(some of this piece was based on what I wrote on July 10th. I've updated it to reflect recent events and no, as I said then she still won't be prosecuted)
Once again, Mrs. Clinton has revealed to us that if she tells you the sun is shining, you'd better make sure you have an umbrella handy.
Most polls show that the majority of Americans, for some odd reason consider her untrustworthy and an out and out liar.CNN’s national poll shows that 57% of Americans see her that way, and ABC News and the Wall Street Journal put that number at 52%.
She's continued to sing the old Right Wing Conspiracy song, and to claim, as she did in an interview with CNN's servile Diane Keillor, “When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system,” she said. “Now I didn’t have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system.”
There are enough outright lies in that small paragraph to warrant a serious trial.
Even storing Federal records on a private server is a serious violation of the Federal Records Act for reasons that should be obvious, and a violation of the agreement Mrs. Clinton signed when she started at the State Department. Mrs. Clinton was likewise required to turn over any and all records in her possession to government, which she quite obviously did not do.
Not only did Mrs. Clinton fail to turn over work-related emails, but she and her staff also edited some of those emails before submitting them, as the Examiner's Sarah Westwood reported.
In legalese, this shows intent. Mrs, Clinton intended to deceive congress.Not only that, but the committee obtained a number of e-mails that were work related and were either edited or somehow missing from the 55,000 Mrs. Clinton turned in:
The missing materials, which the State Department says it does not have, came to Congress by other means. They include writings about the jockeying for oil contracts in Libya after President Obama engaging in a war without congressional approval to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. This comes among her back-and-forth emails with Sidney Blumenthal, a former staffer who had been barred from employment in the Obama administration, to continue offering his insight and advice on Libya. [...]
But the proof of intent to deceive comes in the fact that Clinton or her staff actually edited some of the emails and turned over censored versions to State before destroying her copy of the originals.
I think we can reasonably be certain that cash donations to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for an inside track on oil deals or for Federal contracts involving Libya and other areas were the subject of some of these communications, but what's already known is damaging enough.
Another, much more serious problem than the usual lies and corruption is the fact that Mrs. Clinton's private server was almost certainly hacked by foreign agents. Her server lacked the normal security given to classified information within the government's official system. Professionals who have examined the security of Hillary private e-mail account have said that the question is not whether the account was hacked, but to what degree.
Not only were classified communications almost certainly compromised, but there's not telling what kind of personal, perhaps even indictable messages might have been scooped up. Imagine a president in the midst of negotiations with a foreign power like China, Russia or Iran suddenly confronted discretely with an ultimatum that unless she made certain far reaching concessions, certain information she desperately didn't want revealed would be made public.
Federal Law(36 CFR 1234.24) requires agencies to collect all records from “external electronic mail systems” so that they can be stored inside government archives. There's also a federal law (44 USC 3106) that authorizes legal action through the Attorney General and the Justice Department “for the recovery of records” that are threatened by destruction, deletion or erasure. Willfully destroying a federal record is a felony, punishable by fine and imprisonment. Mrs. Clinton is already guilty of that crime as well by admitting she destroyed her server.
Like I said, a lot of lies in one paragraph.
Mrs. Clinton felt free to destroy her private server and laugh at the subpoenas from congress because she knew that President Obama's Attorney General and the DOJ were not going to take any action against her, again for obvious reasons. Among them is that there's no longer a requirement to do so.
Thanks to Bill Clinton, there is no such thing as a truly independent special prosecutor's office any more. When the Democrats dominated congress after Watergate, they passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that created a special prosecutor, later called an Independent Counsel position, which could be used by either Congress or the Attorney General for investigations of Officials in the executive branch. It was totally independent of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice. That's who Kenneth Starr worked for, whose work led to President Clinton's impeachment for the felonies of perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of office.
As I've mentioned before, one of Mr. Bill's last 'gifts' to the country before he left office in 2000 was to eliminate the Office of the Independent Counsel totally and replace it with the very different Office of Special Counsel, controlled by the Attorney General as part of the Justice Department.
For those of you who've been wondering why IRS-Gate, Fast and Furious, Benghazi and other scandals haven't been fully investigated and prosecuted the way Watergate was, you now have your answer. And now you also know why Eric Holder laughed out loud when congress cited him for contempt.
Congress itself has no real police power anymore. They can investigate matters and subpoena documents, but they have little power to compel testimony or prosecute anyone the Obama Regime wants to protect. Congress does have the remedy of hiring its own prosecutor and impeaching the president, but the process is likely to take longer than 18 months, and certain members of the Republican establishment are afraid that going there would be 'messy.' So that's highly unlikely, just as Mrs. Clinton being prosecuted for breaking federal law is.
The problem Mrs. Clinton has is that unlike her husband, she's not really good at lying. Not only does she lack the delivery skills to pull it off, but she lacks Mr. Bill's astounding memory and forgets what lies she told people previously. That's actually even more disturbing in a way, because it shows an innate contempt for those she wishes to rule to tell them such obvious and easily debunked whoppers.It's as if we're not worthy of the effort to do it really well.
I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether someone like this should be president.
And speaking of which, new developments may actually affect that much, at least. The State Department's inspector general informed congress that 4 out of the 'sample' of 40 e-mails Mrs Clinton provided were indeed classified material that should never have been on her server, and two were of the highest category and classified as “Top Secret.”
The FBI seized both her server (which it turns out wasn't destroyed after all) and three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server. And the probe has expanded to include Hillary's two long time personal aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, who also sent e-mails via the private server.
Her spokesman, Nick Merrill, told CNN last night that Clinton's team "has worked with the State Department to ensure her emails are stored in a safe and secure manner."
I'll just bet they did. And, as you'll recall, Mrs. Clinton claimed to have deleted scads of 'personal' emails from her server. Again that's easy to believe, although her definition of personal is likely to be different and a lot more expansive than the average person's.
In spite of all this, Mrs Clinton won't be prosecuted for offenses that would land most State Department functionaries in jail for years. Aside from what I mentioned above, Mrs. Clinton had a ringside seat to a lot of things the Obama Regime would just as soon sweep under the rug, like Benghazi. She knows far too much about what really happened and why, and is in position to take a lot of people with her if it comes to that.
But there may be another, more cynical game in the works.
Don't be surprised if this goes just far enough to knock Hillary out of the running for 2016.
It's fairly common knowledge that the Obamas and the Clintons aren't exactly friendly. Part of it is personal, as anyone who's followed the politics since 2008 knows. But a lot of it is political in nature.
The Clintons, believe it or not, are the heads of the more conservative part of the Democrat Party as it's composed just now. Barack Obama and the über-progressives that are the base of the party are far to the left of them. And they're not fond at all of She Whom Would Be Queen. They see Hillary and her minions as old, washed-up and not in tune with the new, more radical stance Obama brought to Washington.
President Obama has plans for when he's out of office, and one of them undoubtedly is to replace the Clintonista machine with his own and mold the party in his own image. He already personally owns the vast database his computer whiz kids put together for him of supporters and funding targets nationwide, and his Organizing America is a well constructed machine to direct the über-progressives after he's out of office.
Rest assured that if Barack Obama wanted this business with Hillary stonewalled, that's what would have happened. The inspector generals and the FBI, after all, work for him now.
So I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this goes just far enough to the point where Hillary has to withdraw...and the Clintons and their wing of the party are history.
After which, Obama's ideology and control of the party's direction is assured as his protege, über-progressive favorite Elizabeth Warren jumps in.
We'll be able to tell whether I'm right depending on how this investigation goes. It wouldn't take all that much to stop Mrs. Clinton's coronation.
