This piece, posted on Politico today, attempts to explain why Hillary Clinton won’t be indicted: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/hillary-clinton-prosecution-past-cases-221744
Notice that the author doesn’t mention any potential conflicts of interest between Secretary of State Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. Apparently, he assumes that none of the emails, which Clinton deleted and the FBI discovered, contains damning information on that front.
The author would like us to believe that, if the same standard were applied to others in the State Department on how they handled their email correspondence and for which Clinton is being accused of violating, then everyone in the State Department would be guilty of breaching security regulations. The major difference, however, is that no one in the State Department set up his or her own private server at home, thereby bypassing the government’s secured communications system. What Clinton did was unique and clearly against regulations.
It doesn’t make any difference whether Clinton sent the emails or they were sent to her, nor does it make any difference whether or not the emails were marked classified. Clinton used her private basement server exclusively; she never used a *.gov server, so every single email went through her private server. For the first month or so, her email messages were in plain text, not even encrypted. After that, they were encrypted, but that’s a minor inconvenience for a good hacker, and our enemies have the best hackers on the planet. In other words, the Secretary of State, who should know better, exposed all her email correspondence to the world.
The author points out that her lawyers decided which 30,000 emails to delete, as though Clinton can claim she didn’t know what was going on, thereby distancing herself from the problem she created. She’s responsible regardless. Further, she was supposed to leave her entire record behind at State at the end of her term, which she neglected to do. If Clinton decided to mix in personal emails with State Department emails, that was her decision and her mistake. She does not get to decide which ones are personal and which are government business, nor do her lawyers. Involving other lawyers in sorting out her emails only makes them complicit. It does not exonerate Clinton from running afoul of the law. Her close aides, who helped sort out her emails, knew all Clinton’s email correspondence was offline and outside the government’s secure network. They themselves communicated with Clinton and, therefore, had a strong incentive to designate and delete, as personal, any emails that could incriminate them later on. Remember, the existence of Clinton’s private server arrangement wasn’t discovered by Benghazi investigators until well after Clinton left the State Department. It was never supposed to see the light of day. One can only assume that a lot damage control went into the process of distinguishing which of Clinton’s emails were business and which were personal.
The author’s attempt to downplay the seriousness of Clinton’s email woes doesn’t explain why 147 agents have been assigned to the FBI’s investigation. If the author can singlehandedly exculpate Clinton from any wrongdoing, why expend that kind of manpower and expense on a case that should be dismissed prima facie for its lack of merit?
Maybe the Politico author was hanging out in the same room as this fly on the wall:
investmentwatchblog.com/u-s-justice-department-prosecutors-laugh-off-the-fbis-clinton-email-probe/
– LV