Posted on 02/04/2016 7:16:38 AM PST by Kaslin
This has not been a good week for Hillary Clinton. She prevailed over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses by less than four tenths of one percent of all votes cast, after having led him in polls in Iowa at one time by 40 percentage points. In her statement to supporters, standing in front of her gaunt and listless looking husband, she was not able to mouth the word "victory" or any of its standard variants. She could barely hide her contempt for the Iowa Democrats who deserted her.
Sanders isn't even a Democrat. According to official Senate records, he is an "Independent Socialist" who votes to organize the Senate with the Democrats, and sits on the Senate floor with them. Clinton, of course, is the heiress to the mightiest Democratic political apparatus in the land. Hence the question: What do the Iowa Democrats know that caused thousands of them to flee from her?
They know she is a crook.
On the Friday before Monday's caucuses, the State Department, which Clinton headed in President Obama's first term, revealed that it discovered 22 top-secret emails on the private computer server to which Clinton diverted all her governmental email traffic. This acknowledgement marks a radical departure from previous State Department pronouncements and is a direct repudiation of Clinton's repeated assertions.
She has repeatedly asserted that she neither sent nor received anything "marked classified" using her private email server. The State Department, until last Friday, has backed that up by claiming that while the substance of at least 1,300 of her emails was confidential, secret or top secret, they were not "marked" as such when she dealt with them.
These are word games. First, under the law, nothing is "marked classified." The markings are "confidential" or "secret" or "top secret," and Clinton knows this. Second, under the law, it is not the markings on the email headers that make the contents state secrets; it is the vulnerability of the contents of the emails to impair the government's national security mission that rationally characterizes them as secrets.
Clinton knows this because she signed an oath on Jan. 22, 2009 recognizing that state secrets retain their secrecy status whether "marked or unmarked" by any of the secrecy designations. She knows as well that, under the law, the secretary of state is charged with knowing state secrets when she comes upon them.
Yet, in order to further Clinton's deceptive narrative, the State Department has consistently claimed that it retroactively marked at least 1,300 emails as state secrets. It did this until last Friday.
Last Friday, the State Department revealed that 22 emails it found on Clinton's private server were in fact top secret, and were in fact marked top secret, and were in fact sent to or received from President Obama. This is a revelation that substantially undermines Clinton's political arguments and is catastrophic to her legal position.
Politically, Clinton has lost the final argument in her public arsenal -- that she did not recognize top-secret data unless it was marked as top secret. She has also lost the ability to claim, as she has repeatedly, that she neither sent nor received anything marked classified, as meaningless as that phrase is.
Legally, the ground under Clinton continues to crumble. The more she denies, the more she admits. How can that be? That is so because her denials are essentially an admission of ignorance, forgetfulness or negligence, and, under the law, these are not defenses to the failure to safeguard state secrets entrusted to the secretary of state. They are, instead, recognition of that failure.
Late Monday afternoon, before the Iowa caucuses convened and after Clinton's political folks had lobbied their former colleagues at the State Department to re-characterize what they found and revealed late last week, the State Department reversed itself and claimed that the 22 emails were not "marked" top secret. It was too little and too late. The cat was out of the bag and Iowa Democrats knew it. Few really believed that the State Department would state publicly that the 22 emails were top secret and then state publicly that they were not, without a political motivation and irrespective of the truth. All this is infuriating to the FBI, which perceives these word games as mocking its fidelity to the rule of law.
Sanders' presence in the Democratic primaries will continue to give Democrats who mistrust Clinton a safe political haven. But he is not Clinton's real worry. Her real worry is an FBI committed to the rule of law and determined to fortify national security by gathering the evidence of her mishandling state secrets.
Let's be as blunt about this as the FBI will be: Causing state secrets to reside in a nonsecure, nongovernmental venue, whether done intentionally or negligently, constitutes the crime of espionage.
And there is more. When asked about the consequences of Clinton's brazen exposure of state secrets to anyone who knows how to hack into a nonsecure computer, an intelligence operative winced as if in pain when he remarked that the nation's then chief diplomat surely compromised the "sources, methods, and lives" of her colleagues.
Even Democrats who see Clinton as a symbol of their long-time wish for a progressive female in the Oval Office are beginning to recognize that anyone who has jeopardized American lives for political gain is unworthy of their votes, unworthy of their trust and unworthy of public office.
I hear the siren song, "Biden/Wilson 2016"...
Could it be that the Dims are as sick of political dynasties as conservatives are?
“were in fact marked top secret, and were in fact sent to or received from President Obama”
What? How does President Obama have a JWICS computer attached to the open Internet in order to send TS to Clinton’s private server? The few multi-level secure terminals that exist will not transfer messages marked TS to the unclassified domain.
So this may be a message from Hillary: “Take me down and you go, too!”
Do you mean ‘Biden/Warren 2016’? Because this has been my thinking for a few months. Hillary! will drop out due to ‘health issues’ and Sanders will eventually implode. Te Republican field had better stop attacking each other and start telling the primary voters what each will do to defeat the Democrats/Socialists or our country really is burned toast.
I would say I can’t believe I did that, but unfortunately I can :-/ I meant “Biden/Warren.”
To damn her with faint praise, Warren’s lies only gamed the system for her benefit, without risking the security of the nation as Hillary!’s lies have. That doesn’t mean I want her a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, of course.
Hillary just finished in a tie in a state that she was expected to easily win.
The traditional Clinton response would be to spend big on advertising.
Is she doing that?
The Democrats are not being serious.
Why?
I do not agree with the judge on this. I think they are willfully blind and will follow their fuehrer despite the damage she is doing to the country.
Does anybody else wonder if Hillary didn’t chose to have a personal server so she could hide all her dealings related to the Clinton Foundation and her money grubbing for personal gain?
Causing state secrets to reside in a nonsecure, nongovernmental venue, whether done intentionally or negligently, constitutes the crime of espionage.
Causing state secrets to reside in a nonsecure, nongovernmental venue, whether done intentionally or negligently, constitutes the crime of espionage.
Yes, the fact that we have been talking about this for years, and she and her staff are still walking around free, shows just how far we are down the rabbit hole.
If Hillary becomes President the next FBI director will be a thug...
The really blatant fact about which is that according to the Constitution
- Article 1 Section 9:
- No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state
flatly forbids any government employee - let alone the Secretary of State - from accepting gifts from foreign governments (absent congressional authorization, arguably required for each instance. The POTUS routinely exchanges gifts with foreign dignitaries, but the gifts he receives are officially US government property unless he elects to pay the government for them.
The Clinton Foundation accepted money from foreign governments while Hillary was a principal in the Clinton Foundation and was on the federal dime as Secretary of State. Bill Clinton accepted emoluments (honoraria) from foreign governments for speeches while Hillary was Secretary of State and, simultaneously, a principal in the partnership known as their marriage.Note that the requirement for congressional authorization would cover the case where the federal employee in question was, say, working for the Red Cross. Congress could simply pass a law authorizing it. So even if (yeah, right) the money in the Clinton Foundation were all used in a “Caesar’s&rdquuo; manner, having nothing but charitable rather than self-interested motives exclusively, Hillary is in the wrong for failing to get congressional authorization.
And we are not talking nickels and dimes; we are talking about money on a gigabuck scale. Recalling that, according to Hillary herself, the Clintons left the WH “dead broke.”
And, lest we forget, this is the type of person who cavils over Dnesh D’Souza contributing three times “too much” money to the failing political campaign of a friend. All of Bill’s money is available to fund Hillary’s presidential campaign . . .
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