or not - only history will tell. The college was conceived long before there was a North and South identity, and even the North had slaves at the time, so I'm not sure your reasoning applied to the birth of the US nation.

        It could be argued - however - that the college did delay the civil war; however once Lincoln was elected, all bets were off.

  7. FozzyBear
    Black Helicopters

    So as Secretary of state she signs and acknowledges her responsibilities, regarding the safe keeping of the information she has at her fingertips on a day to day basis. A document that unlike a software license agreement someone actually sits down and explains the responsibilities and the penalties involved breaching them.

    She then has a private email server setup, no protection, easily hacked. Multiple devices are used to send and receive said highly classified information via that private email server. Once she is caught devices are destroyed, the email server wiped cleaned. Lies about it to everyone that asks. Stated that a black guy said she could. Then stone walled any investigation into her wrong doing using her political clout.

    But it is the guy that setup the email server that will be charged. The rich and powerful go free while the worker bee that was doing as asked is left holding the bag.

    Others in the US have been locked up for a lot longer for doing a lot less in releasing classified information. Yep that's U.S. justice for you.

    1. keith_w

      According to the FBI, no she did not send or receive classified information from her server.

      1. tom dial Silver badge

        The classified emails on the servers appeared by magic! Who would have thought it possible.

      2. Suricou Raven

        The emails have already been gone over. She never sent or received anything classified at the time. There were a few things which were later retroactively classified, but that's about it. A bit of government business discussed, but only at the very vague level of making appointments and directing people to contact her through official channels.

        Some of it might technically be illegal, but it's not the treasonable offense that her opponents keep claiming.

        1. tom dial Silver badge

          "She [said] she never sent or received anything classified at the time." - Fixed.

          According to the FBI report after the investigation, she did. A few of them were top secret and some of those were further restricted to those with access to specific programs.

          Repeating untrue statements, especially those made by political office seekers, will not make them true, and on sites like this one, where quite a few of the commenters are well informed, often will elicit a correction.

    2. tom dial Silver badge

      In addition, the backups were deleted and destroyed. That was done after Secretary Clinton left office when Platte River Networks was doing the system administration, and may be why the committee is interested in hearing from Mr. Suazo.

  8. GrapeBunch

    It's confusing, but Platte River Networks = PRN = People's Republic of Nebraska. Doesn't that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?

  9. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    but what about that election promise to 'lock her up'?

    or like so many election promises, it has been quietly forgotten

    Like re-opening those WV coal mines perhaps?

    1. 2Nick3

      Re: but what about that election promise to 'lock her up'?

      The prison at Guantanamo Bay is still there, too.

      Funny how the power of the Office of the President isn't always what a candidate thinks it is.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: but what about that election promise to 'lock her up'?

        Funny how the power of the Office of the President isn't always what a candidate thinks it is.

        Yes, but Trump's the only one I can remember whining on about how hard it is.

        [Paraphrasing:]

        "Who thought health care could be so complex?"

        "I actually work more now than I did before".....

    2. Kiwi
      Trollface

      Re: but what about that election promise to 'lock her up'?

      or like so many election promises, it has been quietly forgotten

      Any claims of promises made by President Elect Trump are FAKE NEWS!. If you believe you've seen videos apparently showing President Trump making such promises, then either those videos have been faked or you are a victim of the mind control technologies funded by Hillary Clinton. I post this annonymously because as we all know Hillary also has had dozens of her enemies killed, along with 100,000,000,000,000,000 of their closest relatives.

      Isn't that how it goes Big J? Deny the existence of material that was promoted by the Republicans only days before, because it turns out such things (eg drumpf threatening/promoting violence) aren't popular after all.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Most important question

    How long are his fingers?

    1. Rich 11

      Re: Most important question

      Long enough to reach the till.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sounds a bit like a witch hunt...

    We can't go after Clinton because she's an influential politician, so let's go after the IT guy/company.

    No question whoever set up the email server screwed up, but Clinton sent Classified information through it breaking the law.

    If the decision Clinton is untouchable, stop wasting everyone's time. Personally I think she should be banned from holding public office, because she willfully circumvented the security systems put in place.

    But, I'm more disturbed that Classified commutations was allowed to flow outward to unsecured systems and no one noticed for a long time. Why isn't outgoing emails scanned flagging documents containing the "top secret" watermark?

    1. keith_w

      It is a witch hunt, just as the Republican's multiple investigations of Benghazi, and all the other investigations of "Clinton wrongdoing" were witch hunts which never found a single trace of wrong doing. The Republicans want to hang someone out to dry and if they cannot get Hillary, then they will get someone else.

      1. Someone Else Silver badge

        Can they get Herr Lügernführer tRump? In one fell swoop, they could redeem themselves from a PR standpoint, and find a favored place in the history books forever!

    2. tom dial Silver badge

      The IT company's guy (a) wiped the disks thoroughly and (b) had the backups deleted and destroyed. This at a time when it was perfectly clear to anyone smarter than a pet rock that there would be a demand for their production for an investigation. As such behavior plainly hints at obstruction, the committee may be interested in whether orders were given to do that, by whom, and whether there is documentation of that. So far, it appears that the administrator copped to doing it on his own - I believe after a grant of immunity. That may be the end of it, unless they have evidence that it is not so, in which case both he and whoever gave the order could be in trouble.

      As to scanning outgoing mail for classification marks: there were reports in generally reliable media that in some cases Secretary Clinton or one of her aides ordered "sanitization" before transmission by insecure fax. Some of the classified email material may have been included by copy/paste and omitted classification information. While either represents significant mishandling of classified material, and certainly would not declassify it, doing so would make it orders of magnitude harder to filter it. It should be noted, too, that nothing classified secret or above is permitted to be stored on a network interconnected with the public Internet.

  12. StillGridlocked

    They were running their servers in the bathroom of a condo. Probably safer than Yahoo either way.

  13. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Can anyone tell me

    Who went to prison for maintaining gwb43.com where 5-22 million emails got lost?

    1. tom dial Silver badge

      Re: Can anyone tell me

      This often repeated analogy is a false equivalence attempt. Those emails were "lost" owing to a backup failure, but later were found (in other backups, as I recall). There was no particular evidence in that case of more than operations sloppiness in a commercial entity.

      1. Someone Else Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Can anyone tell me

        Sure. And Rose Mary Woods accidentally hit the Record button, too.

  14. Anonymous Coward
  15. SolidSquid

    Given they've said he was refusing to produce things via his lawyer, I'm curious what the other side of this argument is. From the letter, they first claim that no justification was given for refusing them, but then they say that his lawyer insisted requests were made in writing (which doesn't seem unreasonable for legal documents) and that they claimed not to have anything to provide based on their reading of the supoena. Doesn't mean they didn't do anything wrong, but it does suggest there might be more to this than just "we're not telling you nothing!"

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IT guys

    Seems like a soft target to me.

  17. dubious
    Headmaster

    I thought it was standard practise for US government officials to have multiple opaque email accounts and even off-site accounts for the purposes of attempting to avoid the records act?

    In my opinion, each government office should have a published address and official business should be directed there rather than to the individual, whatever fake name they're using for their current email.

    We also need to crack down on officials claiming not to use email, as first that is ridiculous in this day and age, and secondly a strong pointer that they're up to no good if they're trying to keep stuff off the official record.

  18. Jonathon Green
    Trollface

    I like Americans, they're funny...

  19. nijam Silver badge

    The "formal letter" quoted in the article gives every appearance of being pure showboating.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A scapegoat is need to avoid exposing their hypocrisy if they go after the Clintons!

    The Clintons had been despicable, dishonest, selfish people, criminals and disloyal for several decades (even when earlier working in the legal profession), and still are, and a lot of other politicians are similar, so they will want to deflect deserved punishment for the Clintons to their underlings!

    If you don't like this, then you could work to undermine bad politicians support bases by identifying and repeatedly deliberately "triggering" many r-types (liberals,Left), to eventually switch their brains to default human K-type behaviour, so that they start to value merit more, and fake superiority, bribes, and fake virtuous actions less.

  21. Mahhn

    Clinton calls the shots

    I'll bet Treve Suazo is trying to avoid having a Seth Rich moment.

  22. Phukov Andigh Bronze badge

    interestingly enough

    two problems ignored by Clinton fans:

    1) Clinton when first approached about the existence of the server explicitly denied it's existence. Straight up lie.

    2) as a government employee she was provided with a secure, official, and AUDITABLE email system to conduct business with. And chose to ignore it without any sort of series of complaints about the system or official reasons to demand repairs or configuration changes before then going off the reservation. WHY does a Highly Placed Federal Government Official want to conduct business away from any auditable or employer monitored channels? We all know the answer to that, but seem to only remember it when one Party uses that excuse.

  23. Smedley54

    Oh my. Butt Hurt Republicans determined to harass the Clintons until the end of time. If they can't get Hillary, they'll pick off anyone that helped them. These people are pathetic.

  24. JJKing
    Megaphone

    One size fits all? Yeah BULLSHIT!

    but the law does apply to everyone, which is one of its redeeming features

    Funny that it didn't seem to apply to Dubya then and his 22 MILLION missing emails. Yes Scooter Libby did get convicted but he landed on Community Chest and picked up a presidential Get Out Of Jail card. Really not much of a punishment for such an egregious crime , eh.

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