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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Or calmly explain the facts of the matter and let the gentleman come to his own conclusion.
How are they relevant then?
This is relevant because, even though none of the e-mails are Clinton's, they do involve Huma Abedin, one of her closest aides who happens to be the ex- of the Wiener being investigated. So there is the possibility that one of the e-mails might contradict what Mrs. Ex-Wiener said under oath during the initial investigation into Clinton's e-mails, which would be A Bad Thing. For her. Not necessarily Clinton, though of course it'd just be another sign of the conniving and evil people she surrounds herself with, etc.
The Very Bad Thing would be if some of these e-mails involve classified material, which would indicate that Clinton was indeed storing such things on her private server, as opposed to documents that were classified later, like what came out of the first batch of e-mails. This is what could cause her some serious trouble.
The Extremely Bad Thing would be if one of the e-mails featured the videotape of Clinton planning the Benghazi attacks and laughing maniacally at the thought of murdering Americans. It's out there, and the GOP is going to find it someday, just you wait.
edited 28th Oct '16 10:47:38 PM by Tacitus
Well, Fox News is predictably treating this as what's going to keep Hillary out of the White House, but the people who watch Fox News already hated Hillary anyway. Sounds like MSNBC is already downplaying this, but again, its viewership isn't going to suddenly jump ship for Trump.
Which leaves the near-mythical "moderate" media like CNN, whose website I've noticed has already gone from "Clinton Email Investigation Reopened" to "Clinton Demands Answers" and a focus on the timing of the release as well as a pretty clear paragraph about how none of these are her emails. So they seem to be more interested in the potential political motivations behind this surprise than drooling over what might be in those emails that could disqualify Clinton.
So if this is a big scandal, it's one that's reinforcing existing viewpoints that Clinton was criminally careless with her e-mails or that Republicans are so absolutely desperate to find ammunition to use against Clinton that they've resorted to speculation over what might be uncovered later in this investigation. It's not going to change the minds of the people who already knew how'd they be voting once the candidates won their parties' nominations.
The question then is going to be how the undecided voters react. I'm going to optimistically assume that anyone who's been taking this long to make their final decision is also going to be patient enough to wait a few days more to see what, if anything, comes out of this.
It's either that or lose sleep freaking out that Trump's chances of winning might go up a few percentage points and get an ulcer in the bargain.
@Memers; No he doesn't need to say anything. Because he's not supposed to BE saying anything during an investigation. The only reason he said this much was because Congress apparently required him to. But until the investigation is done, he's not required to say anything about this stuff, and it is in fact unprofessional to do so, I'm pretty sure. Officers of the law don't tend to say much at all about ongoing investigations unless there's a damn good reason.
The revelation that the FBI has discovered additional emails convulsed the political world, and led to widespread (and erroneous) claims and speculation. Many Republicans proclaimed that the discovery suggests Clinton may have broken the law, while Democrats condemned FBI Director James Comey for disclosing this information less than two weeks before the election, claiming he did it for political purposes.
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said the development showed his opponent had engaged in corruption “on a scale we have never seen before,’’ while Clinton called for the FBI to release all of the information it has, saying the American people have a right to know everything.
The truth is much less explosive. There is no indication the emails in question were withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did anything illegal. Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton, the official said. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of the case, it did not; such investigations are never actually closed, and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that needs to be examined.
As of Friday night Comey had only said the bureau is seeking to determine whether these newly discovered emails involved classified material.
The FBI found the new evidence during an unrelated inquiry into former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner regarding an allegation that he sent illicit, sexual text messages to an underage girl in North Carolina. In the course of that investigation, agents seized a laptop computer Weiner shared with his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide who has already been questioned by the FBI during its investigation. The bureau found the emails now being examined on this shared device, which agents obtained some time ago.
This new evidence relates to how Abedin managed her emails. She maintained four email accounts—an unclassified State Department account, another on the clintonemail.com domain and a third on Yahoo. The fourth was linked to her husband’s account; she used it to support his activities when he was running for Congress, investigative records show. Abedin, who did not know Clinton used a private server for her emails, told the bureau in an April interview that she used the account on the clintonemail.com domain only for issues related to the Secretary’s personal affairs, such as communicating with her friends. For work-related records, Abedin primarily used the email account provided to her by the State Department.
Because Clinton preferred to read documents on paper rather than on a screen, emails and other files were often printed out and provided to her either at her office or home, where they were delivered in a diplomatic pouch by a security agent. Abedin, like many State Department officials, found the government network technology to be cumbersome, and she had great trouble printing documents there, investigative records show. As a result, she sometimes transferred emails from her unclassified State Department account to either her Yahoo account or her account on Clinton’s server, and printed the emails from there. It is not clear whether she ever transferred official emails to the account she used for her husband’s campaign.
Abedin would use this procedure for printing documents when she received emails she believed Clinton needed to see and when the Secretary forwarded emails to her for printing. Abedin told the FBI she would often print these emails without reading them. Abedin printed a large number of emails this way, in part because, investigative records show, other staff members considered her Clinton’s “gatekeeper” and often sent Abedin electronic communications they wanted the Secretary to see.
This procedure for printing documents, the government official says, appears to be how the newly discovered emails ended up on the laptop shared by Abedin and her husband. It is unclear whether any of those documents were downloaded onto the laptop off of her personal email accounts or were saved on an external storage device, such as a flash drive, and then transferred to the shared computer. There is also evidence that the laptop was used to send emails from Abedin to Clinton; however, none of those emails are the ones being examined by the FBI. Moreover, unless she was told by Abedin in every instance, Clinton could not have known what device her aide was using to transmit electronic information to her.
If the FBI determines that any of the documents that ended up on the shared device were classified, Abedin could be deemed to have mishandled them. In order to prove that was a criminal offense, however, investigators would have to establish that Abedin had intended to disclose the contents of those classified documents, or that she knew she was mishandling that information.
If the documents were not classified, no crime was committed. But either way, this discovery has embarrassed Clinton, even though there is no evidence at this point suggesting she has been implicated in any potential wrongdoing.
According to a letter Comey sent to the chairs of several Congressional committee on Friday, he learned of these new emails on Thursday, October 27.
His decision to immediately reveal this discovery was not a partisan act, although it was a horribly mishandled one. Arguably, he had to issue his letter because of previous statements he had made to Congress. In September, he testified that the bureau had completed its review of the evidence in the case and found no crimes had been committed. With the discovery of the information on the laptop shared by Weiner and Abedin, that sworn statement was no longer true, and there was new evidence that needed to be examined. As a result, Comey felt he was obligated to inform the committees as quickly as possible that his previous statement was now incorrect.
However, the letter he sent could well damage the reputation of the FBI as an apolitical organization for years to come. Given that Comey also testified that his agents would examine any new evidence that emerged, Democrats will undoubtedly argue that issuing a letter repeating that point was unnecessary.
In a communication to bureau employees, Comey described his letter to Congress as an attempt to thread a needle – amend his testimony while not disclosing details of an ongoing investigation. The combination, however, created a circumstance where politicians are filling in the blanks, creating a storyline of corruption that was not justified by the evidence developed by the bureau. Making it worse, the communication to the bureau employees is far more detailed than what Comey issued to Congress.
“There is a significant risk of being misunderstood,” Comey told the bureau employees in the communication, explaining why he was so vague in his letter to Congress. “It would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression.”
Unfortunately, by trying to have things both ways – revealing the change in circumstances while remaining vague about what the agents know – Comey has created that misleading impression that could change the outcome of a presidential election, an act that, if uncorrected, will undoubtedly go down as one of the darkest moments in the bureau’s history.
Comey's actions come off a little like "science by press conference" except by law enforcement rather than scientists. That is, to take a probably mostly meaningless bit of information and publicizing and way overblowing it like one has to satisfy one's own attention seeking behaviour. It comes off as improper but I dunno what the correct response - both to this and to that bit of information - would be.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanA Foreign View from The Economist: Proud to be deplorable: At a Trump rally in North Carolina, signs of a shrinking campaign
Full Article Follows:
On the night of October 26th Lexington headed to a Trump rally in Kinston, North Carolina, at a quiet rural airfield where the ex-military runway is long enough to welcome the businessman’s most potent campaign prop, his liveried Boeing 757 airliner. Using the street market as a guide, it can be reported that for Trump fans the most popular closing message of this election, by far, is to boast of being one of the millions of voters whose apparent tolerance for sexism and prejudice against Muslims, Mexicans and other outsiders Mrs Clinton recently called “deplorable”.
Alongside such hits as T-shirts declaring: “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica”, and badges reading “Trump that Bitch”, this week’s best-selling gee-gaws include badges and t-shirts that steal the image of the yellow, dungaree-clad Minions from the “Despicable Me” films, altering it by adding a Trumpian red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and the slogan “Deplorable Me.” There are buttons depicting the Founding Fathers as “deplorables”. Snowy-haired women walk about in sweatshirts that read: “Proud to be Deplorable”. As the crowd waited for Mr Trump to land, anxiously scanning the horizon for anything that looked like a Boeing (a tiny private plane was cheered by mistake at one point, until its titchy size became more clear), local Republicans played warm-up speaker and boasted of being deplorable, asking supporters to raise their hands if they were too.
It is true that declaring themselves besieged and scorned by hoity-toity elites is a sentiment that has long unified and cheered American conservatives. And it is not a complete surprise that even as bad news pours in from the world of national politics, the crowds at Kinston Jetport declared themselves undaunted, because they just know that opinion polls are being rigged by a “mainstream media” that is trying to help the Democrats win. When Lexington covered the far more genteel 2012 presidential campaign, he heard identical complaints from Republicans that polls had been “skewed”, concealing the fact that their candidate, Mitt Romney, was headed for victory.
In Kinston, a sternly conservative corner of a vital swing state, those complaints were joined by a strong whiff of conspiracy. From Fox News television to conservative talk radio, recent days have been filled with talk of voting machines in Texas that allegedly changed Republican votes to Democratic ones (every case involved voter error, Texan election officials patiently explained), or stories about a postman in Georgia who threw away Republican postal votes. Leslie Daw, a construction worker from Chocowinity, North Carolina, declared: “If he doesn’t win, it’s rigged.” Asked how the election might be rigged, he replied: “They got all the blacks and the Mexicans. They just drive them up by the busload.”
Jeff and Tara Glenn, a professional, middle-aged couple from Raleigh (we’re in real estate, they explained) shared those theories but broadened them out. “I believe the polls are inaccurate. I believe the media is swaying people kind of in a way that demoralises them from wanting to come out and vote,” said Mr Glenn. His wife was aggrieved by press reports about Mr Trump’s legal battles with sub-contractors who say that he has a habit of not paying them—reports that Mrs Clinton and Democrats often cite. “Maybe they didn’t complete the work to his standards,” Mrs Glenn said, adding: “And why don’t we hear about Hillary and Bill’s alleged son, and how they used to pay his mother $700 a month?” Where had Mrs Glenn seen news about that, Lexington asked? On You Tube, Mrs Glenn replied.
Lexington asked several supporters whether they thought North Carolina might see a rigged election (they did), then, noting that it has a Republican-run state government, asked why they thought Republicans might connive in such acts. Michael Aman, the retired owner of an electronics business, pondered this for a moment. “I don’t know, unless they have some sort of a hidden agenda,” he finally said.
Good Question.
The queasy Republicans that Mr Trump needs—folk such as college-educated whites and suburban women, who have deserted him in historic numbers—are not about to put on a “Adorable Deplorable” badge. Even if they dislike Mrs Clinton with a passion, and resent her criticism of Republicans, they do not actually want to declare themselves candidates for being deplored, because they side with a candidate who constantly appeals to bigotry. To simplify things still further, to become president of America, a candidate needs to win about 65m votes or so. Yes, the electoral college makes the process more complicated, but still, to sit behind the big desk in the White House, drawing anything far short of that popular vote will not do. Even after this strangest of elections, Lexington does not believe there are 65m Americans who want to call themselves deplorable.
This is a campaign that in its final days is turning inwards and shrinking, not trying to grow its vote. Part of this involves basic competence. North Carolina is one of many states with early voting, and the rally on October 26th was sprinkled with volunteers in neon green shirts signing people up to vote early. But where Lexington stood, his nearest volunteer was simply standing at a fence, looking for Mr Trump’s plane. The North Carolina Republican Party’s vice-chair even scolded the volunteer as she walked to the podium to make a speech. “Green shirt!” she barked, shooing him with her hand. “Work the crowd! Sign people up!”
As for the grislier task of depressing the Democratic vote, Mr Trump has more than enough material to work with. Recent days have seen fresh leaks of mortifying emails from Mrs Clinton’s inner circle, stolen by hackers on the orders of the Russian government, according to American spy chiefs, and released the WikiLeaks website. They show some of the Democratic nominee’s closest aides grumbling about her “terrible” instincts and her self-destructive obsession with secrecy. At the same time, the Obama administration released new figures showing that premiums for health insurance plans bought under the Obamacare health law will rise for many Americans by 25% or so (though most low-income clients will be compensated by higher government subsidies).
A more disciplined campaigner would have made hay with these points. Mr Trump did, indeed, mention the latest WikiLeaks emails and Obamacare, drawing howls of “lock her up” from the crowd and even some chants of “burn her at the stake”. But as so often, he squandered long minutes defending himself against some perceived personal slight. This time, he was cross that pundits and politicians had chided him for spending the morning opening a new hotel in Washington, DC rather than campaigning in swing states. On the tarmac at Kinston, hours after that hotel opening, Mr Trump sounded whiny and rambling, saying that his children had helped him build the new hotel and he had wanted to be there for him. Then he drifted into a riff about how Mrs Clinton did not have the energy to do as many events. Just to offer a flavour of a Mr Trump ramble, here is what he said next:
“We have the biggest crowds, because you know what, we have a movement. Like nobody has ever seen before. The pundits, Bill O’Reilly but many of the pundits, say it is the greatest, it is the single greatest political phenomenon they have ever seen. So I built this building, you have to understand, I never practically go home, I work all the time. Hillary goes, she makes a little speech, she reads her teleprompter, she gets in her plane she goes home and starts to sleep.”
There was more. The crowd was supportive—though to fact-check the nominee it was not very big, with expanses of empty tarmac visible. “’That’s right Trump,” a man bellowed repeatedly from behind your columnist's right ear. But for Republicans hoping to win this general election, Mr Trump’s incredible shrinking campaign looks ever more like a deplorable mistake.
As as aside, the comments for the online article do contain the usual vitriol (and an accusation that the reporter was funded by the Clintons!note ).
Although, I suspect that President Trump would introduce press censorship and would probably banish foreign news organisations from the US.
edited 29th Oct '16 5:40:25 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnDonald Trump Is Running Some Really Insecure Email Servers
The findings come at a time when cybersecurity is a crucial topic in the presidential election, with hackers dumping documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign online, and Trump and his supporters continuing to criticise Clinton’s use of a private email server.
“Running outdated software and operating systems for your publicly facing email infrastructure is problematic, especially when you're a high profile organisation,” security architect Kevin Beaumont, who highlighted the issues with Trump’s servers, told Motherboard in an email. “During an election where cybersecurity is such a big issue, I was a little amazed at what I saw.”
A number of mail servers for Trump Org.com, a domain registered to The Trump Organization, are using end-of-life software, according to Beaumont. Those include the operating system Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0, which comes shipped with it.
“IIS is a webserver, and it’s particularly dangerous to run unpatched,” Beaumont told Motherboard.
According to Microsoft’s official website, “Microsoft will no longer issue security updates for any version of Windows Server 2003. If you are still running Windows Server 2003 in your datacenter, you need to take steps now to plan and execute a migration strategy to protect your infrastructure.” Microsoft ended support for that operating system in July 2015.
“It's rather worse than just using an out of date OS that can’t be kept up to date with security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered,” Professor Alan Woodward, visiting professor at the University of Surrey’s Department of Computer Science, told Motherboard in a Twitter message. “The configuration of the server appears to be somewhat less than ideal.”
On top of all this, Beaumont said the email service only uses single factor authentication. That is, users can’t link a device, say their mobile phone, to receive an extra login code, and to keep their account more secure.
It’s important to point out that Beaumont is only looking at public records and information: he said he hasn’t run any advanced scans on the servers.
“Obviously, there is a lot more which could be looked into—but I'm just looking at publicly available information, I have no interest in accessing these systems,” he told Motherboard.
Others might though.
For months, the character known as Guccifer 2.0 has dumped hacked documents from organisations such as the Democratic National Committee, and has claimed to have provided emails to Wiki Leaks for publication as well. Over the last week, Wiki Leaks has published a steady stream of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.
Based on publicly available information, experts widely believe Guccifer 2.0 to be part of a Russian hacking operation. Earlier this month, the US government officially accused Russia of breaching the Democratic party’s computer systems, and claimed that Russia was trying to interfere in the US election.
Regardless, this certainly isn’t the first time that some sort of Trump-run operation has exposed itself. In August, The Register reported that Trump’s online store wasn’t encrypting customer’s credit card details. And last month a researcher found that Trump’s website had left myriad intern applications openly accessible on the internet.
At the time of writing, Trump.com, which Trump Org.com redirects to, has a message that reads, “Thank You for Visiting. We’re Currently Experience [sic] a High Volume of Traffic, Please Check Back Soon.” The organisation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Update: A Trump Organization spokesperson sent us the following comment:
"The Trump Organization deploys best in class firewall and anti-vulnerability technology with constant 24/7 monitoring. Our infrastructure is vast and leverages multiple platforms which are consistently monitored and upgraded using current cyber security best practices."

The news media are probably going to look really stupid here if there really is nothing relating to Clinton involved.
Right now, a lot of it is coming off as "OH GOD THERE MIGHT BE SOMETHING BAD AFTER ALL!!!!!!" When the truth looks an awful lot like "Eh, the new e-mails mention Clinton once or twice, they're more focused on that guy who ruined his career three times because he couldn't stop sending dick picks."
It ain't going to help the reputation of the news media in the long run.