Clinton’s IT Email Contractor: The Unraveling Continues

We now learn that since mid-2013 Hillary has had her email system managed by Platte River Networks. Strangely, while the Clintons live in Chappaqua, New York where their personal email server was run from their basement with convenient Secret Service guard service providing physical security, the IT services firm used for operating and maintaining their email server and system was located in Denver, operating only in Colorado, except, we presume, for Chappaqua.

This must be some company to attract the Clintons from 1,800 miles away, unless it’s just closer to Hope, or maybe a Hail Mary.

One would think that the Clintons would pick some ace high tech firm from Silicon Valley where they so often go to speak and raise money—a company overflowing with fellow alumni from their family’s past like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. But no, that would to be too easy. Just as using the State Department’s email system, or using another hosted provider like Google, Yahoo, or Go Daddy would have been too easy. Instead the Clinton’s picked Platte River Networks, a company, according to their website, that appears to have their sole corporate location in Denver with 2014 revenues of $4.7 million with 30 employees in 2014. Grossing just $156,000 per employee doesn’t leave much room for R&D, big Ivy League salaries, or high speaking fees.

Until the company took down its management “team” web-page, one could see the brain trust appeared to be firmly with Colorado educational and experiential roots. The individual management team pages, in fact, were more about the cars that represented each of their styles. Vehicles included a BMW 535i for the CEO, a VW “replica of a WWII German jeep,” a lunch truck for the network operations service manager, and a pick up and boat for the company’s CFO. We could go on… Maybe this is a ploy to show Hillary’s common touch, except, of course, for the Nazi staff car.

 

But what really seemed to be missing from the Platte team was a deep educational or experiential background in software or information technology. The one member we found with a Master’s degree in a computer/IT related field had only joined the company in Feb 2015, too late to prevent any hacking into Hillary’s lone server. Most had bull major backgrounds, like Hillary. Maybe they made her comfortable. No employee appeared to have experience with large IT consulting firms like Accenture, IBM, or HP, and none appeared to have defense IT experience or hold a security clearance. Neither did they have any experience at any significant hardware or software companies.

While not yet the “leader of the free world,” Hillary as Secretary of State should have had someone highly qualified, and with a security clearance, if only to keep this system running and out of harm’s way from hackers and to manage potentially sensitive information. Could it be that no professional company, particularly a listed public company, would touch this accident waiting to happen?

The company’s website did state it had expertise in Security, Business Continuity, Monitoring, and Cloud Services including Disaster Recovery Security, something that should have come in handy for remote backups, and recovering disc drives, unless of course they were attempting just the opposite. Certainly they advised Hillary to keep a back-up and will tell the FBI something to that effect, including that they were overridden by Hillary. The internal and external correspondence from Platte Networks should yield more transparency than Hillary has ever provided. In any case, this incident is certainly a disaster that both Hillary and Platte River need to recover from.

Now it also appears that Hillary couldn’t leave well enough alone and took matters into her own hands trying to determine how to delete her own emails:

The last batch of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department included one from Clinton asking to borrow a book called “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe.

Clinton has not said why she requested the book, but it includes some advice that is particularly interesting in light of the controversy over her unconventional email arrangement at the State Department and her decision to delete tens of thousands of emails she deemed to be purely personal.

Take, for example, Chapter Six: “The Email That Can Land You In Jail.” The chapter includes a section entitled “How to Delete Something So It Stays Deleted.

Where is Jon Stewart when you need him to report this stuff?

As in the past it is apparent that the Clinton’s are once again another tornado blowing through people’s lives, destroying whatever they touch. One hopes that Platte Systems doesn’t become the next Clinton tornado victim.