Nobody on Hillary Clinton’s staff read her ‘personal’ emails before they deleted them

 Hillary Clinton admitted that roughly 30,000 of the emails she sent from her personal email server while performing State Department business were deleted because they were personal in nature and were unrelated to official business. I do not doubt that this is the case in some circumstances; it would be hard to believe that she did not use this server for personal reasons and I think even the biggest Clinton hater would have to admit this. 

  We just have to trust her when she says no official government emails were deleted and that is where I have a problem, especially with the new revelation that nobody actually read the so-called personal emails before they were deleted.

  Here is more:

the former Secretary of State explained, those rules bless her decision to erase some 30,000 emails from the family server despite knowing that the emails had become a subject of intense interest to congressional investigators. These were merely “private personal emails,” Clinton averred, “emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.” After she finished taking questions, Clinton’s staff disclosed that no one actually read through those 30,000-odd documents before she “chose not to keep” them.

She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”

This strikes experts as a haphazard way of analyzing documents. Jason R. Baron, a former lawyer at the National Archives and Records Administration who is now an attorney in the Washington office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, says, “I would question why lawyers for Secretary Clinton would use keyword searching, a method known to be fraught with limitations, to determine which of the emails with a non-.gov address pertained to government business. Any and all State Department activities–not just communications involving the keywords Benghazi or Libya–would potentially make an email a federal record. Given the high stakes involved, I would have imagined staff could have simply conducted a manual review of every document. Using keywords as a shortcut unfortunately leaves the process open to being second-guessed.”

  So, Hillary Clinton and her lawyers deemed that any emails with certain keywords were personal and therefore were deleted without being checked, but the truth is that nobody knows what was in those emails because nobody took a look at them. If Hillary Clinton was involved in something nefarious which she knew would eventually come under scrutiny I do not think it is a stretch to wonder if when writing official government emails she included these keywords to justify their deletion if it was ever called into question.

  Am I way off base here? Am I being too conspiratorial? Maybe so, but Hillary Clinton and her husband are considered to be two of the smartest politicians in America, and for just reasons, and as such it is hard to believe they did not have all of their bases covered from the beginning. In my opinion this raises even more questions…

Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium