Posted on 09/04/2015 6:54:38 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The very existence of her illicit server means she broke the rules.
Every time the State Department pulls out a new fistful of Hillary Clinton e-mails like Richard Dreyfuss yanking a license plate out of a sharks belly in Jaws, someone declares that theres no smoking gun!
Ive written before about how shouting Theres no smoking gun! is a non-denial denial. Ask a cop. When a murder suspect immediately exclaims, You have no indisputable evidence I murdered my boss! instead of, I didnt do it! its a good sign that the suspect thinks he covered his tracks, not that hes innocent.
Fellas, if your wife asks if youre having an affair, respond by saying, You have no proof! See if she takes that for a denial.
But heres the thing. There is a smoking gun. In fact, theres a whole smoking arsenal. The problem is that the standards for what counts as a smoking gun keep changing.
Nearly everything Clinton has said in her defense regarding her secret server has been a lie. Among the minor lies: her claim that she set up the server so she could use a single device. (She had two.) Her claim that the State Department was saving her e-mails to staff. (It wasnt until 2010.) Her claim that she erased tens of thousands of e-mails because they included, among other things, her e-mail correspondence with her husband. (Bill Clinton doesnt use e-mail.)
Hillary Clinton said she never solicited e-mail from her lugubrious political hatchet man, Sidney Blumenthal. The latest e-mails show that she was in near-constant contact with him, encouraging him to keep his various reports coming. Blumenthal was barred from getting a job at the White House, so Clinton set him up at her charitycumsuper PAC, the Clinton Foundation.
The more important lie: She said she never received or sent classified information. I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material.
Note: This was not an off-the-cuff statement. She said this while reading from notes, after consulting with her campaign team and her lawyers, in a ballyhooed press conference in March at the United Nations.
And it was a lie. When the inspectors general of the State Department and the Intelligence Community confirmed in July that she had sent classified material, Clinton clarified her carefully prepared lie by saying that what she meant was none of the e-mails she sent or received were marked classified at the time.
#share#This left out the fact that the whole point of the secret server was that it was hidden from the officials whose job is to designate documents as classified (and to keep it all hidden from Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional oversight). Its like setting up an illegal still and then claiming none of the moonshine you sold was marked illegal.
But the deceit goes deeper. Most people can be forgiven for not understanding the difference between classified documents and classified information. A classified document is marked Top Secret or some such. But people who work in government understand that lots of information is classified simply by virtue of the kind of information it is.
My National Review colleague Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has been setting his head on fire trying to get the mainstream media to take note of this fact. He points out that according to an executive order issued by President Obama, all foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security and is therefore presumed classified. Clinton routinely ignored this rule. Thats not just my opinion. A study by Reuters found that Clinton and her senior staff routinely ignored these rules.
Heres my personal e-mail, Clinton told Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who then proceeded to convey numerous private conversations he had with foreign leaders.
The Washington Times reports that Clintons unsecured e-mails contained spy-satellite information about North Koreas movement of its nuclear assets. This sort of information is universally recognized as top secret and is normally subjected to draconian safeguards. There is no way Clinton didnt know this.
All of these and many other facts would have counted as smoking guns if they had been divulged immediately after Clintons U.N. press conference. But Clinton, with the help of her praetorian defenders in the media, keeps moving the goalposts.
Still, all of this ignores the biggest smoking gun of them all: her illicit server. Its sitting in plain view, its smoke visible to anyone with eyes to see.
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review.
Spoke to someone recently who basically said ‘it was just likely an honest mistake and she was just careless’ about how she wound up doing SOS business on her personal email account. When people are that willing to carry water for the democrats, there’s little you can say.
Good article, with good rebuttals to all the Clinton excuses.
Big Media is totally complicit in this cover-up.
Where’s the great New York Times and CNN, and what are all their vaunted investigative reporters doing about this story?
Nothing, because they’ve been muzzled, that’s what.
New York Times, CNN, and others, are looking pretty small these days.
Hillary's "mistake" was about a million times worse than that for which David Petraeus was prosecuted.
If libs didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
Shouting Theres no smoking gun! is a non-denial denial.
When a murder suspect immediately exclaims, You have no indisputable evidence I murdered my boss! instead of, I didnt do it! its a good sign that the suspect thinks he covered his tracks, not that hes innocent.
Fellas, if your wife asks if youre having an affair, respond by saying, You have no proof! See if she takes that for a denial.
++++
But the deceit goes deeper. Most people can be forgiven for not understanding the difference between classified documents and classified information. A classified document is marked Top Secret or some such. But people who work in government understand that lots of information is classified simply by virtue of the kind of information it is.
My National Review colleague Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has been setting his head on fire trying to get the mainstream media to take note of this fact.
++++
I've been preaching this myself here on FR for well over a month. I don't believe that anything that Hillary sent was "marked classified". She is stupid but not that stupid. And anyytime you hear some commentator talk about "removing the classification marking" just move on. This is nonsense squared. It never happened (at least IMHO).
And, based on recent news reports, I think the message is finally getting through to the media: Information is classified based on content not marking. And Hillary was well aware of that fact. This would be jail-time for any non-royalty.
I didn’t do it.
Nobody saw me do it.
There is no way you can prove anything.
Hillary has invoked the Bart Simpson defense.
“Fellas, if your wife asks if youre having an affair, respond by saying, You have no proof! See if she takes that for a denial.”
That would then lead back to your first example: “You have no indisputable evidence I murdered my husband!”.
See?
It works in all directions.
LOL
Clinton MO. “Deny, obfuscate, make counter accusations”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPunmx3STDQ
I've noticed their latest line is "I don't know what wiped means." Heard her smarmy spokesman repeat that tripe yesterday.
The Clintons and their cronies speak. You know they are lying.
What I want to know is why they are not in jail with so many criminal acts done by them.
“And anyytime you hear some commentator talk about “removing the classification marking” just move on. This is nonsense squared. It never happened (at least IMHO). “
Information taken from classified systems was marked as classified. This probably was not done by Hillary personally, as she probably spent very little time at her desk in Foggy Bottom. That means she either commanded or otherwise compelled underlings to transfer classified information to the unclassified systems in order to give Hillary the information she needed as Secretary of State.
“Broke the rules”? She BROKE THE LAW!
Setting up a private server is an act that is so deliberate, and requiring of such effort, that it, by definition, can’t be described as an act of carelessness. You’re acquaintance is a moron. But I’m sure you already know that.
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