Well, the presser finally started at 3 p.m. - a full 40 minutes late.
Hillary basically claimed she used the private server for convenience and didn't think it would be a big deal. She made four claims of fact right at the beginning.
She opted for "convenience" to use her personal e-mail account because she thought it would be easier to use one device for her work and personal e-mails. Looking back, she thinks, it would have been better to use two phones and two accounts, but she didn't think it would be an issue.
The vast majority of her work e-mails went to government employees at their government addresses so they were captured and preserved on the State Department system.
The State Department asked her and other former Secretaries of State. She provided all that would have been "possibly work related," which is what the 55,000 pages consisted of. She chose not to keep her personal ones, like the planning of Chelsea's wedding and so forth.
She took the "unprecedented step" of asking the State Department to make all her work-related e-mails available for the public to see.
Now the problems here are obvious. She can claim all day long that she turned over everything that was work-related, but there's no way to know for sure if that's the truth because no one can examine the full record.
It's true that anything she e-mailed to the government server would have been preserved, but nothing she sent to, say, the governments of Saudi Arabia or the UAE would be preserved.
Also, why print 55,000 pages and turn them over rather than deliver the e-mails in searchable, electronic form?
Here's a rundown of the Q&A:
The first questioner asked if she would be getting these questions if she was a man, so that guy's clearly an idiot.
In response to a question from Andrea Mitchell about her being the sole arbiter of which e-mails were "work-related" and should be saved, she claims that the State Department left it up to each individual to make that call. I doubt that's true, but even if it is, it's misleading because every other employee would have their e-mails backed up on the government server. Hillary wouldn't.
In response to a question, she denies that she deleted any government-related e-mails. Ignores a question about what she's willing to do to prove it.
In response to a question about the private server that she owned, and whether she cleared it with State Department security officials, she says it was set up for Bill's office and it had "numerous safeguards" and there were no security breaches. We're just supposed to take her word on that. She ignores the question about whether she cleared it with State Department security officials.
She keeps insisting that every federal employee makes the decision about what to keep and what to delete. That's a total dodge. If it's on a .gov server, you can't just unilaterally wipe all your e-mails from the system because there is backup. Ask Lois Lerner about that.
She ignores a question about whether she would let a third party examine her e-mails.
In response to a question about the clear nature of State Department rules on this matter, she claims the rules and regulations allowed her to use her e-mail for work, and claims that is "undisputed." (Of course, that is not true.)
She insists she never e-mailed any classified material using her private e-mail account. She ignores a question about e-mailing the president from it and thus exposing his e-mail address to hackers.
David Schuster asked her about the firing of the Ambassador to Kenya three years ago, in part for doing the same thing. She claimed that if he read the report on the firing he would find that was not why he was fired. That's a lie. I've read it. There was a long section about that very issue and yes it was absolutely part of why he was fired. Hillary lied.
No one asked why she turned over her e-mails in printed form rather than electronically in a searchable database.
Basically she did nothing to justify or shed light on anything she did. She just claimed that everything she did was within the rules and the law, and that she met all her obligations. That's obviously not true.
Also telling were the questions she ignored. Did she clear this with State Department security officials? She ignored that question. Would she let a third party examine her e-mail? Ignored that one too.
She was like a suspect under indictment making a defiant proclamation that she had broken no laws. It's total BS, but she says it anyway and dares you to prove otherwise. I doubt she helped herself today, but I guess we'll have to see how it plays.
