
Search Hillary Clinton’s Emails - frostmatthew
http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/
======
bishnu
The banality of it all is what strikes me.

A personal favorite: [http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/#/?d...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/#/?docid=C05787922)

Been there, Hil :)

~~~
chishaku
All the interesting stuff has been [ ].

~~~
samstave
Exactly. If anyone were to think that hillarys email server was not wiped with
cloth prior to any of this BS - they'd be a full on idiot.

~~~
pbreit
Well, every email exists in at least one other email account as well.

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dpweb
What striking to me, however certainly expected, is all the sycophantic drivel
heaped onto a powerful person. "You looked fabulous", "we were discussing how
incredible you are".

Perhaps aides think somehow they are being supportive, but if I were that
powerful person, I believe I would rather just a few people I trust to tell me
when I'm effing up - than everyone telling me how fantastic I am.

~~~
kaitai
I work with some colleagues who use this kind of conversation. Full
disclosure: I am a female, they are also female. They wouldn't talk to you
like that -- it's a female-female communication style with a lot of subtext,
common in parts of corporate America as well.

The majority (by far!) of my colleagues are male, and part of the subtext and
context of this type of conversation is (1) to comment on things guys "can't"
comment on, like "did I wear the appropriate jewelry or footwear for this
event to project the social and intellectual persona that I'm trying to
project", and (2) to combat the everyday little degradations you encounter,
like someone at the registration table not registering you because they
figured you're a girlfriend not a real participant. Women who are trying to
maintain and accumulate power know that they can support each other in
maintaining a stance of confidence rather than acceptance. Being primarily
socialized into a stance of acceptance due to my historically all-male and
socially inept professional circles, I was _way_ confused when I got a female
boss who started saying nice things about/to me. It is true that I do good
things at work, although I don't manage to find the right shoes to project
being corporate -- but I've _never_ had anyone say anything about either of
those things! Ever!

It's a reasonable management tool in some ways. My male bosses asked me
(forced me?) to do my job and also take care of "women things" (recruitment
and retention of women and minorities) without ever saying anything nice or
giving me any credit, so I quit doing most of that. Altruism has limits that
are often reached at the bank account. But now I have a boss who views
outreach as a positive and actually says nice things ("you're incredible! I'm
amazed at how much you do!" etc) so yep, I'm more likely to do it. And it is
good for my organization.

~~~
douche
Interesting perspective. Personally, I would find effusive praise of that kind
profoundly weird, and uncomfortable, because it doesn't fit into the framework
of mostly male-male communication I'm used to(relatively traditional, tinged
with some ex-military vibes). In large part, the sign of doing a good job is
the absence of criticism. Since you could almost always improve on your
performance, there tends to always be some level of criticism.

Maybe I'm weird, but external validation doesn't really push any of my
buttons. If you think I really did a great job, give me a bonus, or an extra
day or two of vacation. Otherwise, I've got work to do.

~~~
grahamburger
I would have said the same until I had a boss who was very openly and
naturally complimentary. It does wonders for impostor syndrome and definitely
kept me motivated through the hard times. It only worked because it came off
as very natural and sincere, though.

Edit: I guess for context I should add we're both male.

------
awakeasleep
Chelsea's email to B & H about her experience in Haiti is an informative read.

I had assumed our disaster mitigation/rescue NGOs were a lot more effective
than they actually are. They sound pretty awful, reading that email.

~~~
Mtinie
I never really had an opinion about Chelsea Clinton, one way or another, but
after reading that email I respect her.

~~~
MicroBerto
It was incredibly well-written. Much respect to her.

You can tell that she is the kind of person that demands action and hates any
kind of BS. Very business like.

This is also why you should always write emails assuming they're public
record. Because one day... They just might be!

~~~
hueving
It was quite 'over-written', if that's even a term. The sentences were very
dense with long compound sentences. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like
it's a failure on her part to drown the reader in text with a low readability
score that isn't even jargon.

~~~
gizmo686
In fairness to her, her preamble explicitly stated that it was written hastily
and without revision, and she did explicitly ask that, if it was to be shared,
her name not be attached to it.

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seecmb
Hi, I'm one of the developers of this interactive graphic. If our search isn't
doing it for you, why not download all the emails yourself? Check out our code
to build a SQLite full-text database [https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton-
email-cruncher](https://github.com/wsjdata/clinton-email-cruncher)

~~~
clamprecht
If someone does this, and wants to use a full-text search-as-a-service to
power the search, I'll provide a free Searchify account for it (I'm the
founder). For example code, see our Enron email search demo:
[http://gosearchify.herokuapp.com/](http://gosearchify.herokuapp.com/)

~~~
hanniabu
Thank you for offering this to any takers. I personally don't have the know-
how to do this but if somebody out there does, it would be great if you could
donate your time.

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kr7
They redacted Sidney Blumenthal's email domain, but they did not redact the
email headers from this email:

[http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/pdfs...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/pdfs/C05791488.pdf)

Looks like he had an @aol.com address, which matches up with the length of the
redacted bit and you can even see the top of the 'l' in some cases.

------
clamprecht
Search for wikileaks, you'll see how concerned they are with it. They get a
periodic update of how worldwide media are covering wikileaks.

------
yolesaber
Neat, but the search interface needs some work. You can choose a
sender/recipient but you can't specify whether they are the sender or
receiver. I was trying to sort by all emails sent by H, but you don't seem to
be able to do that. Still very cool.

Favorite headline so far: H: HIGHLY IMPORTANT! COMPREHENSIVE INTEL REPORT ON
LIBYA. AND DRINK 8 GLASSES OF WATER. SID

P.S. search for 'mini' to get granular breakdowns of H's schedule.

~~~
wcummings
Hopefully wikileaks will mirror it, their search is decent

------
Blahah
Can someone explain why this is happening for us non-Americans (or possibly
just me if I missed some major news event)?

~~~
caseysoftware
When Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, she used a private email
server that was stored at her home and later in hosting facility not cleared
for classified information (supposedly in a bathroom).

Initially, she claimed there was no classified information on the server at
any time. Further, when she was required to turn over records to comply with
archival rules, she had her staff delete the personal messages and pass the
rest along.

In the current investigation, they've discovered classified emails - some
classified after the fact, some not - which included KH-designated
intelligence (aka detailed satellite images). In addition, when she delivered
the data to the State Department, she gave a copy of all of it to her lawyer,
who didn't have clearance for the classified data.. which shouldn't have been
there anyway.

Yes, previous Cabinet-level staff had used private servers but the National
Archives explicitly recommended against it in 2006 (a recommendation, not law)
and then President Obama signed an Executive Order making it the law in 2009.
Secretary Clinton continued doing it until she left the State Department in
2013.

At minimum, it was disregard for the recommendations and eventual law. At
worse, it was flagrant disregard for protecting the means and methods - that
includes people - who collected and needed that information.

~~~
SeanLuke
> In the current investigation, they've discovered classified emails - some
> classified after the fact, some not

"some not"? If you are implying that Clinton's server held messages marked as
classified when sent, could you provide some evidence to this effect? The
Clinton campaign is quite adamant that this is not true.

~~~
PKop
This is a red herring. It doesn't matter if it was marked or not. It is up to
the sender to take the precaution. That there are now thousands of emails
marked after the fact as classified, wouldn't that tell you the assumption
should have been made to err on the side of caution, and assume most
everything you are discussing has high probability to be classified
information?

And using your own insecure personal server for these emails essentially
guarantees that it's been hacked by.. China, Russia, take your pick.

In fact there is a term called "born-classified" which applies to information
about foreign governments provided by foreign sources. Here's some evidence:

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-
email...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-emails-
idUSKCN0QQ0BW20150821)

~~~
snowwrestler
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about classified material, which is
that it becomes de-classified once it is public. Not true.

For example, take the Wikileaks information dump, which came from a huge cache
of State Dept. cables and has now been covered in hundreds of public newspaper
articles. If one of her friends forwarded one of those articles to Clinton,
boom, she now has classified information in her email. Why? Because those
cables, despite being leaked, were never de-classified.

Another example: a lot of the stuff revealed by Snowden was classified at a
very high level. _It still is today_ , even though it is widely available
public information. Can you see how this could cause problems for someone who
is a government official, but has friends/family/contacts who wish to discuss
these news articles?

The press is a well-known vector that leads to a lot of government staff
having classified information in their unclassified email systems. Typically
investigations are rare and prosecutions rarer, because it's basically
impossible to prevent and does no practical damage (since the info is already
out there).

This is why the mere fact of having classified material on an email server
does not necessarily imply incompetence or malice.

------
analog31
While it doesn't excuse Clinton, I think it's a lead pipe cinch that every
single politician since Jimmy Carter has used some sort of off-the-books email
service.

------
awqrre
ObamaLeaks

[http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/pdfs...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/pdfs/C05794787.pdf)

------
rsync
I can't shake the feeling that this was all part of the plan.

We all learn of the true value and humanity of The Hillary by reading her
true, uncensored, selfless self. Now we know who She Really Is(TM).

Plans within plans within plans ...

~~~
quantail
The content seems very banal and will only serve to humanize her in the coming
primaries. Super Tuesday is March 1st.

The timing is uncanny.

------
spydum
"Today, in 2011, I'm giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama
Administration's improbable MVP in the technology realm. "

[http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/pdfs...](http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-
documents/pdfs/C05778327.pdf)

------
mladenkovacevic
It's fun to search for "Syria" then go the second last page and read a curious
e-mail from Sept. 2009 about "the first known case of a successful social
media campaign in Syria".. Then a few pages later, June 2010 - "Bay Area execs
seek to open doors with Syria" about a trip that Hillary's staff took part in
including the infamous Jared Cohen whom Julian Assange talked about in one of
his rants ([https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-
seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)).

One could weave a compelling conspiracy theory if one were so inclined.

------
lknmtlkwenf
Interesting to note that searching using terms to probe her connections to the
financial industry brings back a bunch of heavily redacted emails.

~~~
ytjohn
There's one with the subject "Koch" that is completely blanked out.

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irixusr
I searched by Susan rice and I'm (not) surprised that much of it is redacted,
i.e. the people releasing this do not think it's suitable for release to the
public.

In the end you can't be the most effective Secretary of state (Kissinger's
words) in decades and not be emailing top secret material

------
glitch003
I'm not sure how well the search actually works. I searched for "fart" in the
"Search email text" field, and it returns 2 emails as results, but they don't
contain the word "fart" as far as I can tell.

Can anyone else confirm this? And does anyone have any idea why this would
happen? Some kind of partial text match?

One of the 2 results definitely doesn't contain the substring "fart" anywhere:
"will be available in 10 minutes, per ops. They will connect you as soon as
she calls in. "

~~~
bhz
The OCR is flaky. The first email has "Release in Part" and the 'Part' is
coming up as 'Fart' after OCR. And in the second email the word "fact" is
coming up as "fart".

If you download the PDFs you can search by text and it matches on your search
term.

I have to say that I am sad no one actually said "fart".

------
oofabz
I tried searching for middle-east-related keywords, and got tons of hits. Then
I tried searching for Central American and South American topics, and got very
little.

It's a shame that the Mexican drug cartels, the murders in Central America,
and the economic rise of Brazil/Argentina are not given more priority by our
government. These are both the greatest threats to and the largest
opportunities for the US.

------
fineIllregister
Why are they scanned pdfs of printed copies of the original e-mails?

It's clear in several of these e-mails there are hyperlinks, which are
completely lost.

~~~
ForHackernews
Frequently when the government is forced to release documents by FOIA
requests, they do in the most deliberately inconvenient way possible.

Previous example: [https://www.propublica.org/blog/item/a-readers-guide-to-
the-...](https://www.propublica.org/blog/item/a-readers-guide-to-the-sarah-
palin-emails)

> The emails, which presumably could fit on a few discs, now fit in six boxes
> and weigh 250 pounds per set. Journalists have trekked to Juneau to pick up
> them up. (Mother Jones notes that the state is helpfully lending journalists
> “hand trucks” for hauling the boxes out.)

------
quantail
The different email addresses seem to contain interesting classification.
HRC16, HDR22 and HRC17 are some that jumped out. HRC1 & HRC2 must of been some
particularly lofty circles.

------
rrggrr
Does anyone doubt a grand that a Grand Jury would indict based on this
evidence alone? I would like to see a Judge or Jury hear evidence and render a
verdict here.

~~~
DrScump
If that were to happen before January, Obama would just issue a final-day
pardon to quash it.

------
wdr1
Given these are _email_ , why the heck is the government providing PDFs of
printouts? Why aren't they providing a text version?

~~~
yincrash
One reason (of probably a few that add up), is that it's safer to redact a
printed copy than a digital copy that might have metadata hidden to reveal the
original pre-redacted information.

------
dheera
I don't get it. She used a personal account for official business. That's
against policy, I get that part. But why are we punishing her by releasing all
of those e-mails to the general public? That sounds like a very unorthodox
punishment.

~~~
jml7c5
It's the result of Freedom of Information Act requests. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Freedom_of_Information_lawsuits)

~~~
dheera
So I still don't get why we can open private communications to everyone, or
what purpose that serves but to (1) humiliate her and (2) expose her to
identity theft risk, neither of which are usual forms of punishment. Why not
just fine her, ban her from working for the government, or some other similar
punishment?

Also, what about the fact that I write SO many e-mails using special language,
inside jokes that only the other party would know, PGP, foreign languages,
self-modified languages, and so on? What if in my communications with a
particular friend, red meant blue, blue meant red, building meant banana, and
foreign meant domestic? What if she encoded deeper meaning into what is
seemingly innocuous English text? If I knew that I was at risk of being
victimized by such a system and having my e-mails exposed, you can be sure
that I would use language like that. Or simply avoid using English, use a
smattering of 20 different obscure tribal languages, and write my e-mails in a
form with hidden meanings that I would agree in advance with the receiving
party. Just to make it hard for everyone who really shouldn't be reading my
e-mails. And then use PGP on top of that, although PGP is probably ineffective
against this [0], but the smattering of tribal languages and English language
mappings would at least make it deliberately hard and annoying.

Why is it that "being secretary of state" all of a sudden means that you have
no right to the same level of privacy, identity protection, and security that
everyone else has in the country?

[0] [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

------
bpicolo
Wonder what's classified related to Price Waterhouse

------
redwyvern
Read "Flowers"

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swasheck
hmmm. no hits for "Lewinski."

------
throwaway_exer
All politicians have personal email servers before they're elected and after
they are un-elected. It's human nature that there is a transition time between
pre-election and post-election in which personal email will continue to be
used. Rarely do analysis pieces mention this fact. If our government really
cared about that, they would have dedicated IT staff to onboarding new
officials with systems that actually work.

------
Wargog
Oh cool, top secret files in a searchable index :|

