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Hillary’s Emails

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The coming summer of scandal:

A long-awaited State Department inspector general report on the impact of personal email use on recordkeeping at State is expected to be made public any day. And as many Americans prepare for the traditional Memorial Day kickoff to the summer season, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills is scheduled to sit for a sworn deposition Friday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch.

Mills’ testimony would be the first known time a member of Clinton’s inner circle has been questioned under oath in the email controversy. Another top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is set to testify next month. And Clinton herself is awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether she should be required to give a deposition.

No matter how that comes out, Clinton also faces an ongoing FBI investigation into the email set up. Some of her aides have already been questioned. She’s expressed a willingness to sit down with investigators — something they’re expected to take her up on in the next few weeks. Unless it takes place in complete secrecy, such a session would be the highest-profile legal spectacle the former first lady has faced since she testified 20 years ago before a federal grand jury investigating the disappearance and reappearance of Whitewater billing records.

“I think the [Office of Inspector General] report is going to be of interest and the testimony is going to be out there,” said Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton. “I think the courts will take action this summer….I don’t see any of this going away.”

Nope, no matter how much the media and the corrupt Democrat Party want it to.

[Update a while later]

The media is desperate to resurrect Hillary’s campaign.

For those too young to know what Whitewater was, here’s some inoculation to forthcoming media spin about it. No, she wasn’t “exonerated.”

[Update on Thursday morning]

Hillary’s problem isn’t her emails; it’s her dishonesty:

In this case, her dishonesty evolves from lying to potentially criminal activity.

Hence the FBI investigation, with the possible crimes including serious, fundamental breaches of the laws implemented to protect national security secrets. Hillary Clinton decided to retain personal control of her government-related communications, and the OIG report speaks to this seeming crime. Hiding her government-related communications from legally-required scrutiny served Ms. Clinton’s own personal political interests—more important, to her, than obeying the law. Even worse, her actions prove more important than protecting the American people.

The Federal Records Act has penalties for government employees who do not comply—of course, the Department of Justice has to enforce them.

Apparently, Ms. Clinton never requested permission to operate her own private server system. She certainly refused OIG requests for an interview. Great quote (footnote 152, document page 38): “Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview. The former Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations has not responded to OIG’s request for an interview.” Yes, more than one key Clinton aide refused to grant interviews to OIG investigators. (See footnote 7 on document page 2.)

A close reader of the document will note that current Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to an OIG interview. So did former Secretaries Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright.

But, but, but…THEY ALL DO IT! TU QUQUE!!!

If the FBI concludes it has evidence of crimes, the DOJ must proceed. If it doesn’t, Congress must seek a special prosecutor.

Yes. Or there is no rule of law.

[Update a while later]

Obama snaps at a reporter who asks about Hillary’s emails.

[Update a while later]

Game over, it’s not a right-wing conspiracy, and the FBI will get to the bottom of the mess:

The State IG report, weighing in at over 80 pages, is crammed full of bureaucratese yet paints an indelible and detailed portrait of things going very wrong at Foggy Bottom—especially under Hillary Clinton. It can charitably be termed scathing, and it leaves no doubt that Team Clinton has lied flagrantly to the public about EmailGate for more than a year.

That the State Department’s IT systems were a mess for years was hardly a secret, and the IG report makes painfully clear that State has had a difficult time transitioning into the electronic age. Several recent secretaries of state used email in a manner that would be judged inadequate, and perhaps improper, by today’s standards, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who served under President George W. Bush.

That said, only Hillary Clinton simply refused to use government email for government work—she repeatedly denied requests from State security and IT to use state.gov email—and she systematically dodged federal regulations on electronic communications and records preservation by setting up her private email server of bathroom infamy. Damningly, while several former secretaries of state cooperated with the IG in this important investigation, Ms. Clinton refused to.

…Hints are now emerging that Ms. Clinton’s neglect of basic security may have damaged more than her political reputation. A new report suggests several U.S. counterterrorism operations went awry thanks to Hillary’s slipshod communications security. This serious accusation is unsubstantiated yet plausible, given how easy it would have been for foreign spies to access Ms. Clinton’s email — as well as how much classified information she and her staff routinely put in “unclassified” emails. Counterintelligence officers will be investigating EmailGate for years, searching for clues about clandestine operations that went wrong, possibly due to Hillary’s IT misdeeds at Foggy Bottom.

We may never know just how much damage she did to national security, and how many operations failed and operatives lives were lost.

[Update a while later]

With the IG report, will Bernie finally muster up the gumption to take Hillary down?

We’ll see if he campaigns in California on it. A loss here would be politically devastating to her.

13 thoughts on “Hillary’s Emails”

  1. Oh and the corrupt Republicans as well as the report also notes that Colin Powell his personal email account as well and has been unable to provide them with copies from the ISP he used.

    1. Hillary had nothing but personal email, and she had it on a completely unsecured server.

      Oh, and Colin Powell isn’t running for president, and doesn’t have a massive crime family foundation for which he needed a private server to hide bribes from foreign governments while Secretary of State.

    2. If Colin Powell used an ISP it was probably America Online.

      When he was National Security Advisor he was probably using DOS, and perhaps he’d switched to Windows 3.1 when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

    3. This is an old canard that Jim always tries to use. Powell is the one who set up the current procedures because the State Dept hadn’t worked out its email rules yet.

    4. Heh. According to the stories I’ve seen, Powell used his personal email about five times. No one has claimed that he used it for sensitive business.
      But by all means, if you want to investigate him do so.

      1. Well, actually the Obama administration now claims there was sensitive data, well over a decade later. The basis for the claim as the information was from foreign ambassadors, which is typically classified. While that may be an issue (and if someone thinks otherwise, go prosecute him as was done Petraeus), its not quite the same league as what Hillary did.

  2. I don’t see this going anywhere. The federal government is an arm of the Democrat party. The State Department, FBI, and DOJ have all acted in the service of the Democrats during the last eight years.

    1. It has already gone somewhere. This report is harmful to Clinton. The FBI investigation may be as well, even if the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute.
      Among several other things, the report says that there is no record of Clinton getting permission for this email system, and she wouldn’t have gotten permission. That’s a direct contradiction to what Clinton has been saying all along.

  3. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-sanders-kimmel-debate-223594
    Wow – Trump and Sanders to debate! Imagine Trump talking to Sanders about the Clinton email scandal and IG report. Sanders brushed it off in the past; what about now? And Trump can use this to push details of Clinton’s mistakes (as listed by the IG report) into the public eye. Sanders will have to agree to them; Clinton never would.
    And her million-dollar speaking fee/interest selling business. They may have a lot to talk about.

  4. As I often comment, here and elsewhere, when the big arrow in your quiver is the Tu Quoque argument, you might has well give up.

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