Another columnist calls out the press who are ginning up the email thing

actually two

First:

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/09/it-sure-looks-hillary-clinton-didnt-have-cunning-plan-foil-congressional-investig
The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

Nobody seems to have made the most obvious observation about this: It pretty strongly suggests that Hillary Clinton was not trying to hide anything when she deleted personal emails from her server.

-----snip----

Needless to say, things don't have to happen this way. If you want to make sure that a file is well and truly deleted, it's easy to do. Anyone with even a smidgen of computer experience either knows how or knows how to find out. Here's one way, which took me ten seconds to Google. If I were really serious, I'd take the time to read a bit more, and also make inquiries about backups. This is IT 101.

But apparently Hillary didn't ask about any of this stuff. No one on her staff brought it up. They just pushed the Delete key and the emails disappeared. The IT folks were never involved.

These are not the actions of a staff trying to stonewall FOIA requests or foil a congressional committee. Any bright teenager could have done better on that score. By all the evidence, Hillary is telling the truth. She just told her staff to delete personal emails and turn over the rest to the State Department. There was nothing more to it.

But no one's reporting it that way. Peculiar, isn't it?

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Second Josh Marshall at TPM
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/stop-the-presses-what-s-a-server

Stop the Presses! What's a Server?

The Bloomberg story, like so many others in the genre, presents an incremental so-called development as deeply portentous, with grave warnings that others may decide this represents more bad news for Hillary.

But look what it actually says. FBI sources have told Bloomberg that the FBI is making some progress recovering emails from the servers her campaign or personal staff turned over to the Bureau. They include personal emails and work emails. Wow, that's sucks for Hillary!

Except wait. Unless you do a deep sweep of a server, of course you'll find what everyone knew was there in the first place: both personal and government emails. There are various ways to delete things from storage drives. The way most of us do it, the 'deleted' stuff is still all there. You've just deleted the index entry that says where the data is on the drive. The computer shop down the street can retrieve the data pretty easily. There are progressively more granular forms of erasing that make it much harder, verging on impossible to recover data. But there's never been any evidence or suggestion that Hillary's staff did this. And of course the FBI has vastly more high end data retrieval capacity.

In other words, this new ominous development is about as surprising as the book hitting the floor after you let go of it from your hand. As usual, since there's no actual news in the story or anything incriminating, the news value is chummed up with the usual 'others may find it controversial' formulation.

The extra nugget in this case is that it may also be bad for Clinton because the press may demand to see her unambiguously personal emails, which may be true. But of course no one should be allowed to see her personal emails in the first place.


more at the link