FBI Carries Hillary's Water in Email Scandal
By Matthew Vadum
The FBI's bizarre and shocking refusal earlier this week to cooperate with legal efforts to force the public release of emails from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's hacker-friendly private Internet server is yet more proof that the Obama administration is continuing to provide political cover for the 2016 presidential hopeful.
This strange behavior comes as Republican lawmakers escalate their criticism of Mrs. Clinton's unusual emailing habits. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) is demanding that U.S. Attorney General and Obama lackey Loretta Lynch appoint a special counsel to investigate the case. Other lawmakers want hearings to consider compelling testimony from Bryan Pagliano, a former Clinton staffer who installed the server in her private residence.
The Department of State is also dragging its heels in processing the electronic correspondence, Citizens United President David Bossie said. The agency is "slow walking" the Freedom of Information Act requests for the almost-certainly damning emails to prevent their release before key Democratic primary elections next year, he said.
The server is at the heart of the growing scandal over Clinton's mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, three years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.
There is already convincing evidence that Obama administration officials at the highest levels were long aware of Clinton's cloak-and-dagger email infrastructure. The congenitally corrupt Clintons created the system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requesters, shield Hillary's correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to the international cash-for-future-presidential-favors clearinghouse known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.
At a federal court hearing Monday it was revealed that the long-respected Federal Bureau of Investigation is openly defying Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. The judge ordered the agency to work with the U.S. Department of State to devise a method for making public the emails from the mysterious server which Mrs. Clinton delivered to the U.S. Department of Justice this past summer. While serving at Foggy Bottom from 2009 to 2013, Clinton kept the server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., which happens to be a short drive from Katonah, N.Y., where leftist billionaire and Clinton donor George Soros maintains a home.
The Daily Mail (UK) reports that
James A. Baker, a general counsel attorney for the FBI, sent a letter to the Justice Department -- its own parent agency - that wouldn't even confirm that the agency was involved in the matter, despite weeks of multiple news reports to the contrary. "We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation, nor are we in a position to provide additional information at this time," Baker wrote Sullivan.
Baker's letter was dated Monday, a week beyond the deadline imposed on the FBI by the Justice Department.
At the hearing Sullivan issued a new order requiring the State Department to accelerate its national security-related vetting of emails from Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to then-Secretary Clinton and report back on Oct. 5. The department said the records won't be ready until the end of this year or some time in 2016.
"How long does it take to conduct a computer search?" the judge said. "You push a button."
Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Shapiro protested that "The State Department is being crushed with obligations" and that staffers there are working overtime to comply. "Every effort is being made," she said.
Conservative activists are angry at the government for stonewalling.
"The State Department acts as if Ms. Abedin’s and Ms. [Clinton lawyer Cheryl] Mills’ documents fell from the sky on the eve of the State Department’s production deadline, but that is not remotely the case," Citizens United, which is also suing for the emails, stated in a court filing last week.
Watchdog group Judicial Watch protested the government's noncompliance with the investigation in a court filing Monday.
"We still do not know whether the FBI - or any other government agency for that matter - has possession of the email server that was used by Mrs. Clinton and [Clinton aide] Ms. [Huma] Abedin to conduct official government business during their four years of employment at the State Department."
In a document dump, Judicial Watch advised that Huma Abedin, a longtime aide with familial ties to the world of Islamic terrorism, sent at least 50 pages of emails through the Benghazi bungler's so-called home-brew email server that "openly discussed sensitive topics such as specific hotels where Clinton was staying on overseas trips," the Daily Mail reports.
At the hearing State Department counsel told Judge Sullivan that the agency is having difficulty complying with the court's orders because it is working its way through 100 separate lawsuits seeking the emails. "At other points, the department has been unable to comply because it hasn't been given a complete set of returned emails from aides such as Abedin," according to the newspaper.
Meanwhile, the trickle of bad news for Hillary is turning into a flood.
A soon-to-be-published book says 67-year-old Clinton has "mounting health issues" that could make it difficult for her to serve as president. Despite this, her personal physician gave her a more or less clean bill of health over the summer.
According to Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary, by Edward Klein, Clinton has suffered a series of strokes and is "frequently plagued" by "blinding headaches." In 2012 Clinton experienced a life-threatening concussion-related blood clot of her brain that made her "constantly worried" she would develop a new clot. On the campaign trail she has "felt faint and nearly swooned," but "[t]hose incidents were kept secret."
Clinton has also been experiencing insomnia but the condition hasn't been ameliorated by medication. The sleeplessness has "worried her, because it sapped her energy just when she needed it most for the campaign," Klein reportedly writes.
"For the first time I've known her, she's showing self-doubt about her strength and vitality," a Clinton friend reportedly told Klein. "She is exhausted and depressed a lot of the time."
The tabloid scandal-sheet National Enquirer reported on Clinton's strokes last month but added that she also "is suffering from the early stages of the debilitating disease MS." Multiple sclerosis, known as MS, damages the insulating covers of nerve cells in the brain and spine, interfering with the ability of the nervous system to communicate. The incurable disease can lead to severe physical and psychiatric problems.
Although the newspaper has a reputation for sensational, outrageous-sounding, often thinly-sourced stories, that has begun to change. It broke the true story in 2004 about the love child vice presidential candidate John Edwards (D), then a married man, fathered with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter. In 2010 the Pulitzer Prize Board, the gatekeeper of the most coveted prize in journalism, lifted its ban on accepting nominations from theNational Enquirer.
Clinton campaign staffers have been dodging inconvenient questions from ACORN-slayer and New York Times bestselling author James O'Keefe III who now heads Project Veritas, a nonprofit devoted to investigative video-based journalism.
Breitbart News reports that
O’Keefe recently captured Clinton campaign worker and Nevada immigration lawyer Christina Gupana appearing to condone and encourage what appear to be Clinton volunteers and staffers to ignore and knowingly violate Nevada’s voter registration laws. She tells them, “Do whatever you can. Whatever you can get away with, just do it, until you get kicked out like totally.”
The follow-up video from O’Keefe’s Project Veritas shows a Hillary Clinton campaign worker, identified as Don Andres, acknowledging the existence of a “viral video” but maintaining that the campaign did nothing to violate election laws.
Investigators for Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske (R) are reportedly looking into the Gupana case and O'Keefe is promising more sting videos damaging to to the Clinton campaign.
Contrary to propaganda spewed by Democrats and their left-wing activist allies, voter fraud is not a myth. It happens and can affect outcomes in close races.
In 2011 in Nevada, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the nonprofit group famous for turning graveyards across the nation into Democratic strongholds, pleaded guilty to unlawful compensation for registration of voters, a felony in that state. Significantly, the secretary of state at the time whose office pushed the prosecution was Ross Miller, a Democrat. It was also the only time ACORN itself, as opposed to its individual workers and their associates, had been convicted of a crime. The court fined ACORN $5,000, the maximum allowed.
Prosecutors said the higher-ups in the group knew two senior ACORN executives were involved in a criminal conspiracy in which voter registration canvassers were illegally offered cash bonuses upon reaching the magic number of 21 registrations in a day. In what appears to be an inside joke, ACORN officials in the gambling capital of America called the incentive program “Blackjack.”
During the sentencing hearing, Las Vegas Judge Donald Mosley said the misdeeds of ACORN, which had close ties to both Clinton and President Obama, filed bankruptcy in 2010, made "a mockery of our election process.” The judge added, “This is the kind of thing you see in some banana republic, Uruguay or someplace, not in the United States.”
The New York Post reported this week that for the first time ever Clinton is underwater in a poll in her home state. In New York State, 51 percent of voters view her unfavorably, according to a Siena College poll. Only 46 percent of that state's voters view her favorably. Despite the bad stats, she is still leading her two nearest rivals. Among Democratic voters in New York, she garners 45 percent, far ahead of yet undeclared candidate Vice President Joe Biden (D) at 24 percent, and self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) who trails with 23 percent.
As the torrent of bad news keeps flowing, the Democrats' supposedly inevitable nominee is becoming not so inevitable.
And Hillary Clinton better start praying that the next president is from her own party.
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