The views and skews media blatherskites are hyperventilating at the suggestion the US Department of Justice might indict former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for mishandling of national security information or influence peddling. “How would that affect her presidential campaign?” they worry.
OpenCdA doesn’t know if she will be indicted.
Our uncertainty has nothing to do with US Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s political loyalties or with President Obama’s prejudicial comments made during his 60 Minutes television interview on October 11, 2015.
Prosecutors from the US Attorney General down the prosecutorial food chain to the most incompetent and politically comprimised county prosecutors in Idaho are given great latitude to decide which cases will be prosecuted and which ones will be declined for good reasons, bad reasons, politically expedient reasons, or no reason at all.
Our concern is that when Hillary Clinton used unsecured email systems and her own private server to exchange and store national security information, she knowingly and wilfully exposed that information to exploitation by all enemies foreign and domestic who will use that information harm to our nation.
That damage has been done. It will not be corrected even by criminal prosecution, conviction, and lifetime incarceration for Hillary Clinton.
If there is any value in criminally prosecuting and convicting Hillary Clinton, it is in ensuring she would never again be in any position of public trust and never again have access to national security information. It is in ensuring she would never again be able to barter information which, in the wrong hands, places at grave risk the lives of American citizens and foreign nationals working on our behalf.
“Prove it! Where’s the proof she knew or should have known that her failure to handle national security information properly jeopardized the lives of our military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel not to mention US citizens abroad for private business or pleasure?” her supporters will demand smugly.
That would be a reasonable demand from her supporters. After all, Clinton’s biography clearly shows Hillary Clinton is not some ignorant, uneducated nosepicker. For example:
On January 21, 2009, Hillary Clinton became the 67th Secretary of State after being confirmed by a vote of 94-2-2 in the US Senate. The US Department of State is a member of the US Intelligence Community. As Secretary of State and pursuant to Executive Order 13526 signed by President Obama on December 29, 2009, Hillary Clinton was entrusted with the authority and responsibility to classify and declassify information originated by State Department. She was entrusted with access to even more sensitive national security information originated by other agencies and governments. She acknowledged understanding and accepting the boundaries and limitations of that trust and its legal obligations when she swore her oath of office.
The evidence of Hillary Clinton’s guilty knowledge was proven by the actions she took and orders she gave to others to erase/delete/wipe the information stored on her privately owned and maintained email server.
Maybe her motivation was, as some have suggested, to cover up evidence of corruption, evidence that she had been selling the present and even future influence of her public offices for personal enrichment or public acclaim.
Or maybe she suddenly had a Damascus Road moment, realized the harm she had done to the national security, and acted (albeit belatedly) to try and protect national security information from discovery by the foreign intelligence services and hacktivist anarchists who would use it to the detriment of the United States.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter if either of those two explanations are correct. Neither justifies nor excuses the damage she has done.
The harm done by Hillary Clinton’s action is that in ordering her personal email server to be wiped, Clinton was consciously trying to make it impossible to even identify the national security information she had caused or allowed to be put there. She did not want the extent of the damage she had caused to our national security to be known.
OpenCdA believes Hillary Clinton’s action and orders to wipe her email server were done to hide the evidence of her wrongdoing from US Intelligence Community investigators. They were first and foremost seeking to determine just how much damage her actions inflicted on our nation. It sounds a little like a Yogi Berra-ism, but to determine what had been lost, investigators first had to find it.
If Hillary Clinton had been genuinely remorseful, she would have immediately asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to safely shut down the server and associated components, identify and safeguard all of the components which could contain national security information, and then identify and safeguard all the national security information contained therein. Had she done that, a more complete and accurate assessment of the damage she did could have been made. That would have defined the efforts needed to mitigate that damage.
But Hillary Clinton didn’t do that. She did just the opposite. She took affirmative actions to make it more difficult, maybe even impossible, for the FBI and the other members of the US Intelligence Community to accurately assess the extent of the damage she and those who helped and encouraged her did to the national security. Clinton earned her J.D. from Yale School of Law in 1973 and has been a practicing attorney. She can hardly claim ignorance of the doctrine of spoliation.
Prevented from retrieving everything that was ever on her private email server, only a fool would not presume that all the national security information she allowed on it is now in the hands of foreign intelligence services. Whatever the damage to the national security that has already been done, it is a bell that cannot be unrung even by convicting Hillary Clinton of crimes against the national security.
The only tangible benefit to convicting Hillary Clinton of crimes relating to the national security would be to prevent her from ever being in a position to repeat the offenses against the people of the United States of America.
The only tangible benefit to convicting Hillary Clinton of crimes relating to the national security would be to prevent her from ever being in a position to repeat the offenses against the people of the United States of America.
THAT IS A HUGE BENEFIT, WE WILL NEVER KNOW THE DAMAGE TO NATIONAL SECURITY THAT WAS DONE BY THIS NATION SECURITY BREECH.
Comment by Sharon Culbreth — February 15, 2016 @ 7:59 am
Sharon,
I hope you’re wrong. My fear is that you’re correct — we may never know. More importantly, the US Intelligence Community may never know.
Even if Clinton is indicted for either corruption or some crime relating to the disclosure of national security information, it is very likely that she will engage an attorney who is familiar with the technique of “graymail”. “Graymail” was a threat, almost always by defense counsel, to employ a defense which will require the disclosure of even more classified national security information. It was called the “disclose or dismiss” defense. It required the government to make a choice: Proceed with the prosecution but risk the disclosure of more classified information.
The Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) passed by the 96th Congress was an effort to thwart graymail by establishing procedures which both preserved the defendant’s right to the evidence as well as the government’s requirement to preserve national security information. Here is a link to the CRS report Protecting Classified Information and the Rights of Criminal Defendants: The Classified Information Procedures Act. Here is a link to the US Attorney’s Criminal Resource Manual, Section 2054.Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA).
There is potentially another issue if the government has sufficient information to indict and convict Clinton but chooses not to. The appearance would simply be that certain politically connected people as well as corporate officers of major banks and corporations are above criminal prosecution. That does not encourage diligence by investigators and inevitably leads us ordinary folk to correctly conclude that “equal protection of the law” is meaningless because as Orwell said, some animals are more equal than others.
Comment by Bill — February 15, 2016 @ 1:58 pm
I’ve always thought, from the very beginning, that her use of a private email server was to engage in Clinton Foundation shenanigans that she wanted to keep out of the public’s view. The media over the last year has mentioned the Foundation angle very little. Stay tuned on this aspect.
Comment by Gary Ingram — March 13, 2016 @ 1:45 pm
Gary,
From an investigative perspective, her email server makes it tricky because foreign counterintelligence investigations are typically handled separately from straight criminal investigations such as bribery and money laundering. Prosecuting the straight crimes such as bribery, money laundering, wire fraud, etc. is not made easier when much of the evidence could bear a national security classification. It’s bad enough that gray mail creeps into the courtroom in the national security prosecution, but to also throw it into the straight crime mix is really challenging.
Comment by Bill — March 13, 2016 @ 2:27 pm