Why Bernie Sanders doesn't care about Hillary Clinton's emails
For various reasons not worth explicating I don't really have a horse in the Clinton v. Sanders race, so this is not intended to be a political statement or endorsement of any kind:
- August 14, 2015: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating Hillary Clinton's private email server, confirms that the target of its investigation is not Secretary Clinton herself but other State Department employees who may have circulated classified emails "on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011" before they were ultimately forwarded to Clinton. As reported in the New York Times: "Law enforcement officials have said that Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, is not a target of the investigation, and she has said there is no evidence that her account was hacked. There has also been no evidence that she broke the law, and many specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in her account was probably of marginal consequence."
- August 24, 2015: John Kirby, spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, appears on CNN's "New Day" and confirms that Hillary Clinton did not violate government policy by using a private email account. From the transcript: "Well, we have said in the past, Chris, there was no policy prohibiting the use of a private e-mail account here at the State Department. That is still a fact. Now, we obviously have policies in place now that highly discourage that, and you're supposed to use your government account so there's a constant, permanent record of it. But at the time she was not violating policy. [¶] ... As I said, at the time when she was secretary of state there was no prohibition to her use of a private e-mail."
- September 10, 2015: The U.S. Department of Justice files a legal brief ruling that Hillary Clinton followed the law in deleting emails. As quoted in the Washington Times: "There is no question that Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision - she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server ... ."