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Hillary Clinton Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 28, 2015 61 Comments
I may not be able to read Russian anymore, but I can read people. And I can smell rats. When Hillary Clinton held her tightly-controlled press conference at the U.N. regarding the email server scandal, I read right through her, and smelled a rat. I wrote that her performance reflected Hillary’s consciousness of guilt:
When I first watched Hillary’s press conference, something jumped out at me that has been bothering me since.... Hillary did something that was a dead giveaway, reflecting a consciousness of guilt. Hillary volunteered a piece of information about which she had not yet been asked and which was not critical to her explanation of why she would not turn over the server. Apparently reading from a prepared statement, Hillary volunteered that she deleted “personal” emails... Why volunteer that she deleted personal emails, and drag the red herring across the trail to lead the discussion towards Chelsea, her mother and yoga? Remember, Hillary said she would not turn over the server because it had personal emails on it, but then inconsistently said the personal emails were not on the server because she chose “not to keep” them. Hillary gave away the game at that point to me. Hillary showed a consciousness of guilt and deliberate misdirection. Get the server.
Trey Gowdy then tried to get the server, and was informed the server had been wiped clean. Fox News reports:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 22, 2015 29 Comments
With Hillary's email and fundraising scandals destined to be a permanent fixture in the 2016 campaign if she runs, and with Clinton fatigue already setting in, the voices calling on Elizabeth Warren to mount a challenge are growing stronger. What started with committed progressives at places like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos, now is going mainstream liberal. The Boston Globe Editorial Board is calling on Warren to challenge Hillary:
DEMOCRATS WOULD be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the presidential nomination without real opposition, and, as a national leader, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren can make sure that doesn’t happen. While Warren has repeatedly vowed that she won’t run for president herself, she ought to reconsider.... The clock is ticking: Presidential candidates need to hire staff, raise money, and build a campaign operation. Although Clinton hasn’t officially declared her candidacy, she’s scooping up support from key party bigwigs and donors, who are working to impose a sense of inevitability about her nomination. Unfortunately, the strategy’s working .... Fairly or not, many Americans already view Clinton skeptically, and waltzing to the nomination may actually hurt her in the November election against the Republican nominee..... Unlike Clinton, or any of the prospective Republican candidates, Warren has made closing the economic gaps in America her main political priority, in a career that has included standing up for homeowners facing illegal foreclosures and calling for more bankruptcy protections. If she runs, it’ll ensure that those issues take their rightful place at the center of the national political debate. Some of Warren’s admirers feel she’d be better off fighting for those causes in the Senate — but her opportunities to enact reforms there are shrinking, which should make a presidential run more attractive. As a member of the minority party in the Senate, her effectiveness is now much more limited than when she first won election, since Republicans control the legislative agenda. Democrats face an uphill challenge to reclaim the Senate in 2016 and face even slimmer prospects in the House. For the foreseeable future, the best pathway Warren and other Democrats have for implementing their agenda runs through the White House.
To drive home the point, The Globe today features several Op-Eds also urging Warren to run:

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 21, 2015 8 Comments
The story of Hillary Clinton's email server is already getting lost in spin and talking points. It's easy to forget the fundamental fact at the center of the issue. Hilary Clinton violated the law. Bill Whittle gets right to the heart of it in the new edition of Firewall and frankly calls it criminal. Via Truth Revolt:
Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to conduct, for four years, the office of Secretary of State using her own private email server. Because these emails were not transacted and recorded through the official State Department servers, Mrs. Clinton “willfully concealed and removed” these critical documents from the records and archives of the United States Government. You can further argue that by electing to not have these records placed onto government servers – which are secure, routinely backed up, and most importantly subject to Freedom Of Information Act requests, that she has, by any reasonable interpretation, “mutilated, obliterated and destroyed” these essential records, which belong not to Hillary Rodham Clinton but rather to the Secretary of State of the United States of America, and her employers, the people of that nation. The penalty for this is a fine or up to three years imprisonment, or both. That’s paragraph (a) of the law.
Watch it all below:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 20, 2015 26 Comments
While writers like Ben White are encouraging Hillary to kickstart her 2016 bid immediately, the House Select Committee on Benghazi is still looking for answers. Today, Gowdy sent a letter to Hillary Clinton's counsel confirming the extension of subpoena deadline to March 27, and formally requesting the former Secretary of State surrender her email servers to a mutually agreed upon third party for forensic examination. Gowdy explained Hillary's unusual and likely unprecedented email arrangement, an arrangement that made her the sole arbiter of relevant documentation. Making note that Mrs. Clinton deleted emails, Gowdy wrote, "the deletion of emails is not normal practice once any investigation, let alone litigation, commences. The fact that she apparently deleted some emails after Congress initially requested documents raises serious concerns." The House of Representatives issued the following statement this afternoon:
Washington, DC-- Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy today sent a letter requesting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turn over the server she used for official State Department business to the State Department inspector general or a neutral third party for independent analysis of what records should be in the public domain. “Though Secretary Clinton alone is responsible for causing this issue, she alone does not get to determine its outcome,” said Gowdy, R-S.C. “That is why in the interest of transparency for the American people, I am formally requesting she turn the server over to the State Department’s inspector general or a mutually agreeable third party. “An independent analysis of the private server Secretary Clinton used for the official conduct of U.S. government business is the best way to remove politics and personal consideration from the equation. Having a neutral, third-party arbiter such as the State Department IG do a forensic analysis and document review is an eminently fair and reasonable means to determine what should be made public.

Posted by Amy Miller on March 17, 2015 17 Comments
If you're not at a point in your day where you can handle a Bill Clinton bobble head teetering around in high heels and a dress, click away now, because the "Bill for First Lady 2016" meme factory is back. Anyone with a TV or internet connection knows that political ads are, for the most part, boring, demographic-specific, and safe. But this pro-Hillary 2016 group's new efforts to create excitement around another Clinton candidacy is anything but. They put a Bill Clinton bobble head in drag...and it's part of a bigger strategy to GOTV:
We are a national online grassroots movement of young Americans to support Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and make "herstory" by putting a woman in the White House. With a focus on creating youthful viral videos, catchy campaign memes and sharable social media content, as well as live "Bill" campaign events in cities and on college campuses across the nation, BillForFirstLady2016.com PAC (Political Action Committee) is a strategic effort to move, motivate and inspire younger voters to get involved.
Let's get this over with:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 16, 2015 22 Comments
Hillary's scandal woes aren't disappearing any time soon. In fact, they're only ballooning.

1. Spam filtering service likely had access to Hillary's classified emails

Monday, Dvorak Uncensored pointed out that a spam filtering service had access to Hillary's classified emails. Longtime Clinton supporter, Mark Perkel runs a competing spam filtering service. Amidst the tech talk, Perkel makes two things abundantly clear: 1) Clinton's system has serious security implications, and 2) none of this would have happened if she had just played by the rules.

2. Were emails read before they were presumable destroyed?

Thursday, TIME published a damning long form article revealing an incredibly unsettling fact -- no one read Hillary's emails before they were presumably destroyed:
“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.’”
That no one sifted through Hillary's emails is bad enough. But as we discussed, this revelation is further complicated by the fact that the Department of State has terrible record keeping practices (as noted in a troubling OIG report) nor were any top State official emails automatically archived before February... of THIS YEAR. Add to this nasty cocktail Hillary's initial claim that all emails sent to .gov accounts were captured by the State Department system, and the result is non-potable. Late Sunday evening, Hillary's story changed... again. Three days after the Time Magazine story rankled Team Clinton's attempts to kill EmailGate, a Clinton spokesman finally issued a statement indicating Hillary's emails were in fact read. ABC News reported:

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 15, 2015 38 Comments
James Carville has returned to his role of defender of all things Clinton. Appearing on ABC's this week, hosted by his former fellow Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos, Carville sought to dismiss the email scandal as a non-story. His defense was more revealing than he intended. Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard:
Carville: I 'Suspect' Hillary Used Private Email to Avoid Congressional Oversight "What this is, is the latest in a continuation, and if you take it all and put it together, and you subtract 3.1415 from pi, you're left with not very much. And that's -- at the end of the day, so the Republicans can't pass a budget, alright, we got another investigation, just like we had the Whitewater, just like you go through the filegate, you go through travelgate, you go through seven or eight different congressional committees. And you wonder why the public is not following this? Because they know what it is. "It was something she did. It was legal. I suspect she didn't want [Republican congressman] Louie Gohmert rifling through her emails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take. It amounts to -- just like everything else before it, it amounts to nothing but a bunch of people flapping their jaws about nothing." The comment about Gohmert going through emails suggests Carville thinks Hillary Clinton set up the private email server to avoid congressional oversight.
Here's the video:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 15, 2015 32 Comments
While it's way too early to assess the overall damage to Hillary Incorporated from the email, now document destruction, scandal, is does appear to be hurting Team Billary in ways that are hard to change: Public perception of a politician. While Billary is dreadfully tiresome and transparently faux in its lack of transparency, to much of the electorate Billary is simply a nice old lady with a grandchild. Well, she does have a grandchild, but that's about where the nice ends.  And that unhappy end product of a secretive, controlling, fear-mongering, basically incompetent presidential candidate is coming into public view and that view may be hard to change. Jonah Goldberg hits the Billary on the head when he says:
If you want to know what Hillary Clinton would be like as president, you’re seeing it right now.
Maureen Dowd wrote an Open Letter to Billary:
It has come to our attention while observing your machinations during your attempted restoration that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our democracy: The importance of preserving historical records and the ill-advised gluttony of an American feminist icon wallowing in regressive Middle Eastern states’ payola. You should seriously consider these characteristics of our nation as the Campaign-That-Must-Not-Be-Named progresses. If you, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are willing to cite your mother’s funeral to get sympathy for ill-advisedly deleting 30,000 emails, it just makes us want to sigh ....
So how did this all happen? Ed Klein at The NY Post says Valerie Jarrett leaked key details of Billary's intrigue:

Posted by Amy Miller on March 13, 2015 20 Comments
The scandal swirling around Hillary Clinton's private e-mail account just keeps getting worse. Earlier this week, the press savaged the former Secretary of State at a press conference where she attempted to explain the logistics governing her private e-mail server. Then, a report released by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that one of Clinton's key claims---that all of her e-mails were somehow captured by the State Department---is completely baseless. Now, advocacy organization Judicial Watch has laid into the feeble argument that Hillary never used her private e-mail account to deal with classified information. They focus on a previous JW investigation showing that top State Department officials circulated sensitive and classified e-mails amongst themselves during and in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi. Judicial Watch explains:
It’s hard to believe that the Secretary of State was completely out of the loop on this material, which was disseminated among her top aides as Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first diplomat to be killed overseas in decades, and three other Americans were murdered in the violent ambush.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 12, 2015 51 Comments
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:

2. Hillary won't confirm she signed mandatory form indicating she'd turned over all classified documents (including emails) to the State Department

Posted by New Neo on March 12, 2015 49 Comments
I had thought that the press would stand by Hillary Clinton in the same way they've stood by Obama---through thick and thin. After all, Obama has committed acts far worse than Hillary's, has covered up more, and has been just as egregious in his lies. And yet I can't recall Obama having been subjected to questions even remotely as difficult as the ones Hillary faced (and answered poorly) this week, although the press could have grilled him that way any time he appeared before them. They chose not to do that, but they chose to ask some real questions of Hillary Clinton. Why the differential treatment? As soon as the email story broke, the NY Times led the attack. Originally it seemed that they may have wanted to get it over with in a perfunctory way and then let her candidacy continue, or that this was being done at the direction of Obama who wanted another candidate for various reasons. But now I've come to think that the first reason isn't operative (at least, not any more), and that although the second may be true, it doesn't account for the fervor of the criticism. Perhaps part of the reason this thing has gotten bigger is that Clinton has handled it poorly. Perhaps the MSM is piling on because they thought Hillary would be better at dealing with it than she has demonstrated so far, and they're panicking because her performance means she will be a bad candidate come 2016. Or perhaps they know of other scandals, and they want her out before the revelations multiply (and end up reflecting poorly on their favorite, Obama, or on liberalism itself?) If they can't put out this fire they may want to fan the flames so that the sacrifice happens more quickly and a new and more viable candidate is chosen, and they can get credit for "objectivity" (for hurting one of their own) into the bargain.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 11, 2015 24 Comments
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton stepped out from behind the stone wall to address the press. Her performance fell flat as she grew visibly uncomfortable fielding questions about her private email account. Within minutes, the internet proved several of Mrs. Clinton's statements false or at least questionable, and parsed her double talk into laymen's terms to her detriment. Today, the Office of the Inspector General released a report. Focusing on the State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART) and record email, the report could be problematic for one of Hillary's most important claims -- that all emails sent to State Department employees were captured. "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.”" NBC Reports:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 11, 2015 17 Comments
Elizabeth Warren is gaining quite the reputation for avoiding the press in public areas of the Capitol. Now the latest, from the Hill, on how Democratic Senators are rallying around Hillary, though Warren isn't talking and has aides run interference for her -- physically (emphasis added):
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has effectively stopped dealing personally with the press in public areas on Capitol Hill, declined to comment on the issue Wednesday. The liberal favorite walked briskly away from questions as an aide stepped in as a buffer.
(h/t Brad Dayspring and Colin Reed on Twitter.) (video added) We at Legal Insurrection are aware of Warren's strategy of using bouncers and aides to block access to Warren. At Netroots Nation in 2012, Warren used security guards to keep our Anne Sorock away from Warren, after Kos Kidz figured out who Anne was and blew the whistle. All Anne wanted to do was ask Warren
"Do you view yourself as a role model for women of color?"
since Warren was listed as a Woman of Color in Legal Academia when she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 1993:

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 11, 2015 17 Comments
Hillary's email scandal is a flashback for anyone who remembers the Bill Clinton years. Democrats have put all their eggs in one basket for Hillary in 2016 but as Charles Krauthammer observed on Special Report last night, it's like America has stepped into a time machine. From National Review:
Krauthammer’s Take: ‘It’s the 90s All Over Again’ Charles Krauthammer said Hillary Clinton’s press conference about her exclusive use of a private e-mail account and server made it seem as if, “it’s the 1990s all over again.” He said he thinks Clinton chose to exercise total control over her communications because of President Clinton’s handling of the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s. “She is determined never to let things out of her control,” Krauthammer said on Special Report. “This is going to be stonewalling from here until Election Day.”
Watch the video: This entire episode is a reminder that the Clintons come with baggage, but don't take my word for it.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 10, 2015 32 Comments
Earlier this afternoon, Hillary Clinton held a press conference to address questions concerning the use of her private email from private servers. Beginning with two flimsy decoys, Clinton first addressed women's rights and went on to criticize Senate Republicans for their letter to Iran's Ayatollah. Unsurprisingly, sites like Vox took the bait. Then, the treasure troves of the internet opened up and out sprung three little facts that prove three of Hillary's emphatic statements false. And this is only the beginning. While the statements that follow are multifaceted in consequence and scope, for the sake of brevity, we'll focus strictly on their veracity.

#1: Hillary only used one phone

"When I got to work as Secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one devise for my work and personal emails instead of two. Looking back, it would've been better if I'd used a second email account and carried a separate phone, but at the time this didn't seem like an issue."
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