Do your homework on Clinton

Among California’s Democratic Party “super-delegates,” 46 of 71 have endorsed Hillary Clinton, supporting the corporate media’s narrative of Hillary’s “inevitability” through the misleading inclusion of super-delegate pledges in reported primary delegate vote totals. Pledging their votes for Clinton up to a year before the June 7 California Primary, many of the endorsers represent districts — such as the first through fifth — whose primary voters are inclined to choose Bernie Sanders by overwhelming margins.

If these public servants’ lack of interest in their constituents’ will is callous, their endorsement is beyond reckless in light of current events. As we’ve seen in the cases of California state Senators Leland Yee and Ron Calderon, FBI investigations are not likely to end well for their targets.

Three key assertions of the Clinton campaign regarding the current FBI probe of her emails and private server are:

• The FBI is merely conducting a “security review” of Ms. Clinton’s email.

• She “did not email any classified material to anyone,” later amended to say that she “did not send or receive any emails marked classified,”

• Her predecessors “did exactly the same thing.” Each of these claims are misleading at best.

First, the FBI does not perform security reviews — it conducts criminal investigations. The FBI and Department of Justice have disclosed that the former Secretary is the target of an criminal probe being directed by the FBI with assistance of attorneys in the DOJ’s Criminal and National Security Divisions. The number of FBI agents reportedly assigned to the probe is 147. Issued subpoenas and a grant of immunity to Hillary’s server-entrusted IT staffer suggest that a grand jury is already hearing evidence. Additionally, federal judge Emmet Sullivan has recently granted discovery to independent investigators suing Clinton and the State Department under the Federal Records Act.

Second, her claim that she did not “send any e-mails marked classified” is not a defense against the case she now faces. The government classifies communications based on their content — how they are labeled is irrelevant. Being fourth in line to the president and the holder of high-level security clearances, Clinton was one of a small handful of officials entrusted with the authority to classify information. She had the responsibility to recognize and protect any confidential and secret information that she handled — an obligation spelled out in explicit agreements requisite to her security clearance.



Advertisement
Investigators have determined that thousands of emails containing classified information, and scores containing Top Secret information flowed through her private server, which advertised itself with its ClintonEMail.com address (domain registration records being public) and which lacked encryption for at least part of its life. At least 104 emails authored by Clinton herself have been found to contain classified information, with some receiving Special Access Program classifications. Among those, 22 have been deemed too damaging to national security to release, even in redacted form. The conventional wisdom is that foreign intelligence agencies would have been incompetent not to have intercepted the server’s traffic, if not to have hacked into the server itself.

Clinton need not have knowingly compromised state secrets to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, which includes felony charges requiring only the demonstration of gross negligence. Although some of her messages suggest a willful disregard for security protocols — such as the email to her deputy directing him to: “Turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure” — far more damning is the very existence of her private server hosting classified information.

Finally, Hillary Clinton’s claim that she did “nothing different” than “every other Secretary of State” is disingenuous. Colin Powell and others sometimes emailed state.gov from third-party services like AOL and gmail (whose contents could be subpoenaed and retrieved by U.S. officials). In contrast, Clinton set up a private server in her home, which was un-auditable by her employer. Reportedly never once using her issued state.gov address, Clinton and her inner circle used the ClintonEMail.com server to conduct all of her official State Department business — an obvious attempt to evade accountability and transparency under the Federal Records Statues. Scores of FOIA requests to the State Department seeking information on Clinton’s actions as Secretary have been answered with “No Responsive Records.” Why? Apparently because Clinton’s exclusive use of her private server succeeded in precluding the capture and archiving of her official communications, leaving the State Department empty-handed.

Such violations of the Espionage and Federal Records Acts may be only the tip of the iceberg. By containing classified information, the server became de-facto government property. This makes Hillary’s attempt to “wipe” the server tantamount to destruction of evidence. The decision to delete her “private” e-mails and submit (only in the form of hard-copy print-outs) her “official” emails was not Hillary’s to make.

Why would the former Secretary risk charges of obstruction of justice to shield about half of the emails from public view if, as she suggested, they concerned only things like “yoga mats” and “wedding arrangements”? The elephant in the room isn’t the Republican Party. Throughout Hillary’s tenure at State, the Clinton Foundation was raking in seven and eight-figure contributions, and Bill was pulling down speaking fees that dwarfed his pre-2009 rates. Recently revealed emails show Foundation activities being coordinated through ClintonEMail.com e-mails.

Much about the nonprofit’s Foundation’s financial history remains shrouded in mystery due to the Clintons’ actions: Ignoring a 2009 Memorandum of Understanding to publish yearly disclosures of Foundation donors, filing incorrect Form 990 disclosures, and funneling contributions through opaque foreign pass-through entities. Despite such obstacles, journalists have pieced together a number of transactions that demonstrate, at the very least, glaring conflicts of interest, and have reported them in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, CNBC, and Politico.

Consider just foreign arms sales. A IBTimes analysis published in May of 2015 found that the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments supported the Clinton Foundation. Foundation donors Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, and Qatar all gained State Department clearance to buy American-made weapons despite the Department’s flagging them for corruption and abuses of civil liberties. These deals represented a doubling of the value of arms transfers to the Gulf States over those under the prior G.W. Bush administration.

The topic of corruption at the intersection of Hillary’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation is vast. Rather than attempt to summarize it here, I list the following search phrases for interested readers: “Hassan Nemazee”; “Claudio Osorio”; $500,000 Kremlin; “Polo Resources” “Phulbari Mines”; UBS IRS Hillary; “Gonzalo Tirado” Asylum; Mantz Haiti; Boeing Hillary; Giustra Clinton.

If, as some reports suggest, the FBI’s investigation has expanded to include the Clinton Foundation — and it’s hard to imagine it failing to do so, given the co-mingling of State and Foundation business on Clinton’s server — the future may compare Hillary’s undoing around her private server to Nixon’s around his oval-office tapes. In 1972, Nixon was elected despite a growing suspicions of his involvement in the Watergate Break-In. However, unlike Nixon supporters in the 1972 election, today’s Hillary supporters will not have the excuse that there was no criminal investigation targeting their candidate when they cast their vote.

Democratic Primary voters might be forgiven for overlooking the ticking time bomb of Clinton’s legal problems, whose likely outcomes include a Trump or Cruz presidency and increased Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. The corporate media has been instrumental in concealing that bomb by parroting Clinton’s talking points while implicitly supporting the “vast right-wing conspiracy” narrative through ceding coverage of the probes to “fringe” outlets.

California representatives and senators should know better. Do the Clinton super-delegates really think that Obama’s Justice Department can ignore a criminal referral from the FBI or grant Hillary preemptive immunity without dire consequences? Maybe these politicians just haven’t done their homework, and need to hear from their constituents.