Megalextoria

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned over 30,000 emails she’d sent using a private server to the State Department, she gave the government a hard copy.

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Instead of, uh—what’s that thing, where you transfer a message electronically? And then you don’t have to print it out? And that’s instantly searchable by the recipient computer?

Oh right, emailing! Instead of emailing the emails to the State Department or transferring them via some other convenient, digital method, she printed all 30,000.

Once the papers arrived at State, they had to be re-digitized, a process which took 12 employees more than 2,400 hours at taxpayer expense.

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But it gets worse.

As Newsbusters points out, giving the State Department print copies allowed Clinton to conceal quite a lot of important information:

Investigators will not get the background “electronic fingerprint,” which is not displayed to either the writer or the recipient. This can include (the) originating IP address (as opposed to the email address itself), the server it was sent from, timing information that cannot be easily manipulated (as opposed to the header, which is easy to type or alter in paper format), and whether or not there was an attachment at some point in a multi-level conversation. By handing them over in print, she destroys the data integrity.

Source: Hillary Clinton’s decision to print her emails was actually really deceptive

In one of her last gigs on the paid lecture circuit, Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed an eBay summit aimed at promoting women in the workplace, delivering a 20-minute talk that garnered her a $315,000 payday from the company.

Less than two months later, Clinton was feted at the San Francisco Bay-area home of eBay chief executive John Donahoe and his wife, Eileen, for one of the first fundraisers supporting Clinton’s newly announced presidential campaign.

The two events spotlight the unusually close financial ties between Clinton and a broad array of industries that have issues before the government and paid millions of dollars to her and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in the months preceding the launch of her presidential campaign.

Disclosure documents filed by Hillary Clinton last week revealed that the couple have earned about $25 million for delivering 104 paid speeches since January 2014.

While Bill Clinton’s lucrative speaking career since leaving the White House in 2001 has been well documented, the new disclosures offer the first public accounting of Hillary Clinton’s paid addresses since she stepped down as secretary of state. And they illustrate how the Clintons have personally profited by drawing on the same network of supporters who have backed their political campaigns and philanthropic efforts — while those supporters have gained entree to a potential future president.

Silicon Valley is one place where those overlapping interests come together, according to a Washington Post analysis of the new Clinton disclosures.

Out of the $11.7 million that Hillary Clinton has made delivering 51 speeches since January 2014, $3.2 million came from the technology industry, the analysis found. Several of the companies that paid Clinton to address their employees also have senior leaders who have been early and avid supporters of her presidential bid.

The tech sector was the largest single source of speaking fees for Clinton, followed by health care and financial services, according to the Post analysis. Bill Clinton also made substantial income speaking to tech groups but focused more heavily on financial services, insurance and real estate companies.

A Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment.

While it is common for former presidents to receive top dollar as paid speakers, Hillary Clinton is unique as a prospective candidate who received large personal payouts from corporations, trade groups and other major interests mere months before launching a White House bid. In some cases, those speeches gave Clinton a chance to begin sounding out themes of her coming campaign and even discuss policy issues that a future Clinton administration might face.

Companies that paid her to speak include industry giants such as Xerox, Cisco Systems and Qualcomm, as well as start-ups and trade groups focused on biotechnology and medical technology.

The blurred line between personal and political is apparent in the cases of companies that hired Clinton to speak and are connected to prominent backers of her campaign. Salesforce.com, for instance, paid Clinton $451,000 to deliver two talks last year, and its CEO, Marc Benioff, is a major donor to Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that laid the groundwork for her presidential bid. Another major backer of the PAC is Irwin Jacobs, the former chairman of Qualcomm, which shelled out $335,000 for Clinton to speak in late October.

A spokeswoman for Salesforce declined to comment on how Clinton came to be invited to speak. Qualcomm did not return requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Jacobs said that he is retired from the company and does not play a role in its decisions.

When Clinton arrived at eBay for her March 2014 women’s-leadership speech, she had another connection to the company. Eileen Donahoe, wife of the CEO, had worked for Clinton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Abby Smith, spokeswoman for eBay, said that, “as one of the world’s most admired women, Hillary Clinton was the perfect choice” for the event. Smith declined to comment on the Donahoes’ fundraiser for the Clinton campaign.

The new disclosures showed Clinton’s vast earning power on the public speaking circuit as a former secretary of state who many viewed as the Democratic presidential nominee in waiting.

Source: Hillary Clinton was paid millions by tech industry for speeches

Monday marked another day and another dodge for Hillary Clinton, who is increasingly coming under attack for not answering questions on the campaign trail.

The numbers are in dispute, but the rough estimate is that Clinton has only fielded 13 questions from the press during the first 37 days of her official candidacy for the White House.

During a swing through northern Iowa on Monday, she again sidestepped the national press at the Mason City home of Dean Genth and Gary Swenson, backers of then-senator Barack Obama in 2008. She largely stuck to outlining the pillars of her campaign, including campaign finance reform, and took no questions from reporters during or after the event.

Republicans have in recent days resurrected their attack line that Clinton is “hiding,” a popular description for the former secretary of state among her critics while she was winding down her paid speaking career and gearing up to announce her candidacy earlier this year. And some GOP presidential hopefuls have themselves gotten in on the action, both by drawing contrasts and by explicitly criticizing her.

Jeb Bush, for example, told an audience in Iowa this weekend he had “asked someone to kind of add up the questions that I’ve been asked by people who can ask whatever they want, and, of course, the press that follows me around from time to time,” according to the Washington Examiner. “And we’re probably around 800 to 900 questions asked and hopefully answered.”

“Hillary Clinton has been a presidential candidate for a month maybe, and she’s had 13 questions asked by press,” he added.

Clinton’s allies have started hitting back, while her campaign itself has remained largely silent on the topic. The pro-Clinton group Correct The Record on Monday emailed reporters pointing out that Clinton has taken 20 questions from “everyday Americans,” while posing 117 questions of her own to them.

“While other candidates are using the media to further their own agendas and attack each other, Hillary Clinton is displaying the qualities of a true leader by meeting with the people she hopes to champion as the next President of the United States,” the group wrote.

Genth, one of Clinton’s hosts on Monday, told the print pool reporter that he was not concerned about Clinton’s lack of press interactions.

“We all know she is going to get grilled time and time again throughout campaign season,” he said. “If you want to know what she thinks, read [her book] Hard Choices.”

During the event, Clinton pushed again for campaign finance reform, saying that as president she would seek to appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose the Citizens United v FEC decision that paved the way for super PACs.

“I will do everything I can to appoint Supreme Court justices who will protect the right to vote and not allow billionaires to buy elections,” Clinton said. She also told the group of supporters at the organizing house party that she had been surprised by the number of drug abuse and mental health problems she had heard about in the early days of her candidacy, and she spoke of the importance of making college affordable, as she has in previous public events.

She went on to defend Obama’s Affordable Care Act, noting that she doesn’t “hear my friends on the other side of the aisle talking about getting rid of the Affordable Care Act as much as they used to.”

But she took no questions from reporters during or after the event.

Source: Another day, another press dodge for Hillary Clinton