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Comment by davidf18 | Hacker News Reader

The newest Wikileaks demonstrates that Obama lied when he said he learned of Clinton's use of her private email server when the American public did. He received emails from her private email address according to the hacked emails.

So, apparently Obama lied to us.

But furthermore, when he received these government emails from her private account (hrcoffice.com ?), he knew that she was risking national security and breaking laws doing what she was doing, but he did not report her to the FBI or anyone having to do with security.

EDIT: This story [1] linked to by the NYT article, Clinton's senior aide said that Clinton "could not use a computer." and did not know her own email password, having to rely upon aides.

PCs have been ubiquitous for 35 years, how is it possible?

[1] http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/hillary-clinton-emails...

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Maybe he is lying, maybe not, but I would hardly say this is proof. Most mail programs today default to showing the name of the sender, not their address. Even if he did see the server name, I would imagine he has many more things on his mind.

And, let's say he did know she was using an outside server -- that doesn't mean that he would have any reason to suspect that she was sending classified info through it: in fact, only a tiny handful of emails containing classified information have been recovered.

She had apparently talked to Colin Powell about how to handle information and it seems like the advice he gave her was to just try to not send or receive any classified data and that's what it looks like she was doing as there weren't any emails that contained classified headers or footers that I know of (which are how you generally would know if something was classified). I doubt Obama knew she had classified information on the server unless he dug through all of her actual emails.

I don't think Colin Powell gave her that advice. The reason is that he and others know that all government business, whether classified or not, must be on government servers because by law, there must be a record of all government emails. Again, by law, this information can be disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests, something which Clinton wanted to avoid.

A quick google would reveal that he did in fact give this advice:

"He did write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department," a Powell spokeswoman said.

75% of people probably don't understand domain names/servers; in his position, I would have assumed it was a secure, govt server. Plus, the past secretary of state did the same, and the Bush administration deleted millions of emails (not just a few thousand)

> 75% of people probably don't understand domain names/servers; in his position, I would have assumed it was a secure, govt server

I think we should credit a Harvard Law grad and undergrad Columbia Univ. that has security staff and technical staff briefing him that he would know that government domains end in ".gov" and not ".com" I believe that he would know that the SOS email address domain is "state.gov"

Regarding past SOS, ..... Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was appointed after AG Gonzales was dismissed wrote that criminal charges should be filed [1].

[1] Clinton’s Emails: A Criminal Charge Is Justified Hillary’s explanations look increasingly contrived as evidence of malfeasance mounts day by day. http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-emails-a-criminal-charg...

EDIT: From the article: "When asked whether she had her server “wiped,” she assumed an air of grandmotherly befuddlement: “What, like with a cloth or something?” she said. “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”

The current news, reported in the Journal and elsewhere, is that her server contained information at the highest level of classification, known as SAP, or Special Access Program. This is a level so high that even the inspector general for the intelligence community who reported the discovery did not initially have clearance to examine it."

How often do you read the domains of the people that send you emails? Also how is it surprising that Hillary, who is almost 70, can't use computers. I'm sick of these scandals on both sides with one side assuming Clinton is a Bond villian and the other side perfectly ready the think Trump is literally Hitler

The IBM PC was available when Hilary was 35, hardly an old person to learn how to use a computer, especially since she is a lawyer who would presumably use computers (as lawyers do) for typing legal documents, performing searches through WestLaw, etc.

Hilary was 50 when web browsing on the Internet became available. She was intelligent enough to get into Yale Law school, so one might expect she might be intelligent enough to understand a little bit about email.

Clinton, according to a former Attorney General, broke the law as mentioned in the WSJ column as linked above. She used her own private email server for government email so that emails could be destroyed so as not to be made public through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Many of the political and media elites are critical of Trump, but nothing he has done is as serious as what Hilary has with the emails and the attempts to cover them up.

Many of the elites misstate Trump. He is not against immigrants, he is against illegal immigration. He is hardly a misogynist, since he hired a woman to be in charge of his construction company in the 1980's.

I work for a legal software company so I can tell you that there are still lawyers practicing now who cannot use computers almost at all despite being very smart people. It's just a matter of perspective. She talked to the previous person in her job to figure out what to do and then she did what he said. There was nothing found that was marked classified, which would have made is so she obviously knew exactly what she was doing, so it just seems to me that she didn't really understand the situation and was lax in dealing with information that should've been classified. I haven't seen anything not circumstantial that she purposefully put classified information on this server.

> I work for a legal software company so I can tell you that there are still lawyers practicing now who cannot use computers almost at all despite being very smart people.

Don't they have to type reports or briefs while in law school using Word? Don't they have to use WestLaw and other search programs in law school? Don't they buy things on Amazon? Search for articles in Wikipedia?

> so it just seems to me that she didn't really understand the situation....

There were people telling her not to use the private server. Moreover, I think almost anyone working for government would understand that official Secretary of State business belongs on government emails and servers and not an email server in one's home with private email addresses.

She was doing what she was doing so she could delete the emails so that people could not do Freedom of Information Act requests.

Lawyers do now but they used to search through large books for them and it's only in maybe the last decade or two that computer skills really became important and many law firms were really resistant to computerization. She hasn't practiced law it seems since before I was born and I can pretty easily say that you could have definitely been a lawyer then without computer skills. I don't think the whole thing was against FOIA requests. I might be wrong but I thought she had originally tried to get a more secured blackberry like Obama has and that would've been subject to FOIA requests. She deleted emails before turning them over to the FBI because she didn't want them subject to an FOIA request but as someone who would not want every conversation on his phone public I can't get too mad about it. As always my opinion on it is same as my opinion on most dumb things people have done, mindbogglingly stupid, but not malicious.

Fun Fact: I was talking to a Westlaw salesman and apparently when the Westlaw website first came out he was trying to sell it to a law office and after telling the lawyer how much time he was going to save because of it he just replied "why would I want to save time when I bill by the hour".

> "why would I want to save time when I bill by the hour".

:-)

Another reason besides security for using government servers is that the emails were supposed to be available for FOIA requests by law.

I can certainly see why someone may not want to be subject to FOIA for any kinds of mistakes, etc. but that is the law. If Clinton didn't like the idea of FOIA so very much, she should not have become Secretary of State (or a Senator for that matter).

I didn't make any criticisms of Trump but I think that many of these "scandals" are things that are overblown and taken out of context. I disagree with him on many policy issues but the main thing I don't like about him is how he does politics. He has picked fights and burned bridges with many major Republican leaders, and is even more disliked than Clinton currently. What is he going to accomplish domestically or globally when he can't even seem to get his own Vice President pick to back him up on stuff?

The Republican elites like Paul Ryan and Wall Street Financier Paul Singer as well as others hate Trump because he is against illegal immigration. He is against trade pacts. Both of these displace American workers. Most of the Republican candidates wanted to grant some form of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Of all the Republican candidates, only Trump complained when Carrier air conditioners closed an Indiana factory transferring jobs to Mexico (Sanders also complained, but not Clinton).

The truth is that the Republican elites did not care about the working class, Trump responds to their suffering. Many of the Republican elites could care less about voters -- they though they could win the Republican candidacy with money. Jeb Bush wasted $130 million, at least in part because he was responding to donor needs and not voter needs.

My impression is they more hate Trump because he is taking the party in a different direction than they want and has also said some things that many people think do not reflect well on the Republican party. I do agree though on the influence of money in politics and that's one thing that's so interesting about Trump is that he just seems to say whatever he wants.

He is taking the party in a different direction -- one that favors the working class over Wall Street. Meg Whitman a Republican who ran for governor of California and Head of HP said Trump would make it harder for HP to hire H1-B visa workers. He is anti NAFTA anti TPP and TPP trade because he is trying to protect working class jobs. They are pro illegal immigrants amnesty.

When Carrier air conditioner closed a plant in Indiana moving the jobs to Mexico Trump and Sanders spoke out vociferously. No other Republican cared at all because they were receiving Wall Street funding. Hilary also didn't speak out about Carrier. Like the Republican candidates she is close to Wall Street. She received $675,000 for 3 talks to Goldman. Sanders repeatedly asked her to release the text of the talks but she refused. Wikileaks finally released the text last month.

Trump is for paying H1-b at least as much as Americans.

That makes sense. I don't agree with you on many things and I don't think we would convince each other if we argued all day but it was interesting seeing the different points of view and you gave me some stuff to think about

I don't agree with Trumps demeanor, but the Republicans are the one who made him the candidate by listening to Wall Street (Jeb Bush had $130 million) and other wealthy and their money and not listening to the suffering of the working class.

Remarkably, if one looks at the press accounts early in the campaign, the candidates vent at Trump instead of changing their platform to respond to the wish of the voters. Perhaps it is because they were afraid of losing Wall Street funded campaign funding.

From reading daily summaries of the Podesta emails, the email server is just one of many felonies this enterprise has been committing.

The corruption of the political machine laid bare. I'm sure the emails of every party in the world would reveal similar shenanigans; which really makes a mockery of the rule of law.

To me the existence of the email server is less damning than the clear evidence they were coordinating with "independent" groups, which is illegal and not very difficult to understand. That is, this isn't some technical restriction only lawyers understand - they were breaking the law and they knew they were breaking the law.

I'm amazed Clinton tried to make so much hay out of Citizens United when she refused to follow campaign finance laws that pass constitutional muster.

I don't think it follows. Because the address was hrcoffice then she had a server in her house? No, I don't think you should expect Obama to make that leap.

He would know that she was not using a state.gov or at least a ".gov" domain name and what is a private domain name. Of course, he would not know the location per-se, but he should have alerted the appropriate authorities to put a stop to her use of a non-secure email for government business. The use of government servers not only are for security to prevent hacking but also in order to keep an official government record of all government business. This official record can then be made public through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Obama would know this.

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