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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Emails: Ruh Roh

Scandalabra continues, as the Clinton e-mail scandal is not going away.

The New York Times reports:
Intelligence officials reviewing emails on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private computer server have found information they consider to be of a higher level of classification than “top secret,” according to a letter sent to lawmakers last week by the intelligence agencies’ inspector general.

The letter, dated last Thursday, says that some of the information in Mrs. Clinton’s emails has been determined to be “top secret/SAP.” That designation is usually given to information about “special access programs” — often intelligence-gathering programs and other secret programs run by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — that are among the government’s most closely guarded secrets.
Hadas Gold reports at Politico:
Two of the top searched questions on Google for Hillary Clinton are likely not about the themes her campaign hopes to highlight.
"Will Hillary Clinton get prosecuted?" is most searched question on Google ahead of the Democratic debate on Sunday night. "Will Hillary Clinton win the nomination?" is second and "What did Hillary Clinton do that is illegal?" is the third.
Charles Lipson writes at RealClearPolitics:
To understand the gravity of these issues, it is important to recognize that this is not just an “email scandal.” It is an “email + server + foundation” scandal.” Secretary Clinton didn’t just send sensitive (and now-classified) emails over open lines, she stored them on private servers that didn’t meet the government’s cyber-security standards for sensitive documents. On its face, retaining classified materials in such vulnerable settings is a criminal violation. Senior intelligence officials have been charged for less – far less. Storing some 1,300 classified documents on a personal server, and doing it for years, poses a special problem because it shows the mishandling was not inadvertent. It was Clinton’s standard operating procedure.
...
Beside these national-security matters, the emails reveal obvious conflict-of-interest issues pertaining to the significant overlap between Clinton’s official duties and her family foundation’s operations.

Major donors to the foundation often had business before the State Department, and they sometimes received help. After the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, for instance, Bill Clinton was named co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the State Department began directing parties interested in competing for Haiti contracts to the Clinton Foundation.” Not surprisingly, many contractors became foundation donors, or were already. The FBI now has to decide if any of this was a “pay to play” arrangement. Proving a quid pro quo is notoriously difficult, but Fox News reported Monday that public corruption is now a second track in the FBI investigation.