http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/with-clintons-nixonian-email-scandal-deepening-sandes-must-demand-answers/
When it comes to Hillary
Clinton’s State Department email scandal, reporters — and even her right-wing
critics in the Republican Party — are asking the wrong question.
Sure, doing all her official
business on an unprotected, unscrambled private server in her own home and on
an unsecured private Blackberry phone device means that any two-bit spy outfit,
not to mention sophisticated ones like those of Russia, Iran, Israel or China,
could easily hack it and read secret State Department and other agency
communications. But really, those entities have ways of getting that kind of
secret stuff anyhow.
The real question is what kind
of private conversations Clinton, in her role as Secretary of State, was having
with powerful people both at home and abroad that may have involved cash
donations to the Clinton Foundation and to her and Bill’s personal enrichment
or her future campaign for president.
Hillary Clinton is a lawyer,
and while she’s slippery, she’s no dummy. She may have played dumb when asked
earlier by reporters about her server’s hard drive being wiped clean of data
before she turned it over to the FBI, saying, “What, like with a cloth or
something? I don’t know how it works at all,” but she surely was involved in
the deletion of her private emails — over 30,000 of which were reportedly
erased.
And those erasures were made
without any involvement of State Department security or legal officials. The
decision, according to Clinton, on which emails were “private communications,”
was made by her personal attorney, whose interest, by definition, was her and
not the public or even national security for that matter.
As the Washington Post has
reported, the Clintons went from being, as Hillary Clinton has said, “dead
broke” upon leaving the White House in January 2000, to earning some $230
million by this year — a staggering sum of money even in a new Gilded Age of
obscene wealth. Most of this money has been little more than influence buying
by corporations and wealthy people trying to curry favor with a woman who was
already Secretary of State, perhaps the second-most powerful position in the US
government and whom many expected to become the next president after Obama.
The power couple’s two
foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now
together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as
money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and
friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s
secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign
leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of
human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals
abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefitted from
a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated
back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law
subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.
It beggars belief to think
that Hillary Clinton wasn’t hiding such conversations when she had her private
emails deleted from her server.
The FBI is known to be
investigating Clinton’s private emails, with as many as 100 FBI personnel
assigned to the investigation. Already, one key privately hired tech assistant
who worked on Clinton’s private server, Bryan
Pagliano, has become a cooperating witness, granted immunity from prosecution by
the US Justice Department in that investigation (usually an indication that the
FBI is expecting to indict someone else). Key Clinton aides, notably her top
aide Huma Abedin, have also been interviewed by FBI agents, with the
expectation that Clinton will be interviewed herself soon by federal agents.
But there is no indication from the Justice Department or the FBI as to when,
if ever, the results of that investigation will be released.
However Politico reports
that on Wednesday, a report
by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General, has issued its
report on the emails. It is a scathing indictment, concluding that Clinton
failed to comply with US government and State Department policies on records,
and that counter to assertions made publicly by her, she never sought
permission from the department’s legal staff to use a private server — a
request which if made, the report insists “would not” have been approved. The
inspector general’s report states, “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have
surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government
service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the
Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal
Records Act.”
It’s not as though Clinton
didn’t know what she was doing was wrong and even illegal. The just released
report states that technology staff in the State Department’s Office of
Information Resource Management, who raised concerns about her private server,
were instructed by the department’s director, a Clinton appointee, “not to
question the arrangement.” When one staffer mentioned that her private account
could contain federal records that needed to be preserved “in order to satisfy
federal recordkeeping requirements,” the report says the director of that
office “stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and
approved by the department legal staff and that the matter was not to be
discussed any further.” Yet the inspector general says that assertion by the
director was false, as there was in fact no evidence that in the State
Department’s office of the legal advisor had ever reviewed or approved the
private system, or even been asked to do so by Clinton.
Again and again through her
four years at State, Clinton is found to have resisted efforts to get her to
stop using exclusively her private email to conduct official business. On
several occasions, the report says, she expressly said her concern was having
her mail subjected to FOIA, or in other words, public discovery. Clinton tried
to claim that since her communications with State Dept. personnel ended up on
their servers, there were records of her communications there. But as the
report notes, that wouldn’t include any State Department-related communications
she had with persons outside of the State Department or the government. And
those are precisely the kinds of conversations that the public really needs to
know about — particularly when we’re talking about someone who is running for
the top position in government, and who has demonstrably spent years with her
hand out to powerful people and organizations. After all, it is those
communications that would include any discussions of financial transactions
involving foreign or domestic interests seeking beneficial assistance from the
Madam Secretary.
This scandal is not about
someone simply ignoring some arcane rules. As Secretary of State, Clinton had a
legal obligation to operate in an above-board, legal and transparent manner in
conducting the business of government. Instead, for our years in office, she
conducted that business in a manner that can only be called Nixonian, opting to
openly violate the rules, to hide her communications from government oversight
and public review, to dissemble about her allegedly having received clearance
to do so, and even to attempt to erase records from her server when ordered to
turn them over. Furthermore, suspicions have to be raised because if Clinton’s
concerns were about people accessing her genuinely personal emails, she had
only to set up a State Department email address and obtain a State Department
secure Blackberry phone, and limit her personal server and personal Blackberry
to genuinely personal emails and calls, conducting all State Department
business on State Department systems. According to the IGO report, she
studiously avoided doing that kind of segregation for four years despite
frequent instructions and advice to do so.
Bernie Sanders so far has
declined to make an issue of Clinton’s email scandal, but as more information
comes out from the Inspector General’s Office, from a FOIA lawsuit currently in
the deposition stage in federal court, and ultimately from the ongoing FBI
investigation reportedly nearing its conclusion, it is becoming obvious that
Sanders is being far too kind to her. When he pooh-poohed the scandal in
response to a debate moderator’s question during the first televised public
debate he had with Clinton, the scandal was still fairly new. Today, with
release of the IGO report, it has become much more serious.
Now that Sanders has agreed to
a pre-California-primary televised debate with Donald Trump, following Hillary
Clinton’s refusal to honor an earlier agreement to debate him, he will
obviously be asked about her email scandal before a riveted national audience.
If he doesn’t raise the issue sooner on the campaign trail, Sanders must take
that opportunity to denounce her illegal behavior, to question her motives in
hiding her communications as secretary of state, and to demand that she come
clean by providing copies of all her emails during that period. If it is
important for her to release the transcripts of her closed-door and lucrative
speeches to Wall Street banks, it is far more so for her to explain why she was
conducting State Department business on her private email and trying so hard to
avoid Freedom of Information Act scrutiny.
Sanders should start pointing
out the obvious reality that should Clinton not come clean, and should she
become the Democratic nominee for president this July, she faces the
possibility of an embarrassing and damaging final report from the FBI during
the election campaign, or perhaps even an indictment, and the certainty of
five-months of hammering on the issue by her Republican opponent. Furthermore,
if somehow elected, there will follow an inevitable and interminable campaign
by Republicans in Congress to try and impeach her for her “high crimes and
misdemeanors” committed while serving as Secretary of State in the prior
administration. That would make a joke of her campaign slogan: “A president who
gets things done.”
Dave Lindorff is a
founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!,
an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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