This is an issue because it meant that classified government secrets ended up on her private server. The security of her private server is very unlikely to have been as good as the security of the government's servers. It also gave her control over what should and should not be provided to the government, made public via freedom of information requests, passed on the Congressional committees, etc.
[prh47bridge Sat 29-Oct-16 10:00:39]
This is extremely important, and not just for historians or people writing biographies fifty years from now.
This is day-to-day, really important stuff because the holder of an office must be above board and must be seen to be above board, and because public scrutiny of decisions is what democracy is all about. The equally important second reason besides security to have a government e-mail system is transparency. No transparency = the suspicion of underhand decision making = ultimately the end of democracy.
There certainly is a lot of visceral hatred for Hillary.
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/opinion/sunday/how-hillary-clinton-met-satan.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0 This is a neat explanation of how it got started and gathered momentum.
However, just because people who are very objectionable hate you doesn't mean you are incapable of doing really stupid and maybe even borderline criminal things, and some of the issues that this e-mail(gate) business brings up are:
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Does HRC think she is more important than or bigger than or indistinguishable from the office she holds?
This is really important because your correspondence as Secretary of State is not your personal correspondence. It is the correspondence of the Secretary of State and it should be available for scrutiny by the people and by their representatives and by law enforcement agencies with no law firms vetting it all first.
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Is HRC loyal to the point of blindness to those who are loyal to her?
Questions about judgement are valid here.
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Is HRC capable of making really stupid and dangerous choices because she is not as concerned with details as she should be, or because she thinks she and those in her circle are teflon coated and immune to problem contagion? This brings up the question of disregard for public opinion and also disregard for the law, and more personal qualities like belief in her mission or her destiny causing problems of perspective (by perspective I mean understanding that her role is to represent).
Huma Abedin's stbxh Anthony Weiner has been in hot water for many years now because of sexting. Yet she and he apparently shared a laptop, and apparently confidential material was dealt with using that laptop. www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/1/huma-abedin-often-handled-classified-data-on-compu/
Weiner is a man who was incredibly vulnerable to blackmail, a man who went out positively looking for trouble. This has been known for years by everyone who reads a newspaper or watches the news in the US. This should have made HRC more concerned about the 'small details' of what devices were used by her team, given that she had decided to use a private server.
I agree with Pluto here. The candidates are Turd 1 and Turd 2. I would never identify as Republican and never vote Republican, but I am very glad that DD2 who is a staunch Hillary supporter will not be coming home for Thanksgiving this year. It gets hot enough in my small kitchen without all the grief we would have if she and I and DS were to bring up the topic of the election.
I am glad the FBI Director decided to make the new investigation public. I do not believe has has violated the Hatch Act. His hands were tied and he stood in jeopardy of being accused of purposeful and political silence if he had not made news of the new investigation public. This way he has fulfilled his duty to the people of the US, and the people of the US are in fact the people he answers to, not the Clinton campaign or the Democratic Party.
Additionally, if HRC is elected and tempted to make his head roll, he now has good reason to claim that any future firing of him was politically motivated in order to quelch further investigation and/or as payback for the investigation that has already been carried out. He has also taken steps toward patching cracks in the FBI, some parties in which were immensely angered by the outcome of the previous investigation (no prosecution). I believe he is safeguarding the integrity of his agency and of his office. The criticism that he has attracted from Democratic Party leaders and the HRC campaign is akin to that leveled at Mark Carney, Governor of the BoE, by rabid Brexiters, and it is just as unseemly and disgraceful.
I feel really strongly about keeping the distinction between the person who holds the office and the office itself very clear. HRC should have used the government e-mail system and should not have confused her own person with that of her official role. That is where the rot set in and imo there is a personality issue to blame for the instinct to keep material off the record.
Not sure if UK posters can see this www.pbs.org/video/2365848966/ documentary produced by PBS on the two candidates and threads that have run through each of their lives.
I think what she did bespeaks arrogance and a lack of respect for the institutions that are set up to safeguard democracy - ultimately those institutions have to be bigger than the people who occupy the leading roles in them and function within them. The alternative is people in roles where they do not think themselves answerable to the people. I am not sure someone who says she didn't even think of that aspect of things really understands where she ends and her office begins, and that is a huge problem.