Tag Archives: United States Department of State

Anatomy Of A Scandal

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Bloomberg.com posted a story yesterday about more private Clinton emails that we won’t get to see until after the election. However, some of the emails of Mrs. Clinton’s staff have made their way into the public eye, and they are very revealing.

Bloomberg reports:

Newly released e-mails from a top aide to Hillary Clinton show evidence of contacts between Clinton’s State Department and donors to her family foundation and political campaigns.

The e-mails released Tuesday by the conservative group Judicial Watch included a 2009 exchange in which Doug Band, a senior staff member at the Clinton Foundation, told a top Clinton aide at the State Department that it was “important to take care of” an individual, whose name was redacted.

Huma Abedin, the State Department aide, replied that “personnel has been sending him options.”

…In another 2009 exchange released Tuesday, Band asked Abedin and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury in touch with a State Department “substance person” on Lebanon. The Chagoury Group co-founder has given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to a list of donors posted online.

…Judicial Watch said it has now found 171 messages that weren’t included in the 30,000 e-mails Clinton turned over to the State Department. FBI Director James Comey has said that his agency found “several thousand” work-related e-mails that weren’t turned over by Clinton’s lawyers. Clinton has told the State Department she believes she submitted all work-related e-mails she had in her possession, the department’s Trudeau said in a statement.

Under President Obama (and under President Clinton, if she is elected) there is one set of rules for the politically connected and another set of rules for the rest of us. This story should disturb all of us, regardless of our political inclinations. It is no wonder that the rest of Mrs. Clinton’s emails will not be released until after the election. At that point, “What difference does it make?”

 

The Definition Of Spin

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It is going to be a long election season. I understand that it will only last until November, but it is going to be a long season. During that time we can expect the major media to tell us all variety of things about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. If you believe the mainstream media, by November you will be convinced that Hillary should be nominated for sainthood and Donald should be banished from the earth. That sort of bias is what has led to the rise of the alternative media.

One charge against Trump that the media is trying right now is that he and Putin have a wonderful relationship and Hillary is the only one who can protect us from the evil Russians. It’s a valiant effort at a really good smear campaign, but as usual, the facts tell a different story.

Katie Pavlich posted a story at Townhall today about the relationship between the Clintons and Russia.

The story reminds us of some of the history of that relationship:

Following his 2009 visit to Moscow, President Obama announced the creation of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission. Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state directed the American side, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov represented the Russians. The stated goal at the time: “identifying areas of cooperation and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability, international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties between the Russian and American people.”

The Kremlin committed $5 billion over three years to fund Skolkovo. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department worked aggressively to attract U.S. investment partners and helped the Russian State Investment Fund, Rusnano, identify American tech companies worthy of Russian investment. Rusnano, which a scientific adviser to President Vladimir Putin called “Putin’s child,” was created in 2007 and relies entirely on Russian state funding.

…Soon, dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel and Cisco, made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco committing a cool $1 billion. In May 2010, the State Department facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital—and weeks later the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies.

Wow. What a coincidence–donors to the Clinton Foundation profited from a decision made by the Secretary of State.

It gets worse:

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The article concludes:

Here we are with another case of Clinton accusing her opponent of doing precisely what she’s been doing for years: profiting off of Russian business and government relationships in the private and public sectors.

Donald Trump is not the candidate who compromised national security for personal gain–Hillary Clinton is.

When America Does Not Lead, Strange Things Happen

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On Wednesday, Clare Lopez at the Center for Security Policy posted an article about some of the emerging alliances in the Middle East. Unfortunately, some Middle East countries, feeling that America will no longer stand with them against the Muslim Brotherhood are beginning to align with Russia. Other countries are moving toward other options.

The article reports:

At the annual gathering of Iranians outside of Paris, France on 9 July 2016, where some 100,000 showed up to express support for regime change in Tehran, one of the guest speakers dropped a bombshell announcement. Even before he took the podium, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al-Saud, appearing in the distinctive gold-edged dark cloak and white keffiyeh headdress of the Saudi royal family, of which he is a senior member, drew commentary and lots of second looks. The Prince is the founder of the King Faisal Foundation, and chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, and served from 1977-2001 as director general of Al-Mukhabarat Al-A’amah, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, resigning the position on 1 September 2001, some ten days before the attacks of 9/11.

He took the podium late in the afternoon program on 9 July and, after a discourse on the shared Islamic history of the Middle East, launched into an attack on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose 1979 revolution changed the course of history not just in Iran, but throughout the world. His next statement sent a shock wave through the assembly: Bin Faisal pledged support to the Iranian NCRI opposition and to its President-elect Maryam Rajavi personally. Given bin Faisal’s senior position in the Saudi royal family and his long career in positions of key responsibility in the Kingdom, it can only be understood that he spoke for the Riyadh government. The hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.

The Saudi’s understand the dangers of the Ayatollahs obtaining a nuclear weapon. They have also recently moved closer to Israel in a desire to contain the ambitions of the current Iranian government.

The article further explains:

The NCRI and its key affiliate, the Mujahedeen-e Kahlq (MEK), were on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list until 2012, having been placed there at the express request of Iranian president Khatami. Iranian university students formed the MEK in the 1960s to oppose the Shah’s rule. The MEK participated in the Khomeini Revolution but then was forced into exile when Khomeini turned on his own allies and obliterated any hopes for democratic reform. Granted protection by the U.S. under the 4th Geneva Convention in 2004, remnants of the MEK opposition have been stranded in Iraq, first at Camp Ashraf and now in Camp Liberty near Baghdad since U.S. forces left Iraq. Completely disarmed and defenseless, the 2,000 or so remaining residents of Camp Liberty, who are desperately seeking resettlement, come under periodic deadly attack by Iraqi forces under Iranian Qods Force direction. The most recent rocket attack on July 4th, 2016 set much of the camp ablaze and devastated the Iranians’ unprotected mobile homes. The MEK/NCRI fought their terrorist designations in the courts in both Europe and the U.S., finally winning removal in 2012. The NCRI’s national headquarters are now located in downtown Washington, DC, from where they work intensively with Congress, the media, and U.S. society to urge regime change and a genuinely liberal democratic platform for Iran.

Unfortunately, in 2009 when Iran had a genuine opportunity for a democratic government, President Obama chose to ignore the green revolution. The President was more interested in reaching a nuclear deal with a government that routinely preaches, “Death to America” than helping the Iranian people find freedom. America has become an enemy of freedom rather than a beacon of light in a dark world.

There Are Always Unintended Consequences

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There are always unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences continue for a generation. Recent events illustrate that.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal posted an article about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). President Lyndon Johnson signed the act on July 4, 1966. President Johnson referred to FOIA as “the damned thing” when he signed it.

The article reports:

Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn’t become law: The president “hated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.”

I am sure Hillary Clinton would have agreed with him.

The article reports:

Mrs. Clinton stonewalled FOIA requests for years with her keep-no-records, produce-no-records strategy. In a deposition last month in a civil lawsuit challenging her personal email server, the State Department said its staffers in charge of records didn’t realize until 2014 that its former boss had used private email.

Appropriately enough, Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she used a private email server to keep her records secret only became public in a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s insistence that it couldn’t respond to FOIA requests because it couldn’t locate her emails on its .gov server.

The State Department’s inspector general in May ruled that Mrs. Clinton broke record-keeping laws such as those requiring compliance with FOIA requests, never got permission for her home server and ignored numerous security warnings.

…the judges (federal appeals court judges in Washington, DC) said evading government servers is no defense against a FOIA request:

“If a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose is hardly served,” the judges wrote. “It would make as much sense to say that the department head could deprive requestors of hard-copy documents by leaving them in a file at his daughter’s house and then claiming that they are under her control.”

The article also reminds us that there are indications that Russian agents hacked the servers of the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee. That means that Vladimir Putin has all sorts of information he can either release in October or hold over Mrs. Clinton’s head if she becomes President. Her desire to hide information from the public has potentially damaged American national security.

A representative republic (which America is) relies on informed voters to maintain freedom. When people work against informing the voters, it hurts us all. The fact that Washington, DC, has become a city where wealthy elite politicians govern for their own good may explain why Donald Trump has done so well in this campaign cycle. Because Donald Trump may well go into Washington and clean house, he is opposed by the Washington elites. This opposition will become more obvious at the Republican National Convention and in the press coverage he receives between now and the November election. It is up to Americans to decide whether they want more Washington secrecy and elitist government or whether they want someone to clean house.

A + B Equals Whatever You Want It to

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The following quotes (from ABC News) are taken from James Comey‘s statement concerning the Hillary Clinton investigation:

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

…I have so far used the singular term, “e-mail server,” in describing the referral that began our investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that. Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together—to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work—has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.

…From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

…The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

…Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

So what do we know?

  1. The exclusive use of a private server was against the rules. Permission was never given for that use. It is also interesting that Mrs. Clinton never made it clear that there was more than one server.
  2. Hillary Clinton did not release all of her emails (and lied–saying she did).
  3. FBI Comey said today that there were times when Hillary’s private server could have been hacked.
  4. The investigators reported that 110 emails in 52 email chains were determined to contain some form of classified information at the time they were sent, contrary to statements made by Hillary Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton has avoided an indictment, despite the fact that she obviously broke the law. This is a really sad day for American justice.

Does This Matter To You?

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On Sunday, The New York Times posted an interview with President Obama’s foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes. Ben Rhodes was an aspiring novelist who somehow became a major player in President Obama’s foreign policy. There are a few very telling remarks in the interview.

This is The New York Times description of Ben Rhodes’ job:

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Therefore, it is very easy to lie to reporters. Great. Thanks for doing you job of informing American voters–instead you have chosen to mislead them.

The New York Daily News posted a story on Saturday about the role that Ben Rhodes played in the Iran nuclear deal.

The New York Daily News reports:

Looking far down the road to regional domination, Iran’s radical Islamist leaders made a calculated decision to present a less menacing face to the world.

No longer, for example, would the country’s secular leadership vow the annihilation of Israel and rail against the Great Satan United States.

Worldly President Hassan Rouhani, who earned a Ph.D. in Scotland, took office in 2013, declaring an intention to engage with the West. Foreign minister Mohammad Zarif, educated at American universities, cultivated a close relationship with Secretary of State John Kerry.

Here, finally, were moderates with whom the U.S. could negotiate as President Obama sought to normalize relations with a sworn enemy.

So the Iranian propaganda went as the mullahs hoped for relief from economic sanctions via a nuclear deal with the U.S. and Western powers.

Why would anyone believe such obvious nonsense? One reason — in fact the key reason — is that Obama joined Iran in knowingly peddling the same false propaganda to America, according to an extraordinarily revealing New York Times profile of the President’s deputy national security adviser, Benjamin Rhodes.

“The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal,” the profile states, providing evidence aplenty.

“Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency,” the profile discloses, quoting Rhodes as saying, “It’s the center of the arc” of an Obama strategy of remaking U.S. relations in the Mideast.

We have exchanged our alliance with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East that allows freedom of religion, to an alliance with Iran, a country that has vowed to destroy Israel and America. This has been done with the help of Ben Rhodes (and President Obama), who blatantly lied to the American people about pretty much everything involved in the nuclear deal with Iran.

On Monday, The Federalist posted an article about Ben Rhodes and the Iran nuclear deal. The article included a chart based on a Gallop Poll of American opinion of Iran.

Here is the chart:

IranOpinionWe may have the treaty, but I am not sure the American people are on board.

The New York Times further reports:

As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

This sort of public manipulation is the reason the alternative media has grown. Many Americans are tired of being manipulated and are willing to do their own search for the truth. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has a way of criticizing any opposition to their ideas successfully by using personal attacks and name-calling.

I don’t know what impact this information about the Iran nuclear deal will have on the 2016 election. What I do know is that President Obama sold the national security of America because he wanted a treaty with Iran as part of his legacy. That is a disgrace.

The Numbers Tell The Story

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According to Wikipedia:

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, is a federal freedom of information law that allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government. The Act defines agency records subject to disclosure, outlines mandatory disclosure procedures and grants nine exemptions to the statute.[1][2] This amendment was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his misgivings,[3][4] on July 4, 1966, and went into effect the following year.[5]

The Freedom of Information Act works well as long as the people in power respect it. Sometimes getting information is a bit of a challenge.

Hot Air posted the following today:

Speaking of Hillary and her top aides, one guess which agency within the Obama administration had the very worst record when it came to responding to FOIA requests. If you guessed the State Department under Hillary Clinton, you are correct. A report published in January by the State Department Inspector General found that out of 240 FOIA requests for information connected to Secretary Clinton, 177 were still outstanding more than a year after she left office. Here’s a chart from the report showing that:

State FOIA responseIf Clinton wins the 2016 election, the Obama administration will look like the most transparent administration in history by comparison.

The article reports that the Obama Administration has broken the record for not being able to find documents requested in FOIA requests. Miraculously, when a court order is involved, the documents mysteriously appear. As I said in the beginning of this article, when people on both sides of the request respect FOIA requests, the system works. If an administration or member of an administration thinks they are above the law, FOIA requests do not always get honored.

This Is Long Overdue

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Happy Saint Patrick‘s Day. As we celebrate the life of Saint Patrick, our State Department, led by John Kerry, has finally acknowledged that there is a genocide going on against Christians in the Middle East.

Fox News reported the following today:

Secretary of State John Kerry declared Thursday that the Islamic State is committing genocide against Christians and other minorities in the Middle East, after facing heavy pressure from lawmakers and rights groups to make the rare designation.

“In my judgment, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in territory under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims,” Kerry said at the State Department. Daesh is another name for the Islamic State.

He accused ISIS of “crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The announcement was a surprise, at least in terms of the timing. A day earlier, a State Department spokesman said they would miss a congressionally mandated March 17 deadline to make a decision. Yet as the department took heat from lawmakers for the expected delay, the department confirmed Thursday morning that Kerry had reached the decision that Christians, Yazidis and Shiite groups are victims of genocide.

This is not anything new, and it is time we admitted that it was going on. On of the tenets of Islam is conversion by the sword. Under Sharia Law, Christians have three options when their countries are taken over by Muslims–be killed, convert to Islam, or pay the jizya (a tax on Christians and Jews that can be as much as or more than half of their assets). Paying the jizya involves a submission ritual including a blow to the neck where the infidel acknowledges the mercy of the Muslims who have allowed him to live.

Note that this announcement applies to ISIS. If it were done correctly, it would apply to most of the countries in the Middle East. The only country in the Middle East where freedom of religion is allowed is Israel, and our State Department (and the United Nations) has spent years condemning them for various imaginary human rights violations. At least this move by the State Department is in the right direction.

A New Example Of Take The Money And Run

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The Washington Free Beacon is reporting today that Iran is threatening to walk away from its nuclear deal with the West.

The article reports:

Iran’s most recent ballistic missile test, which violates current U.N. Security Council resolutions, comes a day after the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed that it is prohibited by the nuclear agreement from publicly reporting on potential violations by Iran.

Iranian leaders now say that they are poised to walk away from the deal if the United States and other global powers fail to advance the Islamic Republic’s “national interests.”

“If our interests are not met under the nuclear deal, there will be no reason for us to continue,” Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, warned during remarks delivered to a group of Iranian officials in Tehran.

“If other parties decide, they could easily violate the deal,” Araqchi was quoted as saying by Iran’s state-controlled media. “However, they know this will come with costs.”

So, if I understand this correctly, the deal will only stay in place if it advances Iran’s interests. Please explain to me how we got into a deal with people with that attitude. It seems to me that a deal should advance the interests of all parties involved. I think we need new negotiators.

The article further reports:

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department had difficulty Monday explaining why the nuclear agreement limits public reporting by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, on potential deal violations by Iran.

Yukiya Amano, the IAEA’s chief, disclosed on Monday that his agency is no longer permitted to release details about Iran’s nuclear program and compliance with the deal. The limited public reporting is a byproduct of the nuclear agreement, according to Amano.

When asked about these comments again Tuesday, a State Department official told the Free Beacon that the IAEA’s reports would continue to provide a complete picture of Iran’s nuclear program, though it remains unclear if this information will be made publicly available.

On February 1st, military.com reported:

Iran said Monday it now has access to more than $100 billion worth of frozen overseas assets following the implementation of a landmark nuclear deal with world powers.

Government spokesman Mohammad Bagher Nobakht said much of the money had been piling up in banks in China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey since international sanctions were tightened in 2012 over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency meanwhile quoted central bank official Nasser Hakimi as saying nine Iranian banks are now reconnected to SWIFT, a Belgian-based cooperative that handles wire transfers between financial institutions. No foreign banks operate in Iran, and ATMs in Iran are not yet linked to the global system.

The historic agreement brought about the lifting of international sanctions last month after the U.N. certified that Iran has met all its commitments to curbing its nuclear activities under last summer’s accord.

Now that Iran has the money and the sanctions are lifted, is the deal over?

We Need A New State Department

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Anyone can make a mistake, but some people take it to a whole new level. On March 2nd, The Washington Examiner reported that the State Department had set up a hotline to take calls about cease-fire violations in Syria. That in itself is not a bad idea. However, they used volunteers with limited abilities in Arabic languages.

The article reports:

“In order to help monitor the cessation of hostilities in Syria, we did set up an information hotline that was staffed 24/7, where violations could be reported I think via a number of different apps,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday.

“There were some language issues among some of the volunteers,” he added. “And granted, these again are State Department employees who are doing this in addition to their usual jobs.”

“We are aware that there were some language issues, as you note, and we’re working to correct those, obviously, because it’s important that we have Arabic speakers who are able to field incoming calls,” Toner said.

Toner was asked whether proficiency in Arabic was a requirement for volunteering to work the hotline.

“It was, just but, you know, given the time limits on setting this up, probably some of the language skills weren’t properly vetted,” he said.

“Agreed, we should have people … agree,” Toner said when pressed further. “So, we’re working to address that.”

Shouldn’t the State Department have a good idea which of its employees are fluent in Arabic? If the language issue was a concern, could they have borrowed people from other government agencies who were fluent in Arabic? This sounds like a total lack of common sense.

Watch The Spin

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Today’s Washington Post posted an article about Hillary Clinton’s problems with her email server.

The article reports:

The Justice Department has granted immunity to the former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.

The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.

As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents will likely want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said.

That’s pretty straightforward. Basic facts, etc. But later in the article:

Any decision to charge someone would involve Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who told Congress when asked earlier this month about the email inquiry: “That matter is being handled by career independent law enforcement agents, FBI agents, as well as the career independent attorneys in the Department of Justice. They follow the evidence, they look at the law and they’ll make a recommendation to me when the time is appropriate.

“We will review all the facts and all the evidence and come to an independent conclusion as how to best handle it,” she added.

Current and former officials said the conviction of retired four-star general and CIA director David H. Petraeus for mishandling classified information is casting a shadow over the email investigation.

The officials said they think that Petraeus’s actions were more egregious than those of Clinton and her aides since he lied to the FBI, and classified information he shared with his biographer contained top secret code words, identities of covert officers, war strategy and intelligence capabilities. Prosecutors initially threatened to charge him with three felonies, including conspiracy, violating the Espionage Act and lying to the FBI. But after negotiations, Petraeus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information.

I am learning how to read between to lines to predict what comes next. Who are these current and former officials?

The article continues:

Petraeus “was handled so lightly for his offense there isn’t a whole lot you can do,” said a former U.S. law enforcement official who oversaw counterintelligence investigations and described the email controversy as “a lesser set of circumstances.”

The State Department has been analyzing the contents of Clinton’s correspondence, as it has prepared 52,000 pages of Clinton’s emails for public release in batches, a process that began in May and concluded Monday. The State Department has said 2,093 of Clinton’s released emails were redacted in all or part because they contained classified material, the vast majority of them rated “confidential,” the lowest level of sensitivity in the classification system.

The above two paragraphs are outright lies. I have posted a number of articles about these emails. Judicial Watch has been on this from the beginning. If you believe the above two paragraphs, I suggest you go to the Judicial Watch website and begin reading. The Washington Post article is setting up the story that Hillary didn’t do anything serious and that she is being picked on because she is a Democrat running for President or because she is a woman. Take your choice. This is an example of how a newspaper can lie to create a narrative. We will see a lot more of this as the election campaign continues.

This Could Present A Problem In The Democratic Party Primary Elections

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The Washington Examiner is reporting today that last fall the Clinton Foundation received a subpoena for documents related to projects that required State Department approval as well as records related to Huma Abedin, a top aide of Secretary Clinton and currently vice chairman of Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The article reports:

The State Department inspector general probe is entirely separate from an FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server to shield her official communications.

An inspector general cannot charge anyone with a crime.

But the independent government watchdogs can make referrals to the Justice Department and recommendations to the agencies they oversee.

A referral from the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community sparked the FBI probe of Clinton’s server use, for example.

The Post (The Washington Post) report noted the “full scope” of the inspector general inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and Abedin’s role there was “unclear.”

As I reported here in December:

Bill and Hillary Clinton have amassed a tremendous amount of money since leaving the White House. A lot of that money has been channeled through the Clinton Foundation, which the Charity Navigator refused to rate because its “atypical business model . . . doesn’t meet our criteria.” The Federalist posted an article in April pointing out that the Clinton Foundation actually spends approximately 10 percent of its donations on charity.

It is somewhat amazing how many of our career politicians whose jobs pay $100,000 a year (more or less) seem to become millionaires. That is something that needs to change. While the New Hampshire primary election proves that you cannot buy elections (Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush spent the most money in the New Hampshire primary.), it seems that once you get elected, you can pretty much buy anything you want to. The voters are the only people who can change the current system. As a voter, you have two choices–vote for someone who is outside ‘the system’ and does not seem to want to play inside ‘the system’ or vote for someone who is already rich and really does not need to make any  money by using his political office as a personal fund raiser.

It will be interesting to see if this new inquiry into the financial dealings of the Clintons has any impact on the primary. Polls in New Hampshire already indicated that voters did not see Secretary Clinton as honest–91% to 5%. How much worse can it get?

How Far Up Does This Go?

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The Judicial Watch Press Room posted an article on Monday about State Department efforts to set up a private computer for Secretary of State Clinton.

The article reports:

Judicial Watch announced today that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a “stand-alone PC” so that Clinton could  check her emails in an office “across the hall” through a separate, non-State Department computer network system. Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, “The stand-alone separate network PC is a great idea.”  The emails are from January 23-24, 2009, a few days after Clinton was sworn in as Secretary of State.

The new emails were obtained by Judicial Watch in response a court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for State Department records about Hillary Clinton’s separate email system  (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00689)).

In the email chain, Lewis Lukens, former deputy assistant secretary of state and executive director of the secretariat, responds to a request from Mills by informing her, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and Kennedy that the new personal computer “in the secretary’s office” would be “connected to the internet (but not through our system).” Abedin responds, “We are hoping for that if possible.”

The email exchange discussing plans to provide Clinton a separate computer to skirt the internal State Department computer network begins with a message from Mills to Lukens in which she requests Clinton being able to access her emails through “a non-DOS computer.” The email discusses how the stand-alone computer can be set up and why it is “a great idea’ and “the best solution:”

The article includes copies of the emails involved. Please follow the link to the Judicial Watch article to read them.

So why is this important? What they were doing was illegal. There may be a totally innocent reason for doing this, but the obvious reason would be to avoid archiving requirements and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It really is difficult to see this as an innocent action. If the major media covers this, the entire email scandal may well unravel as people attempt to defend themselves, legally and otherwise.

Will We Actually Have Equal Justice Under The Law?

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Fox News posted a story today about new information regarding Secretary Hillary Clinton’s email. Some of the emails on Secretary Clinton’s private server were marked “special access programs” (SAP).  This is a label higher than Top Secret. These emails were on her private server, which did not have the layers of security that a State Department server would have had. A private server is much more vulnerable to hacking than a State Department server would have been.

The article reports:

According to court documents, former CIA Director David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing intelligence from special access programs with his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. At the heart of his prosecution was a non-disclosure agreement where Petraeus agreed to protect these closely held government programs, with the understanding “unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized retention or negligent handling … could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation.” Clinton signed an identical non-disclosure agreement Jan. 22, 2009. 

Fox News is told that the recent IG letter was sent to the leadership of the House and Senate intelligence committees and leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and State Department inspector general. 

Representatives for the ODNI and intelligence community inspector general had no comment.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. If Secretary Clinton is not prosecuted for her mishandling of classified information, then the charges against General Petraeus should be dropped.

A President Who Does Not Follow The Constitution Impacts Other Countries–Not Only America

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Today’s Wall Street Journal featured a very good article entitled, “Why We’re Suing Obama Over Keystone.” The article was written by Kristine Kelkus, an executive vice president and general counsel at TransCanada. I strongly suggest you follow the link above and read the entire article, but I am including a few excerpts from the article that illustrate how damaging an out-of-control President has been to our country and our neighbors.

The article reports:

For 65 years, TransCanada has built oil and gas pipelines in North America. It’s a job the company is good at, and one we much prefer to building lengthy legal filings that could take several years to resolve. Still, when TransCanada in 2008 walked its application for a presidential permit into the U.S. State Department, the company was prepared for an extensive evidentiary process—albeit one that has traditionally been straightforward.

Until the Keystone XL pipeline, no U.S. administration had prohibited the cross-border construction of a major oil pipeline. And within the past decade, U.S. regulators approved two very similar, large cross-border pipelines that transport exactly the same type of oil that the Keystone XL pipeline would have carried from the same region in Alberta, Canada, to the U.S.

TransCanada already operates the initial Keystone pipeline, which was approved in 2008. And in 2009 the State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama permitted Enbridge, a direct competitor to TransCanada, to build another. Each of these permit reviews took about two years.

…But environmental activists made rejection of the project a litmus test of the president’s climate-change credentials. The State Department’s official Record of Decision reasoned that permitting the pipeline to proceed would “undermine U.S. climate leadership” because “the understanding of the international community”—contrary to the administration’s own findings—was that the pipeline would increase greenhouse-gas emissions. Permitting construction would “undercut the credibility and influence of the United States” in negotiating with other countries, including at the coming Paris climate conference.

In other words, the pipeline and its benefits were sacrificed to increase the president’s negotiating leverage with other countries.

My first reaction to this article was to wonder who runs Enbridge, if campaign contributions were involved, and if Berkshire Hathaway owns the railway that was carrying the oil before the Enbridge pipeline was built (see here).

The article further concludes:

The administration’s actions harm business and public interests that extend far beyond a particular pipeline. The decision calls into question the entire process for cross-border facility approvals. It strongly suggests that investing in the U.S. is subject to a level of “sovereign risk” usually associated with far less developed economies.

Unless they are remedied in court or arbitration, the Keystone decision and the political expediency underlying it will also encourage future administrations to conclude that they, too, can disregard the most basic legal requirements.

We need a President who puts the interests of all Americans above the interests of special interest groups and major contributors.

The Truth Eventually Comes Out

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The Weekly Standard website posted a preview of a January 18th article about the attack  on Benghazi. The article is about the movie 13 Hours, which will appear in theaters on January 15th. The movie was directed by Michael Bay. The movie opens with the quote, “This is a true story.” The movie then details the story of the attack on Benghazi as told largely through the eyes of CIA contractor Jack Silva, played brilliantly by a bearded and newly bemuscled John Krasinski, best known for his role as the affable and sarcastic Jim Halpert on The Office, and four other CIA contractors—Mark “Oz” Geist, John “Tig” Tiegen, Kris “Tanto” Paronto, and “Boon.”

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. The media has not reported the full story of Benghazi, and Michael Bay has decided to tell that story.

The article includes many of the details of the attack as well as a few conclusions:

The film documents the contractors’ concerns about security before the assault on September 11, 2012, making clear that the attack was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a long series of hostilities directed at Western targets. Even before the events of that day, viewers are led to understand the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe. The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a Libyan militia the State Department engaged and ostensibly the good guys, is filled with shady characters, some of whom seem to know well in advance the plans of the jihadists who attack the diplomatic compound and the CIA annex. Hours before the attack begins, members of the local police force are observed conducting surveillance on the compound. Throughout the hours of fighting at both sites, when the Americans trying to repel the attacks see large groups of dark-skinned, heavily armed men show up to the battle, they cannot determine whether the new arrivals are there to help them or kill them.

…Two dominant themes emerge from the film: 1) In the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya it was impossible to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. And, for that reason and others, 2) the U.S. government isn’t very effective in its efforts to create order out of the inevitable instability that results from removing dictators.

The article concludes:

Whatever its impact, 13 Hours is a powerful film that is well worth seeing. From beginning to end, it forcefully rejects the sanitized, no-fault version of Benghazi. In scene after powerful scene, it assigns blame: to policymakers in Washington who naïvely overestimated our ability to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in post-Qaddafi Libya; to Washington bureaucrats who paid little attention to repeated warnings about the security of U.S. facilities in Benghazi; to CIA officials more concerned with career advancement and positive performance reviews than saving lives.

But perhaps the strongest indictment made by 13 Hours is an unspoken one. The film itself is an implicit but devastating critique of the American media that refused to report this story in this way, an establishment media that left to Hollywood the responsibility of telling these important truths.

The days of the mainstream media smothering the truth and filtering information have been numbered since the inception of alternative media. Now it looks as if there are some in Hollywood who also see the need to tell the truth.

Giving More Power To The Internal Revenue Service

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I suspect that most Americans are big fans of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They are something of a necessary evil in sorting out the complex set of lobbyists’ rules that make up our tax code. The have been politicized under President Obama and that may continue under the next President. The last thing we need to do is give them more power, but that is what is happening.

Investor’s Business Daily reported yesterday that the massive transportation bill that a Republican Congress passed this month gives the Internal Revenue Service new powers to authorize the State Department to revoke U.S. passports. Doesn’t that make you feel secure?

The article reports:

But beware: Beginning next year, those living in states that haven’t upgraded their state IDs as federally mandated may need passports to fly domestically.

So if the IRS has an issue with you, you may find yourself kept off the jet that was supposed to take you to spend Thanksgiving with your folks.

Without freedom of movement, this simply isn’t a free country. Standing at the Berlin Wall in 1963, President Kennedy said, “Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”

That has changed. This new rule could well be called “The IRS Wall,” and its express purpose is “to keep our people in” — that is, until they’ve emptied their pockets to the satisfaction of Uncle Sam.

IRS power was already disturbing. Last year, the proprietor of a small, cash-only Mexican restaurant in Iowa, a woman not charged with any crime or suspected of cheating on taxes, saw tens of thousands of dollars seized from her checking account by the IRS without a warrant, just because she made frequent small deposits.

It is time to remind those in Washington that the U.S. Constitution was designed to curtain the power of government–not the freedom of Americans.

Sleep Well

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Yesterday PJMedia reported the following at a House Oversight Committee hearing:

At a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, a State Department official admitted the government does not know the whereabouts of thousands of foreigners who had their visas revoked over terror concerns.

“You don’t have a clue do you?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Bond told the committee that the U.S. has revoked more than 122,000 visas, 9,500 of which were revoked due to terrorism concerns.

Chaffetz asked Bond where those individuals were located now, to which she responded: “I don’t know.”

The startling admission came as members of the committee pressed administration officials on what safeguards are in place to reduce the risk from would-be extremists.

At issue is how closely the U.S. government examines the background of people seeking entry to the country, including reviews of their social media postings.

“If half the employers are doing it in the United States of America, if colleges are doing it for students, why wouldn’t Homeland Security do it?” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. “We don’t even look at their public stuff, that’s what kills me.”

People wanting to come to America are not yet citizens–they do not have the rights of citizens. It is the government’s responsibility to vet them carefully. If the government cannot do that, we need a different government.

Getting Past The Rhetoric

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There is a lot being said right now about what to do with the Syrian refugees fleeing their country. The Center for Security Policy posted an article yesterday that shines a different light on the situation.

The article reports:

President Obama made headlines today in reaction to a question from the press regarding the possibility of taking in Syrian Christian and other religious minorities ahead or in place of Syrian Muslims (Syria is majority Sunni Muslim.) The President responded aggressively claiming such a policy was, “… not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

The reality however is that the Refugee Resettlement system already has “a religious test of their compassion”, to quote the president. And that’s a test which actively disfavors Christians, according to figures released by the State Department:

Of 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, only 53 (2.4 percent) have been Christians while 2098 (or 96 percent) have been Muslims, according to State Department statistics updated on Monday. The remaining 33 include 1 Yazidi, 8 Jehovah Witnesses, 2 Baha’i, 6 Zoroastrians, 6 of “other religion,” 7 of “no religion,” and 3 atheists.

According to the CIA Factbook, Syria has a Christian population of 10%. Approximately between 500,000 and 700,000 Christians have fled Syria–about 16% to 23% of the estimated 3 million Syrians who have fled. Since Christians are one of the main targets of the Islamists, this figure makes sense.

So what is going on here? America does not get to choose her refugees.

The article reports:

As Nina Shea highlights at National Review, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is typically the deciding agency, and recommends to the United States which refugees will be resettled. So the selection process hits several snags. Firstly, Christian refugees almost overwhelmingly avoid United Nations refugee camps out of legitimate fears of possible violence against them. Reports of attacks on Christians refugees by their Muslim counterparts have been reported, such as when Christian refugees on a boat in the Mediterranean were thrown overboard, and German police have openly urged publicly separating Christian and Muslim refugees, due to attacks. In one case a Christian convert was beaten unconscious by a metal baton.

The second part of the problem is the fact that the United Nations is very much controlled by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC comprises the largest voting block in the United Nations. The OIC is headquartered in Saudi Arabia, where the practice of Christianity is illegal.

The article explains the third part of the problem:

Thirdly, and perhaps most largely problematic, is the appearance of overt anti-Christian bias by the State Department itself. As good friend of the Center, Institute for Religion and Democracy’s Faith McDonnell notes in her recent piece on the state of Christian refugees, the State Department has explicitly declared they, “would not support a special category to bring Assyrian Christians into the United States,” in response to a plan by a private aid group to fund, entirely free of taxpayer dollars, the transport of Assyrian Christians facing extermination by Islamic State.

In other words, even when its free, no cost to them, the State Department has preferred to snub Christians rather than save them.

There is a religious test for refugees. Unfortunately that test is not only against the best interests of America, it discriminates against a persecuted group of refugees.

Thank God For The Freedom Of Information Act

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The government’s Freedom of Information Act website describes the act as follows:

What is FOIA?

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law that gives you the right to access information from the federal government. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.

I suspect there are more than a few politicians that really despise this law.

The Washington Examiner reported today that a federal judge has ordered the State Department to release 700 new pages of records from Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State. In November of last year, Jason Leopold of Vice News had filed a FOIA request for virtually all written records from Hillary Clinton and her staff. This was long before we knew anything about her private server.

The article reports:

That FOIA case eventually prompted the court’s high-profile decision to force the State Department to publish all of Clinton’s emails in batches at the end of every month.

Now, the agency could be compelled to prepare thousands of additional documents for release in order to satisfy other aspects of Leopold’s FOIA request, which was narrowed after he and his attorney, Ryan James, sued the State Department.

Remember, Hillary Clinton deleted all of her emails that she deemed personal. This FOIA request may shed some light on how many of those deleted emails were actually personal. Stay tuned. This does not seem to be going away.

Is Anything This Lady Says True?

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Investor’s Business Daily posted an article today about new information about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Despite the efforts of the Clinton presidential campaign to claim this is political, the use of private servers in sending or receiving classified information is a serious offense.

A letter sent to Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer by Patrick F. Kennedy, the State Department‘s under secretary of state for management, included the following statement, “To the extent her emails might be found on any internet service and email providers, we encourage you to contact them.”

The article reports:

She has said that she used the personal account(s) because she didn’t want to juggle multiple devices. That was untrue.

Clinton has also said she had no classified material on her personal email. Again, this is not true.

Also untrue is her claim that she turned over her emails because of a general State Department request asking for emails of several prior secretaries. The request was for hers alone. She was targeted because of suspicions.

And while Clinton has admitted that she employed a private server for personal email accounts used by her and at least one other State Department aide, some say evidence points to the existence of a second server.

Believing the Clintons has become a task too difficult for the average person. Across a quarter century of national public exposure, they have nurtured and refined a special brand of dishonesty. There’s really not anything they can be trusted with, and that includes another shot at the White House.

I suspect that there are many Democrats currently praying that Joe Biden will enter the Democratic primary.

This Really Does Not Look Good

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article stating that the attorney for the Information Technology (IT) specialist who handled Hillary Clinton’s email server has informed the House Select Committee on Benghazi that his client, Bryan Pagliano, will plead the 5th Amendment if he is called to testify before the Committee. The article states that Mr. Pagliano had worked on the 2008 Clinton campaign, moved to the State Department several months after Mrs. Clinton took office, and left the agency in February 2013, when Mrs. Clinton stepped down as Secretary of State.

There are a number of questions about Mrs. Clinton’s emails. The obvious question is whether there was classified information on the server, but in light of all of the information that has come out since we have learned about the server, the real question is who ordered the wiping of the server and when that order was given. If the wiping of the server was done while it was under investigation, that is a crime. It is questionable whether or not the current Justice Department will prosecute the destruction of evidence, but it is a crime.

The other thing that this story illustrates is the problem with rewarding campaign workers with government jobs. In my mind there is a question as to whether Mr. Paliano‘s first loyalty is to America or to Hillary Clinton. Political appointments to government jobs is nothing new, but in light of recent events, I think the practice needs to be reexamined.

This Is What Happens When An Investigation Takes Two Years To Get To The Point

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Yesterday The New York Post reported that Hillary Clinton has handed over her server to the Justice Department. Unfortunately, the server is blank.

The article reports:

Clinton said she turned over all her official e-mails to the State Department in December and then wiped clean her server.

Clinton deleted some 30,000 personal e-mails but backed up work ones on thumb drives that were also turned over to federal authorities.

In compliance with a federal court order, lawyers for two top Clinton aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, assured a judge Wednesday the aides won’t delete any of their official e-mails.

The Clinton campaign said Thursday there is nothing on her server left to retrieve. “As David Kendall [Clinton’s lawyer] said in March, we do not believe any e-mails from her time as secretary exist on the server,” the campaign said in a statement.

Platte River says it began work for Clinton in June 2013, after she left office, to upgrade, secure and manage her e-mail server.

The company retrieved the server from her New York home and housed it at a data center in New Jersey, said company spokesman Andy Boian.

My advice on this matter is very simple–if you are an ordinary citizen, don’t try this at home!

Closer To The Truth

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The Daily Caller posted an article today about the ongoing quest for Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The article reports:

A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides at the State Department, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they have turned over all official government records in their possession.

…In his ruling, Sullivan (U.S. District Court judge Emmett Sullivan) ordered the Staet Department to “identify any and all servers, accounts, hard drives, or other devices currently in the possession or control of the State Department or otherwise that may contain responsive information.”

The State Department must also request that Clinton, Abedin and Mills “confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.”

“If all such information has not yet been produced, the Government shall request the above named individuals produce the information forthwith,” Sullivan ruled.

The State Department must also require the trio “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.”

The use of a private email server was illegal. It also posed a security risk because the private server did not have the anti-hacking software that would have been on the government server. It would probably be easier to ask the Chinese to give us everything that was on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Chances are that they have it.

The Problem With Having A Private Server

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Information came out this week that Mrs. Clinton had classified information on her private server. Aside from the fact that having that information on her private server was illegal, there are also other problems. It is understood that Mrs. Clinton’s private server would not have had the security to protect it from overseas hackers.

On Thursday, The Washington Times posted an article saying that the U.S. intelligence community is working to minimize the impact of the classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s computer being leaked.

The article reports:

“It’s a serious breach of national security if the United States government fails to secure classified material in the hands of people not authorized to possess it, no matter who they are. There are fundamental questions as to what the FBI is doing to securing these classified emails and why the State Department is not fully cooperating with the inspectors general at the State Department and the Intelligence Community to ensure that all of the appropriate emails are identified,” Mr. Grassley wrote.

Mr. Grassley also sent a letter to Secretary of State John F. Kerry inquiring about the delay in sending the 30,000 emails to intelligence community inspectors general.

Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, fended off the new questions about the email scandal and suspicious foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, distracting from her effort to wrangle support from union bosses at the AFL-CIO’s annual summer meeting.

The former secretary of state’s email woes deepened when a federal judge scolded the State Department for delays in releasing the documents, as the agency revealed that Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides and top officials during her tenure at the agency — Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan — also used private email accounts and all of their message have not been turned over to the State Department.

Mishandling classified information is a serious matter. The article reminds us that CIA Director David H. Petraeus was charged with a crime for not properly handling classified documents. It will be interesting to see if the same standard applies to Mrs. Clinton.