Did Hillary just walk into a perjury trap over her emails?
Submits court Declaration under penalty of perjury in FOIA suit as to Huma Adedin’s outside employment.
Part of the chase for Hillary’s emails is taking place in Congress.
Another part is taking place in federal court in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch seeking records as to employment outside the State Department by close Hillary aide Huma Abedin (Anthony Weiner’s wife).
The Washington Free Beacon reports on the background:
The State Department Inspector General is now investigating the arrangement between Huma Abedin and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Inspector Steve Linick is looking into the program that allowed Clinton to hire Abedin for government work even though she was employed by a private firm.
In May 2013, the New York Times reported that Abedin never disclosed her earnings and the private consulting that she was conducting outside of the State Department while continuing to serve as Clinton’s top adviser.
Abedin worked for Teneo, which was founded by Doug Band, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. The corporate client list for Teneo has included Coca-Cola and MF Global, the since-folded brokerage firm run by Jon S. Corzine.
Hillary has been playing hide the ball with records she used through her private email account and server.
The Judicial Watch FOIA case was filed in 2013 and closed in 2014. The case was then reopened by the Court when Hillary’s personal email account and private server, along with deletions, were disclosed.
Among other things, the Court recently ordered that records be preserved after a threat to destroy records:
Judicial Watch announced that at 7:33 pm ET on Friday, August 7, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order to the State Department explicitly instructing that all federal documents relating to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills be preserved:
In view of [20] the Government’s status report, the Court hereby directs the Government to request that Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin, and Ms. Cheryl Mills i) not delete any federal documents, electronic or otherwise, in their possession or control, and ii) provide appropriate assurances to the Government that the above-named individuals will not delete any such documents. The Government shall inform the Court of the status of its compliance with this Order no later than August 12, 2015, including a copy of any assurances provided by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills that they will not delete any federal documents in their possession or control. Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on August 7, 2015.
The order was issued a little over an hour after Judicial Watch lawyers filed an urgent response Friday evening, informing Judge Sullivan of a plan to destroy federal records as reported by State to the court.
Last week’s State Department filing shows that the agency sent the former officials the request and a copy of Judge Sullivan’s order but that both Mills and Abedin, who responded through their attorneys, ignored Judge Sullivan’s request to submit information under penalty of perjury. The State Department reports that Mrs. Clinton has yet to respond. Contrary to both Judge Sullivan’s order and the State Department’s request, Ms. Mills’ attorney said that she told Ms. Mills to destroy federal records in her possession on Monday, August 10. Judicial Watch immediately filed its urgent response informing Judge Sullivan of this plan to destroy federal records.
State had been ordered on July 31 to request that Clinton and her top aids confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession and to return any other government records immediately. The Court wanted State to ascertain how Clinton, Abedin and Mills to describe their use of Hillary Clinton’s email server to conduct government business.
Contrary to both Judge Sullivan’s order and the State Department’s request, Mills’ attorney said that she told Mills to destroy federal records in her possession on Monday, August 10.
Judicial Watch reports that on August 8 Hillary finally submitted a Declaration under penalty of perjury as to records production — but that Declaration is inadequate:
Judicial Watch announced that the State Department today submitted to the court an August 8 sworn declaration from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding federal records on her controversial email system. The declaration states:
I, Hillary Rodham Clinton, declare under penalty of perjury that the following is true and correct:
- While I do not know what information may be “responsive” for purposes of this law suit, I have directed that all my e-mails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records to be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.
- As a result of my directive, approximately 55,000 pages of these emails were produced to the Department on December 5, 2014.
- Cheryl Mills did not have an account on clintonemail.com. Huma Abedin did have such an account which was used at times for government business.
The document is signed by “Hillary Rodham Clinton.” The State Department was ordered by US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan on July 31 to request that Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession and to return any other government records immediately. The Court wanted State to ask Clinton, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to describe their use of Hillary Clinton’s email server to conduct government business. The State Department produced last week the August 5 letter it sent to Mrs. Clinton, which included a copy of Judge Sullivan’s order.
Mrs. Clinton’s declaration fails to comply with both Judge Sullivan’s court order and the State Department’s request. Clinton does not certify she turned over all federal records and provides no information on the extent that Abedin and Mills used her server.
Let’s take a look as the many potential loopholes and outs Hillary has in the wording:
- “While I do not know what information may be “responsive”” — In other words, everything that follows is qualified by Hillary not knowing what she’s supposed to be producing.
- “I have directed” — so if it doesn’t get done, it’s not Hillary’s fault.
- “on clintonemail.com” — special emphasis on “on” — what does that mean to be “on” and email account?
- ” in my custody” — usually I’ve seen wording much broader, “in my custody or under my control” or similar language.
- “were or potentially were federal records to be provided to the Department of State” — so only records that were to be provided by her to DoS are covered, but that’s not necessarily the universe of all federal or potentially federal records.
Any declaration under oath holds great risk. But Hillary’s lawyers have carefully worded her Declaration to admit to nothing, provide multiple ambiguities, and numerous “outs” should she be challenged.
Judicial Watch is continuing to press for answers and documents.
But Judicial Watch is up against the world’s expert on dodging — someone who learned from the Master. Or maybe the Master learned from her.
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Comments
“Did Hillary just walk into a perjury trap over her emails?”
The tell will be if she shows up at a campaign event with a freshly gnawed-off limb…
Are you kidding???? This is a nation where Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno gave orders that resulted in the deaths of dozens children in order to save them in Waco. Mrs. Clinton is untouchable. UNTOUCHABE. Just ask Chuck Todd. The issue is whether Chris Christie should be indicted for a traffic jam, or whether Donald Trump is a misogynist.
Don’t will yourself into self-fulfilling prophesy. Change is coming.
I hope so. I hope Trey Gowdy gets her, drags everything out until Obama leaves office so he can’t pardon her. If Jeb isn’t in the WH, she will do time.
I hope, in turn, that your confidence in Trey Gowdy is well placed. I have not been impressed with any results from him, interim or otherwise. Are you sure that he is not just another Boehner delay mechanism?
I share your concern. Trey says a lot of good things, but seems to achieve nothing after months of work.
How long did Watergate take with a media that was almost universal in its support of Congress and condemnation of Nixon? So why are you expecting speedy results with a press that supports everything Democrat?
As a prosecutor, Gowdy never lost a case he brought to trial. The evidence in these cases is quite technical. A white collar criminal case often takes years to put together. Why do people expect Gowdy to telegraph his moves now rather than wait until it is impossible to get out of the trap?
As for the charge Gowdy is a tool of Boehner, I suggest you read his tepid endorsement from January and then learn Congressional procedures. The proper time to mount a challenge to the Speaker is at the party caucus held in November after the election. The conservatives waited until December. In the interim many conservative leaning congressman already promised to vote for Boehner on the first ballot.
Much like Darryl Issa: all talk, no action.
I’ll wager no one wishes he was done with this more than Gowdy. But it isn’t he who is dragging heels, it is document production from State that holds up the investigation.
But feel free to continue your belief in conspiracies.
When Her Royal Clintoness starts parsing her legal response into ambiguity then you know she is one with Bubba the spinmeister. Truth becomes relative when the ends are consummate political power.
Why hasn’t the FBI, the CIA and the NSA raided the Clinton liar and removed the server long before now? Why? Are they in collusion with her? Are they being paid off?
Those agencies are under Obama’s control. If they come down hard, Hillary is probably sunk. In that case, Obama has no leverage.
Obama is leaving office, so he won’t have the full force of the government to exact his revenge or to persuade cooperation from his fellow Democrats. This discretion is his leverage to keep her from undermining his lame duck years.
– –
There is an old story in chess. Longtime Champion Emanuel Lasker was famous for his cheap Maduro cigars, but the eccentric theoretician Aron Nimzowitsch was allergic to smoke, so Lasker promised not to smoke during their game in a tournament. As the game got tense, Lasker pulled out a cigar and began to fondle it as he thought. Nimzowitsch immediately complained to the Arbiter.
“He isn’t smoking, it is not lit,” the Arbiter observed. Nimzowitsch replied, “Yes, but has not Dr. Lasker himself not written that the threat is more deadly than its execution?”
And so it is with Obama and Hillary.
The FBI might not raid her, but The Donald will, and so will The Ted.
This is true, and why the Dems are so desperate to maintain control of the White House. Personally, I’m interested in what is in the documents Obama withheld from the Fast and Furious investigation. He withheld them claiming a presidential prerogative, but they are not “classified” in any sense. I presume a succeeding president can release whatever documents produced by a predecessor as he or she sees fit.
It’s probably true that the Master learned from her. She has a long history of “losing” documents, probably going back farther than the Rose Law Firm docs.
Why did the court not write a statement for her to attest to “under penalty of perjury?”
She, Huma, and Mills are not parties to the action and not subject to the Court’s jurisdiction at this point.
There you have it, especially since she negotiated with the State Department exactly were to be considerd federal records (apparently anything sent to or from a state.gov address, and not necessarily anything else, although she suppled a limited selected of other stuff, claiming to go beyond what she was required to do)
The State Department accepted her definition of what was a federal record before the informed the committee of anything.
Hillary also claims not to understand exactly what’s being asked for, anyway, which allows her to hide behind the previous definition, agreed with John Kerry’s State Department.
I don’t think she supplied much, if any, of the e-mail between her and her top aides when her aides were using a clintonemail.com address and not their state.gov addresses.
These are so damaging that Cheryl Mills attorney openly declares that he told her to destroy her e-mails today.
…provide multiple ambiguities, and numerous “outs” should she be challenged.
“Should” she be challenged. That’s her escape hatch.
No one will challenge her. At least mot seriously.
Another self-fulfilling prophesy…
Remember the political landscape before The Donald?
A “perjury trap” can only exist if someone with the appropriate legal standing is willing to prosecute. Where could such a theoretical person be found; because he, she, or it have been invisible to date?
Because the State Department is covering for her, even though its own neck is on the chopping block with an angry federal judge who’s said he won’t take it anymore.
The State Department should be prepared to sue, but it’s not, and that goes to Kerry and President Obama.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/03/10/transcript-hillary-clinton-addresses-e-mails-iran/
Perhaps the vast majority in terms of quantity. and vast majority can mean 75%. Also, while emails at state.gov were initially captured, many were not ultimately archived.
The State Department initially asked just her. She negotiated that they would ask all former secretaries of state from the e-mail era, so she could portray that as general house-cleaning and the immediately response was only to that later request. And what the State Deparftment had wasn’t very very searchable if you were searching for e-mail involving her. You’d have to check everybody else’s e-mail.
This was narrowed down, and confined, actually, I think, to mail sent to and from government e-mail addresses.
Which she knew would not happen, especially since they needed to be reviewed for confidential material.
But not all the time with those aides who also had clintonemail.com addresses.
The State Department had to ask Hillary Clinton several times to send more e-mail. They would keep on discovering e-mail from her that hadn’t been sent to them. So eventually anything sent to a state.gov was included (that is, anything that might possibly become known anyway) plus some e-mail turned up by (no doubt reverse engineered) search terms. The searches did not go through attachments.
Again, the Federal Records Act does not permit the destruction of ANY documents by ANY employee for ANY reason.
I agree that Hillary’s statement was meticulously parsed, but that is de rigeur for the Clintons. They will argue the definition of “is” and “sex” to evade responsibility. Remember even in her “Pretty in Pink” White House presser on Whitewater/Rose issues, when reporters brought up allegations and obvious conclusions, she didn’t deny doing X, Y, or Z. She said, “There’s been no evidence of that.”
With the Clintons, it isn’t the truth that matters. It is what you can prove.
She’s scum, and everyone knows it. Her approval ratings are as low as her character. Her chances of wining anything are about as fat as her ankles.
The qualifiers are the interesting part.
“…directed that all my e-mails on clintonemail.com in my custody…”
So if emails *were* on the system and are now gone, they’re no longer in her custody, right?
Yeah. She’s saying that she did the bare minimum to comply with what she was told, if that’s not good enough it’s not her fault anyway, and no one has any business demanding more from her one way or the other, so there.
She’s saying she doesn’t understand what they want, but in any case, what she sent to the State Department from what used to be on clintonemail.com would cover anything being asked for.
Now, actually, it’s known for a fact that there are at least 15 e-mails (I think those are e-mails sent to her by Sidney Blumenthal) that maybe should be considered federal records, since they were sent to the Secretary of State and concerned foreign policy, and most of what he sent she forwarded to Jake Sullivan, who, in turn forwarded it around the U.S. government but not before turning Sidney Blumenthal into an anonymous source.
Hillary Clinton is pretending to say, without actually saying so, that:
1) Anything she had that was a government record was on clintonemail.com, and that:
2) She turned over anything that could be a government record to the State Department.
She’s not really claiming, either, that she made no back-up of what she deleted from the server.
As an aside, Sidney Blumenthal was not himself the qauthirs of the analytical emails he sent to Hillary Clinton.
He was a cut-out. The real author, he testified, was Tyler Drumheller, the ex-CIA official (retired in 2005) who had first vouched for the forged documents that claimed that Saddam Hussein had reached an agreement with Niger to buy yellowcake (uranium ore)
Vice President Richard Cheney wanted to double check this.
Instead of examining the documents, which were easily detectable forgeries, the CIA sent Joe Wilson to Niger, where he reported that IF Niger had ACTUALLY wanted to sell yellowcake to Iraq, the system was set up in such a way so that this could not be done undetected, and it hadn’t happened. But that was not actually the question.
On top of that Cheney didn’t even get any report back, except that the CIA did not reverse itself!
(Later Joe Wilson was to claim that he had debunked the claim taht Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger.)
It should be noted that if this had been true, it would weakened the case for war, because it would mean that SAaddam Hussein was back to Square One, and didn’t have any more enriched uranium. Yes, it wold shown bad intentions, but also less danger.
Later, after all this, Judith Miller of the New York Times, very curious, asked Scooter Libby to if he could tell her who has sent Joe Wilson to Niger (because this whole trip was just a way of finessing Cheney’s question)
And Scooter Libby asked around, and then the CIA spread its cover story throughout the upper exhelons of the U.S. government – that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA and she was the reason he had been sent. This was not true. It obvously must have friends of Tyler Drumheller.
Later, the fact that Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife and worked for the CIA was leaked to Bob Novak, and a whole investigation was started about who revealed the identity of a CIA agent (Valerie Plame actually was no longer covered by the law that forbade revealing the names of CIA agents, but never mind.)
In the meantime, the whole question of who selected Joe Wilson – which went to the dishonesty of his trip, and the falsity of the documents, and the CIA’s unwillingness to declare them forgeries – was lost.
Tyler Drumheller is an associate or friend of Sidney Blumenthal, and we can presume, also, of Hillary Clinton.
It is highly probable that Hillary Clinton knew who was the true author of Sidney Blumenthal’s missives – and maybe even who was paying Tyler Drumheller to write them, and supplying him, at least partially, with the line he was supposed to take. That is, she probably knew whose disinformation that was.
The purpose of circulating it was maybe to report back if the disinformation would fly, or maybe even to make it fly. Some of the disinformation was pretty absurd, and some of it she didn’t forward.
As a government employee any documentation, print or electronic, received by or sent to the employee in that person’s capacity as a government employee, is a government record. It doesn’t matter who sent it, how it was sent, where it was stored, etc. The only things that matter is that the sender/receiver is a government employee, and the traffic was part of that employee’s work. Hillary seems to have operated under the delusion that using a personal e-mail address and a private server would somehow insulte her e-mail traffic from public records requirements, and is still behaving as if she continues to suffer from that delusion.
Here’s a line of questioning I would like to see Hillary have to answer.
You said you used your own email server because you did not want to carry multiple phones. Why did Huma use an email account on your server? Did Huma ask you to set up an account for her or did you encourage Huma to use your server? Have you witheld any emails between your account on your server and Huma’s account on your server?
“Deleted email” “with held”?
Huma shares a bed with Hillary. What does an email account matter?
I hope she finally has backed herself into a corner. However, that may just make her more dangerous. One thing I can tell yo is that she hasn’t yet felt very threatened, because the individual threats she is known for haven’t started yet and believe me they will come. Also, one wonders what kind of dirt she has and one whom?
If she does not know what may be responsive to such an inquiry, how could she know what was work related or just personal email in determining what she has destroyed?
Further, as head of the department, she was responsible for the maintenance of all government emails. She punished employees for their failures to use and maintain the government work product.
Worse, she then allowed specific employees, including herself and specific aides, to conduct government work on private email accounts without the proper security or oversight that the judges ruling oversees.
She and the State Department came up with an agreement as to what was work related. State just gave up arguing.
It would be nice to think there was a strategy at work to take her out at the worst possible time – as patience is a virtue.
Alternatively, per probable reality and Uncle Ambrose: ‘Patience – a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue”
Well THAT’s another big batch of servers and hard drives that just gasped their last. Too bad nothing’s ever been backed up. Anyway, it will be entertaining to the have first female President inaugurated while fighting her conviction for various Federal crimes. Liberals for decades moaned they wanted the US to be “more like” other countries in the world. Congratulations and welcome to Banana Republicstan.
Not a crash this time. Deleted on advice of counsel. But that’s not, I think, legal. I suppose counsel will say he retains copies.
Lying under oath, that sounds familiar.
Ron Brown and Vince Foster are unavailable for comment.
Related? From a computer security newsletter:
According to an NBC News report, Chinese spies have been reading private emails belonging to US officials. The practice has been going on for more than five years. The spies compromised the targets’ personal email accounts, but because the government accounts were more secure, they were not infiltrated.
They provide links:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/china-read-emails-top-us-officials-n406046
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/250703-chinese-hackers-stealing-private-emails-of-top-us-officials
http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/08/report-chinas-spies-read-top-us-officials-private-emails/118994/?oref=ng-channeltopstory
In the mid-1990s, federal special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigative team in Little Rock was headed by a veteran of the courtroom, Hickman Ewing Jr. Grilled by Ewing before a grand jury on July 22, l995,
Mrs. Clinton used the words “I can’t recall” in answer to 50 questions.
http://prorev.com/hillary.htm
Where is Sandy “Socks” Burglar? This looks just the kind of job he is skilled at.
Come on. If no one had the integrity to go after Rachel Jeantel (aka “Dee Dee”) from the Zimmerman trial for perjury, there is no way they will go after HRC.
She will simply claim incompetence (through ignorance) that she “didn’t know” she was sending hundreds of TS and S documents from her living room or kitchen. “My bad, can I get a pass and go be POTUS now?”
Huma is Clinton’s girlfriend. And the Clintons have always had a disregard for the law when it comes to their personal behavior. There’s going to be plenty of shady stuff going on with her girlfriend, just like with Bill’s girlfriends/one night stands/ possible rape victims etc.