Hillary’s emails in spotlight as Justice Dept. asked to look at State Dept. security protocol

CORRECTION: Due to some on-the-fly reporting by the New York Times and some errors by the Justice Department, this blog post has been revised.
Here is how the Times public editor (an in-house ombudsman), Margaret Sullivan, explained the situation in an agitated tone:



The first major change was this: It wasn’t really Mrs. Clinton directly who was the focus of the request for an investigation. It was more general: whether government information was handled improperly in connection with her use of a personal email account.

Much later, The Times backed off the startling characterization of a “criminal inquiry,” instead calling it something far tamer sounding: It was a “security” referral.

The story that just keeps dogging Hillary Clinton, her improper handling of sensitive State Department emails, took a turn on Thursday as two inspectors general asked the Justice Department to conduct an investigation into the matter.

According to the New York Times, inspectors general for the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies believe an inquiry is needed to decide whether the State Department violated any security regulations while handling “hundreds of potentially classified emails” through Clinton's private email account.
A Clinton spokesman quickly criticized the Times piece and said that “any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted."

Over at the National Journal, Ron Fournier, well-schooled in the political machinations of Bill and Hillary Clinton, describes the situation as a “conspiracy of secrecy.”

The spin provided by Clinton, Fournier asserted, tries to dodge the fact that the secretary of state operated a rogue email system that: violated clear White House policy; shielded her work from congressional oversight, media inquiries, or any accountability; and contributed to a conspiracy of secrecy worthy of criminal inquiry.
“When she's not blaming the media, Republicans, bureaucrats, and technology – everything and anything, except the dog who ate her email – Clinton is destroying her credibility,” Fournier wrote.

The Times and Politico have reported that the State Department faces increasing pressure to become more transparent in its actions:

“On Monday, a federal judge sharply questioned State Department lawyers at a hearing in Washington about why they had not responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from The Associated Press, some of which were four years old.
“‘I want to find out what's been going on over there — I should say, what's not been going on over there,’ said Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. The judge said that ‘for reasons known only to itself,’ the State Department ‘has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding.’”