State Department Tag

A report released today by the International Business Times suggests the Clinton Foundation was indeed a thoroughfare for trading influence and political favors. Unless of course the timing was purely coincidental, IBT's report indicates the Clinton Foundation accepted money from a Colombian oil company while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State. After procuring the donation, Secretary Clinton then decided to support a Colombian trade agreement, though she'd vocally opposed it during the 2008 election cycle. The IBT report found:

For union organizers in Colombia, the dangers of their trade were intensifying. When workers at the country’s largest independent oil company staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened violence if they failed to disband, according to human rights organizations. Similar intimidation tactics against the workers, say labor leaders, amounted to an everyday feature of life. ...Yet as union leaders and human rights activists conveyed these harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence, these organizers say. The State Department publicly praised Colombia’s progress on human rights, thereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers. At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire.

You may recall Hillary claiming she only used one device during her tenure as Secretary of State for "convenience." You may also recall how her once device claim was instantly proven questionable when a video surfaced of her stating otherwise. The day following Hillary's press conference, the Associated Press filed suit against the State Department over the embattled former Secretary's emails after repeated attempts to access records were fruitless. Fast forward several weeks into EmailGate. Today, the AP reports Clinton was using an iPad while serving as Secretary of State, placing Clinton's initial one device claim squarely in the Big Fat Lie category. But it gets better. Evidently, Clinton managed to serve as the Secretary of State and only send four emails containing the word 'drone.' Ever. Or at least that's what the State Department is saying:

The State Department says it can find only four emails sent between former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff concerning drone strikes and certain U.S. surveillance programs, and those notes have little to do with either subject. She asks for a phone call in one, a phone number in another. She seeks advice on how best to condemn information leaks, and accidentally replies to one work email with questions apparently about decorations.

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:

You know what doesn't show up in a key word search? Any words contained in a file attachment...or an embedded image. — Morgen (@morgenr) March 12, 2015

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

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: