[Hoot Gibson]

I just love it when lying politicians argue with each other. Two half truths don't result in the whole truth. Hillary is correct in saying that when she sent email messages to government employee addresses that they were immediately "captured," but she was trying to leave us with the impression that those email messages were automatically archived. Email messages are saved on the server and retrieved by the email client but normally email messages are not automatically archived.

I have auto-archiving set up on my government computers, but I still occasionally delete spam and error messages before they are archived. Other systems may be different, but if I wanted to delete email messages before the archival agent ran, those messages would not be easily recoverable. However, on a government computer, I do not have the access privileges necessary to delete messages in a way that would make it impossible to recover.

On my computer, if I plug a cell phone into a USB port and click the wrong button, I will receive a visit from the head of my department and a stern warning not to connect a device capable of storing data to my workstation again. This has not happened to me, but it did happen to a couple of my coworkers.

In Hillary's case, she had total control over her email messages. She was free to delete files using utilities that would make recovering her messages impossible by overwriting the erased portions of her hard drives with random patterns of data. If she wanted to make absolutely certain that she destroyed any evidence of wrongdoing, then she could remove hard drives, strike them with a sledge hammer, and expose them to a strong magnetic field.

However, it is a really, really stupid idea to destroy evidence of email messages that you sent to other people if their email accounts were hosted on government servers that were not under your own control. That is why some members of her staff also had email accounts on Hillary's private server.

It is ironic that a political hack like Hillary Clinton is in hot water for destroying email messages because she was fired by her Democratic boss for unethical behavior in the Watergate investigation. She wanted to crucify Nixon by any means necessary for engaging in the same type of behavior of which she is guilty. As they say, karma is a Hillary.

State Department challenges Clinton claim that emails to officials ‘immediately’ saved