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The Clinton Precedencies and Mar-a-Lago Search
It always ends up back with the Clintons, doesn’t it? The laws Trump may be charged under at Mar-a-Lago appear to have been violated by both of the Clintons, yet the two were never searched, never mind charged and prosecuted. Any action against Trump must account for that to preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest.
The more obvious case involves former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material on a daily basis. Her server held at least 110 known messages containing classified information, including e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, the highest level of civilian classification, that included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState, and maintaining control over what records became part of the historical archive post-tenure.
Clinton seems to have violated all three statues Trump was searched under:
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” says “Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation…” This law is part of the infamous Espionage Act of 1917. Parts of the Espionage Act also includes a gross negligence standard, meaning a prosecutor does not have to prove specific intent in all cases. That Clinton’s server was compromised strongly speaks to the question of injury to the United States.
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 2071, “Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally of an record…” is a no-brainer for Clinton, given that she destroyed thousands of emails, physical hard drives, and handheld devices.
— 18 U.S.C. §§ 1519, The “anti-shredding provision” which imposes criminal penalties on anyone who (emphasis added) “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede or obstruct an investigation.” Clinton destroyed much of the data during an investigation into her communications, satisfying intent. Her overall intent was to block FOIA requests, and might speak to intent to impede or obstruct some investigation that required the full diplomatic record be made available.
Absent a trial no one can say conclusively Clinton was guilty of what Trump is likely to be charged with, but the basic elements are there. That is not the point anymore anyway. The point is that if the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it risks being seen as partial and political. Any further action against Trump and certainly any prosecution of him must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself. Fair is fair, after all.
And then there’s Bill Clinton. Bill made a series of some 79 audio tapes from 1993-2001 with a historian inside the Oval Office, sometimes recording his thoughts and decision making, other times directly recording his phone calls. He kept the raw tapes himself after a book was published in 2009, actually storing them in a dresser drawer inside the White House residence. Judicial Watch sued Bill for the tapes claiming they were presidential records and had to be made available to the public through the National Archives, aka NARA, and that the Archives needed to seize the tapes. Clinton argued they were personal records outside the control of NARA.
In directly contravening what is happening with Trump, the court ruled in 2012 “NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as ‘presidential records,’ and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.”
Judicial Watch argued the Clinton tapes should have been included among the presidential records transferred to the Archivist at the end of the Clinton presidency, but Bill retained them in his personal possession when he left office and refused to produce them for use by Judicial Watch nor hand them over to NARA, considering them his own property just like the underwear and socks he stored the tapes among in his dresser. Judicial Watch lost the case and never appealed, and the tapes presumably remain with the Clintons.
As with the Hillary case, any prosecution of Trump for dispossessing presidential records must address the precedent set in the Bill Clinton case, i.e., the simple assertion by Bill that the tapes were his personal property. More significantly, going forward on the Trump case the DOJ must address the court’s decision in the Bill Clinton case that “NARA does not have the authority to designate materials as presidential records, and NARA lacks any right, duty, or means to seize control of them.” In other words, for what Trump had in his possession to be government records, someone would have had to designate them as such. The court in Judicial Watch v. NARA said NARA could not make such a designation, and the FBI certainly is not legally the one to do it. Could it be the president himself designates when a record is official and when it is personal?
Sort of. It appears a president’s discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will. Per Judicial Watch, “under the statutory scheme established by the Presidential Records Act (PRA) the decision to segregate personal materials from presidential records is made by the president, during the president’s term and in his sole discretion… Since the president is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records.”
Now to be fair there is a fair amount of case law trying to define more clearly what is a presidential record and what is a personal record. There are also mechanisms to try and resolve differences of opinion between a president and NARA. But none of those mechanisms are criminal, and none seem to involve physically seizing documents under a search warrant. It is clear the PRA does not bestow on the president the power to assert sweeping authority over whatever materials he chooses to designate as presidential records without any possibility of judicial review. But NARA on the other hand cannot do so either. The battleground under the PRA is the courts, not the back rooms at FBI headquarters.
If Trump were to designate a record as personal, not presidential, and NARA disagreed, it appears the standard mechanism (as shown in the Bill Clinton case) would be to go to court to redesignate the record. Step One (as in the Bill Clinton case) is not for the FBI to seize the record acting as some Solomon-like neutral party between the president and NARA. The bottom line is Bill Clinton was able to hold on to his audiotapes as personal records, and the tapes were never seized by the FBI under threat of the Espionage Act.
Any attempts to move the Trump case forward as a criminal one will first need to explain how it differs from the Bill Clinton case. If DOJ can’t do that — as well as differentiate Trump from Hillary Clinton and her server — then they have no basis to claim they are enforcing the law without fear or favor. It will be just plain old political hackery, using the criminal justice system to defeat Trump when the electoral system will not. That’s Third World stuff, skippy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Moments of Russiagate Truth
It’s sometime a very sad moment when truth is all that’s left. Suspicions of infidelity become credit card receipts from the no-tell motel. A Facebook post tells of a meal shared when a business trip was scheduled. It is ugly, especially the now certainty that you were lied to by someone you once trusted. Two such instances passed through the MSM this week with barely a notice that deserve notice.
The first is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, through the MSM, lied Russiagate. Hillary, et al, paid experts to create two data sets, one showing Russian cellphones accessing Trump WiFi networks, and another showing a Trump computer in contact with a mystery Alfa Bank server in Russia. The latter was supposedly how Trump communicated incognito with his handlers in Moscow Center. Neither happened, both were lies, and both were made up for and paid for by Hillary. How do we know this with certainty?
Former Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias on the stand May 18, 2022 in the trial of his former partner, Michael Sussmann swore to it under oath. Special Counsel John Durham brought Sussmann to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI, denying he was working for a client when he was representing the Clinton campaign. Elias testified he and Sussmann worked for the Clinton campaign, and had engaged Fusion GPS to acquire dirt on candidate Donald Trump. He also admitted that he had briefed Clinton campaign officials about the fake information, including contacts with Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chair John Podesta, spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, and policy director Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser and who aggressively pushed the Alfa Bank server story in the media. Elias said he also spoke with Hillary Clinton and was involved in meetings where she was present.
Does this have to really be so ugly? Do we have to hear it in her own words? Somethings it takes that harsh splash of cold water. Yes. Hillary tweeted on October 31, 2016 Trump had a secret server and it was communicating with Russia. She knew it was false at that moment because her campaign paid to create that information. The only thing left for the trial to prove or disprove is whether Sussmann lied about working for the campaign when he met with the FBI. He pleaded innocent but is a very bad liar; Sussmann billed the Clinton campaign for his meeting with the FBI. The material facts otherwise have been demonstrated — she lied. Cold and simple. No one colluded with Russia (as the Mueller Report later concluded.)
The next splash of water require you to wallow so deep in hypocrisy and lies if it was all water you’d drown. After refusing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story except to label it Russian disinformation in autumn 2020, the same NBC news headlined a story May 18, 2022, almost two years after the laptop story first broke, reporting “analysis of Hunter Biden’s hard drive shows he took in about $11 million from 2013 to 2018” from Ukrainian and Chinese companies for dubious consulting work. NBC reports this as breaking news, and made no mention whatsoever that they sat on the story.
To understand why NBC spiked the story for almost two years, one needs to go back to 2020 as the laptop tale was breaking elsewhere. Almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” With absolutely no evidence, the signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” “If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was evil brilliance in that it played off earlier prejudices created by Hillary Clinton in 2016, that the Russians sought to manipulate American elections. In fact, most of the key signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had misdirected public opinion around the whole of Russiagate. In the hands of the MSM the meme quickly morphed into “the laptop is fake,” a parallel to “but her emails!!!”
NBC News wrote in 2020 U.S. intelligence agencies suspected Trump associate Rudy Giuliani, who had been shopping the laptop contents to various media organizations, had been in contact with alleged Russian intelligence agents. The FBI was “looking into whether the Russians played any role, and no official has ruled that out,” said NBC. Twitter also blocked the Hunter laptop story after intelligence officials shared Russian hack rumors.
NBC also claimed in 2020 the laptop was not “newsworthy” as it contained no smoking gun, and because despite any ethical lapses by Hunter “Trump… is ethically challenged when it comes to appearing to use the power of his office to enrich himself and his family.” NBC in 2022 offers no explanation why the same laptop contents which it deemed not newsworthy days before Joe Biden’s election to the presidency are suddenly newsworthy in the middle of his second year in office.
The takeaway is NBC News did not pursue the Hunter laptop story in 2020, when it mattered most, because it acted in collusion with the U.S. intelligence community to make the story go away during the election. As Hunter has publicly paid millions in back taxes and the New York Times among others validated the laptop contents, there’s no need to pretend the story is not newsworthy or Russian trickery.
It is easy enough to say “so what?” at this point. Most people who did not support her long ago concluded Hillary Clinton was a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the claims that none of this matters. As for NBC, the last days before the election were confusing times, and the Hunter laptop story after all was out there for anyone who wanted to read it at the NY Post or Fox. So that doesn’t really matter either, right?
Wrong. What matters is less the details of Hillary’s lie but that as someone very close to being elected she would lie about such a thing, claiming her opponent was working for Russia against the interests of the United States he would soon swear an oath to. As for NBC (and Twitter) its journalistic slovenliness laid bare news organizations work with the intelligence community to manipulate elections. Both of this week’s revelations are bombshells if you blow the smoke away, and both threaten to make a second run at our democracy in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: The Smoking Gun, Part I
We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today’s Part I will show Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Trump. Part II to follow will show the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy.
In summer 2016 Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her improper handling of classified information was the political story. Consensus was the election was Hillary’s to lose, that her opponents in general and especially the Trump clown show, could not stop her. Despite the MSM’s heroic attempts to downplay the importance of the emails, the issue lingered in the public mind, often aided by Hillary’s own contradictory statements. The emails nagged at the Clinton campaign — her unsecured server lay exposed during her SecState trips to Russia and China, and the deepest fear was that her internal communications might appear one day on Wikileaks, ending her career.
Clinton fought back. The initial shot was fired on July 24, 2016 by campaign manager Robby Mook, who was the first to claim there was a quid pro quo between Trump and Russia. “It was very concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian,” Mook said, referring to a false story from the GOP convention just a few days earlier. The New York Times sent up a warning flare to all MSM media the next day announcing Clinton was making the Trump-Russia allegation a “theme” of the campaign. As if she knew just what was coming next, Hillary took that as her cue to claim the Russians were trying to destroy her campaign, a theme which soon morphed into the Russians were trying to help Trump. That soon became Trump and Putin were working in collusion to elect Trump as a Manchurian candidate.
A prime driver behind all this was a mysterious “dossier.” The jewel in the crown was a “pee tape,” blackmail, kompromat, Moscow held to control Trump. Word was a former MI-6 intelligence officer named Christopher Steele compiled the dossier, giving the whole thing credibility. America media openly speculated on Trump’s imminent arrest for treason, with Twitter aflutter with phrases like tik-tok, walls closing in, and the like. The FBI’s James Comey and CIA’s John Brennan briefed the newly-elected Trump on the dossier simultaneously with the full contents spilling into the media. Talk shifted to impeachment, alongside claims Hillary might still deserve to be president.
We know now the dossier was fiction. Steele’s raw information was provided by the Clinton campaign, with his chief source working for the Brookings Institute. Steele worked as a double-agent, feeding Clinton-paid for fake info to the FBI pretending he was an FBI informant with sources deep inside Mother Russia. The dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign.
We also now know the Clinton campaign, via one of its lawyers, Michael Sussmann, gathered Internet DNS data on Trump and used that to create a fully fictional story about Trump using a secret server connected to the Alfa Bank to communicate with his Russian “handlers.” Sussmann also peddled a false story about Russian smartphones connecting into the Trump White House. We know Sussmann hid his relationship to Clinton from the FBI, pretending to be a “concerned citizen.” Sussmann is under indictment by Special Counsel John Durham, and in his own defense filing does not dispute the basic facts. He only claims his lying was immaterial.
Both the dossier op and the DNS op were funded by Clinton campaign money laundered through its lawyers at Perkins Coie and then contractors Fusion GPS and Orbis. In both instances the false information created was peddled to the FBI (and CIA) by a Clinton-paid stooge pretending not to be affiliated with the campaign, Steele as an FBI informant and Sussmann as a “concerned citizen.” Both ops used a sophisticated information sub-op, feeding the media as if Steele and Sussmann were not the source and then having Steel and Sussmann step in to serve as anonymous confirmers, an inside loop. In both instances the FBI took the bait and opened unprecedented full-spectrum investigations into first Candidate Trump, and then President of the United States Trump.
Four years after all that, on October 6, 2020, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified documents revealing then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on or about July 28, 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie Candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.
The highly-redacted document says “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Ratcliffe in 2020 also revealed in September 2016 the CIA forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.”
The MSM at the time dismissed these two important disclosures as unverified disinformation. The problem with simply waving away these documents is the very high threshold for information to actually reach the president. Every day a near-infinate amount of information is collected by the CIA. A tiny percentage of that is culled for the standing Agency briefings the president receives. An even tinier subset is seen as important and credible enough to be personally briefed by the CIA Director face-to-face with the president.
Rarely is there near-time “verification” with intelligence. There is however “confidence,” how sure the CIA is the information is true, and the Director would not waste his boss’ time with that of low or medium confidence (and neither would the Agency do the same in sending its referral on to the FBI.) Knowing what we know now about Clinton campaign funding of the ops and Clinton personnel involvement, Brennan’s confidence is better understood. And it is important to remember Brennan openly supported Hillary; he was not the guy to dish dirt on her. He was making sure his boss, Barack Obama, had a heads up if the whole thing was ever exposed.
There is also the matter of Ratcliffe, who hand-selected the documents to declassify, lending them more credibility. Why play high stakes with information Radcliffe knew to be false?
One last concern has been that the CIA source appears to be foreign, and therefore suspect. The CIA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans in America, particularly something as sensitive as a presidential campaign. Even if tipped off by an American, the CIA would need to go overseas and recreate the info with a foreign source. That the information was available through a foreign source also suggests strongly Moscow had eyes on inside the Hillary campaign. Perhaps through her email?
Both ops ran on Clinton’s money and Clinton’s people. The smoking gun of Brennan’s notes ties it all to Hillary herself.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What John Durham Really Said About Hillary Spying
There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them.
According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA, and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn’t use the word “spy” but that in no way changes what happened.
The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show Internet communications between Trump and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information as a good citizen, purposely hiding his ties to Clinton. The allegations about the bank were false.
The new filing is at its heart legal housekeeping, asking that a waiver be considered to allow Sussmann to retain his current law firm. A potential conflict of interest exists because Sussmann’s representative works for a law firm which also represents others Durham may be going after, and may have been involved in the larger events under investigation, perhaps as witnesses. While that is interesting in itself, what is news worthy are broader details of what really happened around Russiagate that potentially point to crimes on a Watergate scale.
The filing says tech company Neustar executive Rodney Joffe (who was also a law client of Michael Sussmann) worked with the indicted Clinton campaign lawyer to access “dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).” Joffe then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Joffe also “enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university” (likely Georgia Tech) who had access to “large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” This would have been how Joffe got access to data from Trump’s private computers. “[Joffe] tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” he added. “In doing so, [Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
Some nerd stuff. Remember metadata, the info about a communication Edward Snowden showed us the NSA gathers? This is like that. Metadata shows, among other things, when and where a communication started, and where it ended up. DNS data, a kind of metadata, comes from a Domain Name Server. When you use a smartphone or type www.spectatorworld.com into your browser, it contacts a DNS server, which translates those English words into the numbers the Internet actually runs on.
DNS is like a phone lookup; you want to speak with Mom, who the phone knows only as 212-555-1212. Same thing for email, Tik Tok, anything online. If you have access to DNS data, such as Joffe did, you know who the White House and Trump were communicating with. DNS data is a road map and if you have enough of it, patterns, such as perhaps regular communication with Russia, emerge. That’s why the NSA does the same thing against its enemies or competitors.
The Clinton people got access to all this information via a private contractor, Joffe’s Neustar, which provided the actual DNS servers to the White House. Durham wrote, starting in July 2016, Joffe’s company “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” In quid pro quo, and despite a fraud-laden past, Joffe was offered a top cybersecurity job in the future Clinton administration.
The data gathering on the Trump campaign began while Obama was still in office (and the EOP portion could have been to establish a baseline of “normal” White House-Russia communications) and continued into February 2017, after Trump took office and all attention turned to impeachment. Having failed to stop his campaign, the data was lined up to aid in driving him out of the White House.
But no one stole or hacked the data, right? Not so fast. Contractors working on sensitive data systems do not own the data they see. Their scope of usage is very specific to the job they were hired to do. It does not include exploiting high-security government contracts for political purposes and personal gain. Sort of like your doctor, who knows your medical information but cannot just share it with his brother who sells life insurance.
Indictments by Durham against Joffe are sure to be coming. It is also curious FBI and CIA did not question where Sussmann got his data, given that it could have only come from White House servers. In addition, if researchers at Georgia Tech who were being paid by the U.S. government via a DARPA grant were freelancing the data they collected to help the Clinton campaign smear Trump, that would be another area Durham will be looking into.
Back to Michael Sussmann, the Clinton lawyer. As he tried to get the FBI interested in the Trump-Alfa Bank tale in September 2016, Sussmann went to the CIA (“Agency-2”) on February 9, 2017 and “provided an updated set of allegations — including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump.”
Sussmann also “claimed lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House.” Durham says this is unsupported, though as recently as October the New York Times was still defending it. The Durham filing also maintains Sussmann lied again to CIA about having any affiliation with his paying clients Joffe and the Clinton campaign.
So call it what you will — spying, hacking, infiltrating, a rebut to but her emails – but here is what it is: Durham asserts Neustar, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, gathered data likely illegally and certainly surreptitiously from White House and Trump computers, seeking a connection to Russia. Lawyer Michael Sussmann, hiding his connection to Clinton and Joffe, brought false conclusions drawn from this data to FBI and CIA (and perhaps the DOJ Inspector General) in hopes they would turn their enormous resources toward investigating Trump. The con worked with the FBI.
This would mean Hillary and her lawyers masterminded a coordinated electronic conspiracy against Trump when he was a candidate and later president, while simultaneously perpetuating the dossier hoax. As with the dossier, everything Clinton peddled was fake. There was no pee tape, no payoffs from Putin, no connection to Alfa Bank, and no Russian-made smartphones. But this is not a fake scandal. Durham has potentially uncovered the most destructive political assassination attempt since Kennedy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Final End of the Clintons, Long Live the Democratic Party!
The worst bout of food poisoning I ever had took days to run through me. Every orifice worked day and night to rid my body of whatever evil I had ingested and even when it was all gone it took more time for things to reset themselves. It was as awful as it was necessary to cleanse. And so it goes with the Clintons.The defeat of the Democratic party in Virginia in general and Terry McAuliffe for governor in the specific could truly be the end of the Clintons and a chance for the Democratic Party to reset itself from the self-destructive path it is on. It can heal and be a righteous challenger to Republicans. Or it might just eat another chili dog and puke through the midterms.
Of all the things Terry McAuliffe is (mediocre former governor, race-monger, liar, visa fraudster, investment scammer) he is also the last bit of Clintonite political feces the body politic needed to have expelled to allow healing to begin. McAuliffe was co-chairman of Bill’s 1996 reelection campaign, Clinton-installed chair of the Democratic National Committee 2001-2005, and chair of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. Bill and Hillary leveraged their then-popularity to help McAuliffe win the Virginia governorship as payback. In 2013, Bill did a nine-city tour of Virginia with McAuliffe, while Hillary raised money for him in California. McAuliffe had never held public office and wasn’t even from Virginia but the job was up for grabs in a state turning blue and the Clinton’s turned on the money spigot.
As Virginia’s governor, McAuliffe was a campaign surrogate for Hillary 2016. Bill Clinton, disgraced as he is, actually still held fundraisers for McAuliffe in 2021, albeit in New York, not Virginia, an early clue to how things would end. Terry nurtured the relationship at every opportunity and got ahead, a reminder of the transactional politics the Clintons thrived on. Compare his political run with fellow Clinton syncopate Andrew Cuomo. After the departure of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros under the cloud of an FBI investigation at the end of Clinton’s first term, Cuomo took over as Secretary of HUD. You know the rest of the story. Of all the faithful, McAuliffe is the last vestigial limb of what once was a Democratic dynasty.
To understand what the end of that dynasty means one has to understand the damage the Clinton’s did not only to America but to their own party. It was in part Hillary’s willingness to stay silent that allowed Bill to escape being removed from office for perjury and overall conduct unbecoming when he had sex in the Oval Office with an intern. Hillary demanded and got her pound of flesh, a walk-on coronation as a New York Senator (it was Terry McAuliffe who in 1999 personally guaranteed the mortgage on the New York home the Clintons bought so Hillary could claim residency) which would be her springboard to the White House. She consistently voted with the political winds of the day for wars, free from any morality. When she was beaten by Barack Obama in 2008, she took SecState as an obvious consolation prize alongside a fairly certain promise she would be the Democratic candidate when Obama retired (sorry, Joe, tonight ain’t your night kid.) She taught a generation of women and girls to have no self-respect, no honor, take whatever your man deals out with over-done smiles and understated pearls, and have nothing but appetite.
Hillary’s destruction of the Democratic party continued with the political castration of Bernie Sanders. Love him or hate him, Sanders represented what is likely to be the last true set of original ideas presented by a mainstream candidate who actually had a chance at winning. The Democratic party’s willingness to destroy Sanders to press Hillary into the nomination left a whole generation of Sanders supporters, the youth which should be today coming into their own as the party base, bitter and disenfranchised. She casually threw away rural voters, once a Democratic mainstay, practically demanding they vote for her opponent after she dismissed them as deplorables. She welcomed silly social justice memes into the party thinking she was building herself a new base. She made the Democrats wholly dependent on the notoriously unreliable black vote. And then Hillary lost to Donald Trump, the only person to claim that title.
What happened next was a void in Democratic leadership. The party went insane, with Nancy Pelosi and her crowd becoming serially addicted to impeachment and a collection of political curiosities like AOC and the Squad elevated to some sort of odd status (be very loud but accomplish nothing) by the media. It was clear no one was in charge. Democratic election strategy became a carnival game of try and dunk Trump. Mueller threw a few balls, until that broke down into a free for all featuring a quasi-coup attempt over a phone call to the Ukrainian president, graphic descriptions of Trump’s penis by Stormy Daniels, and ended with Trump being impeached after he left office for inciting an insurrection that didn’t happen. In the background the Democratic party imploded searching for a nominee, with people like Beto the Clueless Cowboy headlining for a few weeks, then a local mayor who got some tailwind out of being gay, and whatever Andrew Yang was supposed to be. The impression that no one was in charge post-Clintons was finally made clear when the system coughed up a crash test dummy like Joe Biden as the best it could manage and then limp into office thanks to Covid fear and media fealty.
That scenario won’t happen twice. White women in Virginia recorded a 15 point voting swing to the GOP in the gubernatorial election compared to the 2020 presidential election. The setbacks in heavily suburban blue Virginia suggest a backlash to the whining about race and identity championed by Democrats. These voters are not white supremacists and to label them as such is to dismiss a parent’s rightful desire to see their child get the best possible education. The Dems campaigned on a very visible contempt for the people in calling them haters and racists needing to have their children saved from their parents. Dems, you went too far and you lost Virginia. It wasn’t about Trump, it was about you.
The Democrats have a chance to try again. McAuliffe’s defeat frees them from the last of the Clinton influence, an empowering marker that it is safe to finally leave Bill and Hillary behind. McAuliffe’s defeat, based on social justice issues like trans-everything and racism-everything losing to common sense, can be equally empowering, freeing the party from having to listen to people like the Squad ever again. Nobody wants to see Biden run for a second term, and Democrats know there is equally as little support for Kamala Harris (reminder to all, she is still officially listed as vice president.) The Dems, finally, have a chance to find a real candidate. A first sign they see the light might be turning to jobs, Covid, inflation, and the supply chain, indicating they do understand there are voters outside Brooklyn and the Bay Area who care deeply about things other than climate change and transrights. Call it centrist if you like, though realist is a better word. If all the Dems have going into the midterms is some renamed school houses and recycled anti-Trump rhetoric (Van Jones said of the Virginia loss “Glenn Youngkin represents delta variant of Trumpism,”) why would anyone vote for them?
The Dems need the equivalent of drinking clear soup for a few days after a bout of food poisoning has run its course, learning the hard lesson and coming back stronger. Or they can eat another couple of chili dogs at the first sign of feeling better and get sick all over again.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Four Stories You Can Write About Trump
It is nearly-impossible to write anything that purports to be objective about Trump. No one wants to read it. Instead, there are only four basic stories you can do.
The Apocalypse
These stories tend to appear in both the mainstream press (New York Times, Washington Post, cable news) and on left-of-center smaller outlets featuring Michael Moore and Robert Reich. They have headlines and indeed whole paragraphs announcing the end of democracy, the fall of the republic, destruction of the press, and so forth.
Many have references to Hitler, or, if the writer has checked online, the burning of the Reichstag and WWII Japanese internment camps. If the writer does more than a Google search, you’ll see references to Weimer. The stories need to be more hyperbolic than the last one, and are usually framed around one Trump event inflated into a “historians will someday note this as a turning point, assuming they will still be allowed to write freely.”
So, CBP wrongly detains someone = brownshirts are on the march, today the airport, tomorrow maybe in our home? Fear the 2 am knock on the door.
As a bonus, these articles will often use dramatic phrases like “a clear and present danger,” “be afraid. be very afraid,” and end with an out-of-context quote from a Founding Father such as “The tree of liberty without our vigilance will be upended by an orange man as darkness gathers.”
Related: Trump is Stupid and Evil
These stories are basically a personal variant on the The Apocalypse, and are a staple of NYT Op-Eds by guys like Charles Blow, everything on Rawstory and HuffPo, and late night comedy shows like Colbert.
Trump has small hands, a joke about Cheeto Jesus, homophobic jokes about Putin and bromance, a spell-checker typo blow up into proof of something sinister, that sort of thing. They’ll go as far as comedians calling Melania a whore and the Trump kid a ‘tard, followed by an apology if the Internet blows up. They also run as Tweets and Facebook memes that say Trump is mentally ill or has syphilis. Throw in a favorite failed-as-a-businessman tale.
A lot of these stories are based around leaks from anonymous sources that are little more than gossip from interns, such as “Trump is said to chew on the ends of pencils, which many aides claim is embarrassing to the nation.” Look for headlines that have colons, such as Revealed:, Sources: or Report: and passive constructions such as “I’m told…”
Trump is a SaviorFor anything positive about Trump, you have to look w-a-y right, often deep into the dank corners of the web where true racism and hate lie. The more centrist right media seems to spend most of its time debunking stories about The Apocalypse and Trump is Stupid and Evil, or arguing the meaning of fake news.
Hillary Fan Fiction/Obama Revisionism
These are really the sad stories. They will repeat that Hillary won the popular vote you guys, how she would have won except for Bernie, Jill, Stein, Comey and Putin, and/or focus on all the reasons Trump will be impeached (Emoluments Act, Russia, 25th Amendment, a military coup, Chinese buy-out, etc.) They are all textbook examples of denial, lead by once-sane academics like Lawrence Tribe.
Right alongside Hillary fan fiction lurks Obama Revisionism. The last eight years were all unicorns and rainbows, with free healthcare falling from the sky while we all lived in racial harmony and celebrated each other’s’ diversity with vegan, gluten-free treats handed out to undocumented aliens at Whole Foods by smiling refugees.
FYI: I have given up, and get the majority of my news now from watching old Spongebob episodes. Trump’ll get my NetFlix when he prys it from my cold dead hands.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Ready for 2024: Chelsea Clinton to Publish First Book
While she is still a step or two away from her second term as president, Hillary is already grooming her daughter for the succession.Chelsea Clinton was, like William and Harry, born into royalty. Chelsea is only 35 years old and has already accomplished so much. What a bright future lies ahead! America is still a country where any child can grow up to someday become president — as long as your last name is Clinton.
Chelsea’s latest faux-accomplishment is to announce she will write a children’s book, It’s Your World. Crazy coincidence: it will be published just weeks before the 2016 election when Mother Hillary will be hoping to follow Father Bill into the White House. Chelsea’s hard-hitting book, under the sub-heading “Get Informed, Get Inspired and Get Going!” will address issues such as poverty, access to education, and gender equality. Another coincidence: those are basically her mother’s campaign themes.
Clinton the Younger is no stranger to the world of Clinton favors and corruption.
Earning $445 Per Second at NBCUnlike most well-to-do young people who, after a decent education, take a series of unpaid internships and entry-level positions to begin working their way up some corporate ladder, Chelsea jumped more than a few rungs. Despite never having attended journalism school or otherwise having worked in the field, Chelsea was hired by NBC News to do feel-good stories as part of their “Making a Difference” series. Though the starting salary for such positions is already a chunky $100,000-200,000, Chelsea is being paid $600,000 a year for the same work.
All told, in her almost three-year tenure at NBC, Chelsea has worked on all of 14 stories.
Business Insider calculated since starting work in November 2011, Chelsea earned about $26,724 for each minute she appeared on air, or $445 per second. As in one-two-three, there’s your month’s rent.
NBC has an eye for talent, at least the talent of children of important politicians. In 2009, it hired George W. Bush’s daughter Jenna to serve as a correspondent on the Today” show. In 2011, it hired Senator John McCain’s daughter Meghan as a contributor on MSNBC.
More Chelsea $$$$$$$$
In addition to her gig at NBC, Chelsea also serves Vice Chair of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
Chelsea also benefits from a job as a board member for Barry Diller’s IAC/InteractiveCorp. Salary for Chelsea: $300,000. The board position also pays an annual retainer of $50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock.
Chelsea, though she only graduated with a master’s degree in 2010, started teaching graduate level classes two years later at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. Chelsea holds another academic post, salary unknown, as assistant vice provost for the Global Network University at New York University.
Chelsea’s personal fortune is estimated at $15 million, most earned as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and by working for Avenue Capital Investment Group as a hedge fund manager. Chelsea and her husband live in a $10.5 million condominium in Manhattan.
A feature of oligarchy is the dynastic ascension of new leaders, children who rise to positions of power and wealth simply by the luck of birth. We welcome Chelsea Clinton to the club.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Man Who Ran Clinton’s Personal Email Server Worked for State Department
The man who set up and administered Hillary Clinton’s personal email server during her tenure as Secretary of State worked for the State Department. This adds ethical issues to the problems Clinton already faces, as well raising questions about a taxpayer-paid official conducting private business on our dime.
The FBI has begun looking into the security of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail setup. Also last week, the FBI contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, with questions about the security of a thumb drive in his possession that contains copies of work e-mails Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state, some of which — according to the Inspectors General from State and the Intelligence Community — contain classified material.
According to the Washington Post, those briefed on the server state the hardware was purchased for use by Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and installed at the Chappaqua home. That means any malware acquired under the conditions of the campaign migrated with the server.
Bryan Pagliano
More significantly, along with the new server came a technical specialist, Bryan Pagliano, pictured, who had worked as Clinton’s campaign’s IT director. According to federal campaign finance records, Pagliano was paid by Clinton’s Senate leadership PAC through April 2009. The next month, he went to work for the State Department as an IT specialist.
The people briefed on the server indicated that Pagliano continued to act as the lead specialist responsible for Clinton’s personal server even while he was employed by the Department of State. The e-mail system was not always reliable, these people said, with Pagliano summoned at various times to fix problems. Notably, the system crashed for days after New York was hit by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, while Hillary Clinton was still secretary of state. It is unclear what email system the secretary used to conduct the nation’s diplomatic business with during that period.
Responsibility for Clinton’s email system was moved to a private company, Platte River Networks in Denver, only in 2013, after Clinton left the State Department. That company either administered Clinton’s server in New York remotely, or operated a server for her in its own data warehouse. Either would have opened the hardware and its contents to a larger group.
Pagliano at State
Bryan Pagliano’s job at the State Department is confirmed on his LinkedIn page.
He lists his political-appointee position as “Serve as strategic advisor and special projects manager to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) / Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) overseeing the operations of the Information Resource Management (IRM) bureau.” Working at such a high level inside State’s IT structure assures that State’s most senior information officers knew about Clinton’s email setup, and apparently did not or were not able to stop it.
Pagliano’s Facebook page also shows his closeness to the Clintons (the third person is identified on Facebook as Carrie Pagliano):
We note that at the same of this writing, Pagliano’s Facebook page employs no security, meaning anyone may access all of its content. Odd move for a guy in charge of the Secretary of State’s email.
BONUS: The State Department’s Chief Information Officer, who should have stopped the Clinton email server? Well, well, she retired from State a few months before Hillary left, into a nice job at the IMF. It pays to be a winner!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clintons Earned $30 million in Past 15 Months
Hillary and Bill earned $30 million since January 2014, mostly for giving paid speeches, according to financial disclosure forms filed on Friday.
Around $25 million of the total came from giving speeches, while Hillary Clinton earned around $5 million from her book
. “The Clintons’ income puts them at the upper end of the top 0.1 percent of earners in the U.S. population,” notes Reuters.
Show Me the Money
Bill’s standard speech fee is $250,000, compared to $235,000 for Hillary. Bill all-time highest fee is $500,000 for one speech, while Hillary Clinton’s top-earning speech brought in $350,000.
This is all on top of the funding for offices, travel expenses and whatever’s came to the Clinton’s out of the generous donations and friendly spending habits of the charity Clinton Global Initiative.
It all shows how just how far the couple has come since 2001, when they left the White House and Hillary Clinton described the family as being “dead broke.” Since leaving the White House, the Clintons have earned at least $130 million in speaking fees.
Jealous Much?But so what, right? This is America; people should get paid for speeches they give, and hey, if someone is willing to pay you half a million dollars for a one hour talk, why shouldn’t you accept that? There’s nothing illegal here, nothing criminal, and anyone who tries to paint all this money as anything wrong is just reciting the Repub attack points. Hah, maybe the Republicans are just jealous. Who the hell is gonna pay Ted Cruz even bus fare to speak?
And that of course is the point. No one will pay Ted Cruz much, if anything, to speak, because Ted Cruz is a lousy investment. Hillary has a very good chance of being president in 18 months. And that of course is the point.
I’ve heard Bill speak in person, and seen plenty of Hillary speeches on video. They talk pretty, good grammar and all. But like most politicians, they tend not to say much of significance. Nothing remotely controversial, just “global this” and “empower technology for future that.” Could it thus be that the real reason organizations are willing to pay out fantastic fees for that is because they are trying to buy off the next president, who, along with her spouse, seems to have the appetite of a hungry hyena to suck up as much money as she can?
Who Pays?
Who pays Hillary to speak? Since leaving the State Department, Clinton has given paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, the Carlyle Group, the National Association of Realtors and various pharmaceutical companies. All of these organizations have much business in front of the federal government at any time, and all depend heavily on lobbying to ensure they are regulated (or not) in accordance with their business interests.
Anybody who tries to tell you these groups are paying out large amounts of money simply to hear what Hillary has to say today is selling snake oil. The groups are buying access and paying forward for favors and favorable consideration.
And So What?
Oh, right, but everybody does it. No, they don’t. The Clintons are in it deep. Besides, the everybody does it argument didn’t work when your Mom caught you smoking in 8th grade, and it certainly is too trite to invoke when something as important as the last shreds of integrity in the presidency of the United States is on the line.
Then again, Americans, you get what you pay for.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Child’s Treasury of Clinton Email Excuses
Though Madame herself has said nothing out loud (she did send one Tweet) about the bubbling scandal that she used private email to conduct four years’ of official business as Secretary of State, perhaps to help shield her communications from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, there has been no shortage of third-party defenders.Let’s take a look at their arguments, and see how they sound.
It’s Not IllegalClinton supporters fired their first shots claiming she did nothing illegal, that current laws on using personal email were enacted only in 2014. And so if you have done nothing illegal, by definition your actions are legal.
As to the rules/laws/regulations, there are some clear issues.
Clinton as Secretary of State held herself to lower standards than the rank and file. According to eight pages of State Department regulations (5 FAM 440, 443.1), “All Government employees and contractors are required by law to make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency (Federal Records Act, or “FRA,” 44 U.S.C. 3101 et seq).” Those regs have been in place since at least 2009, most since 1995. There’s also another section that’s relevant. The State Department through a series of memos and internal interpretations clarified that persons using personal email for government business should forward copies to their official account as soon as practical. There are no provisions for maintaining a private archive at home and turning over a curated selection years later when asked.
There is also what the official custodian of U.S. government records, the National Archives and Records Administration, in the 2009 National Records Act, has to say, specifically in 44 U.S.C. Chapters 31 and 33 and the regulations issued in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), specifically Subchapter B – Records Management of 36 (CFR) Chapter XII. See Records management by agency heads; general duties (§ 3101), Establishment of program of management (§ 3102), Transfer of records to records centers (§ 3103) and Certifications and determinations on transferred records (§ 3104). Read as much of it as you care to; the requirements are long, specific and mandatory. A personal email server in your home does not fit the bill.
Here’s the shortest version: In 2009, regulations required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.
Everybody Does ItThe question isn’t whether Clinton was allowed to have a private email account; she was, as secretaries of state before her did. The question is whether she was allowed to be the steward of the archives under the 2009 Federal Records Act. She was not. That’s where the violation occurs.
There also exists an important question of degree. Though Condi Rice denies ever using any personal email for official business, and Colin Powell famously used an AOL account more than ten years ago as part of his attempt to drag State into the late 20th century vis-vis technology, no previous government official in the known history of the United States has set up his/her own personal email server and used that exclusively for four full years. The scale sorta really matters.
The other side of the “everybody does it” argument is that it is a really poor argument. Anyone who has been a teenager has likely tried it (“But Mom, everybody drinks beer at my age, yeah I know I’m not 18 but everybody does it!”) and seen it fail. Defendants who went on to become convicted felons also know how unconvincing judges find it when people offer as their criminal defense that others have committed the same offenses but just didn’t get caught.
It seems sad that such an excuse is even thrown out there for a presidential contender, never mind that some are willing to accept it.
What Does it Matter?Absent someone starting an actual courtroom prosecution, this is not about whether an actual crime per se has been committed. It is about what Clinton’s image of open, good government looks like, what her plans for a transparent administration in line with America’s democratic principles might come to be. It is about whether what she says connects tightly to what she does.
It also matters because Clinton’s email actions were deliberate, and included an effort to hide what she was doing. Her email domain was registered in a way to hide its actual ownership (still unknown), and was set up just as she re-entered public life. Clinton never disclosed the email account until the media learned of it. That lack of disclosure continued even as she testified about the tragedy in Benghazi, assuring the public her Department’s internal review represented the full story. It could not have; she still held the emails at that time.
She still has not spoken about all of this, despite it being one of America’s top news stories.
Will she tell the electorate why she set up a personal server and did not use government email? For argument’s sake we’ll agree she was allowed, but that does not tell us why, and why matters.
Why didn’t Clinton turn over her personal emails years ago? Why only recently,and only when asked?
As president of the United States, will she encourage or condone Cabinet level officials to employ personal email servers in lieu of U.S. government systems?
How did she weigh out the security risks of using a personal email service? Yes, the emails were said to be unclassified, but if they were indeed not sensitive enough to warrant high levels of security, then one hopes they will all be released now, unredacted.
Is the way she handled her email at State and now in the aftermath indicative of her approach to public service?
Those things are in part what people are supposed to be assessing when they vote.
Suck It People, and Just Trust Me
Clinton’s people have said they combed through all of the (unknown amount) of emails and pulled out 55,000 pages, delivered literally on paper to the State Department so as to impede electronic searches (sorry to the intern who has to scan them) and of course eliminate the metadata. They all swear cross-their-fingers-hope-to-die that those are all the official emails in the stash. Honest sir, there can’t be even one more we might’ve missed.
But… Huge gaps exist in the emails Clinton provided to a congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the panel’s chairman said. Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said his committee lacked documentation from Clinton’s trip to Libya after the attack despite a popular photo image of her using her famous Blackberry during a flight to that country. “We have no emails from that day. In fact we have no emails from that trip,” said Gowdy. “There are huge gaps.”
So maybe Clinton’s staff missed just a few?
It’s All Republican Attack Cheap Shots
Which brings us to the all-purpose Clinton excuse: whatever bad things have happened to her and/or are being said about her are all a partisan attack, perpetrated by her Republican enemies, just like everything else from Vince Foster/White Water to 2008’s lying about being under fire in Bosnia to everything Benghazi.
And there is truth in that. It is without question that the Republicans will seize on anything negative about Clinton they can find. It is also without question that the Democrats will seize on anything negative about Bush or whoever they can find. Such is the nature of politics in America.
But that doesn’t mean what is under discussion is not true and it does not mean it does not matter. The easiest way for Clinton to escape answering questions is to stifle any discussion (“What does it matter anymore anyway?”) There are things that are worth talking about here, questions that need answers, regardless of whether you lean right or left. Don’t get sucked down the tunnel of partisan politics encouraging you to shut your brain off.
Think about it.
BONUS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Wouldn’t it be great is some mid-level State Department staffer set up her own email server in her apartment next week and sent a message to everyone at work she interacts with saying she was no longer going to use her official email account? Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Department
That sound you hear?That’s Republicans dancing a merry jig, and Benghazi investigators sharpening their subpoenas, because 2016 just got a lot more interesting with the revelation that as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton conducted all official business using a personal email account on her own web domain.
Here’s what happened, and why it matters. A lot.
What Happened
Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, violating federal regulations that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record and thus subject to Freedom of Information Act and Congressional requests. Clinton did not have a government email address during her entire four-year tenure, and her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.
It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Clinton’s personal advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the Department. The contents of the rest are known only to Clinton insiders. The process Clinton’s advisers used to determine which emails related to her work at the State Department were turned over has not been explained.
Instead, Clinton appears to have used email service through her own domain, clintonemail.com under the name hdr22@clintonemail.com. The domain was created on January 13, 2009, just before Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.
In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his e-mail through the clintonemail.com domain hacked.
The Clinton email domain is officially registered to a Jacksonville, Florida company called PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC. The company advertises itself by saying “By signing up for Perfect Privacy when you register your domain, our information is published in the WHOIS database, instead of yours.” That means Perfect Privacy acts as a cut-out, hiding the actual person or organization that set up the domain by sticking its own information online instead.
Clinton as Secretary of State held herself to lower standards than the rank and file. According to eight pages of State Department regulations (5 FAM 440, 443.1), “All Government employees and contractors are required by law to make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency (Federal Records Act, or “FRA,” 44 U.S.C. 3101 et seq).”
It is also apparent no one at State raised any questions. A large number of IT staff must have been aware that Clinton had no official email address, as must have security staff. Everyone who traded email with Clinton also knew. And no one said anything.
Why It Matters
The most basic reason this all matters is because it is the law. As Secretary of State, Clinton was required to maintain her emails as official records. She did not. She choose not to follow the law. Saying “everybody else did it” does not work for teenagers, felons in court or Secretaries of State. Since 2009, said Laura Diachenko, a National Archives and Records spokeswoman, federal regulations have stated that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.” The question isn’t whether Clinton was allowed to have a private email account; she was, as secretaries of state before her did. The question is whether she was allowed to be the steward of the archives under the 2009 Federal Records Act. She was not. That’s where the violation occurs.
It also matters because Clinton’s email actions were deliberate, and included an effort to hide what she was doing. Her email domain was registered in a way to hide its actual ownership (still unknown), and was set up just as she re-entered public life. Clinton never disclosed the email account until the New York Times learned of it. That lack of disclosure continued even as she testified about the tragedy in Benghazi, assuring the public her Department’s internal review represented the full story.
That review clearly did not represent the full story, in that it did not include any of Clinton’s emails. The review also did not note that the documents it had access to somehow did not include any emails from the Secretary of State. A careful analysis of Clinton’s testimony on Benghazi will need to be made to look for signs of possible perjury. If anything in the Clinton emails is new and relevant to understanding what happened in Benghazi, she should be held to explain why it was not revealed at the time of her testimony.
The contents of whatever small portion of Clinton emails released to State, and questions about what is in the tens of thousands of pages withheld, will revive hearings into what happened in Benghazi and what role Clinton played. There remain questions about what information was withheld from Congress. Even of the thousands of pages State received from Clinton, only 900 have been turned over to Congress.
Use of personal email to conduct government business in the age of hacking raises serious security questions, and calls into question Clinton’s commitment to protecting America’s secrets. According to The New York Times, Clinton also used a gmail account, hdr22@gmail.com, to conduct her official business.
With no oversight, the only check on Clinton not discussing classified information in her emails was Clinton herself. “We have no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal e-mail account for anything but unclassified purposes,” State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said Tuesday. “While Secretary Clinton did not have a classified e-mail system, she did have multiple other ways of communicating in a classified manner (assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls, secure video conferences).” Of course, since no one at State has seen the bulk of Clinton’s emails, they indeed may have “no indication.”
2016 just got much more interesting. Republicans will raise the email issue in great detail, especially since Jeb Bush has already released his own email stash from his time as governor. Clinton does not seem prepared to address the question; her spokesperson said incongruously that her use of a personal email account was in compliance with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”
Clinton as a leader allowed herself to be held to lower standards than that of her own rank and file. This, along with the decision to hide the emails itself and the violations of law, will raise questions about what type of president she might make.
Not the First
As Vox.com, and others, stated:
[In 2009, as Clinton took office] The Bush administration had just left office weeks earlier under the shadow of, among other things, a major ongoing scandal concerning officials who used personal email addresses to conduct business, and thus avoid scrutiny.
The scandal began in June 2007, as part of a Congressional oversight committee investigation into allegations that the White House had fired U.S. Attorneys for political reasons. The oversight committee asked for Bush administration officials to turn over relevant emails, but it turned out the administration had conducted millions of emails’ worth of business on private email addresses, the archives of which had been deleted.
The effect was that investigators couldn’t access millions of internal messages that might have incriminated the White House. The practice, used by White House officials as senior as Karl Rove, certainly seemed designed to avoid federal oversight requirements and make investigation into any shady dealings more difficult. Oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman accused the Bush administration of “using nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications.”
That scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush’s presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama’s first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as Secretary of State, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same.
Clinton knew what she was doing, and was aware of the consequences for herself and the White House. She did it anyway. Under such conditions, people will be muttering “Hey, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
Questions
One of the main reasons government officials use personal email is because it is not clearly subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as it is not a government document. Since Clinton now admits at least some of her personal email is indeed part of her official record as Secretary, will does emails become subject to FOIA? One assumes most major new organizations are drafting their FOIA requests as we speak.
And speaking of FOIA, since many/most of Clinton’s emails were not a part of official State Department records until recently means they would not have been identified in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenas or other document searches conducted over the past six years. Is anyone planning to reexamine those requests in light of developments?
There is also the question of how many email accounts where. Republican Trey Gowdy, who chairs the House committee investigating Benghazi stated Clinton had more than one private email account. “The State Department cannot certify that have produced all of former Secretary Clinton’s emails because they do not have all of former Secretary Clinton’s emails nor do they control access to them,” he said.
Who administered Clinton’s personal email network? S/he was not a government employee but had unfettered, Snowden-like access to government information conveyed at the Cabinet-level. As she also used a Gmail account, an unknown number of Google employees enjoyed a level of access unavailable to Clinton’s own State Department staff. Clinton’s personal email server backed up to a Google drive, wide-open to hackers both foreign and domestic.
Why didn’t Clinton turn over her personal emails years ago? Why only recently?
Instead of focusing on the “but was it illegal?” smokescreen, ask the simpler question: why did Clinton alone in her State Department rely 100 percent on a personal email account?
And what about that famous Clinton Blackberry? Blackberry messages go through a special server run by an organization itself. State maintains such a server for its staff’s required use. Did Hillary’s Blackberry run through a State server or a private one? Let’s ask.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Oh, It’s Gonna Be a Long Couple of Years
What stands out for you, young voter? Is it the sense of dynastic ascension? The air of entitlement? The We Will Rock You handclaps near the end? The tired trope of the beautiful blond woman hidden beneath the black motorcycle helmet? The fact that the whole thing looks like a pickup truck commercial? Or the cheesy glass ceiling thing?
Please, take a moment and share your thoughts below as we all stand with Hillary.
Jesus would want that.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Chelsea Clinton Makes $900,000 for Doing Almost Nothing
A feature of oligarchy is the dynastic ascension of new leaders, children who rise to positions of power and wealth simply by the luck of birth. We welcome Chelsea Clinton to the club.
Earning $445 Per Second at NBC
Unlike most well-to-do young people who, after a decent education, take a series of unpaid internships and entry-level positions to begin working their way up some corporate ladder, Chelsea jumped more than a few rungs. Despite never having attended journalism school or otherwise having worked in the field, Chelsea was hired by NBC News to do feel-good stories as part of their “Making a Difference” series. Though the starting salary for such positions is already a chunky $100,000-200,000, Chelsea is being paid $600,000 a year for the same work.
Or less work. Here is a list of Chelsea’s recent NBC stories:
— June 10, NBC Nightly News, on diabetes.
— June 10, Today show, on a car accident in New Jersey.
— June 5, NBC Nightly News, General Motors safety scandal.
— June 4, Today show, missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
— June 4, NBC Nightly News, about people pointing lasers at aircraft.
— June 3, NBC Nightly News, food-borne illnesses.
— June 2, Interviewed the Geico gecko, an animated character who sells insurance.All told, in her almost three-year tenure at NBC, Chelsea has worked on all of 14 stories.
Business Insider calculated since starting work in November 2011, Chelsea earned about $26,724 for each minute she appeared on air, or $445 per second. As in one-two-three = $1335, there’s your month’s rent.
NBC has an eye for talent, at least the talent of children of important politicians. In 2009, it hired George W. Bush’s daughter Jenna to serve as a correspondent on the Today” show. In 2011, it hired Senator John McCain’s daughter Meghan as a contributor on MSNBC.
More Chelsea $$$$$$$$
But back to Chelsea. She told the New York Times in 2011 when hired by NBC she intended to donate most of the money she earned to the Clinton Foundation. In addition to her gig at NBC, Chelsea also serves Vice Chair of the recently renamed “Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation,” where she was “a major force in steering her parents’ charitable work” in the final years of her mother’s time at the State Department.
Chelsea also benefits from a job as a board member for Barry Diller’s IAC/InteractiveCorp. Salary for Chelsea: $300,000. The board position also pays an annual retainer of $50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock.
Chelsea, though she only graduated with a master’s degree in 2010, started teaching graduate level classes two years later at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. Her exact salary is unknown. However, the average salary for a Columbia lecturer is $51,671.
Chelsea holds another academic post, salary unknown, as assistant vice provost for the Global Network University at New York University.
Chelsea has also presented an award to her mother at Diane Von Furstenberg’s International Women’s Day event and hosted her father’s 65th birthday at a Hollywood benefit for the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation with guests Lady Gaga and Bono.
Chelsea’s personal fortune is estimated at $15 million, most earned as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and by working for Avenue Capital Investment Group as a hedge fund manager. Chelsea and her husband live in a $10.5 million condominium in Manhattan.
Chelsea is only 34 years old and has already accomplished so much. What a bright future lies ahead! America is still a country where any child can grow up to someday become president.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Colin Powell: Please Shut the F*ck Up and Stop Embarrassing Yourself
Colin Powell, you need to shut the fuck up. Like Grandpa Simpson, every time you open your mouth you just embarrass yourself and demean all around you. Your time is done. Let the nurse change your diaper without fussing and just watch Matlock on TBS until you wither fully away.
Colin emerged from the land of creamed corn and denture adhesives to cast a shadow on the Sunday talk shows. He said this about Hillary Clinton and the deaths of four Americans at Benghazi:
I think she’s had a distinguished record. And I don’t think that this one incident–which is one of these things that those of us in government have been through many, many times where suddenly an action happens late at night … I don’t think it’s a blot on her record.
You’re surprised. Somebody gets killed, something gets blown up. And then the after-action reports start and everybody wants to know who was at fault. Who was responsible? ‘Why didn’t you keep this from happening?’ Well, you can’t keep everything from happening. Benghazi was a very, very difficult one and a difficult situation, and maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
The reader is reminded that Hillary Clinton was the head of the organization that placed those Americans where, in Colin’s words, “maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place” and thus might, oh, I don’t know, have some responsibility for what happened. Colin, who likely can’t read anymore even with his damn glasses, wherever the hell he left them, might also recall that the State Department’s own report on Benghazi found “a lack of proactive leadership and management ability in their responses to security concerns posed by Special Mission Benghazi, given the deteriorating threat environment and the lack of reliable host government protection.” Since Slick Hilly was head of the pack that showed such poor leadership, maybe she had some responsibility?
Nothing New for Colin Powell
But of course not being responsible for the deaths of others is Colin’s specialty, actually the hallmark of his career.
Colin Powell, as Secretary of State, lent his considerable credibility and gravitas to the case for war with Iraq.
Powell spoke publicly before the UN General Assembly, and privately in depth with America’s allies, about mobile biowar labs, weapons of mass destruction and the imminent danger Saddam Hussein posed. While many people considered Bush an idiot puppet, and Cheney and Rumsfeld psychopathic fibbers, Powell convincingly represented the United States’ case for war. Of course, everything Powell said was a lie. Pimping his book Colin told all (like Benghazi, it was just a “blot”):A blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation. I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me. There is nothing worse than a leader believing he has accurate information when folks who know he doesn’t don’t tell him that he doesn’t.
So why did no one stand up and speak out during the intense hours we worked on the speech? Some of these same analysts later wrote books claiming they were shocked that I have relied on such deeply flawed evidence. Try to get over failure quickly. Learn from it. Study how you contributed to it. If you are responsible, own up to it.
And My Lai Just Happened Too
Colin famously served in America’s retro-war of choice, Vietnam. He was charged with investigating the My Lai Massacre. Powell wrote: “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” Later, Powell’s assessment would be described as whitewashing the massacre. Almost rehearsing his Hillary lines to the very word, in May 2004 Powell told radio host Larry King, “I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored.”
Birds of a Feather
So it is no real surprise that Colin Powell, who took no responsibility for helping America into a horrible war with Iraq, is now dragged out of the retirement home toilet to tell us that Hillary also has no responsibility for the stuff that just kinda happens out there when you go intervening around the world. And hey, in Colin’s own words, you’d be surprised when people want to know who is responsible for the deaths of their sons and daughters. Gosh golly, why would anyone want to know who was responsible for just a blot? And why are we still listening to has-beens like Colin? Have we run out of Kardashians to interview? Do we have to wait for some pathetic sex scandal until we can heap Colin into the dust-bin of once-media-superheroes alongside Petraeus and Lance Armstrong? Colin and Hillary together, what a pair, which is good because without her Colin does not have one.
Thanks Colin, for all your
blotsservice. Now go away you tired old man. Meanwhile, let’s watch this:
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Hillary Calls in Sick on Benghazi
Or will she go all-out and claim total amnesia? Hillary, now suffering from a self-inflicted concussion, dodges for the fifth time publicly testifying about the disaster in Benghazi. 2016 baby!
Here is the piece-de-resistance de Clinton:
Hillary Ducks Once
Right after the attacks in Benghazi, when the US Government was still trying to sell the lie that it was all because of that dumb anti-Islam movie, Clinton did not go on the Sunday talk shows, Unter Fuhrer Susan Rice did it. And hey, Susan, how’d that work out for ya?
Hillary Ducks Twice
Then, just prior to the re-election of Barack Obama, lickspittle Hillary proudly proclaimed that she would assume full responsibility for what happened in Benghazi without actually saying or doing anything.
Hillary Ducks a Third Time
But, then she didn’t show up for the first round of Congressional hearings in November. Because she was “traveling.”
MS. NULAND: Matt, they’ve asked for closed hearings, closed briefings; that’s what we’re complying with.
QUESTION: The Secretary won’t appear before any of these committees?
MS. NULAND: The Secretary has not been asked to appear. They’ve asked for the individuals that are coming.
QUESTION: Would she be willing to fly back from Australia to appear?
MS. NULAND: Again, she has not been asked to appear. She was asked to appear at House Foreign Affairs next week, and we have written back to the Chairman to say that she’ll be on travel next week.
Hillary Ducks a Fourth Time
So with the election now history, Congress scheduled some more hearings on Benghazi for December 20. Clinton was scheduled to appear and testify. But then we learned that State’s own internal report on the death of one of its ambassador’s abroad would be delayed and well, maybe Hillary would not be available. She is also listed as sole witness on the 9:00 am, December 20, hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Benghazi: The Attack and the Lessons Learned.
But then, maybe Hillary would not be available to testify. Here’s the exchange:
MS. NULAND: Again, the Hill has talked about a planning date on the calendar. That presumes that the ARB is finished. I don’t have any dates – any schedule of the Secretary’s to announce here. It’s dependent upon events between now and then.
QUESTION: She hasn’t committed to testify?
MS. NULAND: Again, it’s dependent on the work being finished. Okay?
QUESTION: Are you aware that Senator Kerry announced that she will testify next Thursday?
MS. NULAND: She has made clear that when the work is ready, she will go consult with Congress on it. And that’s a commitment she’s made, and she intends to keep it.
Hillary Ducks a Fifth Time
Well, because that lame prevarication was not enough, just the other day Hillary announced that she had the flu, and would need to cancel some travel and work from home for a full week (government employees get great sick leave benefits). And since that excuse did not seem, um, sympathetic enough when most Americans are forced to go to work no matter how sick they are, we learned that Hils got dehydrated, passed out, hit her head and got a concussion!
One More Time?
Update: “She looks forward to continuing to engage with them in January and she will be open to whatever they consider appropriate in that regard,” Spokesdrone Nuland said following the concussion.
And We’re Spent
She will thus not be able to testify before the Senate on December 20. Of course we then plunge into Christmas, New Years and poof! before you know it Hillary’s time is up, John Kerry is sworn in as Secretary of State and we are all told we are looking forward, not backward.The upshot of all this is that Hillary ends her term as SecState without any naughty video of her fibbing about Benghazi to follow her into the history books.
Or into 2016.
Note: Of course I am not implying that Hillary is faking her concussion for personal political gain. All of us here at We Meant Well wish her a quick recovery, and a joyous holiday. We join in thanking her for her tireless service to America and hope she and her staff are feeling well soon.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Petraeus, Hillary, Benghazi and WTF
While the hearings on what happened in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and elsewhere on the Hill this week are being held behind closed doors, and while SecState-in-Wanting John Kerry as chair is on board to make sure nothing too bad happens, what we do know continues to suggest the cesspool in Washington has no bottom.
Exit Petraeus
David Petraeus’ political assassination last week has taken him off the stage as effectively as any sniper’s round. Conveniently timed to drop just a few days after Obama’s re-election (and on a Friday before a three day weekend to boot, sorry Mitt), in one fell swoop a fall guy is crowned for whatever went wrong in Benghazi, Hillary’s virgin status is preserved for 2016 and at no extra charge a potential Republican candidate is shredded. Not a bad day’s work for our FBI. And of course, most immediately, Petraeus won’t be allowed to testify before the Senate to cover his own philandering butt on Libya. People have learned a lot about how to do these kinds of things since the messy demise of Vince Foster.
New CIA Renditions?
As part of the gift that seems to keep giving, we now can go back and examine Petraeus’ snooki, Paula Broadwell, and see what she has been saying in new light. Overnight she has gone from pretend journalist to oracle into the deepest secrets at the CIA. And what might those be?
How about this: On October 26 Broadwell told an audience at the University of Denver that the CIA annex at the Benghazi consulate came under assault on September 11 because it had earlier “taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back.”
Another source says that prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were also brought to the CIA’s Benghazi location. CIA, as expected, denies everything.
Woooo, holy mother of Christ on toast! Knowing now that Broadwell had access to Petraeus’ top secret pillow talk, her “speculative” statement becomes serious stuff. It tells us without a doubt that the September attack was aimed at the CIA (which this blog called way back then without having to had slept with anyone) not Ambassador Stevens, that the White House and Susan Rice damn well knew the attack was unrelated to the anti-Muslim video and worst of all, that the CIA is back in/still in the kidnapping and rendition business.
The latter is major stuff people. The CIA was kidnapping dudes in Libya? To do what with them? Torture/interrogate them locally and then release them? Render them to some outside secret site? What other sites? What the hell are those bad boys (still) doing in our name?
Where in the World is Hillary?
Just prior to the re-election of Barack Obama, lickspittle Hillary proudly proclaimed that she would assume full responsibility for what happened in Benghazi.
So with that statement of full responsibility, one would assume that Hillary will be up on the Hill this week, adding her insight and responsibility into the Senate’s Libya hearings, right?
Wrong Skippy.
Hillary is off to Australia to pimp for money to prop up America’s overweight defense structure in Asia. And don’t ask her for next week either, because she’ll be “on travel.” And also don’t expect to hear any testimony from any Libyans, either.
From Friday’s State Department press briefing:
MS. NULAND: Matt, they’ve asked for closed hearings, closed briefings; that’s what we’re complying with.
QUESTION: The Secretary won’t appear before any of these committees?
MS. NULAND: The Secretary has not been asked to appear. They’ve asked for the individuals that are coming.
QUESTION: Would she be willing to fly back from Australia to appear?
MS. NULAND: Again, she has not been asked to appear. She was asked to appear at House Foreign Affairs next week, and we have written back to the Chairman to say that she’ll be on travel next week.
QUESTION: Are you aware that any Libyans will be called to the hearings to be talked to?
MS. NULAND: That sounds like a question for the Hill. I’m not aware of any panels other than the government panels.
QUESTION: But you have not been asked to facilitate any visas or anything like this for –
MS. NULAND: To my knowledge, no.
QUESTION: — maybe some Libyan officials?
MS. NULAND: No.
As a public service, looking ahead to the Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016, opposition researchers are invited to bookmark this page.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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