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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
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:
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.
Follow Kemberlee Kaye on Twitter
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY