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Monday, January 25, 2016

Pathetic: Hillary Blames Spiraling Email Scandal on 'Republicans And Their Allies'



After briefly retreating from her campaign's paranoid and laughable "right-wing conspiracy" email scandal spin, Hillary Clinton embraced it on NBC's Meet The Press Sunday morning. She claimed she's "not concerned" about the active FBI investigation into her expresslyimpropernational security-compromisingemail scheme, repeated the "marked classified" canard, and lamented that she can't control what "Republicans and their allies" are up to (via NRO):

I thought it was interesting, Chuck, you’ll as a political observer understand why, back a couple months ago Kevin McCarthy spilled the beans that the Benghazi investigation was all about bringing me down, something that I suspected but I went ahead, testified for 11 hours, answered all their questions and even they admitted there was nothing new. Now, Senator Grassley shows up at a Trump rally yesterday in Iowa. He’s the chairman of the Judiciary Committee who has — and his staff have been behind and pushing a lot of these stories, and announces he’s there for the simple reason, to defeat me. I can’t control what the Republicans are doing. But I know what the facts are and I will just keep putting them out there. This is something that I think is very clear about what happened and I know it will be over and resolved at some point but I can’t control what the Republicans and their allies do, but I think it’s important for voters to know what are they doing.

Notice how she conflates scandals and controversies, roping in Benghazi -- about which she's also been shamelessly lying -- and Donald Trump to muddy the waters. The FBI's criminal probe into her willful and serial mishandling of classified material, its attempted cover-up, and possible public corruption has nothing to do with with Republicans.  The Bureau's chief is a widely-respected professional with bipartisan credibility.  Similarly, the Obama-appointed and unanimously-confirmed intelligence community Inspector General is not a remotely plausible partisan "ally" of the GOP.  This damage control is as feeble as it is nonsensical. 

Speaking of which, Leah wrote aboutthe preposterous opportunism of the State Department linking the DC snowstorm to their delay in releasing the final batch of Hillary Clinton's officials emails (excluding the more than 30,000 emails she unilaterally deleted, including some that have since been proven to be work-related, exposing another lie).  This "accidental" delay has nothing to do with weather, of course; it will conveniently push the court-mandated disclosure past Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.  The State Department has also stated that the "remaining undisclosed emails are 'the most complex to process' because they contain 'a large amount of material' that needs to be approved by other agencies."  In other words, the pile of classified emails is likely to swell significantly beyond the current 1,300-plus level.  Meanwhile, Hillary's latest excuse regarding the revelation that 'above top secret' intelligence was compromised on her unsecure server is falling apart.  She and her supporters have claimed the data in question was "innocuous" and merely touched on a subject that was already in the public domain.  Even if that were true, it wouldn't constitute a legal justification for her habitual disregard for data security protocols.  Nevertheless, the intelligence community is once again punching holes in her ever-shifting narrative:


Kelly: She says it's just one document that talks about a drone program that was already published in the New York Times. Is that what you're hearing?

Herridge: My understanding is that that is one little sliver of the pie. The larger pie, if you will, [has] much more egregious violations in handling this SAP -- or special access program -- information.

How's this for "innocuous"?

At least one of the emails on Hillary Clinton's private server contained extremely sensitive information identified by an intelligence agency as "HCS-O," which is the code used for reporting on human intelligence sources in ongoing operations, according to two sources not authorized to speak on the record. Both sources are familiar with the intelligence community inspector general’s January 14 letter to Congress, advising the Oversight committees that intelligence beyond Top Secret -- known as Special Access Program (SAP) -- was identified in the Clinton emails, as well the supporting documents from the affected agencies that owned the information and have final say on classification. According to a December 2013 policy document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: “The HSC-0 compartment (Operations) is used to protect exceptionally fragile and unique IC (intelligence community) clandestine HUMINT operations and methods that are not intended for dissemination outside of the originating agency.” Dan Maguire, former Special Operations strategic planner for Africom, told Fox News the disclosure of sensitive material impacts national security and exposes U.S. sources. "There are people’s lives at stake. Certainly in an intel SAP, if you’re talking about sources and methods, there may be one person in the world that would have access to the type of information contained in that SAP,” he said.

Some of the 'beyond top secret' intelligence discovered on Hillary's unprotected bootleg server (she initially said it contained no classified material of any sort) was so sensitive that both the Inspector General and senior lawmakers needed special clearances to review it.  The IG's declaration reportedly included "supporting documents from the agency affected, showing how they reached the determination it came from one of its sources, and not from publicly available information."  Where does all of this leave Mrs. Clinton from a legal perspective?  We'll explore that question later today, so stay tuned. 

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