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Hillary Email Scandal Tag

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's top aide, stated that Clinton's private email server during her tenure as secretary of state frustrated the entire staff. It caused her to miss a phone call from the French foreign minister:
“She missed the call because . . . I never got the email giving us the signoff to do it [the meeting]. So she wasn’t able to do her job, do what she needed to do,” Huma Abedin testified Tuesday during a deposition in a lawsuit filed by a government watchdog.

There are many things that raise serious questions about the meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the husband of a woman under FBI investigation, namely Bill Clinton. As I wrote yesterday, Gross appearance of impropriety in AG Lynch private meeting with Bill Clinton:
Neither Lynch nor Bill Clinton are dummies. They both know that such a private meeting creates the appearance of impropriety regardless of what was discussed. Bill Clinton’s wife is being investigated by the FBI — why do you think he dropped in for a chat with Lynch? Of course they didn’t discuss the case. They didn’t need to. If there was no appearance of impropriety, why did Lynch wait until a local news crew, apparently tipped off, asked her about it?
I don't think enough media focus has been on the non-disclosure. If not for the media tip-off, no one would have known the meeting took place except for Lynch, Clinton, and security details. And none of them are going to go on the record, at least not now.

What do you call an Attorney General who meets privately with the husband of a person under FBI investigation, and only discloses it when asked? Loretta Lynch. This is the last straw for me, when it comes to Lynch. I opposed my former law school classmate's nomination because her congressional testimony indicated she would be too political. Events have confirmed my fears, from suggestions that "hate speech" might be prosecutable, to the threat to sue people who disagree with the administration on climate change, her political grandstanding on the North Carolina bathroom law, to the attempt to edit out references to Islam and ISIS from the 911 transcript of the Orlando terrorist.

Judicial watch received more emails from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including one that showed concern about how the State Department treated her records. She wrote on March 22, 2009, to Huma Abedin and Lauren Jiloty, her former special assistant:
I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State. Who manages both my personal and official files?

Emails received by Judicial Watch on Wednesday show that problems with Hillary Clinton's email server caused the State Department to disable security features. Kenneth LaVolpe, a senior technical official, told his IT employees in a December 2010 email that the security issues "should trump all other activities." But emails dated 2011 and 2012 show that problems continued.

Hillary Clinton has a brand new scandal to deal with. The ongoing investigation into her emails has revealed that a donor to the Clinton Foundation landed a plum appointment with a government intelligence board despite the fact that he had no relevant experience. ABC News has the story:
How Clinton Donor Got on Sensitive Intelligence Board Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest labeled the investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails as "criminal." From Fox News:
“That's why the president, when discussing this issue in each stage, has reiterated his commitment to this principle that any criminal investigation should be conducted independent of any sort of political interference,” Earnest said.
Fox News had asked Earnest if President Barack Obama's endorsement for Clinton for president "might apply pressure to investigators assigned" to her case.

A former State Department watchdog told Fox News that previous secretaries of state did not use a personal email address for official business. Leading Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claims over and over she did nothing wrong because her predecessors used personal email addresses. Howard Krongard, who served as inspector general of the State Department from April 2005 to January 2008, strongly disagrees:
“Certainly to my knowledge at least, Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice did not have a personal server. I certainly never either sent an email to one or received an email from one,” said Krongard, who served during Rice’s tenure. Further, he said, “I would have been stunned had I been asked to send an email to her at a personal server, private address. I would have declined to do so on security grounds and if she had sent one to me, I probably would have started an investigation.”

Here at LI, we've been covering the current Hillary Clinton email scandal, but it seems this is not the first time she has engaged in hiding sensitive high level email communications.  As First Lady, Hillary was embroiled in an email controversy that was known as "Project X." The New York Post reports:
As first lady, Hillary was embroiled in another scheme to bury sensitive White House e-mails, known internally as “Project X.” In 1999, as investigators looked into Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and other scandals involving the then-first lady, it was discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails were mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server. The massive hole in White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when Republicans and special prosecutor Ken Starr were subpoenaing White House e-mails.

We've been covering the Hillary Clinton email scandal here at LI, and now it seems that the Obama administration is actively working to prevent her deposition. The Hill reports:
The Obama administration is trying to prevent former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from being deposed in an ongoing open records case connected to her use of a private email server. Late Thursday evening, the Justice Department filed a court motion opposing the Clinton deposition request from conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch, claiming that the organization was trying to dramatically expand the scope of the lawsuit.
Judicial Watch is “seeking instead to transform these proceedings into a wide-ranging inquiry into matters beyond the scope of the court’s order and unrelated to the FOIA request at issue in this case,” government lawyers wrote in their filing, referring to the Freedom of Information Act. The Hill continues:
The lawyers wrote that the request to interview Clinton “is wholly inappropriate” before depositions are finished in a separate case also concerning the email server.

Supporters of Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hopes the FBI swoops in and takes out front runner Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server. An inspector general report found that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton broke State Department rules when she opted to use a private email server for work. The FBI has an open investigation against Clinton, which has puzzled some supporters of Sanders like Julie Crowell:
Like many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters, Ms. Crowell, 37, said she hoped that Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state would eventually yield an indictment, and she described it as the kind of transgression that would disqualify another politician seeking high office. “She should be removed,” said Ms. Crowell, of Tustin, Calif., who attended a Sanders rally here on Tuesday and said she planned to vote for a third-party candidate if Mr. Sanders failed to overtake Mrs. Clinton and capture the Democratic nomination. “I don’t know why she’s not already being told, ‘You can’t run because you’re being investigated.’ I don’t know how that’s not a thing.”

The inspector general at the State Department says Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton broke federal email rules when she used a private server while she served as secretary of state. NBC News reports::
"At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department issues before leaving government service," says an audit by the State Department Inspector General, obtained by NBC News. "Because she did not do so, she did not comply with the [State] Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."

Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been describing the FBI investigation into her private email server as a "security review" or "security inquiry."  That narrative, however, has been dismantled by FBI Director James Comey. Hillary appeared on the Today Show last month and laughed at the preposterous idea that she might be indicted and told host Matt Lauer that "there is not even the remotest chance that is going to happen" because the FBI investigation is just a "security review." The Washington Free Beacon reports:
“Do you think the FBI and the Justice Department write you a letter and say it was a misunderstanding? We’re sorry, carry on?” Lauer said. “Well, we’re certainly going to carry on. I think it’s a security review,” Clinton said. “It is a security review and there are lots of those that are conducted in our government all the time and you don’t hear about most of them. You hear about this one because, you know, it does involve me, so that’s why it gets so much attention.”
Comey, however, said this week that he has no idea what that means in terms of the FBI.

Despite her continued insistence that her email and personal server scandal is a nothing burger, Hillary just can't seem to stop herself from telling untruths.  Despite wide-spread reports that the FBI was moving on to the next phase of their investigation, interviewing Hillary aides, Hillary claimed this week that neither she nor any of her representatives have been contacted by the FBI to set up interviews. The New York Post reports:
On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked her outright: “Have you been contacted — or your representatives contacted — by the FBI to set up an interview” over her e-mail mess? Clinton gave a flat “no.”
Watch the segment:

In an appearance on FOX News Sunday today, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz dismissed Hillary Clinton's email scandal and the ongoing FBI investigation as a non-issue. Host Chris Wallace called her out for innacurate comparisons to other officials. The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Schultz: Clinton Used Private Email The Same Way as Previous Secretaries of State … ‘Other Than the Private Server’ Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) stumbled while trying to defend Hillary Clinton’s private email troubles on Fox News Sunday, claiming Clinton used a private email the same way as previous secretaries of state “other than the private server.”

The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email account and home-brewed server won't be wrapping up anytime soon. Nor is the Democratic convention a consideration in the timeliness of the investigation. NBC reported FBI Director James Comey's remarks Thursday afternoon:
Asked about the case today at a security conference in London, he said, "Somebody asked me if the Democratic National Convention is a hard stop or a key date for you? Are you doing this aimed at that? And I said, no.

Judicial Watch has been fighting a years-long battle to obtain records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regarding Huma Abedin's non-State Department employment arrangement. In the course of that fight, issues regarding Hillary Clinton's handling of email and her email server have become central. Judicial Watch has won many key procedural fights, the latest of which was the Court ruling that Judicial Watch could take discovery as to State Department practices with regard to obtaining Hillary's emails. The two sides have submitted their positions to the Court, but the Court may not need to rule because an agreement was just reached (full embed at bottom of post). The agreement, in the form of a Joint Proposed Order, gives Judicial Watch what it was seeking, but puts off limits discovery regarding Hillary's handling of classified information and the FBI investigation, which Judicial Watch was not seeking in any event. Here is the key paragraph: