We here at Legal Insurrection have done a lot of work in the fight to shine light on the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. Allegations of national security breaches, cover ups, and outright lies have Clinton’s camp circling the wagons, and her supporters grasping at straws when confronted with questions about Clinton’s system of records she used while serving as Secretary of State.
Today, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream grilled former Congresswoman and Hillary Clinton surrogate Ellen Tauscher over the allegations, and Tauscher’s reaction all but spelled out exactly why conservatives are still pushing this issue.
Watch:
BizPac broke it down:
Bream asked what distinguished Clinton’s case from those of former CIA Directors John Deutsch and David Petraeus, who were both prosecuted under the Government Records Act.
“They’re completely different,” Tauscher insisted, claiming that Clinton never received any classified information on her personal server, adding that others can “quibble about whether things should be reclassified,” and called the controversy an exercise in “partisan politics.”
Bream pointed out that two inspectors general reported that at least 30 emails containing obviously classified information on foreign governments were found on her server.
Tauscher eventually admitted that “mistakes were made” after Breamed continued to press her, but continued to argue that Clintons case is completely different from those of Deutsch and Petraeus.
I think it’s safe to say that Hillary’s camp isn’t just worried—it’s freaking out.
Have your doubts? Look at Tauscher’s face. Look at it (Screen grab via Althouse):
So here we are, with two competing narratives, neither of which provide absolution, and neither of which push the cycle against advocacy groups and activists hammering at the constant flow of excuses coming from State and the Clinton campaign.
First, we have (as seen in this video) a surrogate claiming that nothing of note happened—but even if it did, Clinton should not be held accountable because it was someone else’s responsibility to ensure that sensitive information was kept secure.
The second narrative is lazier, but at least doesn’t bold-facedly confront and then cast off accusations of fault on the part of then-Secretary Clinton. Last week, I sat in a courtroom and watched DoJ attorneys attempt to bank their arguments on the fact that Hillary Clinton has taken an oath swearing that she did nothing wrong.
Her surrogates want to pass the buck. The DoJ wants us to take her word for it.
Neither option is flying, either amongst voters or in the media. This is the smoke—and I can guarantee it will lead us to a big national security bonfire. We just have to have the patience to keep digging.
Featured Image h/t Althouse
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
If Hillary Clinton never received or sent classified emails with her private server – and never used a government server – then HOW DID SHE DO HER JOB?
Very poorly?
Or not at all. As history will show, her primary efforts during her tenure were directed not toward serving her country, but funneling as much money as possible to the Clinton Foundation. And it appears she was quite successful at that. Secretary of State……not so much.
She also logged a bunch of miles to pad her resume. Accomplishments? None. But, it’s the globe trotting that counts.
Gotta do that Trillion Dollar Fund Raising you know…..
First things first. The LAST THING I want to do is defend Hillary Clinton. Makes my skin crawl. But here goes. I’ll just think of it as describing the reality of her world.
I’ve been working in the intel world for over 30 years, a few of them on 4 Star flag staffs and staffs directly supporting administrators.
People at Hillary’s level (cabinet secretary, administrator, et al) can have access to multiple networks (classified and unclassified) if they want. Of course, some such as DIRNSA, the CIA director, DNI will have those accounts and use them routinely simply cause they’re intel types and the vast majority of their work is classified.
However, most do the majority of their work in the unclassified realm, Hillary included. So, how do they get exposed to the classified they need to see?
You can imagine that someone like Clinton will have a gaggle of aides. Some have a few, some have many. It’s the aides’s responsibility to make sure the Secretary sees what she is supposed to see, unclassified and classified. If there is classified information she needs to be briefed on, usually she will get exposed to it via hard copy or powerpoint brief or simply
a face-to-face ad hoc report.
I can’t speak to how Hillary received her briefings exactly, but if I were to guess (and it’s a very good guess), I would say she was briefed every morning on classified and unclassified subjects in a face-to-face powerpoint or hard copy folder briefing. She does not have time to sit around and linger on classified networks. It’s more than enough to keep up with unclas email.
If it turns out that the emails said to be classified are in fact so, the blame in my knowledge and experience will point directly at an aide, not Clinton. Good luck connecting Hillary directly to this. She is too slick for that. The one who will take the fall will be Cheryl Mills or Huma Abedin.
It appears that one or more aides for HRC copied the classified information from a secure channel, stripped the classification headers from it and forwarded it to her via the private server.
When one is read on to a compartment, one is expected to be able to ID classified information they received regardless of the header.
If she replied to the message, the message body was sent back to the aide who sent it. That is also illegally sending classified information across an insecure network.
This is going to get very interesting.
If your avatar is accurate then you must know that your entire argument for hillary’s innocence is bogus. If you were in the Navy and anyone on board your ship did something that was against regs and caused a major problem for the Navy your commanding officer would lose his/her job asap. So do not throw this crap out that it was her aides and not she who is responsible for this debacle. She also had many in depth briefings on classified materials and how to handle it. It is also curious that there are no e-mails during the Benghazi time period. Yet she can be seen during that time typing away on her Blackberry!
Hey, bucko, YOU do not know what YOU are talking about. I can guarantee you that someone can take highly classified and remove the markings and you could easily confuse it with unclassified think pieces.
If I am the head of an agency and one of my minions decides to cut classifications off of material and put it on an unclassified network, even one where I see the email, no way in hell I, as the head of the agency will be fired/held responsible. The person who did it will.
Get a clue.
I want to see Hillary go down as much as anybody, but she won’t for this.
Sorry, but whenever someone starts with “the LAST thing I want to do is defend Hillary Clinton” it raises valid suspicions that that is exactly what the commenter wants to do. Time and again on other blogs I have seen posts that begin” I am no fan of Hillary Clinton” but then they go on to defend her.
The fact is these people worked for Hillary who told them what to do. Her aides worked for her and did what she requested. Besides that when she read her emails it was her responsibility to id classified information and ensure that it followed the required procedure.
So Hillary is not responsible for anything her people do or anything that happens on her watch? Her people can do their jobs however they wish and it’s not her problem? She’s not required to recognize classified material and know it should be marked as such even though she received training on how to identify and handle classified information? Being the U.S. Secretary of State takes less personal responsibility and attention to detail than being the CEO of corporation?
Let me give you an example.
I was in the intel department of a federal agency. A watch officer was directed to extract some info from a log entry on a classified network and forward it to several senior people up to the assistant administrator level. Of course, the watch officer was expected to sanitize any classified out of the excerpt. The watch officer missed one sentence that was marked classified.
The watch officer had his clearance pulled. The assistant administrator didn’t have his clearance pulled nor did any of the other recipients even though they received the email. Only one person (who caught the mistake) reported it. Should the assistant administrator (who didn’t report it) and the others have lost their clearances? No. They weren’t responsible. Now, if they had covered up that classified had gone out on an unclassified network, that would be a crime. But in this instance, no crime was committed by the assistant administrator or the other recipients.
That’s the same thing with Hillary. I haven’t seen the messages, and the media usually screws up descriptions of what really happened, but if one of her aides snipped off the classifications (and anything else that makes it look classified), that person must be and will be eaten alive.
However, unless there is a smoking gun directly linking Hillary to this fiasco, such as her telling an aide in email or elsewhere to send her classified info on an unclas network (we know that won’t happen), she will only be held responsible politically, and not legally.
I think that sucks, but that’s the way the system works.
I don’t question your bona-fides Navy Mustang.
But let us suppose said senior principal decided to use his or her personal and unsecured server for government work. Let’s further suppose that the security of that server was below Federal standards for the type of work being done. Let’s further suppose when questions arose said senior principal sanitized his or her server.
Does that change anything in your calculus?
She’s not required (by the law, at least) to use common sense. And the originator of an e-mail is responsible for classifying it.
http://www.bartleby.com/73/1002.html
While that is sound logic, it flies in the face of going to the effort of hosting a server which is a pain in the ass with tons of risk.
Sure someone could carry shovels, tarps, and lime in the trunk of their car and have the DNA of tons of dead bodies in there too. However zero members of the mob caught carrying shovels, tarps, and lime in the trunk of their cars do not also have dead man DNA in there too.
The examples you gave were one off’s.
Hillary’s error count is in the thousands and spans years, indicating a systematic problem.
Her responsibility. No one elses.
and the answer Alex is “Hillary Clinton didn’t do her job?”
I’ll take Muslim Obama for $1000 next Alex!
I watched the interview. Tauscher looked (and sounded) like she was on the verge of losing it. Pro-Hillary people certainly didn’t do themselves any favors by putting that near hysterical female forth to press their cause ~
A certain person who is near and dear to me had narrow pupils like that when she was on psychotropic drugs (e.g. zoloft). Her justified anger had been misdiagnosed as some sort of mental disorder that was treated with anti-depression drugs.
Once she got off of them, her eyes looked normal and she was able to carry on a give-and-take conversation. Notice that this shill for Mrs. Clintoon can’t carry on a conversation very well; she just recites her points as if on a loop.
Zoloft doesn’t cause people to lose control or lie.
The shock and error is possibly stemming from a fatal realization barack will not cover it up as he has for others. Surprise
It’s simple Tauscher. You can have a private email on a secure server that can guard against hacking. You can’t have a private server out of government control.
In the video I look at the desperation in Tauscher’s eyes. It looks like an oh crap moment.
She was Hillary’s second-in-command at State?
Maybe she’s guilty, too – why else the crazed performance?
She was two layers down. She was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control.
Directly below the Secretary of State is the Deputy Secretary and theer are abunch of Undersecretaries.
Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
pretty obviously she should lose any security classification she has. It’s time for consequences for helping/justifying to cover up NatSec disclosures
We can’t assume that anyone at the higher echelons of the BO administration in any department did not conduct official business using private servers and private emails accounts.
Mistakes were made, but no one made them.
If this is one of the Hillary’s chosen water carriers sent forth to shore up and do damage control after last weeks fall out of Judge Sullivan’s court orders, they’ll have to get more and bigger shovels just in order to dig
EACH other out of their holes. Where’s Lanny Davis?
MMMMkay, if there were two different servers, and she had only one receiver, is she saying all the emails with classified info came to her poorly protected receiver, or that she was out of the loop?
No, she said all classified materials that she wanted to see were sent to an aide and printed out. She also used secure telephone and video-conference and in person meetings.
And I suppose if she wanted to send something to somebody on a classified network, she had instructions or questions or concerns sent by an aide, with her name left off.
It appears there is an “air gap” between the networks carrying classified material and the rest of the world. IOW, you cannot hack into them directly. A person must take a printout, a thumb drive, a disk and cross a real space in a real world and put them on another network.
If classified material is out there, somebody did.
That’s one question.
The Hillary question is what she did with the classified material appearing–from where?–on her devices.
Tauscher’s eyes and voice suggest she just snorted at least four lines of methamphetamine.
I watched that segment live yesterday and could not believe someone could say what tauscher was saying. This crap is not “spin” it is bald face lying, insanity. “liberalism is a mental disease” — now on display every day !
Waste no time parsing what Hillary says. It is all, every bit of it, nothing but chaff to throw off media and investigative radar.
The only question I have is why hasn’t the FBI went to her house and secured her current server?
Doing so on live tv. That would get great ratings.
HRC, The master of all lies, is caught once again. How much lawless behaviour is one Politician allowed to get away with and not go to jail. ? Her Computer fiasco IS like Gen. Patraues who was promptly arrested. ( Only Worse )
The distinction is this (I am talking only about what is acknoeledged)
Petraeus was guilty of sharing information he had originated.
Hillary Clinton would be guilty at least of storing information SHE HAD ORIGINATED in an insecure place.
CIA Director John Deutsch was guilty at least of storing information HE HAD NOT ORIGINATED in an insecure place where it was not supposed to be.
Hillary Clinton would also be at least guilty of storing information SHE HAD NOT ORIGINATED in an insecure place, except that she was not the person who might have copied or removed it from its secure location.
Now she might have done a whole lot more, but we are talking abouyt what is acknowledged.
When I saw Ms. Tausher on the TV with Shannon Bream, I thought she looked just like Tammy Faye Bakker during their scandal in the 80s.
Who thought it was a good idea to put this woman on to defend Hillary?
She must be channeling Nancy Puglosi.
Hillary quote ” I am not a crook” Rosemary Woods erased all those emails, I kept saying Rosemary are you sure the delete button doesn’t work ?
I think somebody tampered with the Uher tap recorder Rosamary Woods used – it definitely was not anything like a normal erasure – normal erasures don’t have a buzz – so that on rapid playback (the opposite of Fast Forward) the record head might touch the tape, or something like that.
Hillary’s Believe it or Not? 52% of Americans believe in Alien Abduction, but only 30 % believe in Hillary
There are two issues here – the Federal Records Act and the matter of classified information.
According to David Kendall’s law firm, once there is a record anywhere, in fact once there is a possibility of a record being preserved somewhere, that’s all you need, because you only need one copy of a record.
If the other copy is destroyed, that proves it legitimately wasn’t considered a record (or the other person is equally guilty.)
And it doesn’t need to be in its proper place.
That’s still not enough to put Hillary Clinton in the clear, but it moves things a long way, but esides she and her lawyers reached an agreement with the State Department as to what were work e-mails, and to give the State Department a copy of them, and then even some other things, even though they says she didn’t have to, and the State Department indicated it was satisfied, so that should be enough to settle it. And the possesser of the e-mail anyway is the person who has to determine what is and what is not work related.
As for classification, classification is in the eyes of the beholder IF IT ORIGINAL MATERIAL, and the first person who moves anything off a classified system is responsible, and everyone can do whatever they think is right. At least legally.
And this would have been a problem even if she had had an unclassified state.gov address, instead of her priovate secret e-mail address and server, because the issue there is why is classified information anywhere outside the classified system.
http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2015/08/23/mukasey-on-impact-email-scandal-on-clinton-campaign-huckabee-talks-iran-nuclear/
Clinton’s lawyers are working very hard. They got these statements from people at the national Archives.
Or maybe the archivists they got statements from are part of the Clinton machine.
Still, a standard state.gov e-mail address, which may or may not be more secure than clintonemail.com already falls into the category of not being on the classfied system.
The preview isn’t working here on this partivular computer, right now.
National security implications? I’ll say. Ellen Tauscher is none other than the New Start Treaty negotiator who found some secret lever to break a 20 year impasse on signing that treaty.
She’s a heavyweight in the Democratic Party’s strategic deterrence deep-inside privy council. She’s one of the “eyeball-to-eyeball-with-Ivan” negotiators responsible for verification of treaty protocols. She’s one of the very few folks who can get us all killed except for whoever qualifies for salt-mine work in Siberia.
I wrote a rather inflamed comment on her a day or two ago on Claudia Rosett’s blog at PJM. I could link it but i think i’ll go for max readership and copy it, if the boss here doesn’t mind a long comment.
I like others here cannot understand why Ms Tauscher, who has been absent from the news since the 2010 New Start wrap-up in Spain, was dragged out into the Sunday premier news show, only to make such a pitiful defense of –what –something on that server?
I have about five comments at Ms. Rosett’s blog ; several on that Shannon Bream interview, and one linking to a longtime Kremlin watcher who thinks the “Iran Deal” is being set-up to fail. There is something wrong with the way the Mullahs have been going out of their way, working against interest, provoking the anti-deal Americans on a daily basis. There’s a rat smell, and Ms. Tauscher is a strange loop-closer, if indeed something bad has been set up, and that server has the plotters running scared.
Anyhoo, that link is in one of my Rosett comments, here:
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/obama-and-the-iran-nuclear-veil-covering-up-iran-nuclear-weapons-cooperation-with-north-korea/2/
The comment i threatened to copy/paste is here:
buddy larsen JayWye mentions New Start. Today, Ellen Tauscher, the retired congresswoman from Frisco who was brought into that nuclear weapons negotiation at the last minute to save it via some new something or other related to verification inspections, appeared on Fox News to offer a wild & wooley outrage at how badly Hillary is being served by the server scandal.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-anchor-grills-hillary-surrogate-over-emails-doesnt-she-have-herself-to-blame/
She’s been absent from the news since that treaty signing, and reappeared today voicing a strong desire to stop the momentum on anyone learning something related to that server.
Turns out, she’s quite a player in the strategic defense of this nation, newly on the boards of Sandia and Livermore both, as well as some other related highly sensitive missions and organizations.
It is very striking indeed how the small coterie of strategic defense policy enforcers can be so critical to national survival and yet be so obscure that to an outsider no one seems to be monitoring them, as they perform inside a small ensemble featuring mostly Rhodes Scholar-to-Oxford-to-Carnegie Institue-to-State Dept-to-treaty negotiating-to-verifying compliance, Russian language speakers.
Anyhoo, New Start had set unsignable for 20 years on verification issues, and Obama swoops in with Ms. Tauscher and signs it ASAP he’s in office. It was signed on the premise that Russia and USA were allies in the Terror War, and would cooperate in good faith on meeting the treaty’s protocols.
But soon after, that premise was utterly collapsed by Russia, and the collapse is continuing (Crimea, Ukraine, new weapons, war threats) and gathering force.
So what did WE do? Well, instead of a slow-down to recreate incentive to cooperate, we’ve done the very opposite, and have leaped far ahead of the mileposts of the timeline of our build-down. Putin’s mood change? Not a problem!
Last heard we’re two years ahead schedule (on a govt program, mind you) and busily bulldozing –not just vacating, mind you, but bulldozing facilities that are absolutely vital to our re-arming if neccessary –and selling the land off to private investors, all in a sheer tornado of efficiency and crisp can-do American know-how, in meeting the New Start build-down of strategic deterrence.
Meanwhile, this is all explained away by Tauscher as “we can’t let the daily news interfere with our duty to our commitments”.
We had a leader against New Start, Jon Kyle of Arizona, who had great arguments against ratification –including that it paid no attention at all to China’s war-surge armament rate. But then he suddenly retired, and took a job with Covington & Burling, which is Eric Holder’s law firm and has been the Kremlin’s white-shoe D.C. representative ever since it defended Alger Hiss.
Anyhoo, suggest you read up on Ms Tauscher, and her replacement at the (winking) eyeball-to-eyeball table with Ivan, Ms. Rose Gottemoeller.
BTW, that ‘thing’ that was hanging up New Start, that the nice lady made go away, was probably the verification rules applied to the Yamantau Mountain underground mystery complex, in the southern Ural mountains. Never heard of it? Natch –that’s the whole idea!
===
Well, thanks for reading. Those two national security research labs she’s on the board of governors of, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia, are a helluva couple organizations to have someone like Tauscher aboard. We MUST keep digging –if we don’t the nasty surprise, AKA the sum of all fears, may get the drop on us, or get dropped on us, as it were. If it hasn’t already.
TS isn’t like other classified information. There has to be an official holder and user and people to ensure the proper storage, dissemination and authorization to possess or use it.
The penalties are severe really severe for breaking them. At least when I was working with classified information I had to sign verifications of receipt with pretty dire consequences for violating them.