“She’s lucky she’s running for President because anyone else would have been indicted.” WSJ
We often object to the The Wall Street Journal for trying to have a foot in the Hillary campaign through their deputy editorial page editor Brett Stephens and his overbearing unbalanced disdain for Donald Trump, (not to mention other columnists appearing there along with their cadre of liberal reporters on the news pages). But this is one hard-hitting mast-head piece directed at Hillary Clinton.* Read the entire Saturday article at their site (subscription may be required to view).
The Federal Bureau of Investigation waited until the Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend to release its investigation summary and interview notes with Hillary Clinton about her private email server, and no wonder. The new information makes a hash of what’s left of the former Secretary of State’s credibility.
Mrs. Clinton is running for President as an experienced statesman, but her handling of classified material was even more reckless about state secrets and disdainful of public records laws than even we had thought. Start with her convenient memory lapses.
For example, Mrs. Clinton told the FBI that she “did not know” that the “(C)” marks on classified material meant classified and “speculated it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.” Yet in her famous—and last—press conference about the emails in March 2015 she said, “I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” To the public she claims to be a sharp professional who knows the score; to the FBI she presents herself as a clueless grandee who left the details to her minions.
Mrs. Clinton even told FBI agents she “never had a concern” with how discussions of potential drone strikes were handled and classified and “could not recall a specific process for nominating a target for a drone strike.” In all, she told the FBI 27 times that she “could not recall” or “did not remember specifically” key details and events.
Mrs. Clinton also said in March 2015 that she used private email so she could use only one digital device, and her legal team turned two Blackberries over to the FBI. But the FBI identified 13 other mobile devices and five iPads that had potentially processed classified material. The Clintons were “unable to locate any of these devices” and only three of the iPads, says the FBI.
This also turned out to be convenient because it means the FBI couldn’t determine if those devices were hacked. . . .
Mrs. Clinton knew the risks of being hacked by foreign spies. Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell sent a 2011 memo directly to Mrs. Clinton that warned of a surge in hackers breaking into State personal email accounts. An all-points bulletin to State personnel sent under Mrs. Clinton’s name recommended against conducting State business over personal email “due to information security concerns.” She told the FBI she “did not recall” this episode, but she “understood the email system used by her husband’s personal staff had an excellent track record with respect to security and had never been breached.”
Yet the FBI reveals that the account of a Bill Clinton personal aide on the server was hacked in 2013 and the intruder “browsed e-mail folders and files.” The FBI also discovered she sent or received “hundreds of e-mails” marked classified or confidential outside of U.S. territory, where the danger of hacking is highest.
The FBI documents also suggest Mrs. Clinton’s server was a deliberate effort to evade accountability. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell told Mrs. Clinton in 2009 that her communications were “official record[s] and subject to the law.” State Executive Secretary Stephen Mull also informed Cheryl Mills that a State-issued Blackberry “would be subject to FOIA requests.”
Mrs. Clinton went ahead anyway. She was almost surely trying to protect from public exposure the intimate ties between State and the Clinton Foundation—the commingling of her political operation with her official business. The FBI uncovered “approximately 17,448 unique work-related and personal emails” that were never produced, and whose revelations in recent weeks are proving so damaging to her public image.
What a record. The FBI documents should be seen as a preview of how Mrs. Clinton would govern as President, with the same get-away-with-anything entitlement that always follows the Clintons. She’s lucky she’s running for President because anyone else would have been indicted.
* graphic not in WSJ
