Posted on 03/10/2015 10:42:44 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Thanks to Clinton’s flouting of record-keeping laws, the substance of her communications with the president — on Benghazi, say — remains a mystery
Politico is reporting that President Obama knowingly corresponded with then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton via the latter’s private e-mail address. That does not necessarily mean Obama knew Clinton was systematically flouting administration rules and federal record-keeping law. It does, however, mean he and administration officials had to know she was conducting official business over non-secure, non-government e-mail — even in communicating with the president of the United States; even though the White House claims Obama, as his top aide Valerie Jarrett puts it, “has a very firm policy that e-mails should be kept on government systems”; and even though the president and the State Department forced the resignation of Obama’s ambassador to Kenya, in part over his use of private e-mail to conduct government business.
Four points bear emphasizing.
1. We are not dealing in this scandal with run-of-the-mill federal officials. As Kevin Williamson pointed out in his excellent column over the weekend, President Obama is the head of the executive branch. As a matter of constitutional law, all executive power is reposed in him; his subordinates exercise power only at his indulgence. Similarly, Clinton was the head of the State Department, answering only to the president. As a department head, she was obliged, as a core part of her duties, to enforce compliance with federal laws and administration policies — a big part of which involves personally following them.
As I related in Faithless Execution, the Framers prioritized presidential accountability in designing the Constitution:
Indeed, the main point of having a unitary executive — vesting awesome powers in one president, rather than in an executive committee or in a minister advised by a privy council — was accountability. Ultimately responsible for all executive conduct and unable to deflect blame for wrongdoing, Alexander Hamilton argued, a single president would be amenable “to censure and to punishment.” The future Supreme Court justice James Iredell concurred: the president would be “personally responsible for any abuse of the great trust reposed in him,” a key ingredient in making him “of a very different nature from a monarch.”
In sum, as the chief executive, the president is responsible for any failures or misconduct by his subordinates.
With the help of a sympathetic media, President Obama studiously strikes the pose of a spectator who has no responsibility for the actions of his underlings (or, for that matter, for the negative consequences of his own policies). Clinton takes an “everybody does it” tack in attempting to explain away her derelictions. Even if it is true that many federal employees occasionally break record-keeping rules, “everybody” in government does not systematically operate outside those rules, as Clinton did. But put that aside. The head of a department is not an “everybody.” Even as the former secretary of state is preparing to ask the country to put her in the ultimate leadership position, we are evidently supposed to overlook the deplorable leadership example she set in her last gig.
2. A theme of Clinton’s coming campaign is to be that she is more realistic and hawkish when it comes to America’s enemies than the hard-left Obama Democrats that are the party’s mainstream. In reality, this is nonsense: There is little if any real daylight between Clinton and Obama on foreign and national-security policy — that’s why she lasted four years as secretary of state. But let’s, as Clinton might say, engage in the “willing suspension of disbelief” on that for the moment. What does it say about Clinton’s purported realism about America’s enemies that she would conduct the highest-level government business — matters of life and death — on an unsecure communication system that could be easily hacked by hostile nations that we know spend prodigious amounts of their energy on cyber-espionage?
3. One of the main things we can confidently deduce from the Obama–Clinton private e-mail communications is that what we’ve been hearing the past several days about the president’s insistence on sound record-keeping practices and transparency is so much hot air. If Obama personally and willingly communicated a number of times with then–secretary Clinton via her private e-mail address, then he had reason to know that she was not complying with stated administration policy (and State Department policy) to conduct government business on government e-mail systems. He also had reason to be concerned — if he really cared — that she was violating government record-keeping laws and procedures. (We can’t say he knew for certain because the record-keeping laws allow a federal official to communicate by private e-mail as long as a record is preserved. But, common sense says, the more often and routinely one observes that a government official is using private e-mail, the more likely it becomes that the laws are being flouted.)
Most tellingly on this score: Secretary Clinton plainly knew that the president was not serious about stringent record-keeping and transparency. Otherwise, she would not have dared communicate with him repeatedly by private e-mail — and, of course, he would not have been sending e-mail to her private address.
4. While the wayward communication procedure followed by Clinton and indulged by Obama tells us a great deal, it is not as important as the substance of their communications. As I’ve previously observed, Obama and Clinton clearly knew, from the first minutes of the Benghazi terrorist attack — in which four American officials were killed, including our ambassador to Libya — that it was, in fact, a terrorist attack. Within two hours, they knew that the local al-Qaeda affiliate had claimed credit. Yet, Secretary Clinton put out a deceptive statement shortly after 10 p.m. that night blaming an anti-Muslim video for the violence. That statement was issued only minutes after a phone call between Clinton and Obama — a phone call the White House initially said never happened, changing its story only after Clinton testified about it.
In the weeks that followed, the Obama administration aggressively promoted the fraudulent narrative that the video caused the Benghazi violence and buried the fact that it was a terrorist attack with involvement by al-Qaeda — the organization Obama was then claiming on the campaign trail to have “decimated.” Obama and Clinton even recorded public-service messages for Muslim audiences overseas, implying that the video had caused the attack. Secretary Clinton told Charles Woods, the father of former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the Benghazi attack, that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted” . . . and soon after, the Justice Department arrested and prosecuted Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the producer of the video, as if he were the real culprit.
It is difficult to imagine anything more potentially relevant to the investigation of the administration’s actions in connection with Benghazi than to explore the substance of all Clinton’s communications by whatever medium — particularly the Obama–Clinton communications — throughout the evening of September 11, 2012, and in the days and weeks that immediately followed.
How can it be that obtaining Clinton’s private e-mails was not a priority for the governmental bodies that have investigated, or are investigating, the Benghazi affair? Not just the House select committee currently tasked with the probe; how, for example, could the House Intelligence Committee have purported to complete an investigation and issue a report without learning of Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail? And, if (as I suspect) the Intelligence Committee did know about the private e-mails, why were we not told about them? How could the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) — whose mission was to assess the State Department’s performance in connection with Benghazi — not have discovered or reported the fact that the secretary of state was using private e-mail that was not part of the government records?
Oh, that’s right: Secretary Clinton handpicked the ARB, which conveniently chose not to interview her (it’s not like she was an important witness or anything, right?). Meanwhile, her top aides allegedly removed pertinent documents from the files the State Department delivered to the ARB.
How positively . . . Clintonian.
Shadow government -— after SHE was suppose to be the nominee and therefore the president. She’d show him! He couldn’t boss her.
Throw her a banana!
Yep. Look hard enough and you will come up with secret private emails for Obama, too.
Simple.
He knew he could get away with saying he did not know what she was doing. Besides, he is out of office soon.
Mainly because he could have someone drop a dime on her at the right time to scuttle her chances of running. Today is the right time. It stops big donors from channeling money in to her pockets. Her got two for one too because it stops money going in to the Clinton Foundation from foreigners. He wants that money for his own foundation. Obama, like the Clintons, the Bush family, the Gore family and the list goes on do not make their big money until they are out of office. Why? Because they have loaded the entire government with their own people who will channel money in to their pockets after they leave. It is all setup before they are out if office.
Does anyone thing Jebbie Bush is running for the presidency to serve the public. Lol! No! He and his family know how rich they can continue to become.
This is not about America or the public or doing what’s right. It is only about enriching these families. That’s why I like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, at least they may have an inkling of decency. The Clintons and Obamas are especially crass people. Perverts and cold blooded. The Bush family are simply thieves who see the public at all levels as their own personal piggy banks.
Sites like FR are a threat to all these devoids. They have the media controlled and through that media they push the black people matter BS, class warfare and a whole host of three card monty type card tricks to keep the morons in the country paying attention to what does not matter. They don’t want informed folks paying attention to the incredible debt they have run up and the moral decay they have pushed upon our society through things like abortion and homo agendas. The next card will be domestic terror via moslems that they will use to keep our off off what they don’t want us paying attention to. The bad guys are here, they have been here and they are just waiting for the word “go”.
And the same Rats who are STILL obsessed with what was on 18 1/2 minutes of tape have no curiosity whatsoever about what those private, illegal emails contain.
Agreed....Obama doesn’t want Hillary to succeed him as President. He wants someone more like him. Hillary, while despicable, it just too American for him.
I don’t think so, I think it became an untenable situation security wise over there, but she has only herself to blame for landing herself in it. That’s what she gets for sitting down, shutting up, and expecting pats on the head.
I think Hillary used a lamp on Bill.
Right, he wants to load up the next Democratic nominee with all his people to build his network for years to come.
Perhaps to use it as a weapon against Hillary when the time came to pave the way for Obama’s successor...
So he could use it against her, which he will do.
Yes, he probably is doing the same thing. But you can be certain he is not using BHO@whitehouse.com as his email address.
Keep in mind that Baraq and the Beast have never been friends or allies. She got the Sec of State post as a payoff for allowing 0bama to go forward as the nominee and steal the election.
Of course she setup her own homegrown email without regard to laws or regulations so she could shield her correspondence from any scrutiny. 0bama, not being the brightest bulb in the box (remember he got through on affirmative action and foreign student credits, along with generous donations from FM Davis and the American Communist Party) may have truly not known what she was doing. As ayatollah, some underling was probably tasked with looking at his email. He couldn't be bothered to attend security briefings and he certainly didn't want to wade through the ramblings of the Beast. At any rate, even if he did know, he wouldn't be inclined to call her on something of this nature and risk the klintons' payback.
He is doing it, also. They have both gotten away with so much already, and there is no reason for either one of them to refrain from bending the rules in any way they can.
I personally think she will skate through this, too. As we speak, there is a witch hunt out now to try to find as many Republicans who are guilty of something like this and anything else they can drum up. She won’t go down without a fight.
Hard to claim he didn’t know anything about it when he was texting her on that account. But they’re above the law so what does it matter now?
That’s basically the talking point I’ve seen floated.
It’s total BS because Obama knew exactly what Hillary was doing.
I think you are right. I remember laughing when he first appointed her as Sec. of State. It was a good way to get her out of town, keep her occupied, and let her hang herself at the same time.
Hillary knows where Obama buried the bodies and the BC. She did visit the British Archive you know
How, indeed!
Pickering and Admiral Fallon looks like incompetent fools... Even a Lt jg would have done better. More than likely they sold out on the promise of being rewarded when PIAPS comes to power.
But he can still deny he didn’t know Hillary was running a shadow govt.
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