What’s the big deal, one might ask, about Hillary Clinton using a private account for her e-mails when she was Secretary of State? Maybe it was a technical violation of a very minor law, but lots of us use work e-mail for personal reasons and personal e-mail for work, so what does it matter?
Well, this was not a matter of using a g-mail or Yahoo account. Mrs. Clinton had her own server with sophisticated secrecy features, protecting her messages from media and legal requests under the transparency laws. The normally sympathetic Chris Cillizza explains why this is, in fact, a big deal after the jump.
From Chris Cillizza, The Hillary Clinton e-mail story just keeps getting worse for her – The Washington Post:
Hard on the heels of the New York Times scoop Monday night that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private e-mail account to conduct business as secretary of state comes this report Wednesday morning by the Associated Press:
The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.
The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton’s secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.
Uh oh.
There’s any number of problematic phrases in those two paragraphs but two stand out: (1) “impressive control over limiting access to her message archives” and (2) “secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians.”
Let’s take them one by one.
[Keep reading. . .]
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