The NYTimes walks back the premises behind its own coverage of E-ghazi with a forehead-slapping article.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
It's hard to follow the anti HRC arguments as they proceed to the final resting place of "Well, it has an appearance of impropriety as shown by all the articles that wrongly asserted she broke rules".
But the NYTimes seemed to settle on two areas of concern: HRC chose which emails were official and which were personal, and HRC didn't immediately turn over those emails immediately to be stored with the government.
As to HRC deciding which emails were official to be turned over:
Although the White House has strict requirements dating back two decades that every email must be saved, there is no such requirement for federal agencies. Instead they are in charge of setting their own policies for determining which emails constitute government records worthy of preservation and which ones may be discarded.
“It really is chaos across the government in terms of what agencies do, what individuals do, and people understand that they can decide what they save and what they don’t,” said Patrice McDermott, the director of the transparency watchdog group OpenTheGovernment.org.
As to HRC taking two years to turn them over:
Mr. Obama signed legislation late last year requiring government officials who use personal email addresses for official business to bring those records into the government within 20 days. Before that, the National Archives and Records Administration simply required those messages at some point to be provided to the government.
But the article still ends with what's really important: a gotcha for Hillary Clinton:
As part of a settlement in that case, a little-known staff secretary to President Bill Clinton drafted a memo laying out the new policy: Email had to be preserved and external networks should not be used because those messages would not be retained.
The aide’s name was John D. Podesta. “Podesta helped push the White House essentially into the digital age and created electronic archiving,” said Mr. Blanton, of the National Security Archive.
In January, Mr. Podesta left his post as a senior counselor to Mr. Obama. His anticipated new job: chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential campaign.
Yes! Booyah! Got her right there! Because a low level staffer was tasked with coming up with a new policy for the White House, and he later might work for HRC, HRC should have used her down time while SOS to review all of the department's rules, figure out what should be done, and just do whatever that is and then, nobody would ever criticize her!
Pretty funny, because even in retrospect, nobody in or out of government pretends to have the perfect solution to archiving tons of emails. From the article.
“You’ll find this with any cabinet head,” Tom Reynolds, an E.P.A. spokesman, said of generic government email addresses. “You just can’t use those because you’d just get inundated with emails. It’s not pragmatic.”
Or, some use Bob Gate's solution and just don't put anything official in writing at all. How does it help us archive information if the needs to record simply cause people to avoid recording anything?
Robert M. Gates, who was defense secretary to Mr. Obama as well as President George W. Bush, never even had a government email account, a former aide said. When Mr. Gates sent email, it was from his personal account, usually reserved for sharing jokes or making dinner plans, the aide added.
“He thought it was just cleaner to keep these things separate and distinct, and ultimately not to do anything over email” related to his job, said the aide, who was not authorized to detail Mr. Gates’s email habits.
Look, politics ain't beanbag, but nobody has to suffer fools gladly because those fools have decided that Clinton is to be judged by a "standard" that's is applied only to her, which is the opposite of a "standard". People who don't like pushback should get thicker skins.