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Comment by therobot24

9 years ago

>> She is also supposedly not the first Secretary of State to have an arrangement of this nature.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/...

Politifact rates this idea mostly false.

They rated the statement 'my predecessors did the exact same thing' mostly false. Editorial choice -- they could have rated the statement 'none of my predecessors followed proper procedure for email either' and found it true.

Powell maintained his own email but without the server in his house, Rice claims she avoided all email, so we have exactly 0 secretaries of state who've handled email 'the right way' in 220-some-odd years of this fine country.

Indeed. I believe she should be investigated and prosecuted for this, but I nevertheless think it remains a mostly credible claim with respect to Powell. If I understand correctly, Politifact makes the argument that Powell used a personal e-mail address at an established service whereas Clinton installed her own mail server.

As someone who believes strongly in revitalizing self-hosting, I find focusing on Hillary's use of a personal mail server (and not on the fact that it was not an official e-mail account, full stop) to be unfairly marginalizing personal mail servers or personal servers in general. There's nothing wrong about running your own mail server. The problem is running your own mail server to give yourself a personal e-mail account to use in your job as Secretary of State. But the key part is using a personal e-mail account for your job that involves dealing with highly sensitive and classified materials—an action that would get most government employees fired if not imprisoned.