The thing is, she feels entitled to do things that other people aren't
allowed to do. She's beyond the law, and she knows it. I don't know. They
say that we're supposed to be a government of laws, not men. But the lawyers
determine who can get away with what. Obama can assassinate an American
citizen without benefit of trial, and he can say what he did was legal
because he and his advisors used a process of their own devising, to
determine guilt. Hillary can put emails regarding sensitive government
matters on her private server, classified material that anyone else would be
prosecuted for removing, and she can say that what she did was acceptable
because, because why?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2016 10:35 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hillary Clinton's Damning Emails
As I read and listen to Hillary Clinton, I have a feeling of someone who
feels superior to the likes of me, and can schmooze me, and dismiss me as a
trivial inconsequential bug.
But maybe I'm just being a bit sensitive.
There should be an outrage over the constant lies being blown in our ears.
But folks seem to feel that this is just part of what governments do. After
all, we can't fight City Hall.
Well, back to Hillary Clinton, I simply can't bring myself to support
someone who has no interest in supporting me, or mine. And worse than that,
she lies about really caring for the little folks.
What really gets my goat is the fact that all of my ranting and hair pulling
makes no difference to Hillary. She doesn't need me.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/4/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hillary Clinton's Damning EmailsIt's not going to happen.
Wednesday, 04 May 2016 00:00 By Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed
A few weeks after leaving office, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton may have breathed a sigh of relief and reassurance when
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied reports of the
National Security Agency eavesdropping on Americans. After all,
Clinton had been handling official business at the State Department
like many Americans do with their personal business, on an unsecured
server.
In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March
12, 2013, Clapper said the NSA was not collecting, wittingly, "any
type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,"
which presumably would have covered Clinton's unsecured emails.
I would guess that Clapper's confession may have come as a shock to
then ex-Secretary Clinton, as she became aware that her own emails
might be among the trillions of communications that NSA was vacuuming
up. Nevertheless, she found Snowden's truth-telling a safer target for
her fury than Clapper's dishonesty and NSA's dragnet. But NSA
contractor Edward Snowden's revelations -- starting on June 5, 2013 --
gave the lie to Clapper's testimony, which Clapper then retracted on
June 21 -- coincidentally, Snowden's 30th birthday -- when Clapper
sent a letter to the Senators to whom he had, well, lied. Clapper
admitted his "response was clearly erroneous -- for which I
apologize." (On the chance you are wondering what became of Clapper,
he is still DNI.) In April 2014, Clinton suggested that Snowden had
helped terrorists by giving "all kinds of information, not only to big
countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like." Clinton
was particularly hard on Snowden for going to China (Hong Kong) and
Russia to escape a vengeful prosecution by the U.S. government.
Clinton even explained what extraordinary lengths she and her people
went to in safeguarding government secrets: "When I would go to China
or would go to Russia, we would leave all my electronic equipment on
the plane with the batteries out, because . they're trying to find out
not just about what we do in our government, they're . going after the
personal emails of people who worked in the State Department." Yes,
she said that. (emphasis added) Hoisted on Her Own Petard Alas, nearly
a year later, in March 2015, it became known that during her tenure as
Secretary of State she had not been as diligent as she led the
American people to believe. She had used a private server for official
communications, rather than the usual official State Department email
accounts maintained on federal servers. Thousands of those emails
would retroactively be marked classified -- some at the TOP
SECRET/Codeword level
-- by the department.
During an interview last September, Snowden was asked to respond to
the revelations about highly classified material showing up on
Clinton's personal server: "When the unclassified systems of the
United States government, which has a full-time information security
staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private
server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more
secure is completely ridiculous."
"She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,"
the President said on April 10. In the same interview, Obama told
Chris Wallace, "I guarantee that there is no political influence in
any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI --
not just in this case, but in any case. Full stop. Period."
Asked if Clinton "intentionally endangered US international security
by being so careless with her email," Snowden said it was not his
place to say.
Nor, it would seem, is it President Barack Obama's place to say,
especially considering that the FBI is actively investigating
Clinton's security breach. But Obama has said it anyway.
But, although a former professor of Constitutional law, the President
sports a checkered history when it comes to prejudicing investigations
and even trials, conducted by those ultimately reporting to him. For
example, more than two years before Chelsea Manning was brought to
trial, the President stated publicly: "We are a nation of laws. We
don't let individuals make decisions about how the law operates.
[Manning] broke the law!"
Not surprisingly, the ensuing court martial found Manning guilty, just
as the Commander in Chief had predicted. Though Manning's purpose in
disclosing mostly low-level classified information was to alert the
American public about war crimes and other abuses by the U.S.
government, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Prosecutorial Double Standards
On March 9, when presidential candidate Clinton was asked,
impertinently during a debate, whether she would withdraw from the
race if she were indicted for her cavalier handling of government
secrets, she offered her own certain prediction: "Oh, for goodness sake!
I'm not even answering that question."convict.
Merited or not, there is, sadly, some precedent for Clinton's supreme
confidence. Retired General and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, after
all, lied to the FBI (a felony for "lesser" folks) about giving his
mistress/biographer highly classified information and got off with a
slap on the wrist, a misdemeanor fine and probation, no jail time -- a
deal that Obama's first Attorney General Eric Holder did on his way
out the door.
We are likely to learn shortly whether Attorney General Loretta Lynch
is as malleable as Holder or whether she will allow FBI Director James
Comey, who held his nose in letting Petraeus cop a plea, to conduct an
unfettered investigation this time -- or simply whether Comey will be
compelled to enforce Clinton's assurance that "it's not going to happen."
Last week, Fox News TV legal commentator Andrew Napolitano said the
FBI is in the final stages of its investigation into Clinton and her
private email server. His sources tell him that "the evidence of her
guilt is overwhelming," and that the FBI has enough evidence to indict and
Whether Napolitano has it right or not, it seems likely that Clintonprecedent will be set.
is reading President Obama correctly -- no profile in courage is he.
Nor is Obama likely to kill the political fortunes of the now
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Yet, if he orders Lynch
and Comey not to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for what -- in my
opinion and that of most other veteran intelligence officials whom
I've consulted -- amounts to at least criminal negligence, another noxious
Knowing Too MuchLibya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
This time, however, the equities and interests of the powerful,
secretive NSA, as well as the FBI and Justice, are deeply involved.
And by now all of them know "where the bodies are buried," as the
smart folks inside the Beltway like to say. So the question becomes
would a future President Hillary Clinton have total freedom of
maneuver if she were beholden to those all well aware of her past
infractions and the harm they have done to this country.
One very important, though as yet unmentioned, question is whether
security lapses involving Clinton and her emails contributed to what
Clinton has deemed her worst moment as Secretary of State, the killing
of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel at
the lightly guarded U.S. "mission" (a very small, idiosyncratic,
consulate-type complex not performing any consular affairs) in Benghazi,
However, if there is any indication that Clinton's belatedlyattackers.
classified emails contained information about internal State
Department discussions regarding the consulate's security
shortcomings, questions may be raised about whether that information
was somehow compromised by a foreign intelligence agency and shared
with the attackers. Somehow the terrorists who mounted the assault
were aware of the absence of meaningful security at the facility,
though obviously there were other means for them to have made that
determination, including the State Department's reliance on unreliable
local militias who might well have shared that inside information with the
We know that State Department bureaucrats under Secretary Clintonit all"
overruled repeated requests for additional security in Benghazi. We
also know that Clinton disregarded NSA's repeated warnings against the
use of unencrypted communications. One of NSA's core missions, after
all, is to create and maintain secure communications for military,
diplomatic, and other government users.
Clinton's flouting of the rules, in NSA's face, would have created
additional incentive for NSA to keep an especially close watch on her
emails and telephone calls. The NSA also might know whether some
intelligence service successfully hacked into Clinton's server, but
there's no reason to think that the NSA would share that sort of
information with the FBI, given the NSA's history of not sharing its
data with other federal agencies even when doing so makes sense.
The NSA arrogates to itself the prerogative of deciding what
information to keep within NSA walls and what to share with the other
intelligence and law enforcement agencies like the FBI. (One bitter
consequence of this jealously guarded parochialism was the NSA's
failure to share very precise information that could have thwarted the
attacks of 9/11, as former NSA insiders have
revealed.)
It is altogether likely that Gen. Keith Alexander, head of NSA from
2005 to 2014, neglected to tell the Secretary of State of NSA's "collect
dragnet collection that included the emails and telephone calls ofsource.
Americans
-- including Clinton's. This need not have been simply the result of
Alexander's pique at her disdain for communications security
requirements, but rather mostly a consequence of NSA's modus operandi.
With the mindset at NSA, one could readily argue that the Secretary of
State
-- and perhaps the President himself -- had no "need-to-know." And,
needless to say, the fewer briefed on the NSA's flagrant disregard for
Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and
seizures the better.
So, if there is something incriminating -- or at least politically
damaging
-- in Clinton's emails, it's a safe bet that at least the NSA and
maybe the FBI, as well, knows. And that could make life difficult for
a Clinton-45 presidency. Inside the Beltway, we don't say the word
"blackmail," but the potential will be there. The whole thing needs to
be cleaned up now before the choices for the next President are locked in.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It
may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
RAY MCGOVERNserver.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publication arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served
at CIA from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to that of George
H. W. Bush, and was one of five CIA "alumni" who created Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003.
RELATED STORIES
White House Struggles to Explain Clinton Email Flap By Anita Kumar,
McClatchy Newspapers | Report Clinton Proposes Campaign Finance Reform
While Raking in Millions From Wall Street Since 2008 By Candice Bernd,
Truthout | Report Clinton vs. Sanders: Who Do Progressives Choose?
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Report
________________________________________
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Hillary Clinton's Damning Emails
Wednesday, 04 May 2016 00:00 By Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error!
Hyperlink reference not valid.
. A few weeks after leaving office, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton may have breathed a sigh of relief and reassurance when
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied reports of the
National Security Agency eavesdropping on Americans. After all,
Clinton had been handling official business at the State Department
like many Americans do with their personal business, on an unsecured
. In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on MarchIt's not going to happen.
12, 2013, Clapper said the NSA was not collecting, wittingly, "any
type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,"
which presumably would have covered Clinton's unsecured emails.
I would guess that Clapper's confession may have come as a shock to
then ex-Secretary Clinton, as she became aware that her own emails
might be among the trillions of communications that NSA was vacuuming
up. Nevertheless, she found Snowden's truth-telling a safer target for
her fury than Clapper's dishonesty and NSA's dragnet. But NSA
contractor Edward Snowden's revelations -- starting on June 5, 2013 --
gave the lie to Clapper's testimony, which Clapper then retracted on
June 21 -- coincidentally, Snowden's 30th birthday -- when Clapper
sent a letter to the Senators to whom he had, well, lied. Clapper
admitted his "response was clearly erroneous -- for which I
apologize." (On the chance you are wondering what became of Clapper,
he is still DNI.) In April 2014, Clinton suggested that Snowden had
helped terrorists by giving "all kinds of information, not only to big
countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like." Clinton
was particularly hard on Snowden for going to China (Hong Kong) and
Russia to escape a vengeful prosecution by the U.S. government.
Clinton even explained what extraordinary lengths she and her people
went to in safeguarding government secrets: "When I would go to China
or would go to Russia, we would leave all my electronic equipment on
the plane with the batteries out, because . they're trying to find out
not just about what we do in our government, they're . going after the
personal emails of people who worked in the State Department." Yes,
she said that. (emphasis added) Hoisted on Her Own Petard Alas, nearly
a year later, in March 2015, it became known that during her tenure as
Secretary of State she had not been as diligent as she led the
American people to believe. She had used a private server for official
communications, rather than the usual official State Department email
accounts maintained on federal servers. Thousands of those emails
would retroactively be marked classified -- some at the TOP
SECRET/Codeword level
-- by the department.
During an interview last September, Snowden was asked to respond to
the revelations about highly classified material showing up on
Clinton's personal server: "When the unclassified systems of the
United States government, which has a full-time information security
staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private
server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more
secure is completely ridiculous."
"She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,"
the President said on April 10. In the same interview, Obama told
Chris Wallace, "I guarantee that there is no political influence in
any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI --
not just in this case, but in any case. Full stop. Period."
Asked if Clinton "intentionally endangered US international security
by being so careless with her email," Snowden said it was not his
place to say.
Nor, it would seem, is it President Barack Obama's place to say,
especially considering that the FBI is actively investigating
Clinton's security breach. But Obama has said it anyway.
But, although a former professor of Constitutional law, the President
sports a checkered history when it comes to prejudicing investigations
and even trials, conducted by those ultimately reporting to him. For
example, more than two years before Chelsea Manning was brought to
trial, the President stated publicly: "We are a nation of laws. We
don't let individuals make decisions about how the law operates.
[Manning] broke the law!"
Not surprisingly, the ensuing court martial found Manning guilty, just
as the Commander in Chief had predicted. Though Manning's purpose in
disclosing mostly low-level classified information was to alert the
American public about war crimes and other abuses by the U.S.
government, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Prosecutorial Double Standards
On March 9, when presidential candidate Clinton was asked,
impertinently during a debate, whether she would withdraw from the
race if she were indicted for her cavalier handling of government
secrets, she offered her own certain prediction: "Oh, for goodness sake!
I'm not even answering that question."convict.
Merited or not, there is, sadly, some precedent for Clinton's supreme
confidence. Retired General and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, after
all, lied to the FBI (a felony for "lesser" folks) about giving his
mistress/biographer highly classified information and got off with a
slap on the wrist, a misdemeanor fine and probation, no jail time -- a
deal that Obama's first Attorney General Eric Holder did on his way
out the door.
We are likely to learn shortly whether Attorney General Loretta Lynch
is as malleable as Holder or whether she will allow FBI Director James
Comey, who held his nose in letting Petraeus cop a plea, to conduct an
unfettered investigation this time -- or simply whether Comey will be
compelled to enforce Clinton's assurance that "it's not going to happen."
Last week, Fox News TV legal commentator Andrew Napolitano said the
FBI is in the final stages of its investigation into Clinton and her
private email server. His sources tell him that "the evidence of her
guilt is overwhelming," and that the FBI has enough evidence to indict and
Whether Napolitano has it right or not, it seems likely that Clintonprecedent will be set.
is reading President Obama correctly -- no profile in courage is he.
Nor is Obama likely to kill the political fortunes of the now
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Yet, if he orders Lynch
and Comey not to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for what -- in my
opinion and that of most other veteran intelligence officials whom
I've consulted -- amounts to at least criminal negligence, another noxious
Knowing Too MuchLibya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
This time, however, the equities and interests of the powerful,
secretive NSA, as well as the FBI and Justice, are deeply involved.
And by now all of them know "where the bodies are buried," as the
smart folks inside the Beltway like to say. So the question becomes
would a future President Hillary Clinton have total freedom of
maneuver if she were beholden to those all well aware of her past
infractions and the harm they have done to this country.
One very important, though as yet unmentioned, question is whether
security lapses involving Clinton and her emails contributed to what
Clinton has deemed her worst moment as Secretary of State, the killing
of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel at
the lightly guarded U.S. "mission" (a very small, idiosyncratic,
consulate-type complex not performing any consular affairs) in Benghazi,
However, if there is any indication that Clinton's belatedlyattackers.
classified emails contained information about internal State
Department discussions regarding the consulate's security
shortcomings, questions may be raised about whether that information
was somehow compromised by a foreign intelligence agency and shared
with the attackers. Somehow the terrorists who mounted the assault
were aware of the absence of meaningful security at the facility,
though obviously there were other means for them to have made that
determination, including the State Department's reliance on unreliable
local militias who might well have shared that inside information with the
We know that State Department bureaucrats under Secretary Clintonit all"
overruled repeated requests for additional security in Benghazi. We
also know that Clinton disregarded NSA's repeated warnings against the
use of unencrypted communications. One of NSA's core missions, after
all, is to create and maintain secure communications for military,
diplomatic, and other government users.
Clinton's flouting of the rules, in NSA's face, would have created
additional incentive for NSA to keep an especially close watch on her
emails and telephone calls. The NSA also might know whether some
intelligence service successfully hacked into Clinton's server, but
there's no reason to think that the NSA would share that sort of
information with the FBI, given the NSA's history of not sharing its
data with other federal agencies even when doing so makes sense.
The NSA arrogates to itself the prerogative of deciding what
information to keep within NSA walls and what to share with the other
intelligence and law enforcement agencies like the FBI. (One bitter
consequence of this jealously guarded parochialism was the NSA's
failure to share very precise information that could have thwarted the
attacks of 9/11, as former NSA insiders have
revealed.)
It is altogether likely that Gen. Keith Alexander, head of NSA from
2005 to 2014, neglected to tell the Secretary of State of NSA's "collect
dragnet collection that included the emails and telephone calls ofsource.
Americans
-- including Clinton's. This need not have been simply the result of
Alexander's pique at her disdain for communications security
requirements, but rather mostly a consequence of NSA's modus operandi.
With the mindset at NSA, one could readily argue that the Secretary of
State
-- and perhaps the President himself -- had no "need-to-know." And,
needless to say, the fewer briefed on the NSA's flagrant disregard for
Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and
seizures the better.
So, if there is something incriminating -- or at least politically
damaging
-- in Clinton's emails, it's a safe bet that at least the NSA and
maybe the FBI, as well, knows. And that could make life difficult for
a Clinton-45 presidency. Inside the Beltway, we don't say the word
"blackmail," but the potential will be there. The whole thing needs to
be cleaned up now before the choices for the next President are locked in.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It
may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publication arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served
at CIA from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to that of George
H. W. Bush, and was one of five CIA "alumni" who created Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003.
Related Stories
White House Struggles to Explain Clinton Email Flap By Anita Kumar,
McClatchy Newspapers | ReportClinton Proposes Campaign Finance Reform
While Raking in Millions From Wall Street Since 2008 By Candice Bernd,
Truthout | ReportClinton vs. Sanders: Who Do Progressives Choose?
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Report
Show Comments
