The Republican National Committee thinks it has the smoking gun that proves Hillary Clinton used "multiple secret email addresses" as secretary of state.
It doesn't.
The RNC made its claim in a May 18 blog post hours after the New York Times published copies of emails that Clinton had sent and received when she was secretary. The emails displayed two accounts: hdr22@clintonemail.com and hrod17@clintonemail.com. That seemed to clearly contradict Clinton's claim that she used only hdr22@clintonemail.com while in office, which was from January 2009 to February 2013.
The Clinton campaign says there is a simple explanation for this apparent discrepancy: The emails published by the Times were printed out in 2014 after Clinton had left the State Department and after she had changed her email address, so the printed copies of emails she sent while in office display her new address (hrod17@clintonemail.com), even though they were originally sent under her old address (hdr22@clintonemail.com). We agree that this is possible.
The Clinton explanation passed two tests - including one conducted for Fact Check by Ray Tomlinson, who is widely credited with inventing email. Tomlinson ran an optical character recognition on the PDF of the emails that the Times posted to its website, and what he found is consistent with the Clinton campaign's explanation for what happened.
FactCheck.org also tested Clinton's explanation. Its IT staff created originaluser@asc.upenn.edu and renamed it newuser@asc.upenn.edu. An email sent by originaluser@asc.upenn.edu printed out as if it had come from newuser@asc.upenn.edu after we changed the name of the email account.
Tom Conte, a professor at the Schools of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the IEEE Computer Society, said Clinton's explanation is "technically possible" and that the Fact Check test "proves it."
Jeb Bush, U.N. at odds on climate change
At an event in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush was asked about climate change. He acknowledged that climate change is occurring, but questioned its causes. Bush: "I don't think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. I just don't - it's convoluted. And for the people to say the science is decided on this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you."
But relatively good answers are indeed available from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment report. IPCC, 2013: "It is extremely likely that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in GMST (global mean surface temperature) from 1951 to 2010." This assessment is supported by robust evidence from multiple studies using different methods."Extremely likely" means that the likelihood of an outcome is between 95 percent and 100 percent certain. The IPCC added that it is "virtually certain" - which means 99 percent to 100 percent probability - "that internal variability alone cannot account for the observed global warming since 1951."
Other studies, included in the IPCC analysis, have found that human influence is likely the major contributor to warming every part of the world escept Antarctica. In these studies, science says that humans "dominate" the causes of global warming.
Chip Tuthill lives in Mancos. Website used: www.factcheck.org.
