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    2016 American Presidential Election

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Another sign Hillary Clinton’s State Department was for sale

    n the latest case of donors to Hillary Clinton’s personal causes winning favor from the Clinton State Department, meet Rajiv Fernando.

    The head of a Chicago-based high-frequency-trading firm, Fernando got a seat on the International Security Advisory Board, a group of nuclear scientists, ex-Cabinet secretaries and other experts that looks at the risks of nuclear war.

    That puzzled his new fellows: “We had no idea who he was,” one ISAB member told ABC News during its investigation.

    Thanks to e-mails uncovered by the watchdog group Citizens United after a years-long Freedom of Information battle, we now know that Fernando was put on the board at the direction of Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at State (and now her personal attorney).

    ABC actually started asking questions about Fernando back in 2011. The e-mails show regular State staffers were themselves puzzled about how he’d gotten the job — and were told by Clinton’s flunkies to “stall” on answering ABC.

    Before any answer went out, Fernando quit, and the story died.

    In advance of getting the prestigious position, he’d been a big Hillary donor, maxing out donations to her presidential PAC in 2007 and 2008, and bundling over 100 grand. He’d also given more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation — later rising that to at least $1 million. He’s also bundled for her current White House run. And he’ll be a Hillary superdelegate at the Democratic Convention.

    In unrelated news, Clinton this week doubled down on her promises to clean up Wall Street once she becomes president. Right.

    2016 American Presidential Election

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    FBI investigating drone emails as part of Clinton server probe

    Washington (CNN)A series of emails about the CIA's drone program are among those being investigated by the FBI as part of its probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state, a law enforcement official tells CNN.

    Those emails, sent in late 2011 and early 2012, involve a discussion by the then-U.S. ambassador to Pakistan about a planned U.S.-led drone strike in that country, and took place largely on what's called "low side," or non-classified, State Department email system. The planned drone strike was later canceled.
    The Wall Street Journal was first to report the details of planned drone strike email discussion.
    The exchange in question took place over the December holidays when multiple officials were away from the office and without access to their classified email, and some of the emails were ultimately sent to Secretary Clinton's private email server, according to the official.
    The FBI has not yet interviewed Clinton as part of its investigation. As CNN first reported, investigators have not found evidence to support criminal charges against Clinton and none are expected, but no final determination will be made until that interview has taken place.
    The CIA drone program is covert and considered classified, so while it is widely discussed in public and in media reports, any discussion of the program on a non-classified system is a violation of government rules. For this reason, the CIA insisted that the emails on the subject be retroactively classified.
    Discussion of classified matters on government non-classified email systems is a perennial problem that occurs widely in the government, but damage is typically contained because violators use government email systems. What is not common is a cabinet-level official using a personal server to conduct all official business, outside the protection of government email servers.
    Some of Clinton's closest aides, including her longtime adviser Huma Abedin, have provided interviews to federal investigators, U.S. officials briefed on the investigation previously told CNN.
    State Department spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement, "As we have said previously, the State Department is not going to speak to the content of documents, nor would we speak to any ongoing review." Clinton's campaign did not immediately respond for comment for this report.
    Clinton campaign officials have said she is cooperating fully with the Justice Department review.

    2016 American Presidential Election

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Susan Sarandon: Hillary Clinton ‘more dangerous’ than Trump

    By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Friday, June 3, 2016

    Hollywood actress and activist Susan Sarandon says former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be a more dangerous U.S. president than Donald Trump — provided she’s not indicted first.

    Ms. Sarandon, a supporter of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, told a liberal news outlets this week that Mrs. Clinton’s track record portends a much worse future than anything Mr. Trump might catalyze as commander in chief.

    “I believe in a way she is more dangerous,” the actress told The Young Turks on Thursday. “They’re both talking to Henry Kissinger, apparently. … She did not learn from Iraq, and she is an interventionist, and she has done horrible things — and very callously. I don’t know if she is overcompensating or what her trip is. That scares me. I think we’ll be in Iran in two seconds.”

    The former “Thelma and Louise” star said voters are being “fed” a message that Mr. Trump is “so dangerous” when his promises on illegal immigration amount to a wall being built.

    “I don’t know what his policy is. I do know what her policies are, I do know who she is taking money from. I do know that she is not transparent and I do know that nobody calls her on it,” the Oscar-winning actress continued.

    The activist also appeared on MSNBC on Thursday and predicted Mrs. Clintonwould be indicted by the Department of Justice for the secret email server she operated out of her New York home as President Obama’s top diplomat.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/3/susan-sarandon-says-hillary-clinton-more-dangerous/

    2016 American Presidential Election

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Susan Sarandon predicts Hillary will be indicted

    June 3, 2016 | 10:22pm

    Hillary Clinton will be indicted over her use of a private email server to conduct sensitive State Department business, some Bernie Sanders supporters are insisting.

    Actress Susan Sarandon became the latest Sanders die-hard to predict that the former secretary of state would be criminally charged in the FBI investigation into the scandal.

    “Nobody’s even talking about this indictment. What happens with that?” Sarandon, of Westchester, said on MSNBC Friday.

    Reminded there was not yet an indictment, the activist actress added: “There’s going to be. I mean, it’s inevitable.”

    Dave Handy, 27, a progressive New York activist who will go to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia as an at-large Sanders delegate, made a similar claim on Twitter.

    “It’s going to be funny to watch when Hillary gets indicted, and all her supporters are like: #FeelTheBern,” he wrote.

    Dan Metcalfe, a Democratic law professor and former Justice Department official, also predicted an indictment in a column in LawNewz, a site run by ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams.

    “Given that the facts and law are so clear in Ms. Clinton’s case, it is difficult to imagine her not being indicted,” wrote Metcalfe, of American University’s Washington College of Law.

    Meanwhile, Sanders backers from New York are vowing to stage protests outside and inside Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center when it hosts the convention in July, Politico reported Friday.

    Among them is LGBT activist Allen Roskoff, who was busted last year after demonstrating at a Midtown banquet — dressed in prison stripes — to protest Gov. Cuomo’s refusal to grant clemency to convicts.

    “If the Barney Franks and the Wassermans are going to have their way at the convention and degrade activists, it may be a serious problem,” he said, referring to former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).

    Wasserman Schultz is the Democratic National Committee chair and Frank a co-chair of the convention’s rules committee. Sanders has called for both to be removed because they are ardent Clinton backers.

    http://nypost.com/2016/06/03/susan-sarandon-predicts-hillary-will-be-indicted/

    2016 American Presidential Election

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Corruption Is Catching Up to the Clintons and Their Associates It comes as no surprise that Hillary Clinton's closest allies are involved in a litany of ethics violations

    Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign chair, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, is currently under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice over questionable contributions to his 2013 campaign. According to a recent CNN report, the investigation—which has been going on for at least a year—calls into question Mr. McAuliffe’s service as a board member to the Clinton Global Initiative, a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation. A $120,000 donation from a Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang, made through U.S.-based businesses, raised red flags with investigators—along with several other donations, like the $2 million he gave the Clinton Foundation.

    Governor McAuliffe is just one of several close associates to the Clintons currently under investigation for corruption. Ms. Clinton’s 2008 campaign co-chair, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is under immense pressure to resign thanks to her favoritism for Ms. Clinton throughout the Democratic primaries. Ms. Wasserman Schultz essentially tipped the scale against Senator Bernie Sanders, a violation of the impartiality her position at the DNC demands. Prominent Clinton supporter and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is also under review as part of an ongoing federal investigation into two businessmen with close ties to the mayor. The Podesta Group, implicated in the release of the Panama Papers, was founded by Tony Podesta and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta. Several other prominent donors to the Clinton Foundation have also been linked to the Panama Papers, and the Clinton Foundation itself has been frequently cited as a source of money laundering and exchanging political favors for large donations.

    It comes as no surprise that Hillary Clinton’s closest associates are involved in a litany of ethics violations as corruption has been the modus operandi of Ms. Clinton’s campaign for the entire duration of the primaries. Hillary Clinton has publicly vocalized support for campaign finance reform, yet owes much of her success in the primaries to the current corrupt system, which enables her to fundraise unethically, bending and possibly breaking current campaign finance laws. The Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee between the Clinton campaign and the DNC, was recently revealed by Politico to be laundering money to the Clinton campaign to circumvent campaign finance laws. Mr. Sanders’ campaign has also highlighted additional violations and ethical breaches made by the Hillary Victory Fund.

    “The financial disclosure reports on file with the Federal Election Commission indicate that the joint committee invested millions in low-dollar, online fundraising and advertising that solely benefits the Clinton campaign,” states a press release from Mr. Sanders‘ campaign. “The Sanders campaign ‘is particularly concerned that these extremely large-dollar individual contributions have been used by the Hillary Victory Fund to pay for more than $7.8 million in direct mail efforts and over $8.6 million in online advertising’ according to the letter to the DNC. Both outlays benefit the Clinton presidential campaign “by generating low-dollar contributions that flow only to HFA [Hillary for America] rather than to the DNC or any of the participating state party committees.”

    In an interview with Think Progress, two campaign finance experts emphasized that what the Hillary Victory Fund has done is unprecedented and should be illegal.

    “Their argument is usually that it helps the party generally, but the practical and legal reality is that it benefits Hillary Clinton. You just don’t expect this kind of thing to happen in the primaries,” Larry Noble, with the Campaign Legal Center, told Think Progress. The article noted that this type of fundraising has only been legal since 2014, when the Supreme Court, in the McCutcheon v. FEC ruling, revoked what legal protections in campaign finance law remained after the 2011 Citizens United ruling.

    The Democratic National Committee has completely disregarded the democratic process by colluding with the Clinton campaign to simultaneously raise funds for itself while helping Hillary Clinton secure the presidential nomination. The Party should be pushing to reform campaign finance law—not embracing policies that allow wealthy individuals and corporations to buy off elections. While a few members of Congress push to get big money out of politics—most notably Bernie Sanders—the Democratic leadership has only strengthened its ties to wealthy and corporate donors who have hijacked the party for their own interests over the progressive agenda held by voters identifying as Democrats.

    http://observer.com/2016/05/corruption-is-catching-up-to-the-clintons-and-their-associates/

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Sorry, but there's no hope for a better Hillary Clinton: Kevin O'Brien

    People who are only now, reluctantly, boarding the Trump Train are apt to blush a little, cross their fingers and hope their candidate wouldn't be quite so shamelessly undisciplined or juvenile as president.

    And it's at least possible that Donald Trump won't be as bad as he has been. It is not completely unreasonable to hope that the dignity and gravity of the office might straighten him up a little. Who's to say that after a mere 69 years spent becoming the loutish loudmouth he is today, a fellow can't change and suddenly live up to the calling of high office?

    The people who endorse Hillary Clinton for president are denied the luxury of even such a slim hope. There is no reason whatsoever to believe Inauguration Day would transform her into a woman of honesty and trustworthiness.
    Americans have already seen Clinton in high office. If her progression through public life — from policy dabbler with no constitutional or statutory role (first lady) to one policymaker among many (senator) to an exalted title and great individual responsibility (secretary of state) — were going to make her a better person, we would have seen it by now.

    We have seen quite the opposite.

    As secretary of state, Clinton proved to be secretive, self-serving and dishonest. She was also horribly — fatally — incompetent, but we'll leave qualifications aside for now to concentrate on the character side of the candidate.

    The experience of high office did to Hillary Clinton what it most often does to people: It made her more sharply herself. It intensified her dominant traits, including paranoia, rather than unlocking some new quality.

    This week's report of the State Department inspector general to Congress confirms that Clinton's primary interest as secretary of state was keeping secrets — not the nation's, but her own.

    Despite repeated warnings that her use of a personal email account maintained on a private server for the transmission of sensitive or classified informationviolated State Department rules, Clinton did so consciously, willfully, routinely and systematically.

    One staff member who raised the issue was told "never to speak of the secretary's personal email system again," the inspector general reported.

    That hushing was in keeping with the IG's finding that Clinton and her inner circle were diligent about keeping her secrets secret. Investigators' questions to the State Department undersecretary for management and the Office of the Legal Adviser about Clinton's private email activities drew shrugs. They didn't know.

    Clinton's unmistakable intent was to keep communications in her official capacity as a Cabinet officer out of the sight of anyone who might question her actions or her thinking. Her unambiguous goal was to subvert the State Department's legally mandated record-keeping system.

    In the bargain, she put national security at risk. If she didn't understand that risk at the time, she had no business being secretary of state.

    The inspector general's findings should put to rest the argument from Clinton die-hards that previous secretaries of state used private email for some official business.

    One difference is that other secretaries of state weren't striving to avoid the record-keeping system. As far as is known, they saved privately sent and received official emails to the federal records system, as the law requires. Another difference is that previous secretaries' use of private email was an exception to their usual practice, whereas Clinton purposefully avoided the State Department's official system entirely.

    Those actions, as well as the existence of work-related emails known to exist but not preserved on her server, put Clinton in violation of the Federal Records Act.

    Repeated attempts to get at Clinton's emails through the Freedom of Information Act — especially after her fecklessness in the Benghazi crisis contributed to the deaths of four Americans, including an ambassador — turned up repeated responses that there were none.

    An inspector general's report released earlier this year showed that top Clinton aides, well aware of the secretary's off-the-books email system, routinely answered — either falsely or after no attempt to find out the truth — that no Clinton emails fit the descriptions listed in FOIA requests.

    Willful concealment of public records is a felony under the FOIA, as is a lack of diligence in searching for them. Clinton and her inner circle are well and truly implicated.

    She won't be indicted, though. Not by this Justice Department. Not if she wins in November and chooses the next attorney general. Not even if Trump does, because that would be piling on someone who has suffered enough as a twice-rejected presidential candidate.

    So all she has to do is lie, just as she's been doing since the emails story broke.

    She didn't want the inconvenience of two devices to keep work and private emails separate. All of her emails were automatically saved by the State Department. She handed over all work-related emails. The private email system was set up for her husband. She never sent or received classified information on the private system. The private system was secure from hackers. The State Department approved her use of the private system.

    One demonstrably false claim after another.

    And here's one more: Clinton has said all along that she and her staff have cooperated with investigators.

    Yet they refused to so much as be interviewed by the State Department inspector general. The latest spin on that one is that "there were hints of an anti-Clinton bias inside that office."

    Poor Hillary. Nothing is ever her fault.

    The inspector general's office has an anti-Clinton bias in the same way a cop investigating a bank robbery has an anti-Mugsy bias.

    O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor.

    http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/05/sorry_but_theres_no_hope_for_a.html

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Hillary Clinton's private server doesn't look like an honest mistake

    The State Department's Office of Inspector General has released its report about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Though the report uncovers no smoking guns — no records of Clinton saying "Heh, heh, heh, they'll never FOIA my emails NOW!!!!" — what it does lay out is deeply troubling, even though her supporters have already begun the proclamations of "nothing to see here, move along."

    It lays to rest the longtime Clinton defense that this use of a private server was somehow normal and allowed by government rules: It was not normal, and was not allowed by the government rules in place at the time. "The Department's current policy, implemented in 2005, is that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System (AIS), which "has the proper level of security control to … ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information."

    It also shreds the defense that "Well, Colin Powell did it too" into very fine dust, and then neatly disposes of the dust. As the report makes very clear, there are substantial differences between what the two secretaries of State did:

    - Powell says he set up a private email account, in addition to his internal account, because at the time the State Department "email system in place only only permitted communication among Department staff. He therefore requested that information technology staff install the private line so that he could use his personal account to communicate with people outside the Department." This is a quite plausible reason that, around the turn of the millennium, a secretary of state would have wanted to use his own account. Powell seems not to have done enough to ensure that those records were maintained, which is a problem (though it's not clear that he was aware that he should have turned those emails over). But as far as I can tell, the most plausible explanation of Clinton's behavior is that she set up her email server expressly to keep those emails from being archived as records (and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests), which is a great deal more problematic than setting up an inadequately archived email system because there's no other way to use an increasingly vital communications technology.

    - Powell had an outside line set up in his office, into which he plugged a laptop, which he used alongside his State Department computer. The IT department was, in other words, aware that this was going on, and it seems to have come up in discussions of his drive to get everyone at State access to the Internet at their desk. While the quality of information about Powell's Internet usage is not as high as it is about Clinton's (after 10 years, memories fade, people become hard to contact, and records degrade), there's no indication that he was less than transparent with staff. But folks at State clearly had no idea what was going on with Clinton's email server and, troublingly, at least two people who asked about it were apparently told to shut up and never raise the subject again.

    Three things have changed pretty dramatically since Powell's day: the magnitude (and appreciation) of cybersecurity threats, the quality of the State Department systems and government rules surrounding both recordkeeping and cybersecurity. One can argue that Powell should not have used a private computer during his tenure, but he seems to have done so in consultation with the IT folks, at a time when the policy surrounding these things was "very fluid" and the State Department "was not aware of the magnitude of the security risks associated with information technology." By 2009, the magnitude of the risks was clear, and the policy was also much clearer. As far as the OIG could determine, Clinton took no action to ensure that she was in compliance with that policy, which, in fact, she emphatically was not. Officials at State told the OIG in no uncertain terms that they would not have approved her reliance on a personal email server.

    - The OIG found only three instances in which State employees had relied exclusively on personal email: Powell, Clinton and Ambassador J. Scott Gration, U.S. emissary to Kenya from 2011 to 2012. Gration, who served under Clinton, was in the middle of a disciplinary process initiated against him for this email use (among other things) when he resigned. So it is impossible to argue not only that this was somehow in compliance with State's guidelines but also that Clinton might have thought it was in compliance, unless she somehow failed to notice when or why her ambassador to Kenya went missing.

    - The OIG found evidence that the server was attacked and that Clinton's staff members (and presumably Clinton herself) were aware of it. (Clinton at one point seems to have expressed concern that people might be trying to hack her email.) These incidents should have been reported to computer security personnel, but OIG found no evidence that they were. Clinton's supporters have offered the wan defense that "attacked" doesn't mean "actually hacked," but of course, since they didn't report it, there was no timely investigation, so we don't really know what happened, or even whether her server setup and/or server administrator were sophisticated enough to detect a penetration had one taken place.

    - This is the most profoundly amazing part of the whole story: Clinton's server administrator was hired by State as a political appointee, from which position he continued to provide support to Clinton's private email server during working hours, without telling anyone this was happening:

    linton apparently paid him for the work, but it is impossible to believe that she didn't know this was happening (if her email malfunctioned during the workday, did she expect to wait until 8 or 9 that night for it to come back up?) or that she thought it was OK to hire your private server administrator as a political appointee (a diplomatic political appointee in the IT department?) and then have him keep an eye on your private server from his government office. This has an unpleasant whiff of Tammany Hall about it.

    It's really hard to come away from reading this report thinking "Yup, just an honest mistake." Or indeed, "just a mistake, no big deal." Or even "no worse than others have done." I worked in bank IT for several years before I went to business school, and when this story first broke, I enjoyed an amusing hour or so envisioning what regulators would have said if we'd tried any of these sorts of excuses on them. Since then, I've had several such conversations with folks who are still laboring in the trenches of the securities industry, and their bitter laughter still rings in my ears. Why is Clinton being held to a lower standard?

    Well, because she's a Clinton, and the Clintons have always acted as if the rules applied only to others. And given that Democrats boxed themselves into her name on the ticket so early on, Team Blue had little choice but to rally around and pretend that this is just a minor peccadillo, like forgetting to date the signature on your FEC filings. Lord knows, this election cycle, there's good reason to view this sort of behavior as the lesser of two evils.


    "The DCIO and CIO, who prepared and approved the Senior Advisor's annual evaluations, believed that the Senior Advisor's job functions were limited to supporting mobile computing issues across the entire Department. They told OIG that while they were aware that the Senior Advisor had provided IT support to the Clinton Presidential campaign, they did not know he was providing ongoing support to the Secretary's email system during working hours. They also told OIG that they questioned whether he could support a private client during work hours, given his capacity as a full-time government employee."

    But it isn't minor. Setting up an email server in a home several states away from the security and IT folks, in disregard of the rules designed to protect state secrets and ensure good government records, and then hiring your server administrator to a political slot while he keeps managing your system on government time is unacceptable behavior in a government official. If Clinton weren't the nominee, or if she had an R after her name rather than a D, her defenders would have no difficulty recognizing just how troubling it is.

    That doesn't mean you necessarily have to prefer Donald Trump to her. Back when I was surveying #NeverTrump voters, I heard from more than one conservative intelligence type who basically said "I think Clinton should be in jail for what she did, and I still think she's a better choice than Trump for the presidency."

    Politics is not simply a team sport, and good government is possible only if we're willing to call out misbehavior no matter who does it. Even if we still hold our nose and pull the lever for the misbehaver come November.

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Spokesman: Clinton Declined Interview With State Dept. IG, Fearing 'Anti-Clinton Bias'

    By Susan Jones | May 26, 2016 | 9:14 AM EDT

    (CNSNews.com) - Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined to be interviewed by the Office of Inspector General of the department she once led to answer questions about her use of a private email server and personal email address to conduct State Department business.

    "Through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview," said the OIG report released today.

    On Wednesday afternoon on CNN, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon explained why she did so.

    Fallon said several times that the Clinton team decided to "prioritize" the parallel Justice Department/FBI investigation.

    But pressed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Fallon cited "hints of an anti-Clinton bias" in the State Department inspector general's office. He also said the State Department OIG was "seeking to hasten its timeline to pre-judge the outcome" of the ongoing Justice Department investigation.

    Blitzer asked Fallon: "Don't you think she would have wanted to cooperate with the inspector general and get to the bottom of this? The Justice Department wouldn't have minded if she would have cooperated with him."

    "Well, Wolf, as I said, we made the decision to prioritize the Justice Department review. That is going to be the last word on this matter--"

    "Why couldn't she do both?" Blitzer asked.

    "Well, quite frankly, Wolf, it was always of concern to us, and we never could quite make sense of why this review by the State Department IG was proceeding on its own timeline, in a parallel fashion to the Justice Department review, when it was the same office that suggested that the Justice Department undertake its review."

    Blitzer noted that Clinton has "answered a whole lot of questions" from the news media, and she's promised to make time for the Justice Department: "Why disrespect the inspector general of the State Department, the department she ran for four years, and not at least go to a meeting with the inspector general and answer a whole bunch of questions?"

    Fallon brought up Hillary's 11 hours of testimony before the House Benghazi committee, where members probed her use of a private email server.

    "It looks as if she's got something to hide when she doesn't even want to answer questions from the inspector general of the State Department," Blitzer said.

    "No, Wolf -- look Wolf, if she had anything to hide, she wouldn't be volunteering since last August to go face questions from the Justice Department, where the stakes will be much higher than this State Department IG investigation.

    "And as I said, the appropriateness of the State Department IG's office conducting this review at the same time when the Justice Department was already looking into the same issue is an open question.

    "There were questions raised about this office during the course of its investigation," Fallon continued. "There were reports about individuals in this office coming forward and suggesting that there were hints of an anti-Clinton bias inside that office, all of that adds up to--"

    "That's interesting," Blitzer interrupted. "Are you accusing the inspector general of the State Department of having an anti-Clinton bias?"

    Fallon said as it turns out, the report released by the State Department inspector general on Wednesday "includes an appropriate amount of context about how widespread the use of personal email was.

    "So I actually think the report today puts a lot of those questions to bed, based on how fair it was in explaining that the use of personal email was widespread and done by her predecessors, including Secretary (Colin) Powell.

    "I mention it only because it was another factor in contributing to the sense of uncertainty about why this office was conducting a parallel review and seeking to hasten its timeline to pre-judge the outcome of the very same matter that the Justice Department was investigating."

    "So look, at the end of the Justice Department's review, Hillary Clinton presumably, if she's asked, will have cooperated in full, answered every question that the Justice Department lawyers want to ask of her. The same will be true of all the aides that cooperate in the way that she has asked them to do.

    "And at that point, she'll have cooperated in full with the full-on DOJ review; she'll have cooperated with a congressional committee's investigation into this matter. She'll have cooperated or her aides will have testified and given interviews in various lawsuits brought by third parties.

    "I think that at the end of this, it will be impossible for anybody to suggest that she didn't answer every question that anybody had".

    "anti Clinton bias" when the Inspector General was appointed by President Obama?

    :lmao:

    http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/spokesman-clinton-refused-cooperate-her-own-state-dept-ig-fearing-anti

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Colin Powell. In fact, he told her to do it. :lmao: He's already come to her defense. The State Department is just covering its ass. Condi Rice did the same thing. People used their own private email services. Rules weren't changed until Kerry came along AFTER Hillary left. There should be transparency. Government fixes itself at a snail's pace.

    Articles I have read said Powell used a private email address but didn't use a personal sever.

    "Powell also noted some ways his situation was different from Clintons, for example, that he used a commercial email account. I had no private server, no private domain. I did not take [any messages] anywhere when I left the department, he said.

    Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/fbi-colin-powell-email-probe-218748#ixzz49naWRLC7

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Clintons Email Deceptions

    Updated May 25, 2016 7:53 p.m. ET

    271 COMMENTS

    Hillary Clinton has said for more than a year that her use of a private email server as Secretary of State violated no federal rules and posed no security risk. Only the gullible believed that, and now everyone has proof of her deceptions in a scathing report from State Department Inspector General Steve Linick.

    The report obtained by news outlets Wednesday is ostensibly an audit of the email practices of five secretaries of State. But the majority of the report, and the most withering criticism, focuses on Mrs. Clinton. The IG concludes that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee broke federal record-keeping rules, never received permission for her off-grid server, ignored security concerns raised by other officials, and employed a staff that flouted the rules with the same disdain she did.

    Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary, says the report. At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Departments policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.

    State still has never received emails from her private account for the first six weeks after she became Secretary, and the IG notes that it found (by other means) business-related emails that Mrs. Clinton did not include among the emails she has turned over.

    The report says she has also stonewalled requests to obtain her server. And through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined [the IGs] request for an interview. Former Secretaries Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and current Secretary John Kerry all sat for interviews.

    Mrs. Clintons staff abetted her bad practices. The report says the IG learned of extensive use of personal email accounts by four immediate staff members (none of whom responded to the questionnaire). . . . The material consists of nearly 72,000 pages in hard copy and more than 7.5 gigabytes of electronic data. One of the staff submitted 9,585 emails spanning January 22, 2009 to February 24, 2013, averaging 9 emails per workday sent on a personal email account.

    The IGwho had better hire a food-tasteralso found that Mrs. Clinton neither sought nor received permission for her private communications. The former Secretary also understood the security risks this posed because she was warned several times.

    In March 2011 the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security sent Mrs. Clinton a memorandum that warned of a dramatic increase in attempts by cyber actors to compromise the private home e-mail accounts of senior Department officials, with an eye toward technical surveillance and possible blackmail.

    Following that memo, security staff twice briefed Mrs. Clintons immediate staff on this threat. A June 2011 cable, sent over Mrs. Clintons name to all diplomatic and consular posts, warned of this new threat to home accounts, as well as the news that Google had reported cyber attacks on the Gmail accounts of U.S. government employees. Mrs. Clinton and her staff ignored her own warnings.

    One official suggested State set up a stand-alone computer for Mrs. Clinton in her office to check the Internet and private email. That never happened. A different official suggested she have two mobile devicesone for personal use and one with a State Department email account that would be subject to [Freedom of Information Act] requests. Her team said no.

    As for Mrs. Clintons claim that her private account was secure, the report cites several instances of techies shutting down her server due to hacking concerns. Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information, says the report. But the IG says it found no evidence that Mrs. Clinton or her staff filed such reports.

    ***

    The Clinton campaign is resorting to its familiar strategy of calling this old news while saying everybody does it because Mr. Powell also failed to keep records of private email while he was in office. GOP will attack HRC because she is running for President, but IG report makes clear her personal email use was not unique at State Dept, tweeted Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. But Mr. Powells use of private email was limited, and he never set up an unsecure server in his home.

    All of this should bear on the FBIs email probe and whether Mrs. Clinton understood the security risks she was running. On the IGs extensive evidence, she clearly didand then she lied about it. Voters should understand that this is precisely the kind of governance Mrs. Clinton would return to the White House.

    http://archive.is/RluRf#selection-4173.0-4173.26

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Release of Clintons Wall Street Speeches Could End Her Candidacy for President

    The reason you and I will never see the transcripts of Hillary Clintons speeches to Wall Street fat-cats and the reason shes established a nonsensical condition for their release, that being an agreement by members of another party, involved in a separate primary, to do the same is that if she were ever to release those transcripts, it could end her candidacy for president.

    Nor even that of the many neutral observers in the media who are deeply troubled by Clintons lack of transparency as to these well-compensated closed-door events a lack of transparency that has actually been a hallmark of her career in politics.

    Nor do we even need to take Clintons word for it as we could certainly argue that her insistence that none of these transcripts ever be seen by the public is itself a confession that her words would cause significant trauma to her presidential bid.

    In fact, it appears theyd cause enough trauma that Clinton would rather publicly stonewall to the point of being conspicuously, uncomfortably evasive in public debate after public debate, to endure damning editorial after damning editorial, and to leave thousands and thousands of voters further doubting her honesty and integrity, all to ensure that no one outside Goldman Sachs, and certainly no voter who wasnt privy to those closed-door speeches, ever hears a word of what she said in them.

    http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/release-of-clintons-wall-street-speeches_b_9698632.html

    American 2016 Presidential Election thread part three

    in Politics and World Events

    Posted

    Emails Add to Hillary Clintons Central Problem: Voters Just Dont Trust Her

    For more than a year, Hillary Clinton has traveled the country talking to voters about her policy plans. She vowed to improve infrastructure in her first 100 days in office, promised to increase funding for Alzheimers research and proposed a $10 billion plan to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

    But as the Democratic primary contest comes to a close, any hopes Mrs. Clinton had of running a high-minded, policy-focused campaign have collided with a more visceral problem.

    Voters just dont trust her.

    The Clinton campaign had hoped to use the coming weeks to do everything they could to shed that image and convince voters that Mrs. Clinton can be trusted. Instead, they must contend with a damaging new report by the State Departments inspector general that Mrs. Clinton had not sought or received approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.

    It is not just that the inspector general found fault with her email practices. The report speaks directly to a wounding perception that Mrs. Clinton is not forthright or transparent.

    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-campaign-trust.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.co.uk/

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