Today's "trash Hillary" story came from the Associated Press, who led off the day by saying that Hillary ran her email account from a "home-brewed Email server."
The original title of this story was "Clinton ran own computer system for her official emails" and contained the breathless report that Hillary ran her own email server out of her New York home.
The development on Capitol Hill came the same day AP reported the existence of a personal email server traced back to the Chappaqua, New York, home of Clinton.
That's in paragraph three, but it's also in the first paragraph, where AP clearly states that the server has been traced back to her home.
That is, until you get down to paragraph ten.
It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton's computer server was run, but a business record for the Internet connection it used was registered under the home address for her residence as early as August 2010. The customer was listed as Eric Hoteham.
Bob Cesca picks up the story from here:
Ultimately, what was Clinton’s actual email system?
As of this writing, the mail.clintonemail.com domain name doesn’t point us to Chappaqua, NY at all. However, its DNS history is connected to the IP address 24.187.234.187. If we look up the domains associated with that IP, we get a listing for the domain name wjcoffice.com, which is named in the AP article as being “linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton’s email server.” Obviously “wjc” is an acronym for “William Jefferson Clinton.” What name is listed on that domain? “Eric Hoteham,” aka Eric Hothem, in Chappaqua. But, and this is a big deal, if we do a separate IP locator search, the IP returns the following information:
ool-18bbeabb.static.optonline.net
ISP: Optimum Online
Organization: Optimum Online
AS Number: AS6128 Cablevision Systems Corp.That’s an internet service provider. Optimum naturally offers website and email hosting services, the latter of which can be used with whatever domain name you own.
Which is more believable? Hillary Clinton used Optimum Online's hosting services to host her personal email account, or Hillary Clinton ran her own server in the basement of her New York home?
Until Gmail, I paid for a hosted email account with my own domain name so I wasn't stuck having to hand out a stupid Hotmail or Yahoo address to people. People do it all the time, and it's no surprise to imagine Hillary doing it too.
Will the AP correct their story? I've asked them to clarify whether they've confirmed whether the Clintons used commercial email services via their ISP, but so far, no answer.
