Now it’s a full-blown Hillary document destruction scandal
It’s no longer just about using a personal email account and server.
Whew, boy. It is not looking pretty.
There are several developments on both fronts — the email scandal, and the Clinton Foundation foreign government sugar daddy scandal. But we’ll start with the email.
1. No one read Hillary’s emails before they were presumably destroyed
This excerpt comes from a long piece in TIME:
“For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be ‘private, personal records.’”
And to make matters worse:
You know what doesn’t show up in a key word search? Any words contained in a file attachment…or an embedded image.
— Morgen (@morgenr) March 12, 2015
2. Hillary won’t confirm she signed mandatory form indicating she’d turned over all classified documents (including emails) to the State Department
Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner reported last night:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, like all departing federal employees, was required to fill out and sign a separation statement affirming that she had turned over all classified and other government documents, including all emails dealing with official business.
Fox News Megyn Kelly reported Wednesday evening on the requirement and that a spokesman for Clinton had not responded to a request for comment, including an explanation of when the former chief U.S. diplomat signed the mandatory separation agreement or, if she didn’t, why didn’t she.
3. Questions surrounding the digital security of Hillary’s emails mount as Jen Psaki confirms Clinton never used a State Department issued Blackberry
Josh Gerstein reports for Politico:
The BlackBerry former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is seen using in a ubiquitous photo taken aboard a U.S. military aircraft apparently wasn’t government-owned, since the State Department never provided her with such a device, a department spokeswoman said Thursday.
“Secretary Clinton … was not issued a State Department BlackBerry,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at a regular briefing for reporters.
4. Hillary gets a good glimpse of the White House Bus’s undercarriage
Also from Politico (and definitely worth the read in its entirety), Edward-Isaac Dovere reports:
…To sum up the feelings, all the way up to the highest levels: What. The. Hell.
With so much on the line, with so much time to prepare, she’s back to classic Clinton? She’s flubbing a campaign kick-off eight years in the making because she somehow thought that no one would ever care that she set up a secret email server? That anyone would then accept her word that it was okay that she deleted 30,000 emails even though the State Department had been asking for some of them? And then go silent again?
…“You never feel like you’re quite getting the full story, because everyone’s got some side deal or some complicating factor,” said one former Obama aide, reflecting on dealing with Clinton and her circle. “I don’t think there was a conscious effort to watch out for scams. It was more just, you know who you’re dealing with.”
5. Last night, we covered a new government report that discovered the State Department only kept 61,156 emails out of over one billion in 2011
“It was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their .gov accounts, so those emails would be automatically saved in the State Department system to meet record keeping requirements and that is indeed what happened,” said former Secretary Clinton yesterday.
But there’s just one problem — only a fraction of the emails sent within the State Department are actually kept.
The OIG report found that, “in 2011, employees created 61,156 record emails out of more than a billion emails sent.” To make matters worse, even though their systems were upgraded in 2009 (the year Mrs. Clinton took watch over the State Department) in order to, “facilitate the preservation of emails as official records.” Even with the improved infrastructure, “Department of State employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve “record emails.””
The report also concluded that State Department employees were intentionally avoiding creating official email records, “because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions.”
6. Could Hillary really do her job without sending classified information?
The Wall Street journal doesn’t think so.
Mrs. Clinton insisted Tuesday that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” With the Clintons, you always have to parse the meaning of “is,” and Mrs. Clinton didn’t say she never received classified information via email. But if she meant both send and receive, then how could she have done her job given the hundreds of thousands of miles she traveled during her four years at Foggy Bottom?
Surely she had to inspect classified material on numerous occasions while she was on the road doing highly sensitive government business. If some aide had to carry a separate device for classified communications, then that blows away her “convenience” excuse for using a personal email account because she only wanted to carry one device. Maybe the real question is whether anything in her story is true.
And the Clinton Foundation? Well, this happened:
7. Clinton Foundation staff were paid with taxpayer dollars
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has the scoop:
Say, how is Clinton nostalgia working out for Democrats these days? Some of them may long for the days when Clintonian freeloading meant stealing furniture from the White House. That amounted to chump change compared to the millions received by the Clintons in the years since they loaded up the moving van at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That comes to over $16 million, according to an analysis by Politico’s Kenneth Vogel, and includes cash that has gone into salaries for staffers at the Clinton Foundation
And there you have it. Another day in the life of the Clinton family.
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Comments
I’m among those who wonder, with all the horrible things Hillary has done over the years (Vince Foster was unavailable for comment), why all the media uproar over this trivia?
Who was it who said, “There are no coincidences in politics”?
Because the “media” want to kill Hillary and stuff in their own hand-picked turkey, i.e., Lizzie Borden Warren.
But she’s a bigger fake than Hillary………
If you’ve been paying attention you’ve seen the whispers about MICHELLE Obama running for president . . . keeps the streak going. And she, unlike Lizzie, is “beloved” and authentically black.
Sure would like to know what the keywords were!
You mean to mark an email for deletion? Then it would have to include “Benghazi.”
You know who also has “never used a State Department issued Blackberry” as required – from the start in 2008?
Barry Obama!
I bet he’s been hacked more than a….
Phrases from Hillary’s inclusive Keyword Search – “State Department Christmas Party”, “Drinks After Work”, “Embassy Cocktail Party”, “Jack Daniels”, “On the rocks”, “Air Miles” and “Weekend at Bernies”.
Excluded words: “Benghazi”, “Bill’s Bimbo’s”, “When will Chelsea find a real job”, “Lipstick Lesbians”
Can you say, “Critical mass?”
How ’bout, “Tipping point?”
I’d say we were there. Or very, very close…
It wouldn’t surprise me if Bill was behind the defenestration of Hillary. He’s got it good right now – He can fly off to exotic islands on a private jet full of underage girls, and nobody cares. But if Hillary became President?
Keep in mind that whatever ol’ BJ is doing, he’s doing with a squad of Secret Service agents. So there’s that.
and we know those S.S. agents just like the I.R.S. agents LOVE a wild party!
I cannot help but believe Obama is behind this. He is trying to deep six Hillary to make way for a ‘Draft Michelle’ movement.
too bad its too late to look at the server. grabbing it now will do no good.
you know damned well they created new exchange database on new drive and “lost” the drive prior databases were on.
remember this is not a flat file mail server, its all done through an edb (Exchange DataBase) file.
I am thinking there are dozens of servers, and innumerable e-mail addresses.
One shot throw away e-mail addresses.
The only thing that can stop this practice is integrity and honor.
She didn’t sign any form. Not one time, not ever. Now let her go back to work saving the world’s women.
That should read ‘saving the world’s white leftist feminazi women.’
Here’s yet another dilemma: they have undoubtedly sanitized the server by now (delete system log files, update and/or clear out file metadata, remove “deleted file” information from system directories, and wipe clean unallocated disk space on the hard drive(s) to prevent forensic recovery of files). But any forensic examination of the server would show that, and they’ll have to explain that as well. Hence, they’ll fight any subpoena of the server itself (or an image of its hard disk(s)). Should be interesting.
Very often, we don’t get a jury verdict on fraud based on the POSITIVE evidence we present during trial.
We show great, gaping holes in what is SUPPOSED to be there…what we gave the other side ample chance to bring…but ISN’T there.
Juries are like voters. They are not stupid. They can see what IS…and what ISN’T…true. All you have to do is bring it to them.
Thanks, rags. Your mini-rant about evidence is something I constantly recite to clients. I tell them to stop sweating the other side destroying evidence since that makes our job much easier if they do.
Yeeeeup. It’s like I tell people about witnesses lying in deposition; LET THEM!
Or, like Hillary in a presser.
And we at LI can ALLLLLL see how well that worked for her.
Heh!
And HEH!
“Juries are like voters. They are not stupid.”
As evidence to the contrary, I present you “Obama”.
You ever do anything stupid? I sure have. All of us have.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Me? Of course. My youth was full of stupid stuff. But I did not say the voters weren’t stupid 🙂
its an exchange server.
all they need to do is point to a new exchange database, clear the event log, toss the drive with old on in a river and it would be almost impossible to tell.
your only clue is the new database would have no older emails in it which is not proof of anything.
its not a flat file server, no metadata/overwrites/etc needed unless they wanted to go cheap and save $300 worth of hard drives.
I don’t know about that. The Clinton’s have always depended on obfuscation and intimidation for their cover ups. They aren’t actually very competent.
And really, securely wiping a server while keeping it in operation is not such as easy as it sounds. It would be safer to destroy it.
Look for a suspicious fire at the Chappaqua homestead in 3 … 2 …
Hillary can always call Al Sharpton and arrange for a convenient fire or explosion to physically destroy the server. Or it could . . . oops . . . fall off the truck and into the Hudson on its way to D.C.
Hey, accidents happen!
This is Hillary’s “eighteen minute gap.”
Are we still in silent mode?
She looks good in orange.
http://www.zap2it.com/blogs/hillary-clinton-2008-08
“6. Could Hillary really do her job without sending classified information?”
Since she didn’t actually do her job, certainly not competently, I have no trouble believing that she did not have classified information cluttering up her more important email needs. We know Obama does not read his daily briefings, so why should we believe that Hillary was any more conscientious? If she only gloried in the title, perks, and powers of being Sec of State and not in doing the actual work, then why would she need classified information? I think she could defend her disastrous record better by claiming to be out of the loop and ignorant, rather than maintaining that she was fully informed but produced such horrible results. “I know nothing” is the standard defense put forward by this administration.
Golly, when LI told us that Hillary was re-branding, I thought maybe she would replace her pantsuits with something modern, more like an Elvis-style Onesie. But this new brand is MUCH better! Kudos!
Oh, she has an explanation for that (which is probably also the truth)
The only problem with that is it completely undermines her reason for not having a State Department device of her own.
She was relying on aides to receive classified information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/no-classified-emails-by-clinton-some-experts-are-skeptical.html?_r=0
As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was almost always accompanied by one or more aides with secure government BlackBerrys, laptops or other devices that could be used to send classified material at her direction.
“Classified information was viewed in hard copy by the secretary while in the office,” according to a statement from her office Tuesday. “While on travel, the department had rigorous protocols for her and traveling staff to receive and transmit information of all types.”
Her office said that while serving as secretary, Ms. Clinton “communicated with foreign officials in person, through correspondence and by telephone.” Her staff’s review of her emails “revealed only one email with a foreign official,” one from the United Kingdom, the statement said.
They also said earlier, she used secure phones, secure video teleconferencing and had classified documents printed out for her by aides who received them.
This narrative, although possible, runs counter to the “convenience” story. If Hillary had aides who could tote various communications devices for her, then there is no “inconvenience” that would require the establishment of a personal e-mail server.
Off topic, but…
Anybody note Barracula’s heartfelt, deeply sincere tweet about the LEOs he and Holder managed to get shot?
I guess this means they don’t look like his son/brother/cousin/or uncle who liberated death camps…
Odd.
You do realize that if that liberating Auschwitz story is true, it means his relative was a Soviet citizen? Based on his values and behaviors in office, I tend to believe it.
>>”She’s flubbing a campaign kick-off eight years in the making because she somehow thought that no one would ever care that she set up a secret email server?”>>
An arrogance and entitlement to make Imelda Marcos blush. She may be the most congenitally and rottedly corrupt individual in the history of American governance. Christopher Hitchens pretty much said this back in the day in his book “No One Left to Lie to.”
What’s also interesting is how incredibly greedy all these Socialists are. They go on and on about the greed of others but they can never pack enough away, steal enough and, contrariwise, give so little to charity).
The perennial pattern of the pathological liar. It worked before, why wouldn’t it work now?
Answer: Now we have the Internet on our phones and no one trusts the evening news anymore. But Hillary is a dinosaur who hasn’t noticed that things have changed. (None of which means she won’t pull it out somehow even so. I doubt it, but never ever discount the Clinton machine. At least, don’t ever turn your back on it)
Besides the Hillary debacle, State only kept one in 16,000 (61,000 in a billion, 0.0061%) email records in 2011, who knows by now. Of course when there is ongoing Obama lawlessness, it would be convenient to make sure only a few safe records were kept. Lois Lerner is smiling.
Any actively involved in deliberate hiding should be prosecuted. Need to give a few people immunity maybe, turn on all the others.
She’s a pathetic ass. She has been, and always will be.
The leftist fallacy of her being anything but, is over.
Well you know where this is headed – blame it on the systems admins, claim that the server was ‘really’ in safe secured government building, lose the server hardware and if need be pull an Al Shapton and burn all the records….twice.
Hillary’s campaign song will be “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina!”
Maybe the Russians or the NSA can cough up the missing emails.
The Russians did not hack her e-mail. The hacker Guccifer probably does not exist, and the memos he forwarded probably are Russian forgeries – and had he in fact hacked anybody, it would have been Sidney Blumenthal, not clintonemail.com,
But Blumenthal had no reason to be possession of all that information, nor would he write secret e-mail this way – in a pseudo-objective manner, intended for someone who doesn’t know too much, expressing no opinion as to what was likely to be true, and also naming no sources.
I mean, really?
How do you *know* the Russians couldn’t and didn’t get into either her private server, or the State Department servers for that matter.
In your words “really?”
Perhaps you were expecting a they would leave a little note saying “Vlad was here.”
Their tapping of Victoria Nuland’s conversations (with her famous crude remark about the EU) was admitted to be “impressive tradecraft.” So much for Victoria Nuland’s secret. And it is the same organization, the State Department.
What was it that then Senator Clinton said to General Petraeus, “the willing suspension of disbelief”?
Al Capone got arrested for tax evasion; can we arrest Hillary for email evasion? 😉
Would it surprise anyone if Hillary burnt her house down in Chappaqua to destroy the server (while she was conveniently in some public forum as an alibi)? T
That’s a rhetorical question, of course!
http://time.com/3741847/the-clinton-way/#3741847/the-clinton-way/
After she finished taking questions, Clinton’s staff disclosed that no one actually read through those 30,000-odd documents before she “chose not to keep” them..
…She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so.
And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”
Now, this still probably still does not get to the real problemwith this.
Because a little thought (and paying attention to the clues that there was some negotiationg going on) tells you that:
The search terms were probably reverse engineere!!
Jonah Goldberg says he is told that such a search would not go through any attachments.
So if she forwarded e-mail, you’d only be find it if it got captured by the what was in the main body of the text. The best hope would be the recipient, but if the recipient was not a special person in the search, it wouldn’t be turned up.
Forwarding e-mail to Bill Clinton – who probably had it printed out – not a problem. It won’t be found. (because all communications directed to Bill Clinton, of course, are presumed to be personal)
And on top of that, something really bad might have been deleted, contemporaneously, or in the fall of 2014.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/03/10/transcript-hillary-clinton-addresses-e-mails-iran/
At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.
No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy.
Now I think there are no circumstances, other than an investigation or a lawsuit in which the server is seized and all the emails become evidence, under which information about Chelsea’s wedding or her mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations would become public.
This sort of thing did happen to Monica Lewinsky when her computer was seized.
Now of course, everything not turned oover was labeled personal.
Hillary Clinton (she had to rely on notes, by the way. It was too much to memorize)
In going through the e-mails, there were over 60,000 in total, sent and received. About half were work-related and went to the State Department and about half were personal that were not in any way related to my work. I had no reason to save them, but that was my decision because the federal guidelines are clear and the State Department request was clear.
Yeah, they had negotiated the search terms.
See also this:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-private-email-plan-drew-concerns-early-on-1426117692
Mrs. Clinton said she followed the rules because most of her email was sent to recipients with government accounts, which was automatically retained. Her office said about 10% of her emails weren’t captured that way, and were therefore unavailable until late last year.
In deciding what to turn over, her office says she directed her attorneys to collect all official messages. They identified 30,490 such emails, including one to a foreign official (from the U.K.). They concluded the remaining 31,830 emails were personal, and Mrs. Clinton said they were deleted.
How do you like that?
If 10% were not captured. but only the “vast majority” were, then she wasn’t complying with the Federal Records Act, even under her interpretation, in which it didn’t matter where a record was kept, so long as it was kept.
Another point:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415234/hillarys-specious-arguments-about-her-e-mail-andrew-c-mccarthy
“First, since we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information — the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents.
The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails. We would not be able to judge that absent reviewing the e-mails. If any of the 31,830 withheld e-mails from the private, non-secure system—involving America’s top diplomat who was in constant discussions with other important diplomats, top military and national-security officials, her trusted advisers, and even the president of the United States—touched on classified matters, that could land Mrs. Clinton in very hot legal water. It would be a powerful incentive to hit the “delete” key.”
In her press briefing, Hillary Clinton referred to classified “material” – probably a very careful choice of words, that could seem, at first glance, to mean both documents and information, but could be defended as meaning only documents if “information” was shown not to be true.
She’s probably looking for the non-existent “reset” button.