Hillary Clinton email controversy
[18] As early as 2009, officials with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) expressed concerns over possible violations of normal federal government record-keeping procedures at the State Department under then-Secretary Clinton.
[36] In December 2012, near the end of Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, a nonprofit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a FOIA request seeking records about her email.
[51] A notable exception was during the George W. Bush administration, when dozens of senior White House officials conducted government business via approximately 22 million emails using accounts they had on a server owned by the Republican National Committee.
[52] Dan Metcalfe, a former head of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, said this gave her even tighter control over her emails by not involving a third party such as Google and helped prevent their disclosure by Congressional subpoena.
In a separate interview, he said, "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario—short of nuclear winter—where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business.
[95] Officials associated with the investigation told the media that they found no evidence supporting Lazăr's assertion,[96] and Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said "There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell.
"[125][126] An interagency dispute arose during the investigation about what constitutes “classified” status when information acquired and considered “owned” by intelligence agencies is also independently and publicly available through “parallel reporting” by the press or others.
[131] On August 10, 2015, the IC inspector general said that two of the 40 emails in the sample were "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information" and subsequently given classified labels of "TK" (for "Talent Keyhole" indicating material obtained by aerial or space-based imagery sources) and NOFORN.
"[149] Shortly after the publication of the story, the Inspectors General of the Intelligence Community and the Department of State issued a statement clarifying, "An important distinction is that the IC IG did not make a criminal referral—it was a security referral made for counterintelligence purposes.
[197]” In a letter to the Department of Justice requesting information after the arrest of former FBI New York Field Office Senior Agent Charles McGonigal, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wrote, “Because McGonigal was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office counterintelligence division in the weeks leading to the 2016 election, he may have knowledge of or have participated in political activities to damage then-candidate Hillary Clinton and help then-candidate Donald Trump.
[208] Using also state-level statistics, political operative and lawyer Lanny J. Davis argues in his book that Comey’s letter to Congress, just mere days ahead of the 2016 presidential election, significantly swifted voters away from Hillary Clinton, ultimately leading to Trump’s Electoral College victory.
[211][212][213] On June 23, 2017, several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee opened a bipartisan inquiry into whether former Attorney General Lynch interfered in the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
[224] The Washington Post also stated that "current and former officials" told them that Comey relied on the questionable document in making his July decision to announce on his own without his superiors approval that the investigation was over.
"[132] Jeffrey Toobin, in an August 2015 New Yorker article, wrote that the Clinton email affair is an illustration of overclassification, a problem written about by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book Secrecy: The American Experience.
[226] Nate Jones, an expert with the National Security Archive at George Washington University, said: "Clinton's mistreatment of federal records and the intelligence community's desire to retroactively overclassify are two distinct troubling problems.
[221] "Current and former officials" told Washington Post reporters Demirjian and Barrett that “Comey relied on the document in making his July decision to announce on his own,” because he feared its contents would be leaked, tainting the public's perception of the FBI investigation.
[224] Jane Mayer describes the work of political scientist Kathleen Hall Jamieson who argues that Comey's "damaging public pronouncements" on Clinton's handling of classified e-mails" in July and later ten days before the election can "plausibly be attributed to Russian disinformation".
[254] In an interview with Fox News in late July 2016, Clinton stated "Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails."
The exhibition, created by the American poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, was displayed from May 9 – November 24, 2019 in a balcony jutting out over a supermarket at the Despar Teatro Italia.
[260] The Times reported, "None of the Democrats interviewed went so far as to suggest that the email issue raised concerns about Mrs. Clinton's ability to serve as president, and many expressed a belief that it had been manufactured by Republicans in Congress and other adversaries.
"[11] In attempting to explain the lopsided coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review speculates, "In retrospect, it seems clear that the press in general made the mistake of assuming a Clinton victory was inevitable, and were setting themselves as credible critics of the next administration.
[268] In August 2015, Washington Post associate editor and investigative journalist Bob Woodward, when asked about Clinton's handling of her emails, said they remind him of the Nixon tapes from the Watergate scandal.
[269] On March 9, 2015, liberal columnist and Clinton supporter Dana Milbank wrote that the email affair was "a needless, self-inflicted wound" brought about by "debilitating caution" in "trying to make sure an embarrassing e-mail or two didn't become public," which led to "obsessive secrecy."
"[272] The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an editorial opining that "the only believable reason for the private server in her basement was to keep her emails out of the public eye by willfully avoiding freedom of information laws.
"[273][274] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote in The Week that "Clinton set up a personal email server, in defiance or at least circumvention of rules, with the probable motive of evading federal records and transparency requirements, and did it with subpar security.
[294] Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) took step towards filing an ethics complaint, calling the committee "the new McCarthyism", alleging it was violating both House rules and federal law by using official funds for political purposes.
[301] On March 12, 2015, in response to the uncovering of Clinton's private email account, it filed a motion to reopen the suit, alleging that the State Department had misrepresented its search and had not properly preserved and maintained records under the act.
[266][332][333][334] On March 11, 2015, the day after Clinton acknowledged her private email account, the Associated Press (AP) filed suit against the State Department regarding multiple FOIA requests over the past five years.
[337] In September 2015, the State Department filed a motion in court seeking to consolidate and coordinate the large number of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits relating to Clinton and Clinton-related emails.
"[341] In 2015, Judicial Watch and the Cause of Action Institute filed two lawsuits seeking a court order to compel the Department of State and the National Archives and Records Administration to recover emails from Clinton's server.
