Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton emails

FBI Recommends “No Charges” Against Hillary Clinton, by Tyler Durden

Posted on July 5, 2016 | 2 comments

Here is the initial Zero Hedge story on the FBI recommendation of no charges against Hillary Clinton. In the next few days SLL will make its contribution to the chorus of editorializing, but this article is primarily posted because it has the full text of FBI Director James Comey statement (if you have the stomach for it; SLL has been unable to muster the necessary intestinal fortitude). For videos of Comey’s announcement click the link to the original story. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In a surprising statement which concluded moments ago, FBI director James Comey announced that Federal officials have decided not to pursue federal charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email setup, an announcement that will send a shockwave throughout national politics.

In a press briefing at the bureau’s headquarters in downtown Washington, Comey said investigators and prosecutors had concluded there was not sufficient evidence to push forward with an indictment against Clinton, clearing her of a federal investigation that has loomed over her presidential campaign for nearly a year. Comey’s announcement comes just three days after the former secretary of State sat for a 3.5-hour interview with the FBI on Saturday, and just a few hours before President Obama is set to campaign with Clinton in Charlotte, N.C.

The punchline of Comey statement is that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t face charges over her e-mail practices while serving as Secretary of State because there was no “intentional misconduct” and there was “no clear evidence” of intentional violation of the laws.The FBI’s conclusion will now be referred to the Justice Dept for a decision.

He adds that the decision, if agreed to by the Justice Dept, would remove one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Clinton’s presidential bid, putting an official end to questions about penalties for her use of a private e-mail server, though the issue may continue to resonate on the presidential campaign trail

Still, the FBI director admitted that Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” with e-mail and that it’s “possible” hostile actors gained access to Clinton e-mail system however no direct evidence of it found though.

What is shocking is Comey’s admission that Clinton used not one but several different email servers, adding that 110 emails contained classified information and 8 contained top secret information, he also reported that Clinton did not turn over “several thousand” emails to the FBI and added that due to Hillary’s sloppy set up, it is possible that “hostile actors” got access to Clinton’s emails.

Yet, despite all these “facts”, the FBI has decided not to proceed with recommending charges.

It appears that the FBI is implying that the only reason why no charges will be filed is because there was no “intent”, and yet according to the US criminal code, specifically U.S. Code Section 793 – “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” subsection (f), intent in this case is not required for prosection:

Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

As the Hill adds, the juxtaposition is likely to inflame White House critics, who have insisted that political pressures would prevent any chance of an indictment for Clinton, regardless of the damage to national security. Obama has previously weighed in to dismiss concerns about the investigation — to the ire of Republicans and federal investigators.

To continue reading, and for the text of Comey’s statement: FBI Recommends “No Charges” Against Hillary Clinton

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Hillary on the Ropes, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on June 2, 2016 | 1 comment

A couple of months ago Andrew Napolitano was almost alone claiming that the email issue posed serious legal problems for Hillary Clinton. Even those who accepted his premise of Clinton criminality in the matter usually argued that the FBI and especially the Department of Justice would not go after her. Now Napolitano has a lot more company and it may take a preemptive presidential pardon for Hillary to skate. From Napolitano at antiwar.com:

Late last week, the inspector general of the State Department completed a yearlong investigation into the use by Hillary Clinton of a private email server for all of her official government email as secretary of state. The investigation was launched when information technology officials at the State Department under Secretary of State John Kerry learned that Clinton paid an aide to migrate her public and secret State Department email streams away from their secured government venues and onto her own, non-secure server, which was stored in her home.

The migration of the secret email stream most likely constituted the crime of espionage – the failure to secure and preserve the secrecy of confidential, secret or top-secret materials.

The inspector general interviewed Clinton’s three immediate predecessors – Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice – and their former aides about their email practices. He learned that none of them used emails as extensively as Clinton, none used a private server and, though Powell and Rice occasionally replied to government emails using private accounts, none used a private account when dealing with state secrets.

Clinton and her former aides declined to cooperate with the inspector general, notwithstanding her oft-stated claim that she “can’t wait” to meet with officials and clear the air about her emails.

The inspector general’s report is damning to Clinton. It refutes every defense she has offered to the allegation that she mishandled state secrets. It revealed an email that hadn’t been publicly made known showing Clinton’s state of mind. And it paints a picture of a self-isolated secretary of state stubbornly refusing to comply with federal law for venal reasons; she simply did not want to be held accountable for her official behavior.

The report rejects Clinton’s argument that her use of a private server “was allowed.” The report makes clear that it was not allowed, nor did she seek permission to use it. She did not inform the FBI, which had tutored her on the lawful handling of state secrets, and she did not inform her own State Department IT folks.

The report also makes clear that had she sought permission to use her own server as the instrument through which all of her email traffic passed, such a request would have been flatly denied.

In addition, the report rejects her argument – already debunked by the director of the FBI – that the FBI is merely conducting a security review of the State Department’s email storage and usage policies rather than a criminal investigation of her. The FBI does not conduct security reviews. The inspector general does. This report is the result of that review, and Clinton flunked it, as it reveals that she refused to comply with the same State Department storage and transparency regulations she was enforcing against others.

To continue reading: Hillary on the Ropes

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A Perfect Storm, by Andrew J. Napolitano

Posted on May 12, 2016 | Leave a comment

At this point, Hillary Clinton getting tripped up by her email problems is not the odds-on-favorite, but so many people think it’s impossible, mostly out of justified cynicism, that it makes an interesting long shot bet. From Andrew Napolitano at antiwar.com:

The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of legal misery. Here is what happened.

Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisors when she was Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her and have significant positions in her presidential campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and done in the presence of the same legal team which represented all five aides.

The atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of the interrogations is to enable federal prosecutors and investigators to determine whether these five are targets or witnesses. Stated differently, the feds need to decide if they should charge any of these folks as part of a plan to commit espionage, or if they will be witnesses on behalf of the government should there be such a prosecution; or witnesses for Mrs. Clinton.

In the same week, a federal judge ordered the same five persons to give videotaped testimony in a civil lawsuit against the State Department which once employed them in order to determine if there was a “conspiracy” – that’s the word used by the judge – in Mrs. Clinton’s office to evade federal transparency laws. Stated differently, the purpose of these interrogations is to seek evidence of an agreement to avoid the Freedom of Information Act requirements of storage and transparency of records, and whether such an agreement, if it existed, was also an agreement to commit espionage – the removal of state secrets from a secure place to a non-secure place.

Also earlier this week, the State Department revealed that it cannot find the emails of Bryan Pagliano for the four years that he was employed there. Who is Bryan Pagliano? He is the former information technology expert, employed by the State Department to problem shoot Mrs. Clinton’s entail issues.

Pagliano was also personally employed by Mrs. Clinton. She paid him $5,000 to migrate her regular State Department email account and her secret State Department email account from their secure State Department servers to her personal, secret, non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. That was undoubtedly a criminal act. Pagliano either received a promise of non-prosecution or an actual order of immunity from a federal judge. He is now the government’s chief witness against Mrs. Clinton.

It is almost inconceivable that all of his emails have been lost. Surely this will intrigue the FBI, which has reportedly been able to retrieve the emails Mrs. Clinton attempted to wipe from her server.

While all of this has been going on, intelligence community sources have reported about a below the radar screen, yet largely known debate in the Kremlin between the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Intelligence Services. They are trying to come to a meeting of the minds to determine whether the Russian government should release some 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that it obtained either by hacking her directly or by hacking into the email of her confidante, Sid Blumenthal.

As if all this wasn’t enough bad news for Mrs. Clinton in one week, the FBI learned last week from the convicted international hacker, who calls himself Guccifer, that he knows how the Russians came to possess Mrs. Clinton’s emails; and it is because she stored, received and sent them from her personal, secret, non-secure server.

To continue reading: A Perfect Storm

 

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Clinton Email Scandal: Now A Key Witness’ Emails Have Mysteriously Vanished, by John Merline

Posted on May 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

Another day, another disclosure about Hillary Clinton and her emails. Seems the State Department lost every single email between Hillary Clinton and Bryan Pagliano, who set up her server and has turned state’s evidence. Surely it’s just an innocent and inadvertent mistake. From John Merline at investors.com:

Hillary Clinton’s email troubles just keep getting weirder and weirder — and harder for anyone but the most die-hard Clinton fans to ignore.

The latest twist is news that four years’ worth of State Department emails from Clinton’s top IT staffer, Bryan Pagliano, can’t be found.

“The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” said State’s Elizabeth Trudeau.

State was, however, able to find Pagliano emails for his “recent work at the Department as a contractor, but the files are from after Secretary Clinton left the Department.”

In other words, only those emails he sent after Clinton left State can be found. How convenient.

Pagliano, for those following the story, has been granted immunity for his testimony about how he set up Clinton’s private email server in her home, which she used exclusively to conduct State Department business. He is, in other words, a key witness in what could end up being a criminal case.

The missing emails came to light as the result of a Republican National Committee Freedom of Information Act request — not, it’s worth noting, from any mainstream media outlet — which asked for Pagliano’s emails along with Clinton’ Blackberry Messenger communication.

“It’s hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton’s reckless email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at the State Department,” RNC spokesman Raj Shah told The Daily Beast. “Such records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton’s server, and why he was granted immunity by the FBI.”

If this were some lone bureaucratic hiccup, it would be highly suspicious, given the nature of the investigation. But this fits into a broader pattern by Clinton and the Obama administration of stonewalling investigations, to say nothing of emails central to an investigation mysteriously disappearing. (Remember Lois Lerner’s “lost” IRS emails, which she claimed were destroyed when her hard drive suddenly crashed?)

This kind of behavior would normally light a fire under law enforcement — and the press — since these things usually smack of a cover-up.

But the mainstream press is asleep at the switch — just check out the softball questions John Dickerson lobbed at Clinton on “Face the Nation.” Everyone seems to expect the FBI and/or Justice Department to dismiss the Clinton email scandal as much ado about nothing.

And we’re supposed to wonder why people are cynical about government and don’t trust the press?

 

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A Need To Clear Up Clinton Questions, by Ray McGovern

Posted on May 6, 2016 | 2 comments

Few people are paying attention, but the judicial and investigative process grinds on in the matter of the Clitnon emails, and the outcome may prove shocking. From Ray McGovern at antiwar.com:

“Some people think they can lie and get away with it,” said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with feigned outrage. And, of course, he has never been held accountable for his lies, proving his dictum true.

The question today is: Will former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Teflon coat be as impermeable to deep scratches as Rumsfeld’s has proven to be?

With the “mainstream media” by and large giving Hillary Clinton a pass on her past, few Americans realize how many Pinocchio faces need to be tacked onto many of her statements. Clinton is said to be “unquestionably” the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, essentially the presumptive nominee. That is unquestionably true – but only because she has not been questioned with much rigor at all. And on those few occasions when she has been asked hard questions, she has often ducked them.

For example, at the March 9 debate in Miami, Jorge Ramos, the longtime anchor for Noticiero Univision, asked Secretary Clinton whether she would quit the presidential race if she were indicted for putting classified information on her private email server.

She replied: “Oh, for goodness sake, it’s not going to happen. I’m not even answering that question.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Is Hillary Clinton Above the Law?”]

Not so fast, Madame Secretary. It is looking more and more as if you will, after all, have to answer that question.

Those “Damn Emails” Again

On Wednesday in Washington, DC, a federal judge issued an order that may eventually require Clinton to testify under oath in a lawsuit related to the private email server she used while Secretary of State.

The judge gave Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, permission to take sworn testimony from close Clinton aide Huma Abedin and others over the next eight weeks. It is possible that Clinton herself will have to testify under oath on the serious email issue before arriving at the Democratic convention in July.

One key issue in question is whether all relevant documents have been provided to Judicial Watch. My guess is that – given lawyers’ propensity, and often their incentive, to secure delay after delay in such proceedings – there may not be much likelihood of all this happening that quickly.

More precarious for Secretary Clinton, in my view, is the possibility that FBI Director James Comey will be allowed to perform a serious investigation and pursue Clinton on sworn testimony she has already given; for example, on whether she was aware of an operation run out of Benghazi to deliver Libyan weapons to rebels in Syria.

During her marathon testimony on Oct. 22, 2015, to the House Select Committee on Benghazi chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, was very specific in his questioning, leaving Clinton little wiggle-room:

Pompeo: Were you aware or are you aware of any U.S. efforts by the U.S. government in Libya to provide any weapons, directly or indirectly, or through a cutout, to any Syrian rebels or militias or opposition to Syrian forces?

Clinton: No.

Pompeo: Were you aware or are you aware of any efforts by the U.S. government in Libya to facilitate or support the provision of weapons to any opposition of Gadhafi’s forces, Libyan rebels or militias through a third party or country?

Clinton: No.

Did Secretary Clinton think we were “born yesterday,” as Harry Truman used to say? From what is already known about the activities of the U.S. “mission” and “annex” in Benghazi and the role played by the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens there, it seems quite likely that Clinton perjured herself in answering No.

To continue reading: A Need To Clear Up Clinton Questions,

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Why Did NBC News Sit on Explosive Story About Clinton’s Alleged Hacked Email Server For Weeks? by Chris White

Posted on May 6, 2016 | 1 comment

One thing that Donald Trump can count on during the election is the mainstream media doing everything in its power to help his opponent. From Chris White at lawnewz.com:

As LawNewz.com reported on Wednesday evening, NBC News was the second major news network to announce an upcoming interview with the notorious Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, better known by the name “Guccifer.”

Lazar, whose actions led to the exposure of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, was extradited to the United States in March. He is alleged to have posted emails that were sent to then-Secretary of State Clinton on the internet, including correspondence from close Clinton family confidant Sidney Blumenthal. Lazar was extradited to the United States just as reports indicate that the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server was in in full swing. Lazar is charged with wire fraud, cyberstalking, identify theft, unauthorized access to computers and obstruction of justice.

According to the NBC News press release, Lazar was interviewed by reporter Cynthia McFadden from a Bucharest prison, where he admitted to also hacking into Clinton’s private e-mail account. Here is the transcript from the upcoming NBC interview special, On Assignment:

###

CYNTHIA McFADDEN:

When Hillary Clinton says that her server is absolutely safe – you’re laughing.

MARCEL LEHEL LAZAR (GUCCIFER):

That’s a lie.

McFADDEN:

That’s a lie?

GUCCIFER:

Yes.

McFADDEN:

It’s not safe.

GUCCIFER:

It’s not safe at all.

# # #

As you can see from the transcript, Lazar is openly admitting to hacking Clinton’s private e-mail account. The same private e-mail account where federal officials found over 2,000 e-mails that contained classified information, including at least 22 deemed to contain “Top Secret” information. That is pretty explosive information. To note, Clinton’s campaign has already fired back, in a statement saying “There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell.”

Now, this is where things get a little strange. As was noted earlier, NBC News says Lazar made these claims to McFadden during an interview in a Bucharest prison and we know Lazar was extradited to the United States on or about March 31, 2016. So, it stands to reason that McFadden conducted the interview before he was extradited to the U.S. which means NBC News was sitting on these explosive claims for more than one month. Which raises the question, why would a major news network sit on such an explosive allegation — especially when the claim directly relates to a presidential candidate and the biggest story the 2016 presidential election cycle?

Understandably, production on a special might take longer than usual — but given the story — networks have turned interviews around in mere minutes.

The delay cost them what would’ve been a huge exclusive, or at least seemed to prompt them to hurry and put something out as Fox News went with its own story and interview with Lazar late Wednesday. Fox News clearly did their interview with the hacker after he arrived in the United States. As they mentioned, they visited him in a Virginia jail.

We reached out to NBC News for clarification and a spokesman declined to comment at this time.

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/why-did-nbc-sit-on-explosive-story-about-clintons-alleged-hacked-email-server-for-weeks/

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Hillary’s Secret Weapon, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on May 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

First year law students are given this advice: When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts; when the law is on your side pound on the law, and when neither the facts nor the law is on your side, pound on the table. Certainly immense cynicism is warranted about Hillary Clinton and her emails. That nothing will happen to her is  the odds-on-favorite outcome. And yet…and yet, Andrew Napolitano has both the law and the facts on his side, and he’s been pounding the table. If Hillary skates, it will be an obvious travesty of justice, which will feed into America’s growing revulsion with the political class. Call it a silver lining. But don’t be 100 percent sure that she skates. From Napolitano at antiwar.com:

Last weekend, Hillary Clinton dispatched her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to offer a defense of her alleged espionage. The espionage allegations against her are that in order to escape public and Obama administration scrutiny, she had all of her emails as secretary of state diverted from a secure government server to a non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New York, and, in so doing, failed to protect state secrets in at least 2,200 instances during her four-year tenure.

The essence of her husband’s defense is that the secrets were not secrets when she saw them and the investigation of her is all “a game.”

We know that the FBI is getting closer to Hillary Clinton, because Bill Clinton had not addressed her email issues publicly before last weekend. The defense he offered belies the facts and the law.

He argued that prosecuting his wife over her emails is akin to prosecuting someone for driving a car in a 50-mile-per-hour zone at 40 mph because the police have arbitrarily and without notice changed the speed limit to 35 mph.

The implication in his argument is that Mrs. Clinton’s emails were retroactively classified as confidential, secret or top-secret after she received or sent them and therefore she had no notice of their sensitivity.

His argument is unavailing for two reasons. The first is that it is untrue. Emails are confidential, secret or top-secret at the time they are created, whether marked or not.

The second reason is that Mrs. Clinton signed an oath on her first full day as secretary of state – after she received a two-hour tutorial from two FBI agents on the proper care and lawful handling of state secrets. In that oath, she acknowledged that she had an obligation to recognize and protect state secrets on the basis of the sensitive nature of the information contained in them – whether they bore classified warnings or markings or not.

State secrets are materials that, if revealed, could harm the national security of the United States.

Bill Clinton’s speed zone example, if true, would be a profound violation of due process, the foundation of which is notice. In a free society, for a prosecution to be successful, the government must show that the defendant had notice of the behavior expected of her. Hence, changing the speed limit without notice would be a profound violation of due process and fatal to a prosecution for speeding.

His example is not even remotely analogous to Mrs. Clinton’s behavior while secretary of state.

Why did he address this last Saturday?

He probably did so for two reasons. The first is that people in Hillary Clinton’s inner circle from her time as secretary of state have been offered interviews by the FBI. They all hired the same lawyer, and with that lawyer, they are in the process of answering FBI questions. Bill Clinton – for whom the FBI once worked – knows that the investigation will soon be at his wife’s doorstep, and he wanted to get her version out to Democratic primary voters.

The second reason for Mr. Clinton’s broadside relates to an obscure but profound admission by the Department of Justice. Here is the back story.

To continue reading: Hillary’s Secret Weapon

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Hillary Clinton’s Damning Emails, by Ray McGovern

Posted on May 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

Will the FBI recommend that Hillary Clinton be indicted? If they don’t, what kind of leverage will the FBI, the NSA, and the Department of Justice have over her if she is elected President? From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

A few weeks after leaving office, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have breathed a sigh of relief and reassurance when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied reports of the National Security Agency eavesdropping on Americans. After all, Clinton had been handling official business at the State Department like many Americans do with their personal business, on an unsecured server.

In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013, Clapper said the NSA was not collecting, wittingly, “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” which presumably would have covered Clinton’s unsecured emails.

But NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations — starting on June 5, 2013 — gave the lie to Clapper’s testimony, which Clapper then retracted on June 21 – coincidentally, Snowden’s 30th birthday – when Clapper sent a letter to the Senators to whom he had, well, lied. Clapper admitted his “response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize.” (On the chance you are wondering what became of Clapper, he is still DNI.)

I would guess that Clapper’s confession may have come as a shock to then ex-Secretary Clinton, as she became aware that her own emails might be among the trillions of communications that NSA was vacuuming up. Nevertheless, she found Snowden’s truth-telling a safer target for her fury than Clapper’s dishonesty and NSA’s dragnet.

In April 2014, Clinton suggested that Snowden had helped terrorists by giving “all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like.” Clinton was particularly hard on Snowden for going to China (Hong Kong) and Russia to escape a vengeful prosecution by the U.S. government.

Clinton even explained what extraordinary lengths she and her people went to in safeguarding government secrets: “When I would go to China or would go to Russia, we would leave all my electronic equipment on the plane with the batteries out, because … they’re trying to find out not just about what we do in our government, they’re … going after the personal emails of people who worked in the State Department.” Yes, she said that. (emphasis added)

Hoisted on Her Own Petard

Alas, nearly a year later, in March 2015, it became known that during her tenure as Secretary of State she had not been as diligent as she led the American people to believe. She had used a private server for official communications, rather than the usual official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. Thousands of those emails would retroactively be marked classified – some at the TOP SECRET/Codeword level – by the department.

During an interview last September, Snowden was asked to respond to the revelations about highly classified material showing up on Clinton’s personal server: “When the unclassified systems of the United States government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more secure is completely ridiculous.”

To continue reading: Hillary Clinton’s Damning Emails

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Obama Damns Hillary With Faint Praise, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on April 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

It is easy to be cynical, indeed it is prudent, to assume that there will be no indictment against Hillary Clinton. It might also be wrong. Andrew Napolitano, who unlike many analyst-pundits is an attorney, keeps making the case that legally, HRC is in deep manure. From Napolitano at antiwar.com:

President Barack Obama’s recent remarks to my Fox News colleague Chris Wallace about Hillary Clinton’s email issues were either Machiavellian or dumb. It is difficult to tell from them whether he wants the mountain of evidence of her criminal behavior presented to a federal grand jury or he wants her to succeed him in the White House.

He cannot have both.

His efforts to minimize his former secretary of state’s diversion of emails from government-secured servers to her own non-secure home server by calling it “careless” may actually harm her in the eyes of the public or even serve as a dog whistle to the FBI. That’s because carelessness is a species of negligence, and espionage, which is the failure to safeguard state secrets by removing them from their proper place of custody, is the rare federal crime that can be proved by negligence – to be precise, gross negligence.

Gross negligence is the failure to perform a high legal duty with the great probability of an improper result – for example, driving a car 90 miles per hour in New York’s Times Square. The high legal duty Clinton had was to safeguard state secrets; the improper result is the exposure of those secrets contained in her emails.

What did she do that was criminal, and who was harmed by her behavior?

Clinton knowingly diverted all of her governmental emails from secure government servers to her own non-secure server in her New York residence. Among the 60,000 emails she diverted were 2,200 that contained state secrets. Because the essence of espionage is the removal of secrets to non-secure venues, the crime is complete upon removal. So Obama’s statement in the Wallace interview that Clinton caused no harm is irrelevant. In espionage cases, the government need not prove that the defendant caused any harm.

Obama’s further effort in the Wallace interview to minimize the classification of secrets into the statutory categories of “confidential,” “secret” and “top secret” by snarkily commenting that “there’s classified and then there’s classified” is not what one would expect from someone who has sworn to take care that all federal laws are enforced.

Obama has interpreted that duty so as to permit his Department of Justice to prosecute for espionage both a sailor when he took a selfie inside a nuclear submarine and sent it to his girlfriend and a Marine lieutenant who correctly warned his superiors about an al-Qaida operative masquerading as an Afghan cop in an American encampment but mistakenly used his Gmail account to send the emergency warning.

The evidence of Clinton’s failure to safeguard state secrets is overwhelming because of the regularity of its occurrence. The evidence is well-grounded, as some of the secrets were too grave for the FBI to review and all came from her own server. And the evidence is sufficient to indict and to convict because it was obtained legally and shows a four-year pattern of regular, consistent, systematic violation of the laws requiring safeguarding.

Obama’s suggestion that some secrets were not really secret is also irrelevant, because Clinton, like the president, swore to recognize secrets and to keep them secret, no matter her opinion of them.

To continue reading: Obama Damns Hillary With Faint Praise

 

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The Clinton Investigation Enters a Dangerous Phase, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on March 31, 2016 | 3 comments

From Andrew P. Napolitano at antiwar.com:

The FBI investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to protect state secrets contained in her emails has entered its penultimate phase, and it is a dangerous one for her and her aides.

Federal law enforcement sources have let it be known that federal prosecutors and the FBI have completed their examination of raw data in the case. After the FBI acquires raw data – for example, the nature and number of the state secrets in the emails Clinton failed to protect or the regular, consistent, systematic nature of that failure – prosecutors and agents proceed to draw rational inferences from that data.

Then they proceed to corroborate those inferences, looking for other sources to support or even to contradict them. With one exception, all of this work has been done with neutral sources of evidence – documents, email metadata, government records and technical experts.

The exception is Bryan Pagliano, the one member of Clinton’s inner circle who, with either a written promise of non-prosecution or an order of immunity from a federal judge, began to cooperate with federal prosecutors last fall.

Here is what he told the feds.

Pagliano has explained to federal prosecutors the who, what, when, how and why he migrated an open State Department email stream and a secret State Department email stream from government computers to Clinton’s secret server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. He has told them that Clinton paid him $5,000 to commit that likely criminal activity.

He has also told some of the 147 FBI agents assigned to this case that Clinton herself was repeatedly told by her own State Department information technology experts and their colleagues at the National Security Agency that her persistent use of her off-the-shelf BlackBerry was neither an effective nor an acceptable means of receiving, transmitting or safeguarding state secrets. Little did they know how reckless she was with government secrets, as none was apparently then aware of her use of her non-secure secret server in Chappaqua for all of her email uses.

We know that the acquisition and corroboration phase of the investigation has been completed because the prosecutors have begun to ask Clinton’s top aides during her time as secretary of state to come in for interviews. This is a delicate and dangerous phase for the aides, all of whom have engaged counsel to represent them.

To continue reading: The Clinton Investigation Enters a Dangerous Phase

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