The huge difference between the Trump and Clinton probes

Clinton’s wrongdoing was established fact from the start — whereas Trump's investigation attempts to find out if there was any wrongdoing.

TIMELINE--The House Select Committee on Benghazi started asking questions after a hacker unveiled Clinton’s e-mails with Sidney Blumenthal. Some e-mails were related to the 2012 Benghazi attack yet had never been handed over to investigators. It was soon revealed that Clinton used a private account at the State Dept — leaving the government with no records of her work (contrary to law). That forced State to start collecting Clinton’s communications — and word leaked to the NYT, which broke the news early in March 2015. Clinton soon asked that State make everything public — though much would’ve come out anyway, to retroactively honor countless valid requests that her gambit had stymied.

In July, State officials found classified info in the e-mails, and called in the FBI for a counterintelligence investigation. By November, it had become a criminal investigation, since Clinton and her aides clearly jeopardized national security. For months, State was slowly reviewing, redacting and publicly releasing the e-mails — creating new headlines with each dump. And Clinton’s ever-changing denials and excuses created more. All along, the FBI probe remained confidential, though some necessarily public details rightly made headlines; for example, DOJ decisions to give various Clinton aides partial or full immunity.

Then-Pres Obama in April 2016 publicly declared that Clinton would come out in the clear because she never intended to endanger national security. (He didn’t reveal that he was involved, since he’d e-mailed with Clinton at her private address — and the FBI kept that quiet, too.) Months later, FBI chief Jim Comey would offer Obama’s exact reasoning as his justification for saying she shouldn’t be charged — even though the relevant statutes make intent irrelevant.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi started asking questions after a hacker unveiled Clinton’s e-mails with
Sid Blumenthal. Some e-mails related to the 2012 Benghazi attack, yet had never been handed over to investigators.

The ever-vigilant Judicial Watch has tracked this unpleasant man – “Sid Vicious” — over the years:

<><>(A) How Hillary Clinton relied on him in defiance of President Obama;

<><>(B) how he and Hillary emailed obsessively during her State Dept tenure;

<><>(C) how she originally wanted him to be a high-ranking adviser.

<><> (D) how he availed himself of State Dept slush funds;

<><> (E) yet, all the while Sid was an employee of the Clinton Foundation.

AND THERE'S MORE---MUCH MORE---ABOUT THIS INDIVIDUAL'S MARAUDING ACTIVITIES

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SOURCE: http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/

........one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails released by the State Department under judicial order was one sent on June 8, 2011, to the Secretary of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms. Clinton’s unsavory friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton.

This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.

To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.

NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources, based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”

We can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.

Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.

Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.

How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.

Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports. There are many questions here about what Hillary Clinton and her staff at Foggy Bottom were up to, including Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position.

How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question. Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question. So is: How did nobody on Secretary Clinton’s staff notice that this highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA?

Last, why did the State Department see fit to release this email, unredacted, to the public?

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NOTE WELL: While Sid Blumenthal was involved in the State Dept---dipping into the various slush funds and stealing intel-----he was a $300,000 employee of the Clinton Foundation, hired to advance Bill's (gag) presidential legacy.

THE TWO FACES OF HILLARY CLINTON: On a 2008 Presidential Candidate Questionnaire, candidate Hillary was asked:
Will you work to operationalize the “Responsibility to Protect,” in response to global humanitarian crises?

HILLARY’S ANSWER WAS EXTRAORDINARILY SPECIFIC: Yes. In adopting the principle of the responsibility to protect, the United Nations accepted the principle that mass atrocities that take place in one state are the concern of all states. It is essential that the new UN Secy General of begin to bridge the gap between these words and the institution’s deeds through a series of reforms intended to operationalize this concept. I am also committed to seeing that the US and other economic and militarily capable states and organization take steps to bolster UN action. As President I will:

<><>(A) adopt a policy that recognizes the prevention of mass atrocities as an important national security interest of the US, not just a humanitarian goal.

<><>(B) develop a govt-wide strategy to support this policy, including a strategy for working with other leading democracies, the UN, and regional organizations.

<><>(C) authorize my Secy of State to institutionalize atrocity prevention into the work of the State Dept, and,

<><> (D) direct my Secy of State to strongly support the mission and activities of the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which plays an increasingly critical role.

AFTERMATH—As a candidate, two-faced Hillary said one thing but as Obama’s hand-picked Secy of State, Hillary’s actions on Libya were decidedly different and were sometimes driven by longtime Clinton crony being paid by business interests in Libya-——Sid Blumenthal.

FYI---Sid Blumenthal was banned from govt employment by Obama (although some think this was another of St Obama's holy ruses), but at the same time Blumenthal was pushing Secy of State Clinton to all-out war in Libya, suck-up Sid was privately pushing his business interests WRT contracts with the "new" Libyan government — a government that would exist only after US military intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi.

ITEM--Blumenthal was engaged in massive conflicts of interest since he was simultaneously (a) being paid by The Clinton Foundation, (b) paid by Hillary's 2016 PAC organizers, and, (3) paid by businesses w/ interests in Libya.

If Secy Clinton knew all that, then her actions in circulating memos composed by Blumenthal were egregious. If she did not know, her recklessness is subject to US laws.

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ITEM---to its donors---and to the world beyond---the Clinton Foundation hired Sid Blumenthal to..... (wait for it)..... "promote Bill's presidential legacy." That's what Sid was supposed to be doing for his hefty $325,000 foundation salary.

ITEM---so if the Clinton Foundation Board of Trustees signed off on the Blumenthal hire without being appraised of the full scope of his duties....that would violate state laws and place the trustees in legal jeopardy.

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REFERENCES--- The implications of these Blumenthal revelations are huge, as the Washington Free Beacon points out:

<><> Among the newly revealed Benghazi e-mails were a pair of messages from July 2011 in which Blumenthal described efforts to secure Libyan government contracts for Osprey Global Solutions, a company in which Blumenthal has admitted to having a financial interest.

<><>Blumenthal warned Clinton that French companies were looking to scoop up security contracts from the Transitional National Council, the revolutionary government of the Libyan resistance, and plugged Osprey’s ability to be an American counterweight.

<><> “It puts Americans in a central role without being direct battle combatants,” Blumenthal wrote of Osprey’s TNC contract. He described his efforts in “putting this arrangement together through a series of connections, linking the Libyans to Osprey and keeping it moving.”

<><> Clinton forwarded that message to Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff, and asked to discuss it later.

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SHOCKER Clinton Foundation employee Sid Blumenthal (banned from govt employ) had inside govt info and was constantly in touch w/ Secy Hillary.

<><> For public consumption, Sid was beng touted as a Clinton Foundation hire---the factotum hired to preserve Bill's pesidential legacy (cue laugh machine).

<><> Shockingly, Sid's emails show he had classified State Dept info almost verbatim (as confirmed by the NSA).

<><> How did classified info get into Sid's possession? Did he pass it on to anyone else? Did he sell it to anyone else?

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Blumenthal kept urging Hillary to bomb Libya b/c he had profit-making business interests predicated on a post-Khadaffi Libyan govt.

<><> Sid cunningly used scare tactics----telling Hillary that Obama would lose reelection if the US didn't bomb Libya.

Amazingly, the obedient Hillary passed on this information to Obama.....did O know it came from a person he banned from govt employment?

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Remember, the real Libyan scandal is how we wound up bombing the troops of another United Nation's recognized government without a ‘by your leave’ from Congress.

Remember, the entire purpose of Secy Hillary's secret server was to keep the Clinton Foundation briefed on who the Clintons could shakedown next.

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SOURCE:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-clinton-email-scandal-20160327-story.html

EXCERPT Hillary Clinton's email problems began in her first days as secretary of state. She insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but she wasn't allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices, a secure space known as Mahogany Row. --snip--

Under Title 18, Section 1924, of federal law, it is a misdemeanor punishable by fines and imprisonment for a federal employee to knowingly remove classified information "without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location." Previous cases brought under the law have required proof of an intent to mishandle classified information, a high hurdle in the Clinton case.

The basement server also put Clinton at risk of violating laws and regulations aimed at protecting and preserving government records.

In a statement, Clinton's campaign said she had received "guidance regarding the need to preserve federal records" and followed those rules. "It was her practice to email government employees on their '.gov' email address. That way, work emails would be immediately captured and preserved in government record-keeping systems," the statement said. Fallon said that "over 90 percent" of the more than 30,000 work-related emails "were to or from government email accounts."

Specialists interviewed by The Post said her practices fell short of what laws and regulations mandated. Some of those obligations were spelled out a few months before Clinton took office in National Archives and Records Administration Bulletin 2008-05, which said every email system was supposed to "permit easy and timely retrieval" of the records.

The secretary of state's work emails are supposed to be preserved permanently. In addition, rules also mandated that permanent records are to be sent to the department's Records Service Center "at the end of the Secretary's tenure or sooner if necessary" for safekeeping.

Under Title 18, Section 2071, it is a misdemeanor to take federal records without authorization, something that is sometimes referred to as the "alienation" of records. The law is rarely enforced, but a conviction can carry a fine or imprisonment.

Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he believed that Clinton's server ran afoul of the rules. In a memo to the committee, Baron wrote that "the setting up of and maintaining a private email network as the sole means to conduct official business by email, coupled with the failure to timely return email records into government custody, amounts to actions plainly inconsistent with the federal recordkeeping laws."

On May 19, 2015, in response to a FOIA lawsuit from the media organization Vice News, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered all the email to be released in stages, with redactions.--SNIP--

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