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bounty44 -> RE: Hillary Probed (1/28/2016 2:16:11 AM)
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"Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal Appears Gravely Criminal"
(again, one can hope)
the short of it, if you don't want to read it all, or as a teaser is, the author contends Hillary purposely did what she knew to be illegal.
quote:
From the start, since we first learned about the home-brew email system then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up for conducting her government business, I’ve argued that she very likely committed felony violations of federal law. Yet it appears I underestimated the gravity of her misconduct -- ironically, by giving her the benefit of the doubt on a significant aspect of the scheme...
[S]ince we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information -- the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents. The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails...
In sum, knowing how physically difficult it is to move classified documents from the secured communications systems to the non-secured ones, I figured Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she had never done that was “very likely true.” Instead, I reasoned that her main violation would be privately communicating the substance of the information contained in classified documents, not transmitting the documents themselves.
While that would still be a felony, it was one she hoped to obscure and, if called on it, to dismiss as unintentional sloppiness by a busy government official, not willful flouting of the law.
My bad: The Clintons have made careers of defying our assumptions about how low they can go. I should have reminded myself that anything was possible.
Now, Paul Sperry reports that the FBI is probing indications that Mrs. Clinton did precisely what I assumed, because of the time and purposeful effort involved, she wouldn’t have done.
As I noted in my National Review weekend column, we now know that highly classified information from the secure systems ended up on Clinton’s private, unsecured (and relatively easy to hack) system. That, however, is not the half of it. Sperry reports that the actual documents themselves appear to have ended up in Clinton’s unsecured system -- but carefully shorn of their classified markings.
Quoting a veteran Diplomatic Security Service special agent named Raymond Fournier, Sperry elaborates:
[I]t’s clear from some of the classified emails made public that someone on Clinton’s staff essentially “cut and pasted” content from classified cables into the messages sent to her. The classified markings are gone, but the content is classified at the highest levels -- and so sensitive in nature that “it would have been obvious to Clinton.” Most likely the information was, in turn, e-mailed to her via NIPRNet.
To work around the closed, classified systems, which are accessible only by secure desktop workstations whose hard drives must be removed and stored overnight in a safe, Clinton’s staff would have simply retyped classified information from the systems into the non-classified system or taken a screen shot of the classified document, Fournier said. “Either way, it’s totally illegal.”
Sperry believes the FBI is focusing on three top Clinton aides at the State Department -- chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills and deputies Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan -- as the potential culprits who carried out Clinton’s suspected scheme to defeat classified information protections.
Note the evolution of Mrs. Clinton’s talking points. Remember, her initial claim was that there was no classified information stored or transmitted on her private system. When that became untenable -- i.e., the moment the emails she chose to retain (as opposed to the 30,000-plus she destroyed) started becoming public -- Clinton morphed it into an insistence that nothing “marked classified” had been transmitted or stored...
I made the apparent mistake of giving her the benefit of the doubt: I thought she was guilty of felony mishandling of classified information, but I assumed (wrongly, it seems) that she was being forced by her reckless disregard for the rules to retreat to what she hoped would be a more plausible defense.
Now, it appears there was nothing reckless about it.
Mind you, even the reckless mishandling of classified information is a serious crime. But all indications are that Mrs. Clinton was not grossly negligent. This was a thought-out, quite intentional violation of law.
https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2016/01/25/hillary-clintons-email-scandal-appears-gravely-criminal/
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