Andrew C. McCarthy: the Clinton server, the FBI, and intent
Andrew C. McCarthy discusses what the IG report ignores:
…their analysis left out the best intent evidence, namely, Clinton’s willful setting up of a private, non-secure server system for all official business...
A detailed description of the grossly improper communications system Clinton established would have illustrated that she knew full well the risk she was running. A large percentage of the secretary of state’s job involves classified matters. We are not talking merely about the exchange of documents marked classified but, more commonly, constant deliberations about sensitive intelligence in classified documents, briefings, and conversations. Clinton’s willful concoction of a home-brew communications network — not a harried official’s occasional, exigent use of private email for official business, but her rogue institution of a private, non-government infrastructure for the systematic conduct of State Department business — made the non-secure transmission and storage of classified information inevitable.
Indeed. And furthermore, intent isn’t even required in order to have committed this offense, as many have been saying for a long time, but as the IG report seems to gloss over:
In order to conclude that there was no prosecutable offense, the Obama Justice Department and FBI still had to rewrite the applicable statute (the Espionage Act, codified in Section 793 of the federal penal code). That’s because, for all the supposed obsession about whether investigators had enough evidence of criminal intent, the law does not actually require such evidence — if one is an official who has been schooled in the handling of national defense secrets, gross negligence will do.
Please read the whole thing.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/19/rep_trey_gowdy_grills_horowitz_how_in_the_hell_did_come_never_question_hillary_on_email_intent.html
No further comment needed, but see also:
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/393015-All-the-times-Horowitz-contradicted-Wray-but-nobody-seemed-to-notice
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/in-search-of-takeaways.php
COMMENTER
Ed Z.
Mr. Horowitz has proved that with thousands of man-hours of work, showing painstaking attention to even the most minute of details, it is nevertheless possible to bury the simple, unvarnished truth in a giant avalanche of “facts.”
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/20/a-feeble-pushback-against-the-inspector-generals-whitewash/
“Foxnews.com quotes from the body of the report, which makes the inspector general’s summary seem even more bizarre. Translation into plain English: the FBI decision to give immunity to Clinton’s staff was reasonable because they had concluded in advance that the laptops would contain no important evidence, and no evidence was important, because they had already concluded there was no crime.”
Q.E.D.
There are things you know you know, things you know you don’t know, things you don’t know you don’t know, and things that you don’t WANT to know.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/06/20/following-the-secret-stuff-bread-crumbs-on-russiagate-part-1-the-comey-alibi/
“The short version: leakers disclosed, back in April and May 2017, that the FBI had received information before the election about the Russians having a hacked email in which Debbie Wasserman Schultz discussed Lynch’s alleged guarantee to the Clinton campaign.
…
The reason it remains of such interest is that James Comey keeps coming back to it as a major motive for his decision to announce an exoneration of Hillary in July 2016. He explains that he didn’t want the eventual declassification of this information to make it appear that Loretta Lynch had acted improperly, especially after she held the tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton at the end of June 2016. Basically, Comey implies he decided to take a bullet and make the tough call himself.
…
I want you to think about that for a moment. Most of these stories about little pieces of intelligence are retailed to the public as if they are puzzling clues (or perhaps telling ones, depending on the impression we’re supposed to be left with), about which our government implicitly knows little more than we do.
But we, even in the cheap seats out here, actually know more than we think we do. And we need be in no doubt that our government agencies know that they know more.
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Attention, class. If the FBI gets wind of a DWS email, what do you suppose the FBI is going to do to verify whether such an email might exist?
Not read it, necessarily. But find out whether it may exist.
That’s right. However it’s done – whether through a legitimate, front-door process or through the shadier back door – the FBI has the means to determine whether there are candidates for the alleged email. Did Wasserman Schultz ever send an email that went to Leonard Benardo? It’s not even a secret that the FBI doesn’t have to spend eternity wondering that.
No one with privileged access to the intelligence resources of the U.S. government has to simply wonder. The public has known that for years. This one is not even hard.”
Her intent was to run her bribery scheme through her private server.
Enough messing around. We need a Special Counsel and I nominate McCarthy.
Hillary received extensive instruction of the handling of classified material, which in her FBI interview she claims she forgot after falling and hitting her head.
An interesting item in that instruction is the fact that all communication with heads of state and their proxies (e.g. ambassadors) is to be considered classified as are their itineraries, whether marked or not.
Neo’s linked article and Catherine Herridge’s reporting now states definitively that the Clinton email servers were penetrated by foreign actors.
Now U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was not present at his Benghazi compound for extended periods of time. But somehow the highly organized attack on his compound was aware that he was there on that particular night. Maybe their surveillance of the compound was excellent, but what if?
The attackers don’t need to be master hackers. They just need help from some government that has the access and hates the U.S. Even if you think this is all far-fetched, it could have happened in this manner and illustrates how reckless Clinton was.
But, there was no “gross negligence”. There was only “extreme carelessness”. Though, I am hard pressed to find someone who can define the difference.
The Google dictionary indicates that there isn’t much, if any:
gross – general or large-scale; not fine or detailed
extreme – reaching a high or the highest degree; very great
negligence – failure to take proper care in doing something
carelessness – failure to give sufficient attention to avoiding harm or errors; negligence
Aesop: did you check out that link I gave here a week or so ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BplUD6kQYuU
Cornhead, as usual is spot on — there are enough violations of 18 USC 208, 793, 798, 1924, 2071, and probably others, to keep Hillary in the slam for the rest of her life. And the rest of her gang, including Huma, Susan, Cheryl, etc., etc., etc., away for a long time. Maybe RICO, too. But there is a five-year statute of limitations on the Records Act violations, and 10 years on the Espionage Act, so they better get hustling. (I’ve always believed that the whole Russia collusion matter was just a device to run out the SoL until it lapsed on Hillary’s crimes.)
Andrew McCarthy does a good job of breaking down just how much of a whitewash this report is the the farce of an investigation into Clinton’s obviously deliberate violations of the Espionage Act. But there’s so much more whitewash left to explore. From the IG report:
So what do we have here boys and girls? A blatant admission on the part of the DoJ/FBI that they didn’t want to investigate any crime that they knew they couuld prove AND plausibly or even implausibly absolve her of as they did with the ridiculous excuses they made up for her r.e. the Espionage Act.
1. They claim they already knew what they’d find on any relevant emails following her tenure. How could they know? Answer: there’s no way they could know, they just didn’t want to know.
2. Without interviewing her and despite the mountains of evidence they had prejudged the case and decided that there was no way in hell they were going to find evidence of criminal intent because she just had to win and Trump just had to lose.
3. All the witnesses coordinated their testimony. There is no way you can interview all those witnesses and get the exact same story from each one unless they did.
Although the way this IG worked, unless he had direct “documentary or testimonial evidence” that they had agreed to coordinate their testimony he just can’t connect the dots. Not unless they were stupid enough to put in writing “let’s all get together and get our BS stories straight for this IG investigation” or cop to it during the questioning.
Oh one more thing. The criminal penalties for violating the Federal Records Act are contained in 18 USC 2071. This was actually included in the IG report as one of the statutes the FBI considered relevant to the investigation.
Actually, paragraph (b) also applies. You have to read the DoJ/FBI stupidity to believe it (it’s on page numbered 36 in the IG report).
To sum it up. They didn’t say Clinton didn’t violate the FRA. They claim that every successful prosecution of perps violating the FRA has involved removing or destroying a document already filed or deposited in a public office of the United States. And then in parens (i.e. physical removal of a document).
First of all, as Andy McCarthy points out when exposing the rank partisanship of the investigators r.e. the Espionage Act, that isn’t what the law says. The FBI/DoJ is overruling the National Archivist who updates the regulations (which have the force of law when applied to the Executive branch) as to what constitutes an official federal record. Emails have been official federal records for years.
But the DoJ/FBI is apparently still enforcing the law as originally written in 1950. You can only violate the FRA if you physically remove a document, and therefore it has to be a paper record. So the DoJ/FBI is claiming that this law became unenforceable circa 1986.
Is anybody here stupid enough to believe that?
Steve57:
They are called liberals, and they are that ….
Richard Saunders Says:
June 20th, 2018 at 6:24 pm
(I’ve always believed that the whole Russia collusion matter was just a device to run out the SoL until it lapsed on Hillary’s crimes.)
* * *
Or they could have just shut up and gone away, and no one would have pursued the matter any further after Trump won.
They kept the issue of her server alive by poking at Trump over the (alleged? invented? exaggerated?) Russia connection, and that churning is what turned up the under-side of the FBI manure pile and exposed the cover-up conspiracy.
A couple of side-bars on the Collusion Conspiracy.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/06/20/secret-stuff-on-russiagate-part-2-the-nones-of-march-2016/
“In the interval between Papadopoulos joining the Trump campaign and the end of March, meanwhile, we now have a sequence of three remarkable events.
One is the FBI’s discovery of the Russian hacking intelligence, in “early March.”
The second is the discovery, on or just before 9 March, that the FBI had been processing raw NSA communications intelligence in such a way that government contractors working for the FBI had access to it.
…
The potential that this 9 March event was linked to the “Russian hacking intelligence” obviously cannot be overlooked, and we’ll get to that in a moment.
But we must note the third remarkable development. On 14 March, Russian and U.S. sources reported that CIA Director John Brennan had just held an unannounced, unpreviewed meeting at Russia’s FSB headquarters in Moscow. (The FSB, or federal security service, is the successor to the KGB.)
The reason given for this meeting doesn’t pass the smell test. It was supposedly about “Syria.” But the CIA director wouldn’t coordinate with the FSB about Syria (on which the Obama administration’s activity profile was in any case barely above the thready-pulse level). …
From an analytical standpoint, this mission to Moscow still requires a more credible explanation.”
* * *
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/06/19/how-challenging-was-it-for-the-ig-to-find-strzoks-well-stop-trump-text-message-this-challenging/
“The Department of Justice’s inspector general said Monday that his investigators went to extensive lengths to obtain a text message in which former FBI official Peter Strzok suggested that he planned to help prevent President Donald Trump from becoming president.
Michael Horowitz, the head of the DOJ’s office of inspector general (OIG), said that his cyber forensics team took four separate investigative steps before discovering a controversial Aug. 8, 2016 text message that Strzok sent to former FBI attorney Lisa Page.”
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Strzok’s response to Page is conspicuously absent from previous batches of text messages given to Congress. Page’s question to Strzok was included in those earlier releases.
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[did someone think the committee wouldn’t NOTICE there was a new-style “Watergate gap”?]
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Horowitz said that while the initial process of obtaining Strzok-Page messages from the FBI was “easy,” recovering the “We’ll stop it” text proved “challenging.” He also said that the painstaking process used to recover the message and others raises concerns about the FBI’s text message retention system.
…
[the details are interesting; even more interesting is why did Horowitz stick with the digging as long as he did? was he expecting to find something even more inflammatory than “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” – and what else is yet to be disclosed or discovered?]
…
OIG’s forensic examiners discovered “that the phone had a database on it that was actually also doing a collection of text messages,” said Horowitz.
“They extracted those messages from the phone and found the second part of the August 8 text, ‘No, no, We’ll stop it.’”
“It turned out that the FBI wasn’t aware that that database on there, which was supposed to be an operating function, was actually collecting data,” explained Horowitz, who plans to release a report on the OIG’s text message recovery process.
What Horowitz did not explain — and was not asked — was why Strzok’s portion of the Aug. 8, 2016 message was so difficult to find.
Horowitz said that the FBI’s failure to discover the text messages raises concerns about whether the bureau was able to collect all of its agents’ and officials’ text messages.”