Category Archives: Law
Obama’s Fake Name and Hillary’s Secret Email Server
President Obama told CBS News that he learned about Hillary’s secret email server at “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”
That was before the FBI showed Huma Abedin an email the president had sent to Hillary – using a pseudonym. “Why is this not classified?” exclaimed Huma.
Did Obama share classified information on Hillary’s unsecured secret server? Maybe the Russians will let us know.
All About Obama
Fox’s Judge Napolitano and National Review’s Andrew McCarthy (a former federal prosecutor) speculate that the FBI went easy on Hillary because Obama would have been a defense witness in her case.
Update 10/31/16: Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey joined the all about Obama theme writing in today’s WSJ, “If Mrs. Clintgon was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.” “He” being the president.
Hillary’s Secret Email Server
Here’s Neera Tanden, an informal Clinton advisor and president of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress :
“Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?” Tanden added the next day. “Like whole thing is fucking insane.”
FBI Immunity Chest
Rather than convene a grand jury to subpoena her computer, the FBI gave Cheryl Mills immunity from prosecution. Mills served as Hillary’s chief of staff and as her attorney.
Immunity with Impunity
The FBI also gave immunity to four others and agreed to destroy computers after reviewing evidence on them.
Here’s what VDH thinks of that:
Had anyone else in government set up a private e-mail server, sent and received classified information on it, deleted over 30,000 e-mails, ordered subordinates to circumvent court and congressional orders to produce documents, and serially and publicly lied to the American people about the scandal, that person would surely be in jail.
We’re All Weasels Now
Not that anyone asked, but Director Comey assured us the FBI is not overrun by weasels.
Members of Congress needed assurances after last Friday’s FBI document dump. The dumped documents revealed that Clinton consiglieri Cheryl Mills sat in on Hillary Clinton’s FBI interview. Mills listened along with eight other lawyers while Hillary was questioned about her private email server. Mills is also a witness in that case. Legal experts say that’s unusual because it gives attorney/client protection to her communications with Hillary.
And the Justice Department gave her immunity anyway.
No Weasels Here
Committee Chair Trey Gowdy, a respected former federal prosecutor himself, says this isn’t the FBI he remembers.
When you have five immunity agreements and no prosecutions, when you are allowing witnesses who happen to be lawyers who happen to be targets to sit in on an interview — that is not the FBI that I used to work with.“
Comey sputtered that it is so.
“I hope, someday, when this political craziness is over, you’ll look back again on this, because this is the FBI you know and love,” the Bureau’s director told Gowdy. “This was done by pros, in the right way. That’s the part I have no patience with.”
And he insisted “We are not weasels.”
Two Bit BleachBit Clinton Caper
The FBI did a document dump on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend. The dumped documents detailed Hillary Clinton’s answers to questions about her secret email server.
And it turns out Hillary used 15 Blackberrys with her home brew server. She had publicly claimed she needed the private server so she could use just one device. Of the fifteen devices, two were destroyed with a hammer. The whereabouts of the others are unknown.
BleachBit
Furthermore, an employee of Platte River Networks, the contractor who managed the server, wiped it clean. Not with a cloth or something, as Hillary wondered aloud. He used BleachBit software to destroy data which had been subpoenaed by Congress.
Paul Sperry in the NY Post writes:
Far from exonerating Clinton, the nearly 60 pages of documents expose both the systematic destruction of subpoenaed evidence by Clinton’s aides and the curious lack of interest by investigators in recovering it.
Comey even let Clinton’s State Department aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson sit in on the interview with Clinton’s other lawyers, despite the glaring conflict of interest. FBI documents make clear Mills and Samuelson led the effort to search and destroy Clinton’s subpoenaed e-mails and should’ve been prime targets of the investigation.
They’re Gonna Put Y’all In Chains
Andrew McCarthy in National Review calls Mills, longtime consigliere and chief-of-staff at Hillary’s State Department, the Clinton Family’s Tom Hayden.
I’m pretty sure he meant Tom Hagen.
Obama No Ransom Iran Nuclear Deal Narrative
Earlier this month he WSJ reported that the Obama administration shipped Iran a pallet of foreign cash worth $400 million. President Obama scolded the press for asking if the delivery of the unmarked bills, in an unmarked plane, in the middle of the night was ransom.
You’ve probably seen his four step reply:
1) The payment was old news.
2) It was Iran’s money.
3) It’s illegal to trade dollars with Iran.
4) We don’t pay ransom.
Then he mocked reporters by saying, it “defies logic” that we would pay ransom. He also said the story “reads like a spy novel.”
So it does.
For good measure State Department spokesman John Kirby tweeted:
“Reports of link between prisoner release & payment to Iran are completely false.”
So the WSJ reporters, Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee, dug a little deeper and learned that the payment was “specifically timed to the release of several American prisoners held in Iran.” The money was loaded onto an Iranian cargo plane in Geneva, Switzerland. And it wasn’t released until a plane departing Tehran with the prisoners was “wheels up.”
It’s Not Ransom. It’s Leverage. Or Not.
Based on the new information Kirby was asked by a reporter:
Q: “In basic English, you are saying you wouldn’t give [Iran] the 400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?”
A: “That’s correct,” Kirby responded.
Iranians call it “ransom” (they’re already collecting more ransom chips). Kirby calls it “leverage.”
Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said, “I never used the world leverage” – leaving Kirby hanging out to dry.
