Comment by joshuamerrill

With the current administration I expect that fierce loyalty trumps both competence and accountability. Sadly, I expect to see many more such examples of amateur hour.

    > through gross negligence

If you talk to someone with a law degree (judge, lawyer, whatever), they will tell you that "gross negligence" is very high barrier to cross in US law. Most people misunderstand that. It is very unlikely that any of the people in that chat group would be found grossly negligent, especially for their first mistake. Please do not read that last sentence as an apology or excuse for their behaviour; they should be reprimanded for it.

Why would the FBI investigate anyone who would be pardoned by the president anyway?

Gabbard confirmed that no classified information was contained in the conversation.

T took a top secret binder about Russian election interference to his beach house and we never got it back.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...

Right, among the reasons not to use Signal for this sort of thing is that it is explicitly difficult to verify within Signal that a contact is who you think it is. It can be a secure channel if used correctly. This shows these people are not using it correctly.

Yeah, they do. The US Attorneys and the Attorney General are allowed to give input typically into whether any investigation is prosecutable.

Now did they investigate it? Probably not.

What's interesting to me is that personal phones were not seized for forensic examination though.

Were the phones hacked by foreign agents? What other uses was signal used for?

The fact that nobody on the thread spoke up and said "we shouldn't be talking about this on Signal" worries me greatly.

One possible explanation is that it happens all the time.

> There was no classified information on Clinton's server.

This is absolutely false, or as the kids call it, "misinformation".

A 3 second Google search confirms:

100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department.

The whole issue with her emails is she purposely never labeled anything so as to have plausible deniability.

It is significantly more severe than the diplomatic cables and the other leaks that Assange and Manning each did a decade for.

It looks like it was approved only for CIA use with permissible use. Even though it was installed, did not mean it was suitable for all communications.

Here's the important relevant quote:

    "It is permissible to use to communicate and coordinate
     for work purposes. Provided that any decisions that are 
     made are also recorded through formal channels. So 
     those were procedures that were implemented. My staff 
     implemented those processes," Ratcliffe said.

    "My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message 
     group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not 
     include classified information," he added.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-director-john-ratcliffe-defen...

I think that there is a parallel story to this one that is equally as interesting. There is one group of consumers of this story who see the receipts provided by Jeffery Goldberg, along with confirmation of their authenticity from a spokesperson at the National Security Council, followed by admissions by cabinet member participants of the Signal chat in hearings before congress, and those consumers of all this news can only conclude that the evidence is about as conclusive as you can get that Jeffery Goldberg is telling the truth, that these people are sharing the names of active intelligence officers, and describing imminent plans of action of the US military.

Then there is another group of consumers of this story, with the same access to all of the same evidence, and all of the same first person confirmations, who confidently declare the argument that this might be illegal null and void because Joe Biden allowed the CIA to use signal, and are persuaded away from accepting all of that evidence by articles with that contain such gems as "what the media wont tell you about the Atlantic hit piece", "Democrats talking points on this story quickly unraveled", and "help us continue to expose the lefts desperate attempts to manufacture scandals".

How can propaganda be so effective that people lose the skill of object permanence?

lol no, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about

In reading deeper, many or most of these "classified" emails are comments on news stories that revealed information that another department would rather keep secret, such as news articles about CIA drone strikes, while the CIA at the time wouldn't acknowledge they had a a drone program.

Clinton argued at the time that such emails aren't and shouldn't be classified, since she didn't discuss any information sourced from the CIA, but only the publicly available news article. That seems to me to be at least a reasonable stance.

And Hillary sat in front of Congress for 11 hours.