Hillary Clinton's secret email servers

Hillary Clinton used her own clandestine email servers to handle much of her email communications while she was the Secretary of State.  It was both illegal and improper.  And when she was caught, she excused her conduct with a series of dishonest pronouncements.  Her obfuscation is probably related to the many unanswered questions about the Benghazi terrorist attack, and the phony cover story that was issued by the State Department immediately thereafter.

It may also have a lot to do with uranium.

Valuable clues and historical timelines are hidden in Hillary's private email servers — if those servers haven't already been scrubbed.  We can safely presume that the establishment and configuration of the servers (and the scrubbing) were not done by Mrs. Clinton herself, therefore a genuine conspiracy is afoot.

There is only one reason for Mrs. Clinton's behavior, and that is deception.

Subtopics on this page:

Overviews

Timely news and commentary

President Obama discusses the Clinton email scandal, April / May 2016

The Inspector General's report, 2018

Hillary Clinton's use of file-wiping software

Press conference, March 10, 2015

Press conference, August 18, 2015


Related topics:

Benghazi

The most opaque administration in history

The FBI seems to avoid any evidence against Hillary Clinton

Numerous other Clinton scandals and assorted baggage

The Clinton index page






Background, overview and recap articles:

(Scroll down for timely news, or click here.)


The Benefits of Being Blue When Facing the Justice System.  The FBI published a transcript of former Director James Comey's July 5, 2016, televised press conference titled "Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton's Use of a Personal Email System" easily obtainable by Silicon Valley, the media and anyone who seeks the truth.  Comey stated, "From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received."  That's a sharp contrast to what Clinton told voters months prior during the Feb. 4, 2016, Democratic debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, where she said, "I never sent or received any classified material."  And the opposite of what she's telling us now.  The FBI's probe into Clinton's unlawful servers found "eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification ... Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."

Not Just The FBI: Institutions Across The Board Have Forfeited America's Trust.  In 2015, Hillary Clinton was subpoenaed to preserve her home-brewed email server.  Following the subpoena, her email management company Platte River Network wiped the server clean, and employees sent an email with the subject line stating, "Hillary cover-up operation work ticket archive cleanup."  In 2016, as the FBI was investigating the server, multiple people in the Hillary Clinton orbit were granted immunity.  Cheryl Mills, who was a witness in the investigation, was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.  Compare that to the FBI raids on Trump's lawyers where long-standing norms of attorney-client privilege were thrown out the window.  Hillary Clinton's top aide told the FBI that she wasn't aware of the private server, yet she had her own email account on it.  We also know that then-FBI Director James Comey already had a draft letter prepared to exonerate Clinton even before she was interviewed.  Then, shortly before the 2016 election, it was revealed that Clinton's emails were found on a laptop shared by Abedin and her husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner.  Not a single person was ever held accountable for the lies, the deceit, and the illegal server.

The Supreme Court and the Electoral Coup.  [Scroll down]  Then there was the outrageous saga of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband and ex-president Bill who played tag team in shaking down foreign governments for nearly a billion dollars, which got shoveled into the Clinton Foundation.  All the while Secretary Clinton flagrantly violated U.S. Code § 1924 that prohibits the private storing of classified documents and confidential state matters, which she circumvented by use of an unsecure private server and email system.  That was obviously implemented to cover up her conflicts of interest while serving as secretary.

Since 2016, all that has mattered to most journalists, bureaucrats and other Democrats is getting their power back.  Didn't Hillary, her aides, Obama and many other bureaucrats and diplomats continually violate the nation's security laws by corresponding on a non-secure personal computer for four years?  Didn't her use of the private server jeopardize national security?  The purpose of the private server was clearly to subvert the law and allow her to hide information from the public and the government that they were entitled to.  It allowed her to delete over 30,000 emails without repercussions because the Obama Administration didn't care about the law, only power.  Shouldn't Hillary and others have been prosecuted for these serious violations or were they special and above the law?

I Am the Anonymous Whistleblower.  [Scroll down]  I am the anonymous whistleblower who blew the whistle on the Hillary Clinton corruption.  Travelgate.  Cattle futures.  Whitewater, and the missing records of the Rose Law Firm.  The Uranium One transfer of American uranium to Russian interests while Bill scandalously was getting paid huge speaking fees.  How she joked and giggled about successfully defending a monster who had raped a child.  How she sent the deceitful Susan Rice on four television talk shows in one day to lie to the American people about the real cause of the Benghazi massacre that saw our ambassador murdered, with Rice attributing the catastrophe to a stupid and unwatchable short YouTube video that almost no one ever viewed, even as Hillary secretly was emailing her daughter about the real and true cause of the disaster: an Arab Islamist jihad attack timed to coincide with September 11.  How Hillary was using her email account illegally, endangering the foreign policy of the United States by emailing confidential and highly classified documents in channels that exposed them to being hacked and intercepted by our enemies, even as she maintained a private server in her home bathroom.  How, when she was called upon to produce those emails, she destroyed 33,000 of them — an outright spoliation felony that would have landed any other American in prison long-term.  How she lied to us, as though we all are idiots, telling us that those spoliated emails dealt with things like her yoga classes and buying Chelsea a wedding dress — 33,000 emails for yoga and a dress.

Squeaky clean, huh?  Obama forgot about these 25 scandals.  [#2] Obama knew about Hillary's private email server.  As WND reported, five days after the New York Times disclosed the existence of Clinton's private email server, Obama told CBS News on March 7, 2015, that he learned about it at "the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports."  That was not true, because Obama himself had exchanged emails with Clinton on the server.  And he even used a fake name, for reasons never explained.  The White House later claimed Obama meant to say he did know of the server, just not the details.

What Is Justice for McCabe?  Hillary Clinton checked every box for a violation of the Espionage Act.  So much so that, in giving her a pass, the FBI figured it better couch her conduct as "extremely careless," rather than "grossly negligent." [...] In point of fact, the careless/negligent semantic game was a sideshow.  Mrs. Clinton's unlawful storage and transmission of classified information had been patently willful.  In contemptuous violation of government standards, which she was bound not only to honor but to enforce as secretary of state, she systematically conducted her government business by private email, via a laughably unsecure homebrew server set-up.  Her Obama administration allies stress that it was not her purpose to harm national security, but that was beside the point.  The crime was mishandling classified information, and she committed it.

The Deep State Will Face Justice Soon!  Right?  Today, treason and our two-tier justice system are casually discussed as inescapable facts of today's political landscape.  Heads up for those desperately trying to put the blindfold back on Lady Justice.  If a layered legal system is what we have, it has nothing to do with justice — that's anarchy.  And these smug criminals not only revel in their immunity, but rub our noses in it.  Take for example when Hillary Clinton literally laughed out loud at a question about her email investigation — had to wipe her eyes, she laughed so hard.  She laughed at us, at America, for being so clueless as to think she'd ever answer to our laws.  And she's still laughing, because she's right:  she's untouchable.  The consensus is that even though we know that the first email investigation was rigged by the FBI to clear Hillary, no one will reopen the case.

Trump can change history by declassifying three Obama-era documents.  [Scroll down]  The final Obama-era tranche that requires declassification concerns Hillary Clinton's email controversy — a highly classified set of documents that FBI agents identified as important and necessary in the investigation into whether she violated the law by transmitting classified emails on her unsecured private server.  As I wrote last week, the agents never got to review those documents in 2016 before then-FBI Director James Comey unilaterally decided not to seek criminal charges against Mrs. Clinton.  The Justice Department's internal watchdog in 2018 provided Congress a classified annex explaining how the FBI intended to examine that secret evidence, but never did.  Sources who have seen the annex say it contains explosive revelations about what really happened with Clinton's emails and the national security concerns that her conduct raised.

Hillary Ruins the Plan.  [Scroll down]  Upon becoming President Obama's secretary of state, Clinton improperly set up a private, non-secure system for email communications.  It featured her own personal server, stored in her home and, later, maintained by a private contractor.  Secretary Clinton used this private email system for all of her official State Department communications, notwithstanding that doing so (a) violated government regulations (which, as the department head, she was responsible for enforcing); (b) violated governmental record-keeping and record-production obligations imposed by federal law; and (c) made it inevitable — due to the nature of her responsibilities — that streams of classified information would flow through and be stored in the non-secure system.  This lack of security meant that top-secret intelligence — some of it classified at the highest levels, some of it involving Clinton's communications with the president of the United States and other top national-security officials — became accessible to people who were not cleared to see it.

Andrew McCabe is the new Joe McCarthy.  Simple fairness was not the hallmark of the Comey-McCabe era.  No disinterested observers think the Bureau's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server was treated the same way as the amorphous charges against the Trump campaign.  That bias wasn't the fault of FBI field agents.  Comey pulled the investigation away from them and gave it to his inner circle.  They were men on a mission.  It was not a mission for blind justice.  Their double standards were clear when they passed out immunity to all Hillary's top aides without demanding full testimony in return, when they destroyed Clinton staffers' computers and cell phones without preserving the evidence, and when they wrote a memo clearing Mrs Clinton before she had been interviewed.  Comey, whose incompetence is rivaled only by his smug self-righteousness, then held a press conference that both smeared and cleared Hillary.  It smeared her with evidence that should never have been revealed unless she was charged.  It cleared her by whitewashing the crimes she should have been charged with.

Six Times the Obama Administration Should Have Appointed Special Counsel.  [#1] The Hillary Clinton email scandal:  What about this scandal wasn't tainted?  Obama's former secretary of state and heir apparent to the Oval Office is caught violating federal transparency laws by hosting a private email server — which was only discovered as a result of the Benghazi investigation (which they were also stonewalling). Over 30,000 emails were discovered to have been deleted.  Phones were smashed with hammers... Obama personally communicated with Hillary via this private email, with a pseudonym of his own... FBI Director James Comey had drafted Hillary's exoneration letter before even interviewing her.  We now know that FBI investigator Peter Strzok, who was investigating both Hillary and Trump, had personally softened the language on the exoneration statement.  Right around the same time, he was telling fellow investigator and lover Lisa Page that he would stop Trump from getting elected president.  What difference at this point does it make, right?  Everything about that investigation was tainted.  A special counsel was needed as soon as the private server was discovered.  But, Obama had to protect his heir apparent, and therefore his legacy, and so the investigation was run by pro-Hillary/anti-Trump partisans who had no business doing so.

The FBI, Hillary's computers, and the Russians:
[#1] Doesn't anyone find it strange that the FBI indicted 12 Russians for hacking computers that the DNC and Hillary refused to let agents see?  James Comey, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "The bureau requested, but was denied direct access to the Democratic National Committee's email servers and other hacked devices as part of its probe of Russian hacking."
[#2] Hillary Clinton, either directly or indirectly, ordered her computers to be wiped clean and all her phones to be broken up.  Clinton's I.T. team used the open source cleaning software BleachBit to wipe the computer systems "so even God couldn't read them," according to South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy.
[#3] The Washington Free Beacon reported that CNN confirmed that the Hillary campaign staff destroyed campaign cell phones with hammers.  The Washington Examiner said a contractor for Clinton deleted subpoenaed emails and refused to answer the critical question from the FBI on what he did and why.
[#4] Now the mystery takes us to the ultimate question: if the FBI never had access to the DNC or Hillary campaign computers or cell phones, how could the FBI identify the 12 Russians indicted just before the summit?
[#5] The Daily Caller reported that the FBI agreed to destroy Cheryl Mills's laptop as part of an immunity deal.  However, the FBI agents charged with the destruction refused.  There is no indication that the FBI or the Mueller investigation has done anything with the computer.  What a fantastic twist that the supposed good guys can't or won't see what is going on in front of them.  There are 33,000 emails destroyed while under subpoena, yet nothing happens.

Did Clinton & Obama's use of private email open a door to Chinese intelligence?  Did Clinton & Obama's use of private email, and her routing of govt comms illegally through an unsecured server in her home, open a door to Chinese intelligence?  I think the probability is HIGH.  If so, we are in uncharted territory. [...] It's bizarre that Obama & Clinton would use private email accounts to traffic classified information and comms.  To me, it suggests that they wanted a SECRET channel to conceal communications.  Sorry, but that's NOT normal.  It's also VERY risky.

Could Hillary Clinton still face charges over her emails?  Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information is getting another look with the release Thursday of a Justice Department inspector general report scrutinizing the FBI's investigation into whether she committed crimes using a private email server as secretary of state.  Although it would be controversial, the Justice Department is able to reopen the Clinton email case, and experts say President Trump's 2016 adversary arguably could be charged until March 2025 — after Trump would leave office even if he wins a second term.  Sloppy workers, leakers, whistleblowers, and spies face a variety of criminal charges for mishandling classified records.  But there are leading options available to prosecutors, with varying statutes of limitations.

Progressives on the Brink.  If it is true that President Obama ordered Attorney General Lynch and Director Comey to avoid bringing charges against candidate Clinton and to spy on the Trump campaign with the intention of throwing the election to Clinton, and if high officials at the FBI knowingly requested a FISA warrant on the basis of evidence known to be false, these actions will represent the most serious political crimes in the history of the country.

In Politicized Justice, Desperate Times Call for Disparate Measures.  If you or I had set up an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws; if we had retained and transmitted thousands of classified emails on this non-secure system; if we had destroyed tens of thousands of government records; if we had carried out that destruction while those records were under subpoena; if we had lied to the FBI in our interview — well, we'd be writing this column from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth.  Yet, in a feat of dizzying ratiocination, Director Comey explained that to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be to hold her to a nitpicking, selective standard of justice not imposed on other Americans.

Does equal justice under the law exist in America today?  According to the Washington Post ("How Clinton's email scandal took root," March 27, 2016), Hillary Clinton used an unsecured server as her primary server for State Department emails.  Documents released on Dec. 29, 2017, by the U. S. Department of State in response to Judicial Watch's FOIA request revealed classified material was found on Anthony Weiner's laptop.  He was the husband of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's former deputy chief of staff.  Have either of them come before a grand jury to determine if they ought to be charged?  No, but the Washington Times reports that Machinist Mate 1st Class Kristian Saucier, a Navy veteran, took pictures of a submarine control panel, which is considered classified information, and went to jail.  I believe Hillary Clinton lied continually to the public about how many devices she used to email State Department information, about the unsecured server, sending classified emails over an unsecured server and destroying 33,000 emails.  She was never interviewed under oath by the FBI.  This action protected her from prosecution for lying under oath, but Michael Flynn was charged for lying to the FBI.  In December 2017, Judicial Watch released documents showing the Obama State Department made a deal with Hillary Clinton to hide her call logs and schedules.  An average American's life and reputation would be destroyed if they acted similarly.

Comey Joins Stormy as Latest Porn Star to Target Trump.  First, he made a devastating case for prosecuting Hillary Clinton for her reckless disregard for national secrets using her illegal bathroom email server.  Yet, in the same press conference, announced he was giving her a pass on all of her crimes.  We have since learned that he and the entire cabal of Clinton cronies at the FBI and Department of Justice rigged not only that investigation but also the separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation.  Remember, the Clinton Foundation investigation centered on compelling evidence that the Clinton Cartel was using the foundation for a global shakedown and extortion racket.  They were raking in hundreds of millions in "speaking fees" and other donations in exchange for favors that could be performed far into the future — assuming, of course, that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for the White House.

The Real Collusion Story.  [Scroll down]  It is impossible to paste a classified document into an unclassified email accidentally, because the three computer systems (Unclassified, Confidential/Secret, and Top Secret) are physically separate networks, each feeding into an independent hard drive on the user's desk.  If a classified document appears in an unclassified email, then someone downloaded it onto a thumb drive and manually uploaded it to the unclassified network — an intentional act if ever there was one.  One of Clinton's emails suggests that downloading and uploading material in this fashion was a commonplace activity in her office. [...] The FBI recovered one email, for example, that contained a "C" in parenthesis in the margin — an obvious sign that the corresponding paragraph was classified "Confidential."  When an agent personally interviewed Clinton, on July 2, he showed her the document and asked whether she understood what the "C" meant.  For anyone who has ever held a security clearance, "C's" in the margins are more ubiquitous than "C's" on water faucets — and no more baffling.  But Clinton played the ditzy grandmother.  She had simply assumed, she said, that the "C" was marking an item in an alphabetized list.

Hillary's Espionage and the Statute of Limitations.  The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars developing, deploying, and protecting its internet protocol router networks to enable authorized government officials to conduct the business of government, properly exchange information, and intelligence, up to and including information classified SECRET, with others in the government (and their contractors) who are authorized and entitled to have it.  Mrs. Clinton purposely avoided using the government's networks through the use of a homebrew server.  That she found a way to transmit countless classified documents, up to and including special access program material, to her personal server has been made public and is not in question.  The former Democratic presidential candidate disclosed that she and her aides had deleted more than 30,000 emails she deemed "personal." [...] When the FBI retrieved the spools of microfilm, the Alger Hiss "Pumpkin Papers" printed out to a stack four and a half feet tall.  Hillary Clinton and the FBI have learned much from the Alger Hiss case.  The American public will not be able to read a transcript of Hillary Clinton's interview with the FBI, because the bureau did not transcribe it.  Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton was also not placed under oath during the three-and-a-half-hour interview.  When Mrs. Clinton wasn't placed under oath, she could not be charged with lying to the FBI, as Alger Hiss was eventually charged with and convicted of.

Three Times Barack Obama Attempted to Obstruct Justice.  Obama sent strong signals to police and the judiciary about how he wanted certain cases resolved.  While he was more subtle about it than the bull-in-a-china-shop Trump, his desires were no less clear.  Let's start with the most egregious example, his attempt on April 10, 2016, to influence the decision on whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information by setting up her own email server.

Here's what to do with Hillary.  All the evidence, thus far, is that Hillary has committed grave offenses with respect to national security.  Her lieutenants appear just as guilty of criminal acts. [...] Hillary, and her associates abused classified documents.  These range from the lowest level of Confidential to the highest level of Top Secret - Special Access Program.  In between are Secret and Top Secret.  It is important to recognize that these documents were removed, without authorization and without secure protection, from secure facilities.  Such removal is itself a crime.  An even greater crime is replicating and exposing Special Access information.  Replicating, or exposing, Special Access documents is espionage!

Hillary's Actions Deserve a Special Prosecutor.  Indeed, Trump's senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told MSNBC Tuesday [11/22/2016] that "he doesn't wish to pursue these charges."  If true, this would abandon the pledge that Trump made to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who chanted "Lock her up!" at his rallies and the 61.9 million voters who sent Trump to Washington to purify Hillary's ethical Superfund site.  Hillary auctioned off public favors as if the Clinton Foundation were Sotheby's and abused state secrets so flagrantly that her maid reportedly printed out classified documents for the former secretary of state to read.  According to the New York Post's Paul Sperry, this may have included the Presidential Daily Brief, the most top-secret document in Washington.  Letting Hillary off the hook, yet again, will not only permit her to pay no price for her massive corruption, relentless lies, and shockingly high crimes.  If she gets away with this, it will confirm once and for all that, like slavery, equal justice under law is gone with the wind.

Obama Says He's Had A Scandal-Free Administration.  Here Are 11 of His Scandals.  [#7] Hillary's email scandal.  Clinton's use of a private email server that was unapproved and unsecured has been written about extensively, but it is also Obama's scandal as well, since it has been revealed that not only did Obama know about her private email server, he also communicated with her under the use of a pseudonym.  If their email exchanges involved classified information, then Obama also would have violated the Espionage Act.

Top 6 Hillary Emails We've Yet to See:  Strangely, the Obama Administration is Stonewalling Them.  Only the most ignorant of partisan ideologues could possibly believe that Hillary's private email server, her illegally deleted emails, her mishandling of classified information, and her serial lies about the entire matter were anything but an attempt to cover up criminal activity.

Email controversy dogs Clinton to convention.  The biggest impediment to Hillary Clinton's run for the White House is the controversy that has dogged her presidential campaign from the start:  her use of a private email server as secretary of State.  Republicans have hammered Clinton over the issue, and the persistence has taken a terrible toll on her poll numbers.  Only 28 percent of Americans view her as honest, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll earlier this month.  Sixty-seven percent view her as untrustworthy, a 5-point spike since just last month.  That's a big change from the spring of 2015, when only 45 percent of Americans judged her as untrustworthy.

10 Fun Facts: Hillary Clinton's Email Scandal.  [#4] The legal description of this behavior is termed "anticipatory obstruction of justice," and the punishment is up to 20 years in prison.

A conspiracy of silence:
The Worst Part Of The Email Scandal.  The most amazing part of this entire scandal is that Mrs. Clinton maintained the email and personal server for the four years she was Secretary of State and it never became public.  It was not until the State Department turned over eight emails to the House Benghazi Committee in August, 2014, that the world learned of clintonemail.com.  This was more than five years after the domain was established in January, 2009, during Mrs. Clinton's approval process in the U.S. Senate.  Mrs. Clinton worked for four years in the Obama Administration, and judging by the amount of emails she turned over (not to mentioned the unknown destroyed emails), she received a substantial number and sent a substantial number of emails (maybe upwards to 100,000).  But not one person said anything publicly about the fact that Mrs. Clinton was not using a government email address to send her government email.

Who is lying about Benghazi? Hillary Clinton or State Department?  Last March, when Hillary Clinton made her first public comments on the secret email system she maintained while secretary of state, she took care to say she had turned over everything to the State Department.  "I ... provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related," Clinton told reporters.  "I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and ... the State Department will be able, over time, to release all of the records that were provided."  The message was clear.  Clinton had turned over everything, and the State Department would make it all public.  Then State sent Clinton's emails that concerned Libya to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  Chairman Trey Gowdy immediately expressed skepticism about the claim that everything had been turned over.  "There are gaps of months and months and months," Gowdy said.  Gowdy's suspicions appear to have been confirmed.

Hillary Clinton: the gold standard of flawed candidates?  [Scroll down]  She had unsubstantiated intelligence sent to her private email system; from an address her lawyers said did not exist when she was at State.  That was a lie.  She claims to be the most transparent (chuckle) person in public life, yet we find little nuggets every day about her non-profit failing to disclose donations, botching tax forms, and allegedly being the nexus for foreign governments to cash in on their favors from their donations to the Foundation.  She had a private email system, which she used to conduct all her business while at the State Department, even though it was pretty much against government regulation to do so — and served as judge and jury for emails on that server that were work-related and personal.  Oh, and she deleted the personal emails and wiped the server clean.

GOP: Hillary Clinton must turn over her email server.  You see, right now there is no way for us to know whether we have all of the State Department communications that rightfully belong to the American people.  The only way to truly know is by having access to Secretary Clinton's personal server.  Why is this so important?  Because these communications may help us answer vital questions.  We need to know why the security at our embassy was left inadequate.  Why were requests for additional security denied?  Why was our response not sufficient?  Why were some members of the administration slow to acknowledge a terrorist attack had actually occurred?  It is simply unacceptable for so many questions to remain unanswered.  And it is unjust and simply wrong for anyone to withhold evidence that may lead to the answers.

Hillary Clinton's secret mess.  Plainly, Clinton didn't want anyone snooping around her virtual file cabinet.  Who does?  But this isn't the point.  When you are secretary of state and are mulling a run for president, you steer clear of anything and anyone remotely questionable.  No one should know this better.  Questions that merit serious consideration include whether the Clinton server was secure.  Clinton insists that it was because her New York home, where the server lives, is protected by the Secret Service.  Given the optional sobriety of agents these days, this is less than reassuring.  Then, too, hacking doesn't require on-site handling.

Hillary's email scandal is about privilege.  "For any government employee, it is that government employee's responsibility to determine what's personal and what's work-related," Hillary Clinton said in her March 10 press conference called to address mounting concerns over her use of a private email system for official use during her four years as Secretary of State.  The phrase "any government employee" made it sound as if Clinton's actions were perfectly normal — no different than anybody else.  In reality, Clinton's actions reflect her sense of privilege, a broader problem for her presidential ambitions than the email scandal itself.

Advice for conservatives about Hillary Clinton email scandal.  The Clintons are synonymous with scandal:  Whitewater.  Rose Law firm.  Trading pork bellies.  Travelgate and now the 2016 presidential wannabee is up to her political eyeballs in another scandal.  This email scandal is a big story with lots of legs:  Did Mrs. Clinton break the law?  Was she hacked?  Is President Obama complicit?  Did Hillary Clinton use the State Department connection to fill the coffers of the Clinton Foundation and will those funds find their way into her presidential campaign?

New scandals and reasons to wonder if Hillary is hiding something.  The Hillary Clinton e-mail controversy is a reminder of one inescapable fact:  She comes with baggage. [...] How could anyone serve four years as secretary of state with no official e-mail account, instead conducting business from a private address with its own domain and server?  The answer is:  Deliberately.  The only reason for Clinton to go through the trouble of setting up this system — rather than just call the State Department's version of the IT help desk — would be to ensure that nobody got to rummage freely through her communications, personal or official.  She must have wanted to be able to decide which e-mails would become part of the historical record and which wouldn't.

Benghazi babe at clinton email dot com.  If you've been busy leading a full and rich life and missed this week's excitement here it is in a nutshell:  on the day of her confirmation hearing for the position of secretary of state, Hillary Clinton set up an internet server in her home (purchased under an apparent pseudonym "Eric Hoteham").  Perhaps the domain was even run out of two commercial web hosting firms, instead of the home server:  For her entire term at the department she exclusively used this unprotected email server, utilizing at last count about 9 different email addresses for all her Internet communications.  These entire addresses end in clintonemail [dot] com, which signaled to anyone reading the message that this was not sent on a government server.  This tactic allowed her to avoid disclosure of her correspondence to Freedom of Information Act and other document production requests, including Congressional inquiries.

Hillary Milhous Clinton.  Since 2005, the United States State Department has had very clear rules that employees cannot use personal email for official business.  In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent out an internal directive reminding State Department employees that they could not use personal email addresses for government business.  Likewise, she removed a United States Ambassador for using personal email for government work.  Now we are learning that prior to becoming Secretary of State in 2009, Hillary Clinton set up a personal email server in her home.  She used that email address for all of her government business and her personal business.  She helped plan her daughter's wedding with that email address.  She received important State Department communications with that email address.  For six years she violated State Department policy.

Dems Spin Furiously for Hillary.  Democrats are circling the wagons to shield their likely 2016 presidential nominee after it was revealed that Hillary Clinton transacted sensitive government business using her personal email during her time as America's top diplomat.  The Benghazi bungler, the nation has learned, set up an email system worthy of a James Bond movie villain when she became U.S. secretary of state in 2009.  Mrs. Clinton used private instead of government email and even established her own private email server that has been traced back to her Chappaqua, N.Y., home address.

How Many Straws on Hillary's Back?  As secretary of state, Clinton used personal e-mail accounts on her own private, unsecured server in a way that was designed to avoid transparency.  But for a government official, communicating without an electronic trail is both unethical and illegal.  Promising when caught to turn over government correspondence is not quite the same as making such communications available from the get-go.  Note that Clinton's private, non-government server domain was not for secondary accounts; it was her sole e-mail account during her tenure in the Obama administration.  The only logical implication is that Clinton was trying to shield her communications from later public scrutiny — and from possible scandal or subpoenas.  And it largely has worked.  What is missing from discussion of this scandal is that the secretary of state for four years freelanced with private e-mail addresses — and that everyone in the administration who received her e-mails knew it, and no one cared.

Early Onset Clinton Fatigue.  She burned the tapes.  Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate.  Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun.  Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon.  She saw.  She learned.  Today you don't burn tapes.  You delete e-mails.  Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual:  "I didn't see any reason to keep them."  After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone.  How do we know that?  She says so.

Hillary Clinton's Questionable Process for Sorting Work Emails.  Hillary Clinton asked the public to trust her during a recent press conference at the United Nations, when she stated that she has already complied with transparency laws by turning over all public records she generated as Secretary of State.  She had no business making that claim.  A Time magazine report about the process used to identify public records in her possession shows that she cannot possibly know if she is in compliance with the law.  And juxtaposing her process with the words used in her press conference shows her core claim to be misleading.

Team Hillary changes its story on email deletions.  "That's my story, and I'm sticking to it" worked for Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, but Hillary Clinton's undeclared presidential campaign is taking a different approach to explaining how thirty-some thousand e-mails on her personal e-mail server (that also handled her official correspondence) ended up deleted.  Following her U.N. press conference last week, her office released a nine-page "fact sheet" that explained how the deletion process is supposed to have worked.

The Clintons' Criminal Board of Trustees.  [Scroll down]  More recently Hillary revealed that all her government emails from her time at the State Department were routed through her own personal Internet server and that tens of thousands of the emails that happened to be U.S. government property were deleted.  Emails were deleted while subject to a congressional subpoena from the Benghazi Select Committee.  This suggests Mrs. Clinton is guilty at a minimum of a species of obstruction of justice known as spoliation of evidence.

Comey grabbed authority he did not have to clear Hillary Clinton.  To begin with, Hillary Clinton has every right to be furious with Comey for holding his unprincipled news conference back in July 2016 where he announced she would not be charged over the issues surrounding her home-brewed server.  But he then went on to lay out a damning case against her recklessness and carelessness with classified material, even though it is highly unethical for anyone in law enforcement to lay out a case against someone who is not going to be charged.  What was truly outrageous, though, was Comey grabbing authority he did not have in announcing Hillary would not be charged.  He is the FBI director, not a prosecutor.  His job is to investigate and present his findings to a prosecutor, in this case, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Obama's Guilty Contentment.  At least from the time she became secretary of state, Hillary Clinton used a private email system — "Clintonmail.com" — for official business.  She and her staff routinely sent top-secret information via that system to each other.  That information included "SITK" — Special Intelligence Talent Keyhole — intelligence information as well as "SAP" — Special Access Program — information.  There are no higher levels of classification our government uses to protect secrets than SITK and SAP.  Top-secret information — under an executive order signed by Obama — is defined as information the disclosure of which can severely damage the security of the United States.  Each of those emails was a violation of 18 US Code Section793(f), a felony carrying the penalty of ten years in jail.  Clinton's email system, according to internet security experts I know, didn't even have the rudimentary security features found on gmail.  Any foreign power or terrorist group could have — and must have — tapped into her system and learned our most closely-guarded secrets.

The Democrats' Long History of Making Incriminating Documents Disappear.  Then-FBI Director James Comey let Clinton off the hook because, he said later, she lacked "evil intent."  In making that judgment, Comey apparently failed to consider that spoliation of evidence — "the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, fabricating, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding" — is a modus operandi of the Clintons and their associates, and has been for four decades.

Scandal, Corruption, Lawbreaking — And So What?  The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus.  Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Did Barack Obama 'Obstruct Justice' in Clinton Email Case?  [Scroll down]  In the draft, Comey mentions that President Obama had communicated with Clinton while she served as secretary of state and "was on the territory of ... an adversary":  "We also assess that Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent," the draft statement reads.  "She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries.  That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary.  Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account."  By the time the July 5 statement was issued letting Clinton off the hook, any mention of emails made by Obama to Clinton's un-secure email account had been removed from Comey's statement, which is extremely fortunate for Obama, because if he did knowingly discuss classified information with Clinton through unsecured emails, he could also be investigated for violating federal laws forbidding such reckless activity.  And there's evidence Obama may have attempted to cover his tracks by having his e-mails sealed under the guise of executive privilege.

Clinton's River of Corruption.  [Scroll down]  Hillary Clinton's use of her private, unsecured email system to confer with her staff on Top Secret matters was confirmed by FBI Director James Comey in July, destroying her claim that she'd never sent or received classified information.  Long before that, I'd raised the obvious question of President Obama's involvement in that crime.  It had to go like this.  Hillary and her staff were using her unsecured email system exclusively.  They — both she and the staff — had to be communicating with our intelligence agencies that way, which would have brought about a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot question from the intel folks.  They would have had to have raised the obvious problem to their superiors up the line until it reached cabinet level.  Why hadn't Obama shut it down?  Simple.  As we know now from the WikiLeaks dumps of the Podesta emails, Obama was using her "Clintonemail.com" address to communicate with Clinton.

These are the times for which the Constitution was written.  This election presents us with the head of a criminal organization, a person who has already used her office of Secretary of State to solicit donations to her family's foundation, theoretically in exchange for access to the Secretary of State in policy issues.  Hillary Clinton is under investigation by the FBI for allowing access by foreign nations to state secrets by utilizing an unsecure email server that she would be able to control and unavailable to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  Hillary Clinton is also under investigation by the FBI for engaging in a pay-for-play scheme involving the Clinton Foundation as mentioned above.  The Clinton Foundation is also under investigation by the FBI in connection with the actions of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  Ties to the Clinton campaign have been (self-admittedly) engaged in vote rigging and encouraging illegal voting and inciting riots at Clinton's political opponent's rallies.  There has been collusion between the Department of Justice and the Clinton campaign.

Hillary Clinton's Top 17 Scandals and Controversies.  [#1] The E-mail Leaks:  Somehow Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin are so incompetent, Huma's ex-husband Anthony Weiner has 10,000 of them (along with 650,000 others).  These aren't just "weddings and yoga" e-mails as Hillary claims, but national secrets, including at least 60 confidential and 22 top-secret e-mail threads.  The difference between the two is that confidential is information that can hurt the person who possesses it, and top secret information is information that could cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security".  This is why the FBI case has been reopened, as this information was put on a compromised private server and then deleted to hide the information from the government and FBI.  This doesn't even cover any other content that is actually in the emails.

Why Hillary Clinton Is Such An Effective, Perpetual Liar.  We know that Hillary Clinton's secret e-mail server was highly illegal because it processed and stored classified government information on an unsecure system.  We know that much of this classified information originated with Clinton herself.  We know that she ordered at least one aide to break the law on her behalf by sending classified information over an unsecure system.  We know she has lied repeatedly about transmitting classified information on her server, at press conferences and once, incredibly, under sworn testimony.  We know that, although she insisted otherwise, Clinton deleted thousands of work-related e-mails.  We know that one of her aides-destroyed Clinton's mobile devices with a hammer, preventing a full forensic analysis of her e-mail usage.  We know that Clinton has lied about the FBI's own assessment of her previous lies.  And so forth.  Given this staggering level of criminal behavior, one might ask:  how has Clinton been able to defend herself?  The answer is:  lying.  For much more than a year Clinton has lied repeatedly and ceaselessly about her e-mail woes.  She has lied about the classified information on the server, she has lied about her recordkeeping, she has lied about the very lies she has previously told, she has lied so frequently that it is entirely possible she has come to believe some of her own lies.

Too Stupid To Rule.  We have enough of the details at this stage to have a rough idea how we got to this point.  They wanted to have a secret communication method that would be not be subject to government security and Freedom of Information Act requests.  They also figured that this secret system would be free from Congressional oversight.  After all, if no one knew it existed, then no one could ask any questions about what was on it. [...] Hilariously, it appears they came to the conclusion that having their own e-mail server meant that all the e-mail was magically hidden in the box in Hillary's bathroom.  Their subsequent attempts to erase the hard drives suggests they did not know that e-mail travels across networks and is also stored on the receiver's servers.  Those servers are usually on a network not controlled by the recipient.  They started to realize this at some point, which is why they smashed their phones and laptops. [...] There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved.

The Colossal Clinton Con.  This past year highlighted the Hillary I know in action.  The private server.  The classified emails on the unprotected server.  The destruction of laptops and phones with a hammer.  The actual risk to our national security and the lives of many, all for personal gain.  Many involved with this server holding not a whisper of a security clearance.  The bizarre immunity deals granted to just about everyone in her periphery when a grand jury had not even been impaneled.  The manipulation and the destruction of the emails while under a congressional subpoena.  The secret tarmac meeting between the Attorney General and Bill Clinton just before the FBI's curiously tortured findings were unveiled.

Hillary Clinton Email Scandal Explained.  Hillary Clinton is in the spotlight over the worst scandal for a presidential candidate since Watergate.  The FBI has a search warrant for Clinton aide Huma Abedin's laptop, obtained Sunday night after new emails surfaced in the law enforcement investigation of Abedin's husband Anthony Weiner for allegedly sexting with a minor.  The Hillary Clinton email scandal can seem complicated.  But it's easy to understand.  Here is the full story: [...]

13 Times Hillary Clinton Was A Truly 'Nasty Woman'.  [#13] All The Times She Acts Like She's Above The Law:  Hillary Clinton was instructed to be very, very careful with sensitive information and government secrets while serving as secretary of State, but instead she was "extremely careless."  Apparently her fast-and-loose approach to classified information rubbed off onto her staff.  E-mails reveal her staff repeatedly left sensitive documents in their hotel rooms and in cars while traveling abroad.  She also would repeatedly lose her Blackberry devices — which probably contained a lot of classified information.  After the news about her private server started to reach the ears of authorities, one of her State Department officials, Patrick Kennedy, tried to bribe the FBI into declassifying e-mails in order to save her from prosecution.

Clinton's Pretense That She Didn't Understand 'C' Was for 'Classified'.  So now Hillary finally knows what the "(C)" stands for in government documents:  It's Cartwright ... as in four-star Marine General James E. Cartwright, the retired 67-year-old former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the expendable federal official against whom laws protecting classified information actually get enforced. (C), see?  Oh wait — sorry.  I don't mean to confuse Mrs. Clinton by starting this second paragraph with "(C)".  After all, as she diva-'splained to the FBI, she could only "speculate" that "(C)" must have something to do with organizing paragraphs "in alphabetical order."  Speculation was necessary, she said, apparently with a straight face, because she didn't really know what "(C)" meant.

The Clinton Record.  Throughout her entire four-year tenure as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton never acquired or used a government email account.  Instead, she transmitted — in violation of government regulations — all of her official correspondences via a private email address that traced back to a secret, private, unsecured server that was housed at her New York residence.  And immediately after those emails were subpoenaed by Congress, Clinton instructed a team of her advisers to unilaterally delete, with no oversight, almost 32,000 of the roughly 60,000 emails in question.  Clinton claimed that her reason for having used only a personal email account, rather than both a personal and a government account, was that she found it "easier," "better," "simpler" and more convenient to "carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two."  It was eventually learned, however, that Mrs. Clinton in fact had used no fewer than 13 mobile devices to access emails on her private server, but the FBI was unable to obtain any of those devices in its investigation, in some cases because Clinton aides had been instructed to smash them with a hammer.

Hillary Clinton, who tells dreadful lies.  Today, it is the American people who have been burned, time and again, by Hillary Clinton's dreadful lies.  Let's review just a few examples of her serial dishonesty:  She lied repeatedly about her emails.  She lied when she said she had "turned over everything I was obligated to turn over" (FBI Director James Comey said the FBI "discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not among the group of 30,000 e-mails returned by Secretary Clinton to state in 2014").  She lied when she said there was "no classified material" in her private emails ... that there was nothing "classified at the time" ... and that there was nothing "marked classified" in her private emails — all of which the FBI director said were untrue.  And, to top it all off, she lied about her lies — declaring on national television that "Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people" — a claim The Post's Fact Checker gave "Four Pinocchios."

Hillary Clinton's Email: the Definitive Timeline.  Clip and save for future reference.

The Clearest (No Spin) Summary of FBI Report on Hillary Clinton Email.  The FBI could not review all of the Hillary Clinton emails under investigation because:
  •   The Clintons' Apple personal server used for Hillary Clinton work email could not be located for the FBI to examine.
  •   An Apple MacBook laptop and thumb drive that contained Hillary Clinton email archives were lost, and the FBI couldn't examine them.
  •   2 BlackBerry devices provided to FBI didn't have their SIM or SD data cards.
  •   13 Hillary Clinton personal mobile devices were lost, discarded or destroyed.  Therefore, the FBI couldn't examine them.
  •   Various server backups were deleted over time, so the FBI couldn't examine them.
  •   After State Dept. notified Hillary Clinton her records would be sought by House Benghazi Committee, copies of her email on the laptops of her attorneys Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were wiped with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn't review them.
  •   After her emails were subpoenaed, Hillary Clinton's email archive was also permanently deleted from her then-server "PRN" with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn't review it.
  •   Also after the subpoena, backups of the PRN server were manually deleted.

Hillary Coordinated With Democrats To Set Up Benghazi Hearing.  Amidst all the controversy over Hillary Clinton's private email server, one question seems to be ignored more than any other:  why?  Why would the Secretary of State set up a private server, in advance, if she knew she wasn't going to do anything wrong?  Why would she run all of her email through it, rather than running her corruption-related emails through a private server, keeping it walled off from her normal work?  The answer:  Hillary's paranoid.

If Hillary Is Corrupt, Congress Should Impeach Her.  In keeping with page one of the Clinton-media playbook, any scandal that emerges on Friday night is "old news" by Monday morning.  The press seeks to stretch this hidebound strategy by regarding as "old," and therefore stale and unworthy of attention, any new revelation tied to the e-mail debacle.  It's the gambit you'd expect, given Mrs. Clinton's failed attempt to destroy well over 30,000 e-mails, tens of thousands of which are now dribbling out for the first time.  Since the newly revealed e-mails put the lie to Clinton's always risible claim that these communications were unrelated to State Department business, they tend to be double-whammies.  First, their substance is stunningly corrupt, often showing how she and her staff ran the State Department as an annex of the Clinton Foundation, the enterprise Bill and Hillary used to monetize political influence to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Second, even the most innocuous of the e-mails that concern State Department business illustrate that Clinton brazenly lied to Congress and the public for over a year:  maintaining that the destroyed e-mails involved yoga, Chelsea's wedding, and other personal matters, not the operations of government.

Under Hillary, State and the Clinton Foundation were one seamless entity.  The Democratic nominee obviously didn't set up her server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets — that was incidental.  She set up the server to keep secret the details of the Clintons' private life — a life built around an elaborate and sweeping money-raising and self-promoting entity known as the Clinton Foundation.  Had Secretary Clinton kept the foundation at arm's length while in office — as obvious ethical standards would have dictated — there would never have been any need for a private server, or even private email.

What Happened This Week in the Clinton Corruption Chronicles.  First, we go back to her email problem.  She says it's all been resolved — nothing to see here.  But then the FBI finds another 15,000 documents related to her home-brew email server long after she had claimed that she had turned over all State Department-related emails.  So the appearance of a cover-up and further indicators of corruption grow.  This woman who so desperately wants to be president — anyone who craves elected office so strongly is obviously disturbed and therefore unfit — has clouds of shame from the 1980s she can't escape.  And the clouds get bigger and darker still, and they are clouds of her own making.  How can anyone with her history be qualified for any office?

The bribery standard.  The central problem with Hillary Clinton's emails was not the classified material.  It wasn't the headline-making charge by the FBI director of her extreme carelessness in handling it.  That's a serious offense, to be sure, and could very well have been grounds for indictment.  And it did damage her politically, exposing her sense of above-the-law entitlement and — in her dodges and prevarications, her parsing and evasions — demonstrating her arm's-length relationship with the truth.  But it was always something of a sideshow.  The real question wasn't classification but:  Why did she have a private server in the first place?  She obviously lied about the purpose.  It wasn't convenience.  It was concealment.  What exactly was she hiding?

The ultimate Clinton scandal.  The scandal of Hillary Clinton's private email server is in a sense the ultimate Clinton scandal.  It shows Hillary Clinton's heedless treatment of national security for corrupt personal reasons.  It shows her willingness to say anything to extricate herself from a fix.  Indeed, the scandal shows her pathological approach to facts.  She may believe her own lies.  One has the impression that she could pass a lie detector test on her multitudinous misrepresentations.  She lies like a criminal, without a conscience, to cover up her criminal wrongdoing.

Hillary Clinton short-circuited?  On the state secrets issue, she has told the public countless times that she never sent or received anything marked classified.  She could not have said that to the FBI, because even a novice FBI agent would have recognized such a statement as a trick answer.  Nothing is marked "classified."  The markings used by the federal government are "confidential" or "secret" or "top secret."  When Director Comey announced last month that the FBI was recommending against indictment, he revealed nevertheless that his agents found 110 emails in 52 email threads containing materials that were confidential, secret or top secret.  The agents also found seven email chains on her servers that were select access privilege, or SAP.  SAP emails cannot be received, opened or sent without knowing what they are, as a special alphanumeric code, one that changes continually, must be requested and employed in order to do so.  SAP is so secret that the FBI agents investigating Clinton lacked access to the code.  Could Clinton have legally received, opened, stored or sent a secret or top secret email without knowing it, as she has claimed?  In a word:  NO.

From Whitewater to Benghazi:  A Clinton-Scandal Primer.  [Scroll down]  During the course of the Benghazi investigation, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt learned Clinton had used a personal email account while secretary of state.  It turned out she had also been using a private server, located at a house in New York.  The result was that Clinton and her staff decided which emails to turn over to the State Department as public records and which to withhold; they say they then destroyed the ones they had designated as personal. [...] A May report from the State Department inspector general is harshly critical of Clinton's email approach, but Loretta Lynch announced on July 6 that the Justice Department would not pursue criminal charges, removing the threat of an indictment that could be fatal to her campaign.  But the scandal will remain a millstone around her neck forever.

Hillary Clinton:  Too Connected to Jail.  [Scroll down]  There are, however, people who are not cynical about the Clintons.  These are the people who were reading Mrs. Clinton's electronic correspondence which she made accessible through her quest for secrecy.  It did not occur to her that in keeping her email away from the prying eyes of those pesky oversight committees she made it available to anyone with the will and the means to hack into her various servers.  In one of my police assignments I was schooled in electronic surveillance methods by former special forces operators who had practiced those methods overseas.  To anyone knowledgeable in this arena, it is inconceivable that Mrs. Clinton's email wasn't being read in real time for her entire tenure as secretary of state.  For all practical purposes, the United States had no secrets during that time.  Mrs. Clinton's defenders will point to Comey's statement that the FBI found no evidence that her email was successfully hacked, but this is only because her laxity in protecting it made such evidence impossible to detect.  You might discover you've been burglarized if you come home to find your door kicked in or a window broken, but if you've left your door unlocked, and if the thief has been careful in his selection of the loot, you might never know you've been victimized.

Yup, She's Crooked.  Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to get this close to becoming president of the United States.  Aaron Burr was corrupt, but his treason didn't occur until after his presidential possibilities had dried up.  Ulysses Grant was a great man whose administration was riddled with corruption, but he wasn't personally involved.  Warren Harding wasn't a great man, but he wasn't party to the corruption in his administration either.  Hillary Clinton stands alone.  Her corruption has many dimensions.  It encompasses her personal, professional, and political life.  There are lots of overlaps.  Her use of a private email server engulfs all three aspects.

Hillary Signed on the Dotted Line — And Then Broke the Law.  The non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is executed by all who have access to classified and sensitive information.  It is beyond doubt that Hillary Clinton executed one of these while secretary of State.  It is also beyond doubt that she violated her NDA, the "special confidence and trust" that such access confers, and the law.  This standard NDA delineates the conditions and prohibitions of disclosing, storing and maintaining classified and sensitive compartmented information (SCI).  These documents repeatedly refer to the specific statutes under the laws that govern transgressions of these requirements as well as acknowledgement and awareness of the "special confidence and trust" that this access confers.  The signatory also agrees never to divulge classified or SCI material, to adequately protect classified and SCI material and to return all classified and SCI material in their possession under penalty of law.

Democrats, Have You No Shame?  Hillary Clinton set up her own email operation separate of the State Dept. and against government policy.  No one she worked with ever questioned her use of a private email address for critical government information, much of which was top secret.  The use of this email address did not come to light until a Congressional committee finally received long-withheld documents two years after she left office.  Clinton dumped emails and has been caught in lies about what was in the emails, whether she transferred all relevant emails, and the security of those emails. [...] No Democrat stood up and questioned her abhorrent behavior.  No one called her out.

Why Hillary Clinton Must Go To Jail.  In 1994, Hillary Clinton took questions under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.  Wearing a pink pantsuit, she offered what would become her customary mix of lies and defensiveness, admitting to something and then trying to shift the blame, denying that she had broken the law and then claiming ignorance.  It was an act that we would see over and over again for the next few decades, but back then it was still new when Hillary Clinton claimed that she couldn't remember anything, that the whole Whitewater affair was an invasion of her privacy and that she had never meant to do anything wrong.  Some twenty years later, we have spent the past few months witnessing the same performance.

Hillary Clinton:  Sandy Berger in Drag.  Gen. David Petraeus was prosecuted and convicted of merely mishandling classified material, having it in his house to aid a biographer writing a book.  The material never made the book and was returned.  It was never exposed to hackers, which Comey confirmed, or was made available to blackmail a future president.  Hillary exposed classified material to foreign hackers and governments on an unsecured server.

The Insidious Power of the Media Disinformation Campaign for Hillary Clinton.  While it is certainly true that the chief editor of a major newspaper or the producer of a network newscast has the ability to spike or kill a story, which is essentially their way of "ignoring" the news if you will, what is more subtle, deceitful — and dare I suggest corrupt — is their penchant to frame a story to fit a specific narrative.  They no longer report the news, but they do shape a message.  There is not a finer example of the media ignoring the facts and shaping a message than what we are witnessing regarding Hillary Clinton's email server, the classified material on that server, as well as the case of the missing emails.  The media have embraced the Clinton campaign's narrative that there is "nothing to see here," that there wasn't some "mishandling email controversy," at most, or repeat Secretary Clinton's own bogus statement, "using a personal e-mail was permissible" as "other Secretaries of State did the same thing."  Other excuses have been thrown against the wall to see if something will stick, such as, she was "trying to protect her privacy" or "she was clueless about how regular emails work on a conventional computer."

EXCLUSIVE — Darrell Issa:  There Is Enough Evidence to Indict Hillary Clinton.  Republican California Rep.  Darrell Issa said that there is enough evidence to indict Hillary Clinton for mishandling national security information on her private email server. [...] Issa said that while there is enough evidence to indict, the American people will have to play judge and jury in November's election.  "It's not even a high bar.  To be considered to be president of the United States, you are supposed to be completely free of this kind of treachery against your country," Issa said.

Hillary Clinton faces serious, even legal, potholes on the road to becoming Democratic candidate for president.  First, her mishandling of emails while secretary of state will not go away.  A new report from the State Department's inspector general makes it clear that Clinton broke the rules.  Among five recent secretaries of state, Clinton was the only one who refused to co-operate with the investigation.  This wouldn't be so bad if she hadn't misled everyone a year ago.  She claimed none of the thousands of emails on her personal server were classified.  The IG report maintains more than 2,000 were, indeed, classified.  Some were even "top secret".  Her excuse of "convenience" was also questioned, given she carried several devices and how she used them took effort and planning.  Clinton broke State Department rules.  But did she also break the law?  The FBI is investigating, leaving open the possibility Clinton could be indicted on criminal charges under state secret statutes.

The Lawyers Who Could Take Down Hillary Clinton's Campaign.  In February, a federal judge took the highly unusual step of ruling that State Department officials and aides to Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about her use of a private email server, a controversy that has dogged the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for more than a year.  In comments from the bench, a visibly frustrated Judge Emmet Sullivan complained about the fragmentary way that new revelations about Clinton's email use have come to light — largely through press reports and leaks and her shifting explanations for why she set up the server in her New York home rather than use an official ".gov" account when she was secretary of state.  "This is a constant drip... That's what we're having here, you know, and it needs to stop," Sullivan said.

Hillary Clinton:  The Unpopular, Corrupt, Shameless Habitual Liar Democrats Deserve.  [Hillary Clinton] has become the first presidential candidate of either gender to clinch a major party's nomination while under active FBI investigation.  That criminal probe — not a "security review" as she and her campaign have wrongly claimed — continues to produce serious new developments.  Based on her deliberate, national security-endangering conduct, as well as a string of clues and actions by federal investigators, it is entirely possible that a recommendation for criminal prosecution will be handed down in the coming weeks.  As America's top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton ordered the implementation of an improper email scheme that predictably culminated in the compromising of thousands of classified documents, including top secret and 'beyond top secret' material.  She ignored specific, personal warnings from State Department security officials about her reckless arrangement in 2009 and 2011, using her shockingly unsecure system throughout her four-year tenure as a means of thwarting public records requests and wielding total control over her correspondence.  When the existence of her private server was revealed, Clinton and her attorneys unilaterally deleted tens of thousands of messages, falsely stating that none of them were work-related.  She has verifiably and flagrantly lied about virtually every aspect of this scandal from the very beginning.

We can't reward Hillary Clinton with the White House for breaking all the rules.  In its report on how Hillary Clinton handled her "private" emails while serving as secretary of state, the State Department's inspector general (IG) has found that Hillary Clinton disregarded cyber security guidelines when she used a private computer server.  She continues to deny she did anything wrong and falsely claims she turned over "all" of her emails to the State Department after she left office.  In fact, she, or members of her team, deleted about 30,000 of them before an investigation of her practices began.

James Comey:  Enforcing the Law Requires Indicting Hillary Clinton.  The facts known about Secretary Hillary Clinton's actions surrounding the use of an unsecure private email server for conducting State Department business, show that she acted with reckless disregard of the security interests of the United States and violated some ten federal statutes.  Several are national security-related felonies, just three of which include:  1) disclosure of classified information (22 of which documents were Top Secret); 2) unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents; and 3) destruction of evidence (erasure of the hard drive and deletion of some 30,000 emails by Secretary Clinton), after a government investigation had commenced (Benghazi hearings began October 10, 2012).

4 things Hillary Clinton got wrong in her latest statement about those emails.  [Y]es, previous secretaries of state have used personal email addresses while in office — Colin Powell most notably and extensively.  But, and this is really important, Clinton is the first secretary of state to ever use a private email address exclusively to conduct her business.  Period.  That was and is unprecedented. [...] As for Clinton's assertion that she has turned over "all" of her emails, remember that Clinton deleted more than 31,000 emails that she deemed personal before ever turning anything over to the State Department.  There was no third party brought in to make judgments on what was entirely private and what might be closer to the professional line.  We have to, quite literally, take Clinton's word for it.

5 Reasons Hillary Clinton Isn't Fit To Be President.  [#4] She belongs in jail.  In America, no one is supposed to be "above the law."  Not you, not me, not the president of the United States.  Yet, if Hillary Clinton doesn't go to jail over having classified emails sent to her private server, it will be purely for political reasons.  She knew what she was doing was highly illegal from day one.  Not only are there people in jail for doing less than she has, any normal person with a government security clearance who did what she did would EXPECT to go to jail if he were caught.

From Whitewater to Benghazi:  A Clinton-Scandal Primer.  The email-server story seems to move in waves:  silence for a while, then an onslaught of news.  Late last Thursday [5/12/2016], it emerged that while Clinton hasn't spoken to the FBI yet, several of her top aides have.  (She has repeatedly said that she will cooperate if asked to speak.)  One of the aides to speak is Huma Abedin, one of Clinton's closest and longest-serving confidants.  It's not clear what other staffers have been interviewed.  Meanwhile, a judge ruled last week that the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch might be able to depose Clinton as part of a lawsuit over her use of private email — a matter that concerns not the national-security implications of a potentially vulnerable server, but whether Clinton actually complied with federal-records law in turning over her emails.

The Clinton Email Scandal Timeline.  I'm a political liberal, and up until a few months ago, I would have gladly supported Hillary Clinton.  I didn't pay much attention to Clinton's email scandal, and what I heard about it made me suspect that it was another Republican-led scandal that never amounted to much.  However, I eventually heard enough concerning news stories about it to make me want to take a closer look.  The more I learned, the more shocked and convinced I became that this was a very real and very serious scandal.

More background and overview:
Mens Rea and Hillary Clinton.  In connection with her February 1, 2013 departure from the State Department, Clinton was clearly responsible under the State Department's own records-management manual to prepare an inventory of personal papers and government materials, along with any proposal for retention of papers in the inventory for requisite State Department approval.  The purpose of the procedure was, by its own terms, to certify that the documentary materials proposed for removal could be removed without diminishing the official records of the department or violation of national security or other restrictions on disclosure.  The SF 312 requirements specifically encompassed in its coverage "Presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate."  Secretary Clinton did not comply with any of the SF 312 procedures upon her departure from the State Department, but rather, simply retained her private server. Her document retention included at least 22 TOP SECRET/SAP documents.  She continued to maintain the server in the basement of her Chappaqua, New York home.  In May 2013 she turned over the server to Platte River Networks that matriculated all of Clinton's emails to another server.  The emails were additionally backed up by a cloud-based backup server for recovery in the event the primary server failed.  Platte River Networks was not authorized to be a custodian of these government records.  For 22 months after Clinton's departure from State, the existence of the server was unknown to the vast majority of the federal government and the public at large.  Admittedly, some State Department personnel were aware of the server.  The existence of the server was first discovered by the Benghazi Special Committee in early 2015, and was brought to public by the New York Times on March 24, 2015.

Hillary's Sputtering Campaign.  Although the FBI has not finished its investigation and sent its results and recommendations to the Obama Justice Department, most of the media and public have learned enough about the e-mail/server scandal to conclude that had any mid-level State Department or intelligence-agency employee emulated Hillary Clinton's use of a private unsecured server — along with serial denials and lying about such use — he would have been fired and prosecuted. [...] What keeps Hillary out of jail, or at least a plea-bargain, is her political viability, first as the likely Democratic nominee, and second as a presumable winner over Trump.  But take either likelihood away, and she de facto loses exemption and becomes expendable — a fact that is well known to her and which cannot be an easy reality to face each morning.

Is It Time to Water the Tree of Liberty?  [Scroll down]  Without getting too deep in the technical weeds, let me try to explain this as simply as possible.  Hillary's server, and her computer, had an open 3389 port which allowed remote use of her tree system, called RDP or Remote Desktop Protocol, and that port is not secure in any way.  It also connects, as I understand it, the server system's various networks meaning that any computer, or email system networked through that server, as also easily accessed by the hackers.  To put it another way, the open 3389 port was easily accessible and open to the entire internet. [...] So, did Hillary Clinton commit espionage?  Because of her intentional efforts to store classified and above top secret documents away from government controlled secure systems, because she didn't provide even the most basic security on her unlawful private system, because she shared those documents with others who didn't have the proper security or any security clearance and because she intentionally disallowed government oversight, an Inspector General to be inside the State Department throughout her entire reign there... and as a result, her system was hacked, and those documents, including the SAP documents were then open and available to our friends and enemies alike... and because she obviously attempted to cover her tracks with regard to purging 30,000 emails, including every single email to or from her IT specialist, Bryan Pagliano... yes, Hillary committed espionage against the United States.

"Malicious intent" is not required to break the law in Hillary Clinton's case.  There's a new trend in the mainstream media's ongoing efforts to defend Hillary Clinton over her email scandal and you should be keeping your eyes open for more of it in the future.  When the question first came up, most liberal outlets went through the usual stages of denial and accommodation.  Initially it was all just some story cooked up by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.  Then, when the private bathroom server turned out to be a reality which could no longer be denied, the story was that it was simply personal information or routine business with her staff, along with Chelsea's wedding and baby shower plans which were none of our business.  We all saw how the story morphed from that point on until it was painfully obvious that there had been Top Secret material left lying around on the server outside the control of the government.

Clinton Email Server Greatest Intel Disaster in History.  Former frontline CIA Officer Scott Uehlinger says Hillary Clinton clearly broke the law with her private unprotected server.  Uehlinger explains, "What the Clintons rely on is most Americans don't really understand the security procedures.  So, they can throw up a lot of smoke and mirrors that confuses people and makes them think that this was not so much of a problem.  But people in the military and people in the intelligence community understand this better, and certainly it is even worse than it appears. ... The fact that she set up a private server, in and of itself, means she is guilty of a felony right there.  Obviously, by having a private server, she was conspiring to evade her signed sworn statements that she would uphold secrecy agreements.  The fact that she simply established that (private server) regardless of what was on it, she intended to go around and circumvent the law.  Now, we had more than 100 highly classified emails on the server, and the fact that this server is absolutely vulnerable to any Chinese, Russian or Iranian hacking, this is the greatest disaster or mishandling of classified information at the upper levels of the U.S. government in history.  There is no question about it."

Will the Wheels of Justice Grind Hillary?  Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus believes Hillary Clinton will get indicted.  So does former attorney general Michael Mukasey, a Republican who served in the George W. Bush administration, as does the Senate majority whip, John Cornyn of Texas.  Many — perhaps even most — Republicans believe the former secretary of state will face some sort of legal consequence for keeping classified information on her private email system.  Republicans cite the cases of national security adviser Sandy Berger, CIA director John Deutch, and General David Petraeus to show clear precedent for prominent officials facing consequences for mishandling classified information.  They point to the preponderance of public evidence clearly and indisputably showing a bevy of classified information was stashed on Clinton's home-brew server.

Hillary's 'classified' smokescreen hides real crime.  Since the beginning of the Clinton email scandal, the nation has been subjected to a political and criminal defense generated smokescreen.  The Clinton campaign has attempted to make the public believe that she is not guilty of anything because the information on her very unprotected server was not "marked as classified" or "classified at the time."  The applicable statute, 18 USC 793, however, does not even once mention the word "classified."  The focus is on "information respecting the national defense" that potentially "could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."  793 (f) specifically makes it a crime for anyone "entrusted with ... any document ... or information relating to the national defense ... through gross negligence (to permit) the same to be removed from its proper place of custody."  A jury (not a Democrat or Republican political administration) is, of course, the best body to determine gross negligence on the facts of this case.

New documents refute Hillary Clinton's secret email server timeline.  Documents confirm Hillary Clinton was using her secret email server before the March 18 start date she previously claimed, and the State Department had access to some of the messages all along but didn't notice, a conservative legal watchdog said Thursday [3/24/2016].  Judicial Watch, which has filed a host of lawsuits to try to pry loose Mrs. Clinton's emails, released a Feb. 13 exchange between Mrs. Clinton, the new secretary of state, and aide Cheryl Mills concerning Mrs. Clinton's desire for a secure BlackBerry to handle classified email traffic.  Last year, Mrs. Clinton indicated she started using her secret account on the clintonemail.com server she kept at her home in New York in March, two months after she was sworn in as secretary.

The Email Saga.  For alumni of U.S. national-security departments and agencies, Hillary Clinton's email saga is mind-numbing.  The publicly available information makes clear she and her aides violated so many elementary security prohibitions that alumni are speechless.  They wonder, had they done what she did, how quickly they would have lost their clearances and jobs and how extensive the criminal indictments against them would be.  By contrast, many who have never served in government or dealt with classified information see the affair as opaque, even overblown.  Certainly Clinton has worked hard to foster that impression.  Leaving political spin aside, and without delving into arcane legal analysis, which is it?  What did Clinton and her entourage actually do day-to-day, and what does it mean?

Is America Ruled By Law or Ruled by Power?  Hillary Clinton is a felon many times over.  Assuming the facts are as being reported — or that they are even a tenth of the severity of what has been reported — Hillary Clinton is guilty of multiple serious felonies stemming from her conscious choice to unlawfully hide her correspondence as Secretary of State on a "private" server that was kept in some dude's bathroom somewhere.  I use the term "private" only in the sense that it was non-governmental; every foreign intelligence agency, friend or foe, was reading it.  Only we American citizens can't see what was on it, and that's because much of it was highly classified material.  So she is a felon many times over.  Understand that this is not open to debate.  There is no "her side of the story."  There is no excuse nor harmless explanation.

Hillary's Email Recklessness Compromised Our National Security.  We could go on at length about Clinton's arrogance in setting up a homebrew communications network, an outrageous violation of the transparency standards that were her responsibility as secretary of state to enforce.  It was a familiar exercise in Clintonian self-dealing:  Anticipating running for president in 2016, she realized she was enmeshed in the Clinton Foundation's global scheme to sell influence for money, so she devised a way to avoid a paper trail.  Accountability, after all, is for peons:  The yoke of recordkeeping requirements, Freedom of Information Act productions, congressional inquiries, and the government's disclosure duties in judicial proceedings was not for her Highness.

Hillary Clinton's Secrets Contract Should [End] Her Candidacy.  Simply receiving at least two emails containing top secret material on the nonsecure private server she set up for herself, as we know she did, and for which the Justice Department is investigating her, is an obvious violation of that contract she signed with the federal government (and, considering the national security implications, with the American people themselves).  If it weren't for the steep slant of the dominant media, the revelation of Clinton's nondisclosure agreement would signal a perfect storm forming to doom her presidential candidacy.

Why is the Mainstream Press Still Coddling Clinton?  [Scroll down]  Over at NBC News, Lester Holt sat down with Clinton on Friday [1/29/2016] to ask her such hardball questions such as "do you get your feelings hurt," after admitting that he "winced" when he heard someone tell her at a town hall that people think she's dishonest.  Clinton got asked two perfunctory questions about the latest email revelations on CNN Monday morning [2/1/2016], one of them being, "How do you convince voters not to be concerned?"  Now, try to imagine a Republican running for office who, while secretary of state, conducted all his emails on a private, nonsecure server so he could pick and choose which emails to turn over to investigators, then tried to wipe the server before handing it over to a private third party, who clearly lied about not sending or receiving any classified information over that email system, and who then tried to blame it on liberals in government and Democrats for being on a witch hunt.  Oh, and because of this negligence, America's national security might very well have been put at risk.  Reporters would be in a state of mad fury, with all hands on deck to get to the bottom of it.  The story would dominate the news, day after day.

A Felon By Any Other Name.  Were her last name anything other than Clinton, Hillary would be indicted today.  Actually, she would have been indicted long ago and sitting in prison today.  But her last name is Clinton.  As such, she's on the verge of becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party for president. [...] The Clintons always have been about one thing — the Clintons.  Although there is a certain degree of narcissism necessary to run for public office, and an even healthier dose required the higher up the power ladder one climbs, only the Kennedys rival the Clintons in their naked lust for power and thwarting of the law.

Hillary's Last Hurrah.  The FBI is investigating two aspects of Clinton's conduct while she was secretary of state:  first, the handling of classified information — up to and including top secret/special access program information — on her private email system; second, the possibility that Clinton, as secretary of state, sold American foreign policy to the highest bidder who wanted to contribute to the Clinton Family Foundation or pay Bill another $500,000 for a twenty-minute speech.  To begin we have to recognize the obvious:  that her private email system was set up for a corrupt purpose, namely to ensure that she had control over all the communications she sent or received as secretary of state.

Hillary Email Scandal: 7 Smoking Guns Found ... So Far.  After each previous batch of emails that has been released, reporters would quickly proclaim that there was nothing in them definitely proving that Clinton broke the law.  At least, that's what one would assume constitutes a "smoking gun," given the way the scandal has been covered.  But what if a "smoking gun" means catching her in a flat lie or putting national security at risk or being unbelievably, if not criminally, negligent in her handing of classified information?  By those perfectly reasonable standards, there are so many smoking guns now that Hillary is starting to resemble Annie Oakley.  The latest revelation is the hardest for even a biased press to ignore, because it so clearly demonstrates that Clinton repeatedly lied when she said she never knowingly sent or received any classified material from the private, unsecured homebrew email server stashed in her New York home.

Why Hillary Clinton's legal woes are grave or even fatal.  The failure to safeguard state secrets is an area of the law in which the federal government has been aggressive to the point of being merciless.  State secrets are the product of members of the intelligence community's risking their lives to obtain information.  Before she was entrusted with any state secrets — indeed, on her first full day as secretary of state — Clinton received instruction from FBI agents on how to safeguard them; and she signed an oath swearing to comply with the laws commanding the safekeeping of these secrets.  She was warned that the failure to safeguard secrets — known as espionage — would most likely result in aggressive prosecution.

None Dare Call It Treason.  The disclosure about Valerie Plame was called "treason" and people have gone to jail for mishandling classified info, what Hillary Clinton is accused of.

6 things we've learned from Hillary Clinton's emails.  [#1]  Clinton used more than one device[.]  After news broke about her personal email account, Clinton said she'd used one only as a matter of convenience so she would not have to carry two devices.  "I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two," she said last March.  But her emails show she did have two devices — a BlackBerry and an iPad that she received in June 2010.  On Junev25 of that year, Clinton aide Philippe Reines sent her an email announcing the arrival of what he called her hPad.

Secrecy is the root of the Clinton email scandal.  The Washington Post has published a lengthy article by Robert O'Harrow, Jr. called "How Clinton's Email Scandal Took Root."  Much of the article covers ground familiar to those who are following this saga.  However, the story is still worth reading. [...] I doubt that, for purposes of determining whether Clinton violated the law, it matters whether her motive was convenience or a quest for control of her records.  However, O'Harrow's piece, without saying so, shows that her motive was control, not mere convenience.  It makes this clear in two ways.

Clinton Email Scandal: How A Biased Press Tried To Ignore It.  The Washington Post led its Monday [3/28/2016] paper with a story titled "How Clinton's Email Scandal Took Root."  What it revealed was that, left to the mainstream press, the story might never have hit the ground.  No one reading the Post's 5,000-word account can come away thinking that the Clinton email scandal is unimportant.  The FBI now has 147 agents chasing down leads.  A key person involved in the scandal has been granted immunity.  Hillary Clinton — who has already been caught in several lies — might be questioned by federal agents.  There are fairly obvious violations of the law, even if it's just those governing record-keeping.  And there were, and continue to be, concerns that national security secrets were compromised, or at least casually disregarded.

Caddell: Hillary's Email Scandal Worse Than Watergate.  On Breitbart News Saturday [2/13/2016] on Sirius XM, Pollster Pat Caddell, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter, told host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that the Hillary Clinton email scandal is "worse than Watergate." [...] "This is the greatest scandal in the history of the United States," Caddell said.  "They all ought to be indicted.  This is worse than Watergate."  Clinton, he explained, would soon be exposed for using her connections in the State Department to enrich her family, her foundation, and her supporters.

The Server Is the Smoking Gun, Part 2,088,129.  As I've been ranting for quite a while, the never-ending search for the smoking gun in Hillary's e-mails keeps missing the huge smoking artillery piece lying out in plain sight:  the server itself.  It was if not an explicitly criminal act to create it, it was a criminal act to use it the way she did.  All of the e-mails that have come to light simply demonstrate that fact.  It also bears repeating that every single thing Hillary Clinton said in that initial press conference at the U.N. has been proven to be a lie several times over.  One lie, however, still had a rice-paper-thin firewall.  In that press conference Clinton said "there is no classified material."

How Hillary's Insane Paranoia Led Her To Put Highly Classified Material On Her Homebrew Server.  Hillary Clinton may be headed to jail — and if she does, she wants you to know it's going to be all the fault of the vast right wing conspiracy.  Yes, even though the executive branch is controlled by her former boss Barack Obama, the real problem is unspecified conservatives illegally leaking information to the press.  On Tuesday [1/19/2016], Fox News reported that Hillary Clinton's private server contained intelligence "from the US government's most secretive and highly classified programs, according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior lawmakers."

Where Is The Indictment?  If anyone else had done any of what Hillary has done, they'd already be in the dock and probably already have had their trial.  They certainly wouldn't be running for President.

Hillary Email Scandal: Server Was Wellspring Of Classified Material.  It's been established that at least 1,340 of Clinton's emails contained classified material.  And now the inspector general for the intelligence community is saying that "several dozen" more with classified material have been found, including some with "a level of classification beyond even 'top secret,'" reports Fox.  That classification would be "special access programs," which Wikipedia says "may be a type of black project."  This is highly sensitive material intended to be available only to those who "need to know."  But Clinton couldn't be bothered with using a secure State Department email account and server, so this material was left exposed on her wonky server, which had a habit of crashing and was certainly not secure.

Why Clinton's email problem won't go away.  For readers who've mostly ignored emailgate — assuming it would disappear — and now feel the need to catch up, here's a primer on why it matters.  It's difficult to avoid the suspicion that Clinton, after the scandals that rocked her husband's presidency during the 1990s, simply did not want to leave behind a paper trail (or e-trail).  And so, as secretary of State, she tried to skirt federal records law by employing her own IT systems and servers, and by exclusively using a personal email address.  This maneuver, however, created a far bigger problem than the one she intended to avoid, because a large portion of what any secretary of State does is classified to some degree. High-level diplomacy is inherently a secret matter and always has been.

Why I've written 50 posts on Hillary Clinton's e-mails.  [Reason #3] The story about the e-mail server has changed.  Repeatedly. When Clinton acknowledged the existence of the server back in March — following a New York Times report revealing it — she insisted that the private server need not be examined by a third party.  She (finally) turned it over last month.  She said that the handing over of the e-mails was a procedure that all former and current secretaries of state were undergoing at the same time.  But, as reporting from The Post this week showed, the State Department specifically requested Clinton's e-mails after they realized she had used private e-mail exclusively.  It wasn't until months later that requests for documents was made of other former secretaries of state.  A story that keeps changing like that bears further analysis and investigation.

Clinton: Questions About my Email Are 'Beyond the Pale'.  Since the story broke in the spring, Clinton continually dismissed the saga over her use of private email while secretary of state as a distraction that she didn't have to apologize for, insisting over and over that what she did was allowed by the government.  Eventually, Clinton did say she was "sorry" for what she'd done.  Questions ranging from her potential misuse of classified information to why she elected to use a private server to conduct government business at all have dogged her campaign and caused her trustworthiness numbers to suffer with voters.

The United States of Injustice.  [Scroll down]  Where citizens used to be equal, there are now two kinds of citizens.  There are the allies of Obama, and there are the rest of us.  There are two sets of laws, two standards of behavior, two Americas — one for them, and one for us.  Look at Hillary Clinton, that poisonous, pant-suited toad whose shameless, felonious email antics would have her in a federal court docket if she was anyone else except the Democrat frontrunner.  It's not even a close call — those of us who dealt with classified information understand that had we done a tenth of what she did we would be spending the next decade transforming big rocks into little rocks at Leavenworth.  In fact, General Petraeus did just a tenth of what she did, and he was prosecuted.  But though her guilt is beyond question, she never, ever will be.  That is unjust.

Here's the bottom line of the Hillary e-mail dump.  The content of the Hillary Clinton emails released New Year's Eve doesn't matter nearly so much as what the State Department held back:  It found 275 of the messages to contain classified info — in two cases, "Secret" information.  The total so far is 1,274 classified emails, debunking Clinton's claims that she never sent or received such info on the account run from the private, unsecured server in her home.  Her fallback defense is that nothing was marked "classified."  Yet all State employees are warned that some stuff is "born classified."

'This was all planned': Former IG says Hillary, State Dept. are lying.  The State Department is lying when it says it didn't know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal emails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency email address for her in the first place, the department's former top watchdog says.  "This was all planned in advance" to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency's inspector general from 2005 to 2008.  The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov email address like previous secretaries.

Hillary needs to answer for her war.  Hillary Clinton, running for president, has not held a press conference in the past 88 days.  You'd think she was running from something rather than for something.  And maybe she is.  During that period, the State Department has released 16,700 of the emails she illegally concealed for years from the public and from lawful Freedom of Information requests.  In that same 88-day period since Clinton last faced unscreened press questions, 842 of those emails, which she stored on an insecure server in her own home, were deemed to contain national secrets that merit classified status.  About two dozen were deemed Top Secret.  One reportedly contained extremely sensitive information about an Afghan national who could have faced lethal retribution for collaborating with American intelligence services.



Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally

      (a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
      (b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.  As used in this subsection, the term "office" does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

18 U.S. Code § 2071      



Timely news and commentary:

Guilty! — But Not Really Guilty?  In 2016, an FBI investigation found that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had violated the law by transmitting and receiving classified information over an unsecured private server.  Subsequently, she destroyed thousands of emails and some devices, some of which were under subpoena.  FBI Director James Comey found that "any reasonable person" should have known it was illegal to transmit classified information in such a sloppy fashion.  Comey, however, found that "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."

Judicial Watch Settles State Department Lawsuit that Uncovered Hillary Clinton's Unsecure, Nongovernment Emails.  Judicial Watch announced today [2/27/2024] it settled its 2014 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, which sought the emails of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack.  This suit led directly to the disclosure of Clinton's use of a nongovernment email server to conduct government business.  The settlement commits the State Department to a payment to Judicial Watch of $97,000.  This FOIA lawsuit, about the Obama administration's Benghazi scandal, forced the Obama administration to admit to Hillary Clinton's hidden classified and other government emails in 2015.  Judicial Watch uncovered "talking points" created by the Obama White House and other documents showing that statements about the attack made on the eve of the 2012 elections by then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice were false.  On December 6, 2018, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers and Clinton aides, as well as Susan Rice, to be deposed or answer written questions under oath.  Judge Lamberth called the Clinton email system "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency."

Docs Reveal FBI Questioned Obama DOJ in Hillary Email Probe.  A presidential candidate faces an FBI probe surrounding alleged mishandling of classified information, amid questions about the independence of the Justice Department.  Meanwhile, the candidate's supporters allege political interference and demand that the chief investigator be investigated.  Such was the case in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election.  Democrats and other supporters of Hillary Clinton complained that then-FBI Director James Comey violated the law in notifying Congress that he had restarted an investigation of Clinton's use of a private, unsecure email server while she was secretary of state.  Meanwhile, FBI officials questioned the independence of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and considered asking for a special counsel to investigate Clinton's private email server, according to a heavily redacted transcript of an interview with a top FBI career official.

Who could forget Carlos Danger and Pierre Delecto?
Obama, Clinton and Biden ALL used secret, fake-name email accounts to hide their actions.  I am surprised that anyone is surprised that, as vice president in the Obama administration, Joe Biden used email accounts under fake names to loop his son Hunter into official US government business.  This is how the Obama administration rolled.  When high officials were involved in a dodgy activity they wanted to shield from public disclosure laws, they frequently used pseudonymous email accounts.  That included President Barack Obama himself.  As I argued at the time, one of the main reasons the Obama Justice Department whitewashed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's criminally negligent mishandling of classified information, through the lawless homebrew server system she set up for doing official government business, is that Obama was implicated.  He knew that she was using a non-government communications channel because, numerous times, she used it to correspond with him.

A Country Descending into Madness.  This is what it looks like when a country descends into madness.  Two standards of "justice" preclude any justice at all.  Hillary Clinton kept top-secret information on a home-brew private server that was infiltrated by malicious foreign actors, and she suffered no legal consequence — even after having destroyed Blackberry devices and other subpoenaed evidence of criminal culpability.  President Trump keeps personally declassified documents in his home, and the FBI sends a SWAT team into Mar-a-Lago so that Merrick Garland's goons can throw Trump in prison.  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama conspired with the Intelligence Community to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy and remove him from office, and not a single perpetrator involved in that incendiary plot has been indicted.

They are rubbing our noses in their filth.  A day after the 240th anniversary of the birth of America, Jimmy Comey — Obama's FBI director — announced that even though she sent 33,000 emails to a Chinese email account, Missus Clinton would not be prosecuted.  They had her dead to rights — and Comey let her live.  He told the press, "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. [...]" Shorter Comey:  She did it and we don't care.  The fix was in and they were blatant about it with Bill Clinton openly meeting with Comey's boss — AG Loretta Lynch — on the tarmac at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix in 110-degree heat.  They wanted the world to see that the fix was in.

Comey's Grand Illusion Book Tour.  Most Americans will never forget the congressional hearings regarding the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  Members of Congress wanted answers, questioning whether or not then — secretary of state Hillary Clinton had failed to provide appropriate security for assassinated ambassador John Christopher Stevens and the consulate staff.  As part of the congressional investigation, it came to light that Secretary Clinton had illegally been utilizing a private email account and an unsecured server, by which classified documents were sent.  The resulting political and legal firestorm rocked the nation and resulted in a year-long FBI investigation.  In the end, [FBI director James] Comey came before the American people with apparently cut-and-dried evidence that Clinton — the Democrat running for president at the time — had committed multiple federal crimes.  In his highly anticipated public statement, Comey claimed that over 100 Clinton emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret."  An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department.

Can Trump Clean The Augean Stables on the Potomac?  [Scroll down]  This is the moment we return to Hillary Clinton and her "home-brew" email server through which she ran all manner of classified correspondence.  According to disgraced former FBI Director James "Higher Loyalty" Comey, "no reasonable prosecutor" would go after Hillary, even though she deleted thousands of emails and destroyed mobile phones and hard drives after being subpoenaed.  If you are hearing the winds murmur "two-tier system of justice" you are not imagining things.  Donald Trump, as president, could declassify anything he wished.  Neither Joe Biden nor Hillary Clinton had that authority.

Trump [was] indicted, not Hillary, Hunter or Milley.  The FBI is best at covering up crimes.  Consider Hillary sending state secrets while secretary of state via email to foreign governments and others who paid the troll via donations to her fake charity.  Remember the words of Jimmy the Weasel Comey, who said, "From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.  Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification.  Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were 'up-classified' to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent."  She committed at least 110 felonies by e-mailing classified information.  Comey admitted it.  And yet as head of the FBI in 2016, he recommended against prosecuting her.

Hillary Clinton Brazenly Gloats About Getting Away With Classified Emails on Basement Server.  In the wake of news that former President Donald Trump would be indicted on federal charges next week related to his handling of classified documents, many rightfully noted the two-tiered system of justice that's being employed to go after Trump while turning a blind eye to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — Democrats who had classified materials in unapproved locations.  Democrats, of course, are used to this benefit of belonging to the "correct" party, and now Hillary Clinton is outright gloating about the partisan immunity she enjoys.  In a Friday morning tweet, the former first lady sought to make a buck off her previous actions that, had she stayed a Republican after her days as a "Goldwater Girl," would have earned her a federal indictment:  [Tweet[

19 Times Democrats And DOJ Deliberately Politicized Law Enforcement.  [#4]  While the DOJ investigated the Trump campaign in 2016, the agency gave cover to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her private email server scandal.  The FBI told journalists there was no evidence that a foreign power reviewed Clinton's emails improperly stored on a private server.  According to a report from the DOJ inspector general in 2018, however, texts show they almost certainly did, "at least one of them classified," as Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi wrote.

Hillary Clinton plays the victim — but her history of avoiding criminal charges shows she's anything but.  "I can't believe we're still talking about this, but my emails...":  Hillary Clinton's disbelief this week was shared by many critics left dumbfounded by her claim her private server contained "zero" classified documents.  The expression of utter incredulity was classic Clinton — she's selling hats reading "But her emails" for $30 a pop.  But Hillary's denial of what was found on her server exposes something far more serious than signature hypocrisy.  It reflects establishment figures' sense of license that they can literally rewrite history with little fear of contradiction by the media.  While calling for limits on free speech over "disinformation," Hillary has no qualms about falsely denying what published government reports detail.

Prayers for Jonathan Turley After His Definitive Takedown of Hillary's Latest 'but My Emails' Defense.  Twice-failed candidate for president Hillary Clinton craves the spotlight much like Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) craves the undivided personal attention of Chinese honey traps, and unfortunately for the sanity of those who are all too familiar with her checkered past, the mainstream media usually gives it to her.  Such has been the case over the last month or so as Hillary and daughter Chelsea Clinton have been on a media tour of sorts to promote their upcoming Apple TV+ docuseries, "Gutsy."  Most recently, Hillary Clinton sat down for an "interview" with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell, where predictably there was much gushing and much revising of history as it related to Clinton's sordid political track record.  As is often the case with Clinton, however, she didn't confine her revisionism to the TV news airwaves.  As we previously reported, she also took to the Twitter machine Tuesday to post a lie-filled rant in an attempt to debunk comparisons of her email scandal to the FBI's raid of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.

Hillary Keeps Shamelessly Lying About Her Emails.  Hillary Clinton lies with the recklessness of someone who's gotten away with countless acts of corruption in her career.  Who can really blame her?  Here she is today:  [Tweet]  None of what Clinton says in her thread is even remotely true.  Hillary contends that "Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails."  Even if the former FBI director had changed his mind, it would not have mattered very much once he was out of office.  But Comey never did any such thing.  After scrupulously detailing Hillary's numerous evasions of laws governing the handling of classified information in July of 2016, Comey let the former Secretary of State skate, maintaining the FBI couldn't prove intent.  Clinton, he said, had merely been "extremely careless" in "handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."  Comey didn't charge Hillary, probably to save himself the trauma of indicting someone he believed would be the next president.

Is this the Public Image the FBI Wants?  The fact that we have two justice systems, one for Democrats and another, harsher one for Republicans, is no longer debatable.  Anyone who disagrees needs to explain the difference in the treatment of Hillary's mishandling of classified documents, and Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents.  The classified materials on Hillary's bathroom server were verified as among our most closely held secrets, and were almost certainly accessed by foreign actors.  The documents in Trump's basement were reportedly declassified and were secured per FBI instructions, in a building guarded by the Secret Service.  And yet no search warrant has ever been served on the Clinton estate.  The FBI has been a key player in the creation of our two-tiered justice system with its dogged pursuit of Republicans, and its willful blindness to Democrat infractions.  The bureau has become the Democrat party enforcer, and the public recognizes it now.

Think the FBI Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt?  The FBI repeatedly told journalists there was no evidence that a foreign power had reviewed Clinton's emails that she improperly handled on a private server.  According to an inspector general report in 2018, however, texts show they almost certainly did, "at least one of them classified," as Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi wrote.  "It is more accurate to say," read a text from Strzok, "that we know foreign actors obtained access to some of her emails (including at least one Secret one) via compromises of the private email accounts of some of her staffers."

A Timeline of the Hillary Email Scandal.  [Spreadsheet]

IG: "FBI... Identified '81 Email Chains... That Were Classified... and Sent to or from Clinton's Personal Server'".  The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice released a report in June 2018 that stated that the FBI had "identified '81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails that were classified from the CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET levels... and sent to or from [Hillary] Clinton's personal server."  The IG cited the information from a "letterhead memorandum" (LHM) that the FBI produced about its investigation of the matter.  The IG report also noted that "[n]one of the emails... included a header or footer with classification markings."  "According to the LHM," said the IG report, "the FBI, with the assistance of other USIC [U.S. intelligence community] agencies, identified '81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails that were classified from the CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET levels at the time the emails were drafted on UNCLASSIFIED systems and sent to or from Clinton's personal server.'

Biden's Supreme Court Pick Shielded Top Clinton Aide Amid Email Scandal.  President Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee shielded one of Hillary Clinton's top State Department aides from scrutiny about his use of a personal email account to conduct official business.  Then-U.S. district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2015 denied Gawker's request for details about press aide Philippe Reines's stewardship of the account in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which sought emails Reines traded with 34 different media outlets.  Jackson blocked Gawker's request, calling it "extraordinary" and claiming there was no proof that Reines had acted in "bad faith" by using a personal email address.

The FBI's Broken Relationship with Us.  All large organizations suffer from the occasional presence of bad actors.  The FBI is no exception.  But it managed to retain a good relationship with the public in spite of its flaws, because it was still solving rather than creating crimes.  But something fundamentally changed in the last five years. [...] The "Midyear Exam," the bureau's name for the Hillary Clinton email investigation, was a farce.  No subpoenas were issued, central figures were given immunity without cooperation, evidence was destroyed by the FBI, and then the attorney general had a clandestine meeting with "Slick Willy" Clinton — the husband of the target.  Surprise:  No charges were filed.  "The Cardinal" Comey held a press conference and announced that even though Hillary had broken numerous laws, she didn't mean it, so he was giving her a pass.  It must have been an accident that an email server, containing classified documents, appeared in her bathroom — with a support staff.

How Did the FBI End Up in This Mess?  [Scroll down]  James Comey was also a product of the prosecutorial side of the DoJ.  Like Mueller before him, he was a U.S. Attorney and Deputy Attorney General.  James Comey is a man of unquestionable integrity — according to James Comey.  In fact, peers and subordinates gave him the nickname "The Cardinal" due to his sanctimonious self-regard.  Director Comey decided to run the Clinton email investigation out of FBI headquarters, rather than a field office so that it could be overseen by such giants of virtue as Peter Strzok and himself.  Under Comey's guidance, it was a unique investigation.  No grand jury was used, no subpoenas were served, key witnesses were given immunity, and the investigators themselves destroyed the evidence.  Comey then went on national television and laid out how all of the elements of a felony had been committed by Madame Secretary "Dirty Tricks."  But then surprise, surprise — no indictment would be sought because Hillary really didn't mean it.  It turns out that "The Cardinal" is not only a paragon of virtue, he's also a mind reader.  With that broadcast, Comey unveiled the partisan FBI for all of the world to see.  Corruption had officially arrived at the FBI, and "The Cardinal" wasn't even hiding it.  But Comey didn't stop with his election interference by simply giving Hillary a pass.  He also began painting an image of criminal behavior by the Trump campaign.

If the FBI Knew Danchenko Was Lying From the Start — And They Did — Why Didn't The Mueller SCO Charge Him?  When you are a federal prosecutor and you are not actually interested in pursuing a particular case, but you want to go through the motions to make it look good, you do things like not seizing computers, allowing defense counsel to decide what documents investigators should receive, allow lawyers who are witnesses to possible criminal activity to serve as defense counsel for targets so they can sit in and listen to interviews, hand out immunity to whoever asks without having a clear view of their culpability ....  Wait — that was the Hillary email investigation.  Danchenko and Crossfire Hurricane are different.  Aren't they?  With the indictment of Igor Danchenko this past week, the answer to that question is becoming less and less clear.  While the two investigations were, technically speaking, separate from one another, a similar coterie of DOJ and FBI officials seemed to want their "Igor Problem" to slip beneath the waves and disappear in the same way the "Hillary's Email" problem was made to slip beneath the waves and disappear.  The tactic is to use decision-making implicitly designed to not produce a prosecutable case, ignore or excuse evidence of criminal culpability, and point to a bright shiny object of supposedly greater significance to be concerned with.

DOJ inspector general cannot identify FBI leaks regarding Clinton server in lead-up to 2016 election.  A years-long investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general revealed that numerous FBI employees had "substantial" media contacts prior to the 2016 presidential election, but it could not determine who leaked sensitive information to reporters.  The 10-page report issued Thursday by Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that while FBI policies strictly limit the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, those rules "appeared to be widely ignored" in 2016.  The new findings expand upon the investigative work included in a June 2018 report entitled the "Review of Allegations Regarding Various Actions by the Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Advance of the 2016 Election (2016 pre-election report)."

Russia Collusion Wasn't About Donald Trump, It Was Designed to Protect Hillary Clinton.  Barack Obama's spy chiefs never believed that Donald Trump was a Russian spy.  The Trump-Russia collusion narrative originated as a diversionary tactic in the event emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server went public. [...] This week a former senior intelligence official in the Obama administration confirmed to me that in the lead-up to the 2016 election, elements of the U.S. intelligence community informed the FBI that the Democratic candidate's emails had been compromised.  "They concluded that there were approximately 30,000 emails in the possession of foreign entities," said the former Obama official.  "The FBI was provided with digital copies of some of the emails and then evaluated them, determining their veracity and identifying what sensitive issues were being addressed.  The FBI had been informed of this prior to James Comey's press conference exonerating Clinton."

An Open Letter to Every [...] Politician!  On the Election, Corruption, all of it!  Night after night, year after year, we watch you on the evening news pontificate about this issue or that scandal and yet you all do nothing.  We're sick of it!  We watched Hillary Clinton break every law in the book by lying to the FBI about her using her own private server to conduct government business, and then deleting over 33,000 emails once she was caught.  She broke the law multiple times, regardless of intent.  In fact, the laws she broke specifically said that intent was not needed for the law to be broken.  And what did you do?  Nothing.  Sure, you put on a show, but who was punished?  Who went to jail?  Who was held accountable?  Hillary Clinton?  James Comey?  Please.  And what about the IRS targeting Tea Party Groups.  After the IRS was caught intentionally harassing these groups, they finally came clean and admitted that they were breaking the law.  Who was sent to jail?  Who was fired?  Lois Lerner?  James Clapper?  Obama?  CIA Director, Brennan?  No one, that's who!

Trouble for Joe?  Hillary's Emails Are Resurfacing.  Every election cycle there's some sort of "October surprise."  It's when campaigns release the dirt they have on their opponent, in hopes of flipping some voters.  But not every election surprise has to come from a campaign.  In fact, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said the State Department is getting closer to releasing emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server.  You know, the ones that contained classified information that should have been safeguarded?  "We've got the emails, we're getting them out.  We'll get all of this information out so the American people can see it," Pompeo told Fox News' Dana Perino.  "We're going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.  You'll remember there was classified information on a private server, should have never been there, Hillary Clinton should never have done that, that was unacceptable behavior."  According to Pompeo, Clinton should have never had classified information on a private server.

Jim Comey Ignored Department Whistleblower on Hillary's Crimes With Classified Material.  One year before Jim Comey was immersed in his plot to overthrow Donald Trump, the duly elected President of the United States, a brave Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State came forward with firsthand information of Hillary Clinton's rampant abuse of Classified material.  The man, a senior State Department diplomat who had served as the acting Ambassador (Chargé d'Affaires) in the Asia Pacific region under President Clinton, also was a veteran of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.  The letter from this whistleblower is stunning and I am going to present it in total.  It is dated 10 January 2016. [...]

Mike Pompeo Says He Has Hillary Clinton's Deleted Emails and Will Begin Releasing Them Before Election Day.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday dropped a little October surprise said his department has Hillary Clinton's 'deleted' emails and will release them before the election.  "We're getting them out," Pompeo told Fox News Dana Perino.  "We'll get all of this information out so the American people can see them," Pompeo said.  "There will be more to see before the election."  "You will remember there was classified information on a private server.  It should never have been there.  Hillary Clinton should never have done that.  It is unacceptable behavior."

Sidney Powell discussing the 675,000 Hillary Clinton Emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop.  675,000 Hillary Clinton Emails [were] found on Anthony Weiner's laptop.  "New York Police Officers who saw some of it, who were hardened investigators had to go throw up.. it's bad!"

Brennan Personally Briefed Obama on Clinton Campaign's Russia Collusion Operation in 2016.  CIA Director John Brennan personally briefed former President Barack Obama on Russia's knowledge of Hillary Clinton's "plan" to smear then-candidate Donald Trump as a Russian stooge during the 2016 presidential election, newly declassified documents reveal.  Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified Brennan's handwritten notes from the briefing, as well as a CIA memo revealing that officials referred the matter to the FBI for potential investigative action.  That referral was sent to then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok.  Ratcliffe first revealed in a letter late last month that the FBI were aware of Russian intelligence regarding Hillary Clinton's plan to link Trump to Russia as "a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."

Gregg Jarrett:  Declassification of Russia probe documents could prove Hillary Clinton committed [a] felony.  President Trump's announcement on Twitter Tuesday that he had fully authorized the declassification of all documents related to the Russia investigation is bad news for Hillary Clinton, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett told "Hannity" Tuesday [10/6/2020].  "It demonstrates just how immoral, unscrupulous, devious and corrupt Hillary Clinton was," Jarrett said.  Earlier Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified documents revealing that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama in 2016 on Hillary Clinton's "plan" to stir up a scandal tying then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia and distracting from the controversy over her private email server.  Jarrett said Clinton may have committed a felony in disseminating false information, depending on "how it [the information] was leaked and to whom."

Trump: I'm declassifying everything on "the single greatest political CRIME in American History".  Donald Trump is declassifying information on Fanny Foxe and Wilbur Mills?  No, of course that's the description Trump uses for the "Russia hoax" and its targeting of his 2016 campaign.  Last night, Trump announced that all material related to the investigation into Operation Crossfire Hurricane, including all intelligence notes, would be declassified: [...] Why now?  The catalyst appears to be a recently declassified — but still heavily redacted — set of notes from John Brennan from July 2016.  In the notes, the then-CIA director documented his briefing of Barack Obama and other administration officials about the Russia-collusion allegation.  According to the notes that weren't redacted, Brennan told Obama that the Hillary Clinton campaign planned to use this allegation as a distraction from her e-mail scandal.

President Trump Authorizes Total Declassification of All Documents Related to Spygate, Hillary Email Scandal — WITH NO REDACTIONS.  President Trump Tuesday night went scorched earth and authorized the total declassification of all documents related to the Russia hoax, Spygate and Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  "No redactions!" Trump said.  "I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax.  Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal.  No redactions!" Trump tweeted. [...] Trump's tweet comes after DNI John Ratcliffe declassified and released documents on Tuesday revealing former CIA Director John Brennan briefed Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton's plot to 'stir up' a scandal to tie Trump to Russia in order to distract from her email scandal ahead of the 2016 election.

Newly released documents give a clearer picture about the Russia hoax.  We learned last week that (a) Hillary Clinton approved of faking a Russia-Trump scandal to detract from her unsecured server; (b) that then-CIA director John Brennan briefed Obama and intelligence officials about the plan; and (c) that intelligence officials sent a memo to Peter Strzok tell him of Hillary's plan.  The actual documents were made available on Tuesday.  They revealed that Obama knew almost from the beginning that "Russian collusion" was a hoax, while the media's current cover-up of the newly released documents shows that the Russia hoax will live forever in their reporting.  Brennan's July 2016 notes of his meeting with Obama and other national security advisers are almost entirely blacked out.  What remains, though, establishes that Obama knew as of July that Hillary intended to fake collusion between Trump and the Russians.

DNI Declassifies Handwritten Notes From John Brennan, 2016 CIA Referral On Clinton Campaign's Collusion Operation.  Top U.S. intelligence officials were so concerned heading into the 2016 election that the Russians were aware of and potentially manipulating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's plans to smear Donald Trump as a Russian agent that they personally briefed President Barack Obama on the matter, newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents show.  CIA officials also requested that the FBI investigate Russian knowledge of the Clinton campaign's collusion smear operation.  Newly declassified handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan show that the U.S. intelligence community knew in 2016 that Russian intelligence was actively monitoring, and potentially injecting disinformation into, Clinton's anti-Trump collusion narrative.  The intelligence concerning Russia's knowledge of Clinton's campaign plans was so concerning to Brennan and other national security officials that they personally informed Obama of the matter in the Oval Office in the summer of 2016.  The handwritten notes from Brennan were declassified by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe and provided to Congress on Tuesday afternoon.

How much did the Russia and Hillary Clinton email probes cost taxpayers?  President Trump announced Tuesday evening [10/6/2020] that he has "fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents" related to the Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server surrounding a 2012 attack that occurred in Benghazi that took the lives of four Americans.  According to biannual reports released by the special counsel's office, Mueller and his team spent $12.3 million in direct spending between his appointment on May 17, 2017 and Sept. 30, 2018.  The office also said it incurred $12.9 million in "indirect" Justice Department spending, a category it described as "neither legally required" for disclosure, nor reported in filings by previous special counsels.

DNI declassifies Brennan notes, CIA memo on Hillary Clinton 'stirring up' scandal between Trump, Russia.  Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified documents that revealed former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton's purported "plan" to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as "a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server" ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Fox News has learned.  Ratcliffe declassified Brennan's handwritten notes — which were taken after he briefed Obama on the intelligence the CIA received — and a CIA memo, which revealed that officials referred the matter to the FBI for potential investigative action.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence transmitted the declassified documents to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Tuesday afternoon [10/6/2020].

Bombshell Allegation:  Hillary Orchestrated Collusion Hoax to Distract From Her Emails, According to Russian Intel.  Hillary Clinton personally signed off on the Russiagate farce to distract attention from her email scandal, according to a Russian intelligence analysis that was obtained by U.S. intelligence agencies in July 2016.  That is the bombshell allegation that National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe has just dropped on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the first presidential debate just a few hours away and with former FBI director James Comey scheduled to testify before that Committee tomorrow morning [9/30/2020].

Sidney Powell's Speech From March Is Now Making Waves as New Reports Indicate Clinton Foundation Is Under a Criminal Investigation.  A speech by Sidney Powell back in November is now given more attention with word that the Clinton Foundation is now under a criminal investigation.  In her speech in March, Powell shared the following: ["]The Anthony Weiner laptop, which I don't know if you heard this.  I wrote an article about that too. 675,000 Clinton emails when they got Anthony Weiner's laptop in a search warrant because of all his sex perversion issues.  It was all the Clinton emails, the Clinton Foundation, her Secretary of State emails, Huma Abedin emails, lots of people emailed Huma as a proxy for Hillary, and it included what Comey called... the golden emails, because they were the blackberry backup emails.  That they were supposedly just looking for very diligently, well guess what they did when they found them on the Weiner laptop?  They got a search warrant for things that didn't include the blackberry backup emails.  So when they told us, when he stood there and said that day, oh we've reviewed all the emails now, there is nothing there.  That was a bald face lie."["]

FBI Agent Who Discovered Hillary's Emails On Weiner Laptop Claims He Was Told To Erase Computer.  FBI agent John Robertson, the man who found Hillary Clinton's emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, claims he was advised by bosses to erase his own computer.  Former FBI Director James Comey, you may recall, announced days before the 2016 presidential election that he had "learned of the existence" of the emails on Weiner's laptop.  Weiner is the disgraced husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.  Robertson alleges that the manner in which his higher-ups in the FBI handled the case was "not ethically or morally right."

Book: FBI Agent on Sex Crimes Unit Found Hillary Clinton Emails.  An FBI agent investigating child pornography on former Rep. Anthony Weiner's computer first stumbled on hundreds of thousands of emails, many of which were to and from Hillary Clinton, ahead of the 2016 election, a new book reveals.  The Washington Post's Devlin Barrett wrote "October Surprise:  How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election," in which he provides an inside look at what happened in the weeks before the 2016 election — and how the discovery of the Clinton emails threw a wrench into the electoral process.  Special Agent John Robertson was investigating allegations that Weiner sent sexually explicit material to a 15-year-old girl when he stumbled on 600,000 emails from an account belonging to Weiner's then-wife Huma Abedin, Clinton's top aide, sitting on Weiner's laptop.  Many of the emails were either to or from the private email address of Clinton, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

New details emerge about FBI delay on Weiner laptop in 2016.  New details have emerged about 2016's "October Surprise," during which the FBI found emails belonging to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on disgraced New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop, with the FBI official who found the emails speaking out for the first time.  FBI agent John Robertson, who worked in its New York office's child sex crimes unit and was later cited (though not named) in Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 2018 report on the handling of the investigation of Clinton's unauthorized private email server, spoke with the Washington Post's Devlin Barrett for his upcoming book, October Surprise:  How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election.  Robertson unearthed tens of thousands of Clinton emails in late September 2016 on the laptop belonging to Weiner, the husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, in a sex crimes case involving underage girls, but for weeks after being alerted, top FBI leaders [...] took little to no action to investigate.

FBI agent who found Hillary Clinton's emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop calls agency's handling of case 'immoral'.  An FBI agent who found the messages that led to the Hillary Clinton email investigation being reopened days before the 2016 election said the way the bureau handled the case was 'not ethically or morally right'.  John Robertson feared he would be made a 'scapegoat' when he found the new emails less than two months before voting day, in the wake of DailyMail.com's revelation that Anthony Weiner, whose wife Huma Abedin was Clinton's top aide, was sexting an underage girl.  Robertson watched nervously as the bureau did nothing for a month until he went outside the chain of command and spoke with the US Attorney's office overseeing the case.

Elite Democrats can wipe their phones and their servers with impunity; you can't.  [Scroll down]  Remember Hillary Clinton's "tech troubles"?  After the Benghazi scandal, when the then-Secretary of State stood beside the flag-draped caskets of American service-people and lied to Americans about the attack that killed them, her actions were the focus of an investigation.  What followed was a data-disappearing act of comic proportions.  The FBI reported that during their investigation they learned Ms. Clinton used a total of thirteen different mobile devices that would have contained classified information.  None of them could be located.  In addition, then-Democratic Presidential Nominee Clinton somehow miraculously had the server wiped that contained emails the investigator wanted to see.  When she was asked about the allegations of data-wiping, she famously responded in a smug and condescending manner:  "What?  You mean like with a cloth or something?"  Ms. Clinton's acts would have earned an indictment for any ordinary citizen, and they especially would have earned an indictment for not-so-ordinary Republicans.  Ms. Clinton is not going to jail.  Neither will anyone from the Mueller team who destroyed government records.

Appeals court rules Hillary Clinton doesn't have to sit for Judicial Watch deposition.  A three-judge appeals court panel ruled that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can dodge a sworn deposition from a conservative watchdog group, reversing a lower court decision that had ordered the sworn testimony about her private email server during her time at the State Department.  Clinton, who appealed the order from earlier this year requiring she and her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, sit down for depositions, scored the legal victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday [8/14/2020].

Time to Tear Hillary Clinton's Name from State Department Pavilion.  In the final days of the Obama Administration, Clinton's name was slapped up on the walls of the just-finished U.S. Diplomacy Center at Foggy Bottom.  The Hillary Rodham Clinton Pavilion was an obvious slap in the face of the incoming administration.  A defiant reminder of Secretary Clinton's shameful legacy.  On January 10, 2017, just ten days before Donald Trump was sworn into office (instead of Clinton), the former Secretary of State returned to the State Department to help open the new pavilion that bore her name.  "I'm thrilled to be here at the new Hillary Clinton Pavilion," Clinton said during her remarks at the ceremony.  "I'm sure you will notice it is the most transparent part of the entire project."  An obviously defiant statement mocking the deceitful nature of her tenure, which included her felonious use of a private, unsecured email server to transmit state secrets.

Hillary Clinton lost her appeal, order stands testify on private server and Benghazi emails.  Amid the chaos and anarchy across blue-city America that exclusively possessed public attention for the last couple of weeks, it was not hard to miss any other bit of news — especially if that news has not appeared or been even briefly mentioned by any major mainstream media outlet.  Take for example the news of Hillary Clinton, who lost her appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on June 2, where she tried to avoid testifying under oath about her emails and the Benghazi case.  The hearing in the D.C. Circuit came in the case Judicial Watch v.  Clinton, a public records case involving a request for State Department documents and communication about the 2012 terror attack at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.  U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the attack.  The case also involves Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton asks appeals court to help her dodge Judicial Watch deposition on emails and Benghazi.  A three-judge appeals court panel heard arguments this week from Hillary Clinton's lawyer and Judicial Watch as the former secretary of state seeks to avoid a deposition about her private email server and the Benghazi attack talking points.  Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, argued Tuesday [6/2/2020] that the depositions of Clinton and Clinton's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered by a D.C. district court judge was necessary to understand whether Clinton attempted to avoid the Freedom of Information Act when she improperly used a private server to conduct her State Department business and whether the agency adequately searched for all her emails.

Google Subpoenaed for Emails of Mystery Gmail Account Tied to Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch served a court-authorized subpoena to Google on April 15 requesting emails from a controversial Gmail account tied to Hillary Clinton.  The subpoena is part of a yearslong Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which has led to the discovery of Clinton's use of an unauthorized private email server to conduct government business during her tenure as the secretary of state.  Judicial Watch, a conservative government transparency group, requested the emails and metadata from the [...] gmail.com account.  Clinton IT aide Paul Combetta claimed to have used the account to transfer all of Clinton's emails from a laptop to an email server.

Judicial Watch subpoenas Google in ongoing hunt for Hillary Clinton missing emails.  Legal watchdog group Judicial Watch has served Google with a subpoena for all emails believed to be linked to an account used by 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during her tenure as President Obama's secretary of state.  According to a press release, the subpoena — which was authorized by a federal court in Washington, D.C. — Platte River Network IT specialist Paul Combetta reportedly accessed the Google account to move Clinton's emails from a laptop to the firm's servers before using a program called Bleachbit to destroy the emails and remove all traces of them the computer.

Justice Department Declines to Support Blocking Hillary Clinton Deposition.  The Justice Department has declined to join former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's effort to block depositions of both herself and a key aide in a case concerning her use of a private email-server system to conduct Obama administration business.  Though the DOJ's decision will inevitably be reported as political retribution against President Trump's 2016 election rival, there is actually nothing much here.  The Trump State and Justice Departments have defended the former secretary throughout the suit in question.  The government's refusal to support Clinton's latest gambit to avoid answering questions under oath is consistent with Justice Department policy and will have no bearing on the outcome of the case.

FBI Using Chinese Virus as Excuse to Keep Protecting Hillary Clinton.  Is it just me, or is the FBI just about as worthless and pathetic today as it was the day before President Trump fired James Comey?  Here are two salient facts that have just come to light that we've never seen reported anywhere before:  First, the FBI actually found all 675,000 of Crooked Hillary's emails (oops), and second, they only reviewed 3,000 of them before declaring her innocence just days before the 2016 election.  The FBI received a court order to release Hillary's emails to Judicial Watch at long last, and it's been slow walking the release of those emails ever since. [...] Convicted child predator Anthony Weiner had all of Hillary's emails on his laptop for some reason. [...] This means Comey was actually able to recover the 30,000 emails that got Bleach Bitted when Hillary wiped her server.  You know, like, with a cloth.  It also included the tens of thousands of emails that Hillary sent on her Blackberry device, which the FBI had never recovered during its "exhaustive" investigation before Comey cleared Hillary the first time, in July of 2016.  Weiner's laptop even had all of Hillary's emails from her first two months as Obama's Secretary of State, which was another batch of emails that the FBI never recovered from any source.  But wait, there was more!  The Weiner laptop also had all of Hillary's Clinton Foundation emails on it.  Nothing to see there!

New Clinton scandal memos confirm FBI stalled a month to search Weiner's laptop.  The FBI waited a month between the time it discovered Hillary Clinton emails on disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop and obtaining a search warrant — as Clinton and Donald Trump were entering the closing weeks of their tight 2016 White House race, according to newly obtained records by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.  The documents are communications between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page, who exchanged emails during the 2016 race that suggested they did not support Trump becoming president.  Weiner, at the time the emails were discovered, was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.  The emails were purportedly from when Clinton was Secretary of State.  The Justice Department was already investigating Clinton using a private server to send official State Department information.

Hillary Clinton Appeals Ruling To Testify About Emails.  A federal judge has ordered criminal Hillary Clinton to sit for a deposition to address private emails and her illegal email server before Judicial Watch, but not Clinton has filed an appeal in order to overrule the order to testify about any of it.  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton dropped a bombshell on Friday the 13th:  "Hillary Clinton APPEALS Ruling that She Must Testify About Emails."

Lawyers for Hillary Clinton Ask Appeals Court to Overturn Order for Her.  Judicial Watch announced today that lawyers for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills have asked the Court of Appeals to overturn a U.S. District court order granting Judicial Watch's request for their depositions about Clinton's emails and Benghazi attack records.  Lawyers for Clinton and Mills filed a "Petition for Writ of Mandamus" earlier today [3/13/2020].  The Clinton request comes in Judicial Watch's lawsuit that seeks records concerning "talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack".  Judicial Watch famously uncovered in 2014 that the "talking points" that provided the basis for Susan Rice's false statements were created by the Obama White House.  This Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

Hillary Clinton:  The Most Investigated Innocent Person in America?  Hillary Rodham Clinton recently claimed that she is the most investigated innocent person in America.  Really? [...] In purposely saying there is no regulation against her use of a private email server (in the bathroom of her private residence) for highly classified communications, Mrs. Clinton attempts to excuse her actions or somehow exonerate herself.  She purposely overlooks the fact that her actions, as explained herein, are clear, flagrant, prima facie violations of the gross negligence provisions of the Espionage Act. [...] The provisions of the Espionage Act, subsection F, 18 USC 793, state that "an intent to deceive or perform illegal actions regarding the handling of classified government information is not required; gross negligence alone is grounds for prosecution."  Penalties allowed under the Espionage Act for gross negligence in handling classified materials include a fine, imprisonment of up to ten years, or both.

The Editor says...
No one needs to explain this to Hillary Clinton.  She went to law school.  She knew the risks.  She knows how much trouble she could be in now, and the best way to fight it is to stay out in front of it with phony claims about being the most investigated person in the country.

Hillary Says No Regulation Bars Secretary of State From Using Private Email Server.  Pompeo Disagrees.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed back Friday against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's claim that there was no regulation against her use of a private email server.  "No, having a private email server and keeping your government records on that is completely unlawful," Pompeo said during an interview on Fox & Friends.  "She has been investigated a lot, I think there might be a reason for that," Pompeo added.  "We have an obligation, as senior leaders in the United States government, that our records are protected and available through [the Freedom of Information Act] and all the other mechanisms."  "It's a bad idea," Pompeo said regarding the destruction of records.  "Not a model that I recommend to any leader anywhere."

The Editor says...
If wasn't illegal, why was Hillary's email server kept secret?

Judicial Watch Wins Court Order Forcing Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills to Sit for Depositions.  A federal judge has ruled that Hillary Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills must sit for a deposition within 75 days.  Judicial Watch won the court ruling despite the ongoing efforts by the DOJ to block their inquiry.

Federal Court Orders Deposition of Hillary Clinton on Emails and Benghazi.  Hillary Clinton has escaped the hoosegow for decades; the string of her perfidy is a mile long.  Here are just a few events for which the hangman has passed her by (so far):
  •   Cattle futures speculation
  •   Clinton Foundation money-laundering
  •   The Haitian squeeze play (Clinton Global Initiative-related)
  •   Uranium One
  •   Benghazi gun-running
  •   Emailgate pay-for-play
But hey!  Those last two might be back in play thanks to Judicial Watch.  A federal court announced today [3/2/2020] that Hillary Clinton has been ordered by Judge Royce Lambert to give a deposition on "Benghazi and emails."

Hillary Clinton is ordered to be DEPOSED over her secret server for the first time by federal judge.  A federal judge has ordered former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to submit to a deposition by lawyers for the conservative group Judicial Watch over her fateful decision to use of a private email server.  Judge Royce Lamberth issued the order in response to litigation by the group that has dragged on for more than five years and seeks the public release of information from Clinton's tenure at the State Department.  'Any further discovery should focus on whether she used a private server to evade FOIA and, as a corollary to that, what she understood about State's records management obligations,' the judge wrote about the federal open records law.

The Editor says...
Allow me to spoil the surprise:  No matter what questions are asked, Hillary Clinton will repeatedly claim she "can't recall" whatever she is asked.  And that will be the end of it.

Federal judge orders Hillary Clinton deposition to address private emails: 'Still more to learn'.  A federal judge Monday [3/2/2020] granted a request from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch to have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sit for a sworn deposition to answer questions about her use of a private email server to conduct government business.  Clinton has argued that she has already answered questions about this and should not have to do so again — the matter did not result in any charges for the then-presidential candidate in 2016 after a high-profile investigation — but D.C. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in his ruling that her past responses left much to be desired.

Thank You, Judicial Watch:  Hillary Clinton Must Be Deposed Over Her Private Email Server Fiasco.  Hillary Clinton is a former first lady, secretary of state, U.S. Senator, and a two-time presidential loser.  She also will have to revisit a 2016 ghost this year: her email server.  Clinton, while serving as our top diplomat, conducted all official State Department business on a private email server that was not secure.  It wasn't authorized by State Department officials, contrary to what the former first lady said about the unusual communication arrangement.  And if she did ask for permission, Clinton would have been denied.  It was all part of the State Department Inspector General Office's report on the matter, which only added more fuel to the fire over this story during the 2016 cycle.  And it kept the story in the news, which at the time — was something the Hillary campaign was desperate to neutralize.  It only added more suspicion and rehashed old criticisms of the Clintons, one of which being that they think the rules don't apply to them.

Hillary Clinton will feign amnesia if forced to testify about her secret email server.  Good luck deposing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  She's as slippery as an eel and twice as devious.  She'll figure out a way to circumvent the truth.  It's her greatest skill set.  Clinton and her lawyers have spent months inventing one excuse after another for why she shouldn't have to answer questions in a deposition about her unauthorized and unsecured computer system.  She used a clandestine server to handle all of her electronic communications as secretary of state, including the transfer and dissemination of thousands of classified and top-secret documents.  There is no doubt that Clinton's unprotected email apparatus jeopardized America's national security.  The State Department eventually divulged that there had been, at minimum, thirty separate security breaches.  Chinese intelligence reportedly gained access to her server housing classified documents.  Did the Russians penetrate the same system?  You can bet on it.

Hillary's Reckoning Isn't Over.  The increasingly desperate Democratic Party and its allies in the media weep tears of joy at the thought of Hillary Clinton riding in to save the party, perhaps after a deadlocked Democratic National Convention.  No such luck.  After a judge's decision Monday [3/2/2020], Clinton would be wise to lay presidential dreams aside and lawyer up. [...] On Monday, acting on a request from Judicial Watch, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would allow Judicial Watch to depose the one-time secretary of state, her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and two other State Department officials.  Not only will this bring back questions about Hillary's actions before and after the Benghazi terrorist attack, in which four Americans were murdered, but it will at minimum serve as a reminder of the failure of her tenure as the nation's top diplomat. [...] It's clear that as secretary of state Clinton used her private email system to avoid legal scrutiny of her actions, either by the government agencies or by outside groups such as Judicial Watch.

The Monstrous Lie Behind CrowdStrike.  Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 presidential election was predicated largely on the claim Russian intelligence had hacked the Democratic National Committee's servers ahead of the November election. [...] A lot of ordinary folks just can't stop wondering why the DNC wouldn't let any federal investigators examine their servers.  Only CrowdStrike, an independent contractor on the DNC's payroll, was allowed to do so.  CrowdStrike executive Robert Johnson appeared on "60 Minutes" to address concerns that his firm hadn't been completely forthcoming with its findings.  But he only succeeded in raising more questions by claiming that the "FBI got what it needed and what it wanted."

Strzok email shows Hillary's apology for private server was excluded from FBI's 302 report.  Hillary Clinton had admitted to using her email server "out of convenience" and had apologized to the FBI according to newly released emails from former FBI official Peter Strzok.  But her apology was "not in" the FBI 302 report summarizing her interview, according to one message that was part of the 191 pages of emails between Strzok and his lover, former FBI attorney Lisa Page, obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Obama Admin. Tried To Meddle In Several Criminal Probes.  [Scroll down]  Obama also downplayed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email scandal in 2015.  During an interview, he said he believed Clinton's breach of policy did not pose a national security problem.  He added he "didn't get an impression" from Clinton she was purposefully trying to hide something.  "Hillary Clinton is and has been an outstanding public servant," he said.  "She was a great Secretary of State for me."  Obama's decision resulted in James Comey's takeover of the investigation, in which Comey decided there was no basis for criminal indictments in the case.  This came after the former administration prosecuted others for having classified material on their private computers.

Sean Davis on Twitter:.  Multiple foreign governments hacked Barack Obama's email while he was president, which could explain why James Comey was so eager to make the investigation of Hillary Clinton's illegal private email scheme go away.

5 Times Barack Obama Protected His Allies from Justice and Democrats Didn't Care.  [#1] Hillary Clinton:  It was not all that long ago that Hillary Clinton was the heir-apparent to Barack Obama, and Obama wasn't going to let her criminal behavior get in the way of her winning the election and keeping his legacy intact.  Thanks to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey, Hillary was never going to be punished for her illegal private server and mishandling of classified and top-secret information that would have seen anyone else indicted.  In fact, FBI Director James Comey had drafted her exoneration letter before Hillary had even been interviewed by the FBI.

Could New Hillary E-mails Lead to Criminal Charges?  After a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit produced yet more e-mails this week from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — indicating that she had even more classified information transmitted on her unsecure and non-government server — calls are being raised for Clinton to face criminal consequences.  Clinton previously escaped any criminal sanctions in July 2016 when then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not seek any such sanctions.  But now that Comey is no longer in a position to save her from criminal liability, these newly discovered e-mails have led to speculation that she could face a new — and real — investigation.  Judicial Watch released 37 pages of new Clinton emails that had been found by the FBI after the FOIA request.  Also found were text messages used by Clinton to conduct government business, which is also illegal.  The State Department told a federal court in November of last year that the FBI had found these previously undisclosed e-mails.

Fake Investigations — Designed To Fool You.  [Scroll down]  The second type of 'investigation' is when the Deep State pretends to investigate the Deep State.  In these 'investigations' the outcome is known in advance, but the script calls for pretending, sometimes for years, that it an honest investigation is underway.  There was nothing about the Hillary investigations that had anything to do with finding facts.  The purpose from the beginning was exoneration.  Key witnesses were given immunity and many were allowed to attend each other's interviews.  There were no early morning swat team raids to gather evidence.  Evidence was destroyed with no consequences.  When Anthony Weiner's laptop was found to contain over 340,000 Hillary emails in a file named "insurance", the FBI did not rejoice about finally getting the 'lost' email.  No, they hid the discovery for weeks until a New York agent threatened to go public.  Then, quite miraculously, Peter Strzok found a way to very quickly examine 340,000 messages and found that there was nothing at all that was incriminating.  No rational person would believe that.

Years Later, More Illicit Hillary Clinton Emails Emerge.  It has been more than three years since President Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, but all of Clinton's emails at the center of the email scandal that plagued her failed presidential campaign have still not seen the light of day.  But on Friday [1/10/2020], conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced the FBI produced 37 new pages of Clinton emails demonstrating she mishandled classified information and used text messages for official business as well.

How Stupid Do They Think We Are?  These days it seems like coincidence abounds in the precincts of leftism.  And an unquestioning Deep State Media are only too happy to label anyone who points out the absurdities of the supposed coincidences as "conspiracy theorists," having long ago abandoned journalistic inquisitiveness for allegiance to a political ideology. [...] Then we have Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton "bumping into" each other at the culmination of the FBI's pseudo-investigation into Hillary Clinton's outrageously criminal conduct in running highly classified government records over a ridiculously unsecure personal server, surely in violation of the Espionage Act and Federal Records Act, if not other laws.  The advance planning that goes into the travel of both a former president and a current Attorney General by their protective details and logistics personnel is immense.  Two such officials do not simply have their respective airplanes sidle up to each other on the tarmac of an airport like you might bump into an old high school chum at Starbucks.  The impropriety of the Attorney General meeting privately with the spouse of the subject of a high-profile FBI investigation was off the charts.  But, we were told, they just discussed golf outings and grandchildren.  Nothing to see here either folks.  And the likes of CNN dutifully reported that it was only congressional Republicans who saw fit to question the circumstances.

Judge delays legal challenge by conservative group over Clinton emails.  A federal judge has delayed a ruling on whether former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must submit to cross-examination stemming from a complaint by a conservative group concerning emails she wrote and received while serving in an official capacity.  U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lambeth said Thursday a decision would likely come in January concerning a request by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, but added he was concerned by the continuing emergence of new emails in the case.

Watchdog Asks Court to Subpoena Google for Records of Mystery Clinton-Tied Gmail Account.  A watchdog group asked a federal judge on Dec. 17 to subpoena Google for records on a Gmail account used to transfer the archive of Hillary Clinton's emails from her tenure as the secretary of state.  Judicial Watch, a conservative government transparency group, filed the request as part of its yearslong litigation against the Department of State.  The group also is seeking an interview with Paul Combetta, the information technology specialist who used the Gmail account to transfer all of Clinton's government emails to an unauthorized private email server.  Combetta created the Gmail account [...] in 2012 and used it to test email issues for his clients.  The name of the Gmail account, CarterHeavyIndustries, has fueled suspicions that China gained access to all of Clinton's emails.

Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Deep State:  A RICO Criminal Conspiracy.  [Scroll down]  The players acted together — in the usurpation of power, the abuse of power by public officials, bribery, thefts by fraud including federal funds, money laundering, perjury and the obstruction of justice, the violations of fundamental of civil rights, aided and abetted in the commission of these crimes and or to conceal these crimes.  Criminals will lie and can't keep their lies straight.  Their methods and behaviors are the same, whether engaging in street crimes or elaborate white-collar financial schemes.  The only difference is when more money is involved, the perps are more adept in concealing, covering up their sins, and hiding where the money went.  Many of these scandals are well known to the American Thinker readers.  I will focus my comments on Hillary's home brew sever and the Clinton Foundation as an example of how RICO can be used to prosecute the players.

Our Russia Collusion Nightmare:  All Hillary's Fault?  As awful as this orchestrated campaign against President Trump has been, it is absolutely maddening to realize that none of it would have happened had Hillary Clinton not engaged in one of the greatest pay-for-play operations in American history while placing our most guarded secrets (as well as the very lives of our soldiers and civilians) on a silver platter for those governments and adversaries who wish us the most harm in this world.  Three years of Russian hysteria happened only because of the deep corruption of Hillary Clinton.

FBI finds more irregular emails from Hillary Clinton.  The FBI has found more emails than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent from private servers and for which she is being investigated.  Public officials in the United States must use official servers to send information related to their government jobs so that this information is available to interested citizens through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

FBI Uncovers New Clinton Emails.  Judicial Watch today [11/28/2019] released a court filing that reveals the FBI found more Clinton emails it recently turned over to the State Department for review.  In the November 15, 2019 filing, the State Department informs the court that the FBI located additional Clinton emails that potentially had not been previously released.

Chuck Grassley Rips Comey:  You Missed Key Evidence In Clinton Investigation.  I'm Going To Find It.  On Tuesday, Senator Charles Grassley released a statement slamming former FBI Director James Comey for his failure during the Hillary Clinton investigation to find out that government officials deliberately transmitted classified information on unclassified systems. [...] Grassley noted that he had recently released a report from the State Department that noted Clinton's use of a non-government server for government business caused 588 security violations for mishandling classified information.  He continued, "If the average American did that, they'd lose their clearance, their job, and might even go to jail."

Russian Asset Number One:  Hillary, Not Tulsi.  [Scroll down]  Finally, there is the matter of the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement (Form 302) that Hillary signed: [...] Having signed this document, under oath, means Hillary is charged with all required knowledge therein, a concept fully understood by any graduate of Yale Law School.  Thus, any hacking into her emails by foreign powers are intrusions for which she bears responsibility.  In consciously disregarding known, serious risks, she acted not only grossly negligently but also recklessly.  This made her not only a Russian asset but also a Chinese asset, a North Korean asset, an Iranian asset, etc.

Judicial Watch:  Benghazi Emails Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up.  On Monday [10/21/2019], Judicial Watch released new emails involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and that would have exposed Clinton's private email account if they had been released to Judicial Watch in a FOIA request [in] 2014.  One long withheld email, which provides talking points for a call with senators and therefore fits the criteria of records concerning "talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack," should have been disclosed in 2014, but it was hidden from Judicial Watch for years.  "This email is a twofer — it shows Hillary Clinton misled the U.S. Senate on Benghazi and that the State Department wanted to hide the Benghazi connection to the Clinton email scheme," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.  "Rather than defending her email misconduct, the Justice Department has more than enough evidence to reopen its investigations into Hillary Clinton."

New Benghazi Documents Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up.  Judicial Watch today [10/21/2019] released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton's email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014. [...] The Clinton email cover-up led to court-ordered discovery into three specific areas:  whether Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department's intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch's request.  The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton's email.  (The court ruled that the Clinton email system was "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.")

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin Regrets Coverage of Clinton Email Scandal: 'I Should Have Been Talking About Other Issues'.  CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin voiced regret on Monday [10/21/2019] for how he covered the Hillary Clinton email scandal during her failed 2016 presidential run, saying in hindsight that he "should have been talking about other issues."  Toobin made the comments while responding to Friday's news on the Justice Department finally concluding their investigation into the Clinton email matter and found no "systemic" effort from the former secretary of state to flout laws protecting classified information.

Clinton Email Probe:  State Department Finds 38 People Committed Violations.  The U.S. State Department concluded its investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email usage and determined nearly 40 people committed violations, the Associated Press reported Friday [10/18/2019].  The department determined that those 38 people were "culpable" in 91 cases of sending classified information in messages that ended up in Clinton's personal email.  The 38 are current and former State Department officials but were not identified in the report that was sent to Congress this week.

Nobody is going to jail.  Why?
State Department Concludes Clinton Email Review, Says It Found Nearly 600 Security Violations.  State Department investigators probing Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state discovered nearly 600 security incidents that violated agency policy, according to a report the Daily Caller News Foundation obtained.  The investigation, conducted by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, found 38 individuals were culpable for 91 security violations.  Another 497 violations were found, but no individuals were found culpable in those incidents.

State Department report on Clinton emails finds hundreds of violations, dozens of individuals at fault.  A State Department report into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business, obtained by Fox News on Friday [10/18/2019], found dozens of individuals at fault and hundreds of security violations.  The report summarized an administrative review of the handling of classified information relating to Clinton's private email server used during her tenure as the nation's highest-ranking diplomat between 2009 and 2013.  The report, dated Sept. 13., was delivered to the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee until last year.  The report reflected only approximately 30,000 emails that the State Department was able to physically review, and found 38 individuals were responsible for 91 violations.

FBI Agent Says They Found 'Ten Times' as Many Hillary Emails as James Comey Publicly Claimed.  According to a new book, FBI agents claimed the discovery of thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop was an "oh s***" moment, with one admitting there were "ten times" as many as former FBI Director James Comey has admitted to publicly.  The book, titled 'Deep State:  Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law,' written by James B. Stewart, paints a picture of an agency stunned by the findings.  Thousands of additional emails were discovered after investigators found them on devices used by Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin.  The agents had been probing the former Democrat congressman's explicit texts with a 15-year-old girl.

Judicial Watch Fights in Court to Depose Hillary Clinton.  The court previously ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department's intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch's request.  The court specifically ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers and Clinton aides to be deposed or answer written questions under oath.  The court ruled that the Clinton email system was "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency."  On August 22, 2019, the court then ruled that Clinton and Mills had 30 days to oppose being questioned in person under oath by Judicial Watch related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  Additionally, Judicial Watch was granted seven new depositions, three interrogatories and four document requests.  In granting the additional discovery, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth commented:  "I'll tell you everything they've discovered in this period raises serious questions about what [...] the State Department's doing here."

The moment FBI agents found Hillary Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop.  FBI agents were stunned to find thousands of Hillary Clinton's private emails while examining Anthony Weiner's electronic devices for explicit text messages with a teen girl, a new book alleges.  The agents called the discovery an [alarming] moment as they combed through Weiner's iPhone, iPad and laptop after it was revealed he had been sending inappropriate messages to a minor, journalist James B. Stewart claims in his new book "Deep State:  Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law," out Tuesday [10/8/2019].  Within hours of the Sept. 26, 2016, search warrant, FBI technicians noticed there were 340,000 emails on the laptop between Clinton and her top aide, Weiner's wife Huma Abedin — many of them from domain addresses such as "hillaryclinton.com" and "state.gov."

The Madness of Progressive Projection.  Who made the decision to quash the investigation of Hillary Clinton after she destroyed over 30,000 emails under subpoena?  Who excused Obama officials after they knowingly misled federal FISA court justices?  Who leaked information about a surveilled phone call between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador?  Who decided that it was acceptable for Samantha Power to request over 260 times the unmasking of names of American citizens swept up in government surveillance, many of which were illegally leaked to the press and most of which Power denied requesting and alleged others had used her name to do so?  Somewhere, somehow there was a great deal of obstruction and distortion of justice that so far has prevented the pursuit of these criminal acts.

State Department Ramps Up Investigation Into Hillary's Emails.  The State Department has reportedly ramped up its investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server, an issue that took center stage during the 2016 presidential election.  According to the Washington Post, the State Department has called in 130 officials who had access to Clinton's email inbox.  The officials ranged from low-level employees to senior officials who reported directly to Clinton.  Former aides were sent letters letting them know that their emails were retroactively deemed "classified" and sharing that information could be deemed a security violation.

At least 130 State Dept. officials notified of possible 'culpability' in 'security incidents' related to Hillary's private email server.  The wheels of federal bureaucratic responsibility, like the wheels of justice, grind very slowly, so only now are we learning that the scandal of Hillary Clinton's private email server used for official business is still being scrutinized.  And while the Big Fish, Hillary Clinton, is out there shooting off her mouth accusing President Trump of the corrupt practices she undertook, the smaller fish in the State Department are learning of their own culpability in corresponding with her on a private server.  Just the kind of leverage a determined prosecutor could use to obtain plea deals implicating higher ups.

State Dept. intensifies email probe of Hillary Clinton's former aides.  The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said.  As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials.  Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post.  State Department investigators began contacting the former officials about 18 months ago, after President Trump's election, and then seemed to drop the effort before picking it up in August, officials said.

Hillary Clinton Seeks to Withhold 6-Page Memo Describing Her Lawyer's Review and Deletion of Her Emails.  Judicial Watch previously sought a deposition from Hillary Clinton, and last month the Court gave the watchdog group additional discovery and witnesses on the Clinton email case.  The judge wanted Judicial Watch to "shake the tree" on a newly uncovered potential Clinton email trove and gave Hillary 30 days to oppose their request to question her under oath.  Hillary Clinton's lawyers responded to Judicial Watch late Monday evening and sought to withhold a 6-page memo describing her attorney's deletion of her emails.

Federal Judge Blasts State Department Lawyers in Hillary Email Case — Warns 'No FOIA Exemption For Political Expedience'.  Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Friday released transcript from their hearing on August 22 where Judge Royce Lamberth granted new discovery and witnesses on Hillary Clinton's email case.  Judge Lamberth, a Reagan appointee blasted State Department lawyers defending Hillary Clinton who were working to cover up her email scandal.  'There is no FOIA exemption for political expedience, nor is there one for bureaucratic incompetence,' Judge Lamberth said warning the government lawyers.

Judicial Watch Victory:  Court Grants Significant New Discovery in Clinton Email Case.  Judicial Watch announced today that a federal judge granted seven additional depositions, three interrogatories and four document requests related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private, unauthorized email server.  Hillary Clinton and her former top aide and current lawyer Cheryl Mills were given 30 days to oppose being deposed by Judicial Watch.  The court rejected Justice and State Department arguments to protect Clinton and the agencies from additional discovery and ordered agency lawyers to respond to Judicial Watch's questions about their knowledge of the Clinton email issue.  The court granted all of Judicial Watch's requested discovery but gave Clinton and Mills 30 days to file any opposition to the requests to question them in person under oath.

Mystery Gmail Account Revives Questions About Clinton Email Probe.  FBI Section Chief Peter Strzok looked dismissive and aloof as he listened to Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General investigator Frank Rucker relay an alarming lead for the Clinton email investigation on Feb. 18, 2016, at the bureau's headquarters in Washington, according to Rucker and Jeanette McMillian, an attorney who accompanied him to the meeting.  Days earlier, Rucker had discovered an anomaly in all but four of the 30,490 emails Clinton's lawyers provided to Congress.  Each message contained "carterheavyindustries@gmail.com" in the metadata, suggesting that a copy of each message that passed through Hillary Clinton's private, unauthorized server during her tenure as secretary of state was forwarded to the Gmail address in real-time.  Rucker's concern was amplified when he searched for "Carter Heavy Industries" on Google and came up with information for a Chinese company with a similar name.

Hillary's IT Guy Created An Encrypted Gmail Account And Sent All Of Clinton's Emails There.  Remember Hillary Clinton's emails, the 30,000 or so that went missing that were subpoenaed?  Well, we might be able to find them.  We just need to ask Google.  At The Daily Caller, investigative reporter Luke Rosiak said that the former first lady's IT guy, who ignored a congressional subpoena, might have created an encrypted Gmail account and forwarded all those communications to that address.

Hundreds of Hillary Clinton's classified emails sat unprotected on Gmail account weeks before Comey exonerated her.  Several hundred emails from former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton sat unprotected in a private Gmail account for more than two years and remained there about two weeks before then-FBI Director James Comey exonerated her for criminal mishandling of national secrets.

Clinton's Deliberate, Felonious Actions Harmed National Security.  Earlier today, my good friend and colleague, Bonchie, penned an excellent article about the latest twist in the Clinton e-mail saga, one that demonstrated just how dangerous her actions were to National Security.  Please go have a look.  Because of his timely article, I thought I might once again review just how corrupt the FBI was, especially former Director Comey, when he "cleared" Secretary Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing.  Comey's excuse?  Secretary Clinton had no intent to violate the law.  Despite the fact that the applicable statute regarding the handling of classified information doesn't require intent, the explainer below will show that there was indeed such intent and a number of people should be doing hard time.  Let me be clear at the outset; somebody committed a felony, likely several.

Clinton pastor's son is suspected mole during Hillary probe.  Senate says hater still works for Trump.  A suspected Clinton-linked mole within the federal investigative office that performed most of the probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's illicit email habits now reportedly works in President Donald Trump's administration in some sort of intelligence-related capacity.  Moreover, this suspected Clinton-linked mole's Facebook page was reportedly littered with anti-Republican, anti-Trump memes and content as recently as this past Thursday [8/15/2019].

The Hillary Clinton Email Saga Just Got A Lot Weirder.  Due to the declassification and release of a trove of documents late in the week, the Hillary email story has gone hot again.  As I shared a few days ago, we now have confirmation of what we heard from sources several months ago, namely that every email on her illegal server was being forwarded to a Chinese email account. [...] This account was setup by Paul Combetta, Hillary's IT specialist who was given immunity by the FBI for no justifiable reason.  Why Combetta chose to add an email account associated with a Chinese company and whether the emails were actually going to the Chinese required more investigation but the FBI decided to bury the evidence instead.

Strange Jeep Followed ICIG Investigators Probing Hillary Email Scandal.  Frank Rucker and several of his fellow ICIG investigators who were probing the Hillary Clinton email scandal were also followed by a strange Jeep for several weeks.  Recall, Frank Rucker and other ICIG investigators discovered Hillary Clinton's emails were hacked by China and confronted the FBI about the 'anomaly' they found on Hillary's server.  Peter Strzok ignored these warnings from the ICIG investigators and seemed 'indifferent' according to the Senate report.  One of the ICIG investigator's was followed from the State Department to his home where someone broke into his house and stole all of his computers — another investigator realized someone rummaged through his recycling bin in his home looking for paperwork.

Intel Lawyer With Clinton Ties Suspected Of Leaking During Email Probe, Now Works For Intel Director.  The Intelligence Community Inspector General — whose office performed some of the most important work on the probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server — suspected someone on his team was leaking information, Senate testimony shows.  His counsel was tied to the Clintons.  The suspected mole is now working for the Trump administration in at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), according to the testimony.  After returning from the State Department, an ICIG investigator noticed a Jeep that began tailing him and his colleagues and even rummaging through recycling, according to testimony in a Senate report by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa released Wednesday.

More Clinton Email Funny Business.  [Scroll down]  We may never learn all the details of Hillary's email frolic, but we probably don't need to.  What we know for sure is bad enough: she ignored statutes and State Department rules by creating a technically incompetent off-the-books email system that was easily vulnerable to penetration by foreign powers.  She did this in order to evade the Freedom of Information Act and to keep secret matters relating to her job duties that the American people were entitled by law to know (and perhaps other things as well).  In the Obama administration, Clinton was no outlier.  Other senior Obama officials did the same or similar things — Obama's EPA head conducted official business using a private email account in the name of her dog — and President Obama himself was well aware of Hillary's improper conduct.

Clinton IT Aide Who Defied Subpoena Says He Created A Cryptic Gmail Account And Sent It Nearly All Of Hillary's Emails.  All but four of Hillary Clinton's 30,000 emails were copied, likely secretly, to a Gmail address called CarterHeavyIndustries@gmail.com, according to a new Senate report.  The FBI says that the account was linked to Paul Combetta, an IT aide Clinton hired who used BleachBit to destroy emails after they were subpoenaed and misled FBI agents.  Combetta said he sent all of her emails to the Gmail account as part of trying to copy them to a new server.

The Hillary Clinton Emails Worth Reading.  When she was first caught using a private email server, Hillary claimed the emails she destroyed were ones about Chelsea's wedding and Yoga, and the media tripped over their neckties, tumbling all the way down the rabbit hole.  This is what the influential WaPo wrote about the missing emails in:  "There's lots we don't know about Hillary Clinton's e-mail cache from her days as secretary of state.  But one thing we do know:  She was a diligent yogi!"  What a scoop!

What Hillary, Seth, and Paige Have in Common.  The insiders come in various stripes.  Many are simply careless.  These are people who, either for reasons of convenience or nefariousness (or both), choose to disregard the most basic security protocols with respect to their computer use.  Hillary Clinton, of course, is the most notorious recent example of this category of insider threat.  Her knowing use of an unsecure personal email server to traffic the nation's mostly highly guarded classified information would have landed any of the rest of us in jail.  Hillary engaged in this unbelievable behavior — as did dozens of government officials who knowingly corresponded with her on this system — with complete disregard for our nation's security and the safety of people who put their lives on the line for our country.  She did this in order to hide her corrupt pay-for-play operation, trading State Department favors for money to her Clinton Foundation, from public and congressional scrutiny.

New Evidence Unveils Disturbing Facts about Hillary's Email Scandal.  [T]he American Center for Law and Justice or ACLJ (Jay Sekulow's organization, not related to his role as the President's attorney), has obtained actual copies of the immunity agreements pertaining to Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson in the Hillary email scandal.  This was a stunning litigation win, hard-fought after years of litigation by the ACLJ attorneys, who were unable to extract the documents through the normal FOIA processes, due to a lack of cooperation by the government.  In reviewing what the agreements uncovered, keep in mind that Cheryl Mills was Secretary Clinton's Chief of Staff at the State Department and then bizarrely, she subsequently served as Clinton's attorney, representing her in the email scandal.  Heather Samuelson worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and then became a Senior Advisor to her at the State Department, as well as the White House liaison.  Somehow, she also became one of Clinton's personal attorneys during the email scandal.

Too big to jail
ACLJ Has Obtained Obama DOJ's Immunity Agreements With Hillary Clinton's Attorneys.  On Monday night's [7/29/2019] edition of Hannity, it was announced that The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has obtained the Obama DOJ's immunity agreements with Hillary Clinton's lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson.  These records were obtained via a FOIA request filed by the ACLJ two years ago.  Mills served as Clinton's chief of staff and Samuelson served as a senior advisor and White House liaison during her tenure as Secretary of State.  Both women became her personal attorneys after she left [the Department of] State.


ACLJ Obtains Obama DOJ's Immunity Agreements with Hillary Clinton Lawyers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to "Dispose" of Evidence.  The ACLJ has just obtained previously unreleased documents related to the Clinton investigation and immunity agreements given to top Clinton aids.  These agreements reveal that James Comey's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Loretta Lynch's Department of Justice (DOJ) granted immunity to Hillary Clinton's aids and lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, from prosecution for anything found on their laptops violating multiple felony criminal statutes governing the mishandling of classified information and/or the removal or destruction of records, including Espionage Act provisions.  Further, the DOJ and FBI also agreed to evade the statutory requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by purporting to deem the contents of the laptops as not under DOJ or FBI "custody or control."  These laptops were critical to any meaningful investigation of Hillary Clinton's handling of classified emails and records.  According to the DOJ Inspector General, who identified these as the "culling laptops," "[a]ll 62,320 emails pulled from the Clinton servers were stored at one time on these laptops."

The Fix Was in from the Start for Hillary's 'Exoneration,' Immunity Agreements with Aides Suggest.  The American Center for Law and Justice finally got some satisfaction from its numerous FOIA requests to the Department of Justice.  It took a specific court order from a federal judge to release long-secret documents that might raise a few eyebrows among those who are still interested in matters pertaining to Hillary Clinton's aides and the former secretary of state's missing emails.

Here's why Hillary Clinton can still be charged and imprisoned for her misuse of classified emails.  [Scroll down]  In a second video released Wednesday [7/10/2019], Judicial Watch reported that John Hackett, a former top official at the State Department, warned his superiors repeatedly about Clinton's email issues.  In particular, he first warned about Clinton's use of an unsecured Blackberry device, then warned about how she had deleted some 30,000 emails without following strict National Archives regulations and restrictions.  Hackett would go on to warn that the formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) review process for Clinton's email documents may have been tampered with.  "This disturbing testimony points to an Obama administration conspiracy to hide and destroy Hillary Clinton's emails," Fitton said in a statement.  "Even worse, the testimony suggests Clinton's Benghazi emails were under-classified to protect Hillary Clinton," he added.

New Clinton Email Scandal Testimony.  Judicial Watch attorneys obtained blockbuster testimony from former State Department official John Hackett, who was Director for Information Programs and Services (IPS), which handles records management at the State Department, Mr. Hackett testified under oath that he had raised concerns about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's missing emails.  Her staff had "culled out 30,000" of the secretary's "personal" emails without following strict National Archives standards, he said in his deposition. [...] His testimony came as part of a series of court-ordered depositions and questions under oath of senior Obama-era State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides.  Hackett also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) review process related to the classification of Clinton's Benghazi-related emails.

Hillary Clinton Withdraws As Cybersecurity Conference Keynote Citing 'Unforeseen Circumstance'.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton withdrew from the cybersecurity conference where she was scheduled to be the keynote speaker, citing an "unforeseen circumstance," according to an email from the FireEye Cyber Defense Summit.  Clinton — who infamously transmitted classified information over a homemade server once housed in her bathroom — was the centerpiece of the October 9-10 summit in Washington, where Clinton was to have "engage[d] in a Q&A discussion with FireEye CEO, Kevin Mandia on the geopolitical landscape and its implications for global cyber security today."

Official Raised Alarm About Deleted Clinton Emails.  A former top official in the U.S. State Department testified that he raised concerns about deleted emails from Hillary Clinton's personal email system.  Clinton set up and used a private email server for the majority of her time as secretary of state during the Obama administration.  John Hackett served as deputy director and then director of the department's Information Programs and Services from 2013-16, which handles document management for Freedom of Information Act requests among other things.  Hackett said he was concerned over news that the Clinton team had segregated and then deleted about 30,000 emails out of a larger batch set to be turned back over to the department, and what criteria the team had applied when deciding which emails to delete.

FBI gave immunity to Hillary lawyer responsible for 33k email deletion.  Heather Samuelson testified under oath in a Judicial Watch court-ordered deposition that, contrary to what she told the FBI, she was, in fact, aware that Clinton used a private email account as secretary of state.  That's not all.  The former Secretary of State's White House Liaison at the State Department, and later Clinton's personal lawyer, Heather Samuelson, admitted under oath that she was granted immunity by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2016.  Samuelson also revealed that, contrary to what she told the FBI in 2016, she was, in fact, aware that Sec. Clinton used a private email account while secretary of state.

China Hacked Clinton's Email Server, Congressman Confirms.  The U.S. intelligence community established that China hacked Hillary Clinton's unauthorized email server when she served as the secretary of state, according to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).  In an interview with The Epoch Times published on June 26, Gohmert said that the Chinese "actually hacked Hillary Clinton's personal server — as our intel community established without any question — even though the FBI refused to ever examine the evidence.  "There's no question, China was involved," he added.  Gohmert is the first lawmaker to publicly confirm that China was the foreign actor that hacked Clinton's server.  President Donald Trump is the only other official to have made the same claim.

Hillary Clinton's Lawyer Changes Story on When She Knew About Emails.  Heather Samuelson, Hillary Clinton's personal attorney, told the FBI and Judicial Watch conflicting explanations of when she learned the former secretary of state used a private email system to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business.  "I believe I first became aware when either she e-mailed me on personal matters, such as wishing me happy birthday, or when I infrequently would receive e-mails forwarded to me from others at the department that had that e-mail address listed elsewhere in the document," Samuelson told Judicial Watch lawyers during a June 13, 2019, deposition.

Comey Hid 'Clinton Emails' Binder In His Office Safe and Had Hillary's Backup Email Device.  Former FBI director James Comey had a white binder marked "Clinton Emails" in his office on May 16, 2017, a few days after he was fired, as the Department of Justice was trying to get back the items in Comey's office safe.  The State Department and FBI also possessed a "Datto" backup email device for Hillary Clinton's private email server, which a judge ordered released.  Michael Bekesha, who waged the Datto case for Judicial Watch, tells Big League Politics that the State Department is "still processing the FBI investigative file," even though Datto contents were ordered released by last September.

A Jihad Basis for the Coup.  We are the last defenders of civilization.  Period.  The evidence now shows that Obama, Hillary, and John Kerry sold out.  We still don't know how many secrets Hillary sold to foreign powers for money, but thirty thousand emails are still missing.  Even conservatives tend to forget how deeply the Democrats hate this country.  We don't really want to know that, being normal, decent people.  The Democrats colluded with Stalin in the 20th century, and they never got over being exposed by Joe McCarthy.  They were the party of slavery and secession, and later, they supported the Klan.  Their record is morally abysmal.  As for Obama, he never showed any understanding of American moral values.  He is either very blind or on the wrong side.  Take your pick.

Hillary's henchmen investigated.  The news out of Washington is 15 people are in trouble for aiding and abetting Hillary's use of a private computer to conduct official business as secretary of State.  The Washington Times reported, "While the full review is not completed, the department said it's found 23 violations and seven infractions of security protocols related to Mrs. Clinton's emails.  "Some of the 15 people got write-ups placed in their security files at the department, according to a letter sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican.  Those could affect future attempts to gain security clearances, the department said."  No one was named but this could get quite sticky.

Why Wasn't Everyone Looking for Hillary's Missing Emails?  [Scroll down]  The accusation suggests that if Clinton's contraband communications — emails she claimed were non-work related — had been unearthed before the election, the trove could have influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.  But how could that be if Clinton was telling the truth?  This should have raised suspicions that Clinton's deleted emails involved questions that risked implicating her in deeper scandals just months before Election Day.  (Talk about interference!)  Instead, the media immediately criminalized any attempt to locate the emails that Clinton's aides erased from her server — that is correspondence she sent and received during her tenure as secretary of state.  Never mind that the files were material to pending lawsuits and an ongoing congressional investigation.

State Dept.  Says Hillary Email Server Had at Least 30 Security Breaches.  It's not the public's fault that so much of this was kept hidden for so long and that it's just now starting to trickle out.  Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server made news again yesterday after a letter sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley was released.  In it, the State Department outlined that at least 30 security breaches took place during its operation. [...] Laws are for the little people though, so Hillary and her associates, who clearly knew about and intended to propagate the scheme that took place, have faced no consequences for their actions.  I'm not even sure any of them have lost their security clearances.

Judicial Watch Releases Testimony of Clinton Email Administrator — Clinton Lawyer Cheryl Mills Communicated with Him a Week Prior to Testimony.  Judicial Watch today released the deposition transcript of Justin Cooper, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee who registered the domain name of the unsecure clintonemail.com server that Hillary Clinton used while serving as Secretary of State.  Cooper admits that he spoke with Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff, one week prior to his deposition and let her know that the deposition had been scheduled.  Cooper also said that he worked with Huma Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff, to create the private email system, but can't recall if Clinton had any input in its creation or if he wiped the original server.  The entire transcript is available here.

State Dept identifies 15 people culpable in 30 instances of Hillary security violations.  The State Department has identified 30 instances of classified-intel mishandling involving 15 individuals connected to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unauthorized use of a private, unsecured email server.  The mishandling of classified information was revealed in a letter from Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs at the State Department, to Senator Chuck Grassley.  Grassley, a Republican, is leading Congressional oversight of the security review.  The State Department did not identify the culpable individuals pursuant to longstanding policy, nor did it reveal if any of the individuals still work at the State Department.

State Department: 15 [people] broke rules in mishandling Hillary Clinton emails.  At least 15 people broke State Department rules in mishandling former Secretary Hillary Clinton's emails, the department said in a review released publicly Monday [6/17/2019].  While the full review is not completed, the department said it's found 23 violations and seven infractions of security protocols related to Mrs. Clinton's emails.  Some of the 15 people got write-ups placed in their security files at the department, according to a letter sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican.  Those could affect future attempts to gain security clearances, the department said.

State Department identifies 23 violations, 'multiple security incidents' concerning Clinton emails.  The State Department revealed Monday that it has identified "multiple security incidents" involving current or former employees' handling of Hillary Clinton's emails, and that 23 "violations" and seven "infractions" have been issued as part of the department's ongoing investigation.  The information came in a letter to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is responsible for overseeing the security review.  "To this point, the Department has assessed culpability to 15 individuals, some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents," Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the State Department's Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, wrote to Grassley.  "DS has issued 23 violations and 7 infractions incidents. ... This number will likely change as the review progresses."

FBI Notes on Clinton Emails Go Missing.  Given the FBI's repeated intransigence over the years in responding to our FOIA requests, I'm not of a mind to assume this story represents simply an innocent mistake.  The FBI has released 277 pages of redacted records that show the FBI failed to produce information from an August 2015 meeting with Intelligence Community Inspector General about Hillary Clinton's email server.  The FBI claimed that notes are "missing" and the CD containing notes from meeting is likely "damaged" irreparably.

Reference material:
Spoliation of evidence.  The spoliation of evidence is the intentional or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. [...] The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party's destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding:  the finder of fact can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party.

Spoliation defined
Black's Law Dictionary, 1991, page 1401.

The FBI Just Dropped New Documents On Hillary Clinton And They Are Really Bad.  Late Friday night, we got a document dump from the FBI dealing with the investigation into Hillary Clinton's illegal email server.  While we've already gotten ample evidence that she absolutely should have been charged for her mishandling of classified information, these latest revelations are still pretty mind-blowing.  After you read them, you are left asking yourself how it was possible that she wasn't indicted.  Well, we know why. [...] Starting with Hillary's actions, her criminality isn't even in doubt anymore.  Stripping highly classified materials of their markings and then pushing them out via unapproved means is illegal.  Nowhere in the statute is their a requirement for "intent" nor could any serious person argue she didn't intend to do what she actively chose to do.  While we already knew that, it's pretty amazing to see that even the FBI was admitting it at the time.  Shortly after, the full whitewash would go into effect.

FBI docs:  Study found Clinton email server hacked, info found on dark web.  Information from Hillary Clinton's unauthorized, private email server were found on the dark web, newly released documents from the FBI show.  It has long been suspected that Clinton's server, located in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., might have been breached by hackers, but that has never been publicly confirmed.  But notes from a independent review, obtained by the FBI and released from "The Vault" on Friday, determined the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer breached a server for Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal, who was passing information about Libya to the secretary of state, and Clinton's server was "indirectly" hacked likely as a result of the breach of Blumenthal's server.  This information was transferred to a computer or network located south of Bucharest, Romania.

McCabe: Comey's Draft Statement Exonerating Clinton Two Months before Her FBI Interview Was Not Normal Protocol.  "This is the only time I am aware of, sir."  "I have not seen that before, sir."  "I've never seen that."  These are just some of the words utilized by former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe when asked during closed door testimony about an email penned by disgraced ex-FBI chief James Comey circulating a draft statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in the private email server case[,] a full two months before the FBI interviewed Clinton and other witnesses in the criminal probe.

Hillary Aide Huma Abedin Lied:  People Died.  It now appears that Clinton consigliere Huma Abedin bold-face lied to FBI investigators and — because we live in a two-tier justice system — she wasn't charged.  To set a little context, we now know that a variety of foreign adversaries hacked Hillary Clinton's server, dispatching every email she sent and received to — among others — the People's Republic of China.  Concurrent with this security debacle was the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack that occurred under Obama and Hillary's watch, probably the most devastating cyberwarfare event that has ever ocurred in American history.  The OPM, which maintains the most sensitive details of every applicant for any security clearance, was hacked from 2014 to 2015.  Millions of cleared individuals, including all covert agents, were revealed during the Obama-Clinton reign.

FBI Docs Show Notes about Meeting with Intelligence Community Inspector General about Clinton Emails are Missing, CD Containing Notes Likely Damaged.  Judicial Watch announced today [6/8/2019] that the FBI released 277 pages of redacted records in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that show the FBI failed to produce information from an August 2015 meeting with Intelligence Community Inspector General about Hillary Clinton's email server.  The FBI claimed that notes are "missing" and the CD containing notes from meeting is likely "damaged" irreparably.

The Editor says...
As recently as 2015, who used CD-ROM storage for vital information?  And why was there only one copy of it?  And why was the only copy of that CD-ROM left unattended in a place where Hillary could reach it?

FBI emails show rush to cooperate with Clinton after investigation.  The FBI rushed in the months ahead of the 2016 presidential election to accommodate Hillary Clinton's request for expedited processing of information from its investigation into her secret emails, according to documents released Monday [6/3/20119].  Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest legal group, obtained hundreds of pages of documents after suing the FBI for ignoring a public records request.  Among the documents are emails from then-FBI General Counsel James Baker recounting his conversation with Clinton attorney Doug Kendall in the weeks after then-FBI Director James B. Comey cleared the Democratic presidential candidate of criminal wrongdoing.

Deep State:  The collusion between the FBI and Mainstream Media that everyone stopped talking about.  The Office of Inspector General's report on the FBI and Justice Department's handling and mishandling of the investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's use of an unauthorized, non-secure email server to conduct secret government business as Secretary of State revealed real and damning information on the mainstream media and their tight relationship with the deepest members of the deep state.  But for some reason this story has just disappeared into the ether.  And with all this talk of collusion you'd think this would be a hot topic.  While the FBI was leaking classified information, reporters were funneling bribes back to the leakers in the form of tickets to sporting events, golf outings, dinners, drinks, invites to private exclusive parties and more.

Hillary Clinton will give keynote speech at cyber defense summit.  Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will serve as a keynote speaker at the Cyber Defense Summit 2019, the cybersecurity company FireEye announced on Thursday. [...] The event is designed to inform executives on cybersecurity, as well as security practitioners on how to "mitigate, detect, and respond to cyber attacks."  Her comments will follow a slew of appearances in which she attributed her 2016 loss partly to Russian cyber activities used to interfere in the election.  In May, she said the election was "stolen" from her.

Hillary Clinton To Give Keynote Speech At Cyber Security Summit.  Hillary Clinton, who used a private email server as secretary of state, will speak at a cyber defense summit later in 2019, it was announced Thursday [5/30/2019].  FireEye, a cybersecurity company based in California, announced Clinton will give the keynote speech at its annual summit in Washington, D.C., in October.

Justice Department Declines to Prosecute Serial FBI Leaker.  The Department of Justice declined to prosecute a senior FBI official linked to the Clinton-email investigation, despite evidence that he or she leaked information from a sealed federal court filing in violation of federal law, according to an investigative summary released by the DOJ inspector general on May 29.  The inspector general discovered evidence that a deputy assistant director (DAD) at the FBI leaked sealed federal court information and sensitive law enforcement information to the media.  The FBI official also had dozens of contacts with the media in violation of FBI policy, according to the findings.

Americans Unite to Demand Justice.  The Equal Justice Tour kicked off in Chappaqua, New York, where citizens assembled outside the home of Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday, May 26, 2019, to call attention to her illegal activities as documented by FBI Director James Comey during her tenure as Secretary of State.  As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized, unsecured server to store, send and receive classified emails, exposing some of the nation's most sensitive information to hostile foreign powers.  She deleted tens of thousands of emails, used software to irretrievably erase the server, and physically destroyed computer and telephone hardware while under FBI investigation.  Despite the obvious violations of law, Clinton was "exonerated" by former FBI Director James Comey on July 5, 2016.

Why Both The Left And The Right Should Defenestrate James Comey From Public Life.  Democrats and Republicans will never agree on the validity of the outcome of the Hillary Clinton investigation.  While Clinton backers believe the former secretary of state committed no crime by transmitting classified information through her personal email account, critics counter that former FBI director James Comey's conclusion that Clinton acted "extremely careless" euphemistically described gross negligence subjecting her to criminal liability. [...] Comey is playing his audience and America.  He is no hero.  He was a weak, smug, self-important fraud when he dragged the country through his mishandling of the Clinton investigation.

Judicial Watch:  Obama White House Orchestrated Clinton Email Cover Up.  According to newly released emails obtained by Judicial Watch, the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) records request concerning Hillary Clinton's unsecured, private email server.  These new emails prove that the Obama White House knew about the scandal earlier than previously admitted, and attempted to cover it up.  Months after the Obama White House got involved, "the State Department responded to the FOIA requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), falsely stating that no such records existed."

Are Impeachment Democrats Geniuses or Idiots?  What would you have done as president the first time you heard about the Hillary e-mail system?  I'd say any president with half a brain would demand that either the e-mail system or Hillary is outta here by sundown.  But Obama is weak, feeble.  And what about the non-concession of the 2016 election?  I'd say that on election night, Hillary was drunk, and in no fit state to make a concession speech.  And then on the following day, she was hungover.  People don't make very good decisions when they are drunk and/or hungover.  And then the Mueller investigation.  I thought that Rule One for a lawyer is:  you never ask a question in court unless you already know the answer.  So, you gin up a two-year witch-hunt without knowing whether the witches did it?

Obama White House Knew About Clinton Emails Years Earlier Than Previously Admitted.  Top officials working in the White House for President Barack Obama knew Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was using a private email system for official government business three years before it became public, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch.  "WH [White House] called — have we received a FOIA request from CREW (Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington) on the topic of personal use of email by senior officials?  "Apparently other agencies have.  If we have it, can you give me the details so I can call the WH back?  I think they'd like it on quick turnaround.  Thanks!  Sheryl," read a Dec. 20, 2012 email from Sheryl L. Walter, who was then director of the Department of State's Office of Information Programs and Services (IPS).  Her email was addressed to several of her subordinates.

Obama White House Tracked FOIA Request For Hillary Emails That Was Improperly Denied.  The Obama White House kept tabs on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email accounts that the State Department improperly denied, according to newly released emails.  The emails, which were provided to Judicial Watch, show for the first time that the Obama White House was aware of the Clinton-related FOIA request, which the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) submitted to the State Department in December 2012.  The State Department denied the request in May 2013, claiming that no responsive records existed.  That despite officials at the State Department, the White House and even President Obama himself knowing that Clinton used a personal email account for government business.

Obama White House Was Tracking FOIA Requests Regarding Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch has scored an impressive achievement by digging into the records of the entire Clinton e-mail scandal, showing that not only was the Obama White House aware of what was going on, but Clinton's State Department may have lied in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.  While you probably thought we'd heard the last of this tale, it turns out that this debacle dates back to 2012.  At that time, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had submitted a FOIA request to the State Department asking for information about how many email accounts the Secretary of State had been using.  They were told no such records existed and the White House continued to maintain that position for some time to come.  But now, new documents show that the White House was indeed aware of the situation and were tracking CREW's FOIA requests, presumably to keep a handle on the situation.

Judicial Watch:  New Records Reveal Obama White House Paranoid, Tracking FOIA Request For Hillary Clinton Emails.  Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Friday [5/10/2019] announced it obtained 44 pages of State Department records through a court-ordered discovery that revealed the Obama White House was paranoid and tracking a December 2012 FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request seeking documents on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private server system (shortly after the Benghazi terror attack).  A few months after the Obama White House intercepted and got involved, the State Department responded to the FOIA requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and falsely claimed that no such records existed.

Huma Abedin's Response When Told That Server Had Been Hacked.  At 2:57 am on January 9, 2011, Clinton aide Huma Abedin received an email from technology pro Justin Cooper, who oversaw Hillary Clinton's private email servers.  Cooper:  "I had to shut down the server.  Someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt want to let them have the chance to.  I will restart in the morning." [...] This document indicates that there were many occasions when Clinton's technology team "either suspected it had been hacked or seemingly acknowledged that security measures had come up short."  This batch contains 277 pages of email exchanges, text messages and information about the specific equipment used by Clinton and her minions.

Attempt to hack email server stunned Clinton aide, FBI files show.  The revelation was contained in a trove of newly released, partially redacted FBI documents from the agency's investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information — a probe known as the "Midyear Exam."  The document release reveals numerous episodes in which the Clinton team either suspected it had been hacked or seemingly acknowledged that security measures had come up short.  In a tense email exchange, Cooper wrote to Abedin at 2:57 a.m.  Sunday [1/9/2011]:  "I had to shut down the server.  Someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt want to let them have the chance to.  I will restart in the morning."

FBI admits notes from meeting with IG in Hillary email case went missing, evidence on damaged CD couldn't be copied.  Reportedly released last week by the FBI itself, the records contain internal emails sent only three months ago in which it's revealed that a CD that contained notes from an Aug. 3, 2015 meeting with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community has gone "missing."

The Editor says...
I suppose that was the only copy of that information.  Does anyone believe it was not intentionally destroyed?

Clinton Projection Syndrome.  Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller's massive report.  She concluded of the report's assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump's words and actions that "any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted."  Psychologists might call her claims "projection."  That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one's own similar, if not often even worse, sins.

How Pseudo Events Are Used by Media to Manufacture Controversy.  [Scroll down]  Hillary Clinton pulled a similar move the same day, stating on April 23 that when it came to Trump as described in the Mueller report, "any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted."  Keep in mind, this is the same Hillary Clinton who was let off in the investigations into her use of a private email server to handle classified information.  The DOJ under Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had set an unusually high threshold for prosecuting Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged.

The walls are closing in on Obama.  The truth of violations of law by the Obama White House, long buried, is being excavated by two private groups.  Judicial Watch has obtained testimony from a top FBI official that Hillary Clinton's home-brew server emails were found in the White House.  This means that Barack Obama's illegal handling of classified information contained in those emails is closer to being exposed.  This implicates him in the same felonies committed by Hillary Clinton that James Comey falsely claimed "no reasonable prosecutor" would pursue.

Judicial Watch:  FBI Admits Hillary Clinton Emails Found in Obama White House.  Judicial Watch announced today [4/23/2019] that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President.  The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.  E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue.  U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as Priestap, to be deposed or answer writer questions under oath.  The court ruled that the Clinton email system was "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency."

Former FBI Official Admits Hillary Clinton Emails Were Found in Obama White House.  A former top FBI official has admitted under oath that a repository of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email records was obtained by the Obama White House and housed in the Executive Office of the President.  Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently coaxed the admission out of the former assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap, as part of a court-ordered discovery regarding Clinton's unauthorized email server.

Rush Limbaugh:  Hillary Clinton Needs to Be Investigated, Indicted and in Jail.  Tuesday [4/23/2019] on Fox News Channel's "The Story," conservative talker Rush Limbaugh reacted to comments former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had made earlier in the day at the TIME 100 event in New York City regarding President Donald Trump and impeachment.  Limbaugh dismissed Clinton's overtures and said that instead, Clinton should be the one investigated.  "This is the irony:  Hillary Clinton is who tried to rig a presidential election, Martha," Limbaugh said.

Rush may be right:  Hillary Clinton 'needs to be in jail'.  Rush Limbaugh, on "The Story" on Fox News with Martha MacCallum, said it's not President Donald Trump who has anything to worry about when it comes to the whole Russia investigation thing — it's Hillary Clinton.  She should be in jail, Limbaugh said.  And a whole world of political watchers go — absolutely.  And then, just as quickly, a whole world of political watchers go, sigh. 'Cause it'll never happen.

Judicial Watch:  FBI Found Clinton Emails At Obama White House.  A top FBI official has confirmed Hillary Clinton's missing emails were found in the Obama White House.  Assistant FBI Director Bill Priestap admitted under oath the bureau had found 49,000 Clinton emails at the Executive Office of President Obama.  The new revelations are according to a statement made Tuesday [4/23/2019] by government watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Hillary Clinton:  Anyone other than Trump would have been indicted for obstruction.  Hillary Clinton said Tuesday [4/23/2019] she believes Donald Trump would have been indicted in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe if he weren't president, though stopped short of calling for his impeachment.  Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, argued during a Q&A session in New York that Mueller's report "could not be clearer" in making the case Trump tried to obstruct the Russia investigation — even though Mueller did not come to an explicit conclusion on that question.

Hey Hillary, maybe you shouldn't speak too loudly about who should be indicted.
Hillary: Trump would 'have been indicted' by Mueller if he wasn't president.  Hillary Clinton said Tuesday the reason President Trump escaped obstruction charges following the Mueller report was because of his presidential title.  "Any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted, but because of the rule in the Justice Department that you can't indict a sitting President, the whole matter of obstruction was very directly sent to the Congress," the New York Democrat said while speaking at the Time 100 summit Tuesday [4/23/2019].  Ms. Clinton said she has little faith in Congress acting, saying Speaker Nancy Pelosi's efforts to investigate deeper into special counsel Robert Mueller's report will be for naught against "the do-nothing Senate."

White House:  Now probe Hillary email scandal, Clinton Foundation, Page, and Strzok.  The White House Thursday [4/18/2019] ripped the "breathless" media coverage of the Russia collusion "hoax" and said now that it's over, journalists should turn their attention on Obama-era scandals. [...] The administration cited the email scandal that dogged former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose loss to President Trump in 2016 still shocks Democrats.  The administration noted that former President Barack Obama gave the email scandal a pass when, on "60 Minutes," he said it was a "mistake" but not "a national security problem."  That comment raised concern in national security circles, and one former official said, "That's a problem, right?"  It also cited the destruction of over 30,000 Clinton emails from her private server in New York after a preservation order had been issued.

FBI failed to provide details on contact with Clinton campaign lawyer:  Judicial Watch.  The FBI failed to respond to an October 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking more information about secretive communications in late 2016 between a top Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer and the bureau's then-general counsel, according to the transparency group Judicial Watch.  Additionally, the group said, the FBI has ignored September 2018 FOIA requests concerning bureau communications with, and payments to, British ex-spy Christopher Steele — who authored the infamous anti-Trump dossier.  In response, Judicial Watch announced Tuesday [4/16/2019] it has filed lawsuits seeking the full release of all relevant documents.  The flurry of litigation comes just days before Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report is set to be publicly released, with some redactions.

Judicial Watch FOIA Releases 422 Emails Proving Clinton "Cover-Up".  422 pages of FBI documents showing evidence of "cover-up" related to the Clinton email system were discovered by public watchdogs, according to reports.  FBI notes memorializing the Bureau's interviews with a Platte River Network official include an email dated December 11, 2014, that reads "Hillary cover up operation work ticket archive cleanup."  The bombshell revelation indicates that Hillary's hired cover-up contractors were also at least somewhat aware enough of the sensitivity of the operation that they had to keep more detailed communications about the operation offline.

Clinton Contractor Described 'Cover-up Operation Work Ticket' in Newly Uncovered Email.  A newly obtained internal message from the Denver-based Platte River Networks firm that serviced the personal email system used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for official diplomatic business referenced a "Hillary cover-up operation work ticket archive cleanup," the nonprofit government watchdog Judicial Watch said on April 8.  The email with the cover-up reference is contained in FBI notes on a February 2016 interview of an unidentified Platte River Networks official.  Judicial Watch obtained the notes as part of more than 400 previously unreleased FBI documents a federal district court order turned over to the nonprofit as a result of its Freedom of Information Act suit.

Documents Received From Tom Fitton's FOIA Request Show Pretty Solid Evidence Of 'Cover-Up' By Hillary Clinton's Minions.  Thank goodness for Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton whose tireless pursuit of the truth has already exposed so much.  His most recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has provided us with 422 pages of FBI documents related to "Midyear Exam," the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State.  The server was managed by a company called Platte River Networks (PRN).  The FBI notes of a February 2016 interview with a PRN official are especially damaging to the former First Lady.  The notes reference an email dated December 11, 2014 which reads "Hillary cover up operation work ticket archive cleanup."  Asked about the email by an FBI agent, the official said it was "probably related to change to 60 day [sic] email retention policy/backup," but he did not "recall the prior policy."  The notes show that PRN "gave someone access to live HRC archive mailbox at some point."

Hillary's email server a 'serious' problem, 74% of Americans say in new poll.  Americans have not yet forgotten about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State almost a decade ago.  She served in the role from 2009-13.  A new poll finds that nearly three-fourths of Americans still deem that practice a "serious" practice according to new research.  Six-out-of-10 also say the use of the server was illegal, says a wide-ranging Economist/You Gov poll released this week.

China Hacked Hillary's Server, Congress Knows, Comey Lied About It, But Still No Probe.  At the end of January, an Epoch Times reported that the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) told the "FBI in 2015 that a forensic review of Hillary Clinton's emails unearthed anomalies in the metadata of the messages.  The evidence in the metadata suggested that a copy of every email Hillary Clinton sent during her tenure as the secretary of state was forwarded to a foreign third party."  Evidence proved the third party was China. [...] Judicial Watch announced earlier this week that it is trying to get to the bottom of the hacking of Hillary's server.  They announced that it is suing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for details of a meeting they had with the FBI regarding national security threats associated with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "private" email system.

The Next Shoes to Drop After the Mueller Report.  The slap-dash investigation of Hillary Clinton's email shenanigans must be thoroughly reviewed.  Her aides received unprecedented immunity without giving evidence; their computers and cellphones were destroyed; and the principal herself was cleared before an interview with her was conducted.  Who really made the decision not to prosecute?  James Comey says he did.  But FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified under oath that the order came from the Department of Justice.  This discrepancy must be resolved, along with the obvious questions raised by the original decision.  How high up did it go?  Did it reach the Obama White House?

How to end our national nightmare — probe Hillary Clinton again.  [Scroll down]  But even as we learn the details of what Mueller found, there remains a giant black hole about the very origins of the FBI investigation that led to his appointment in the first place.  It is astonishing, for example, that at this late date, we still do not know what evidence the disgraced James Comey and his FBI had to open the original probe in the summer of 2016, and whether there was anything other than the fatally tainted Russian dossier.  Nor do we know of any compelling reason why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein later decided a special counsel was necessary to get to the bottom of the swirling accusations of collusion that started during the campaign and mushroomed after Trump's upset victory.

Judicial Watch Uncovers More Classified Emails in Hillary Clinton's Unsecure Email System.  Judicial Watch today [3/21/2019] announced it received 756 pages of newly uncovered emails that were among the materials former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to delete or destroy, several of which were classified and were transmitted over her unsecure, non-"state.gov" email system.  Hillary Clinton repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails.  In response to a court order in another Judicial Watch case, she declared under penalty of perjury in 2015 that she had "directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done."

With Trump in Attendance, Crowd at Mar-a-Lago Fundraiser Cheers Lindsey Graham Call to Investigate Hillary Clinton Over Dossier.  Hours after the Mueller report was released with no new indictments, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania attended a GOP Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser held at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Friday night [3/22/2019].  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) headlined the dinner; former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was the emcee.  Press was barred from the event but a few bits leaked out. [...]

Unfortunately For Hillary, The FBI Was Able To Recover Some Of The Emails Her Staff Tried To Destroy And Judicial Watch Has Obtained Them.  In 1996, the late William Safire called Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar."  His label was to become even more apropos over time.  In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in May 2015, Judicial Watch received 756 pages of Clinton's emails on Thursday which had been sent or received over her private server.  Unfortunately for Hillary, the FBI had been able to recover some of the emails her staff had tried to delete and/or destroy after she had received a congressional subpoena to turn them over.  The subpoena was sent on March 4, 2015 and the emails were destroyed sometime between March 25-31st.

Clinton, in newly revealed emails, discussed classified foreign policy matters, secretive 'private' comms channel with Israel.  A newly unearthed batch of heavily redacted, classified emails from Hillary Clinton's personal email server revealed that the former secretary of state discussed establishing a "private, 100% off-the-record" back channel to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that one of her top aides warned her that she was in "danger" of being "savaged by Jewish organizations, in the Jewish press and among the phalanx of neoconservative media" as a result of political machinations by "Bibi and the Jewish leadership."  The 756-page group of new documents, revealed Thursday [3/21/2019] as part of a transparency lawsuit by Judicial Watch, seemingly contradicted Clinton's insistence under oath in 2015 that she had turned over all of her sensitive work-related emails to the State Department, and included a slew of classified communications on everything from foreign policy to State Department personnel matters.

DOJ reached agreement with Clinton lawyers to block FBI access to Clinton Foundation emails, Strzok says.  The Justice Department "negotiated" an agreement with Hillary Clinton's legal team that ensured the FBI did not have access to emails on her private servers relating to the Clinton Foundation, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok testified during a closed-door appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last summer, according to a newly released transcript.  Republicans late last year renewed their efforts to probe the Clinton Foundation, after tax documents showed a plunge in its incoming donations after Clinton's 2016 presidential election.  The numbers fueled longstanding allegations of possible "pay-to-play" transactions at the organization, amid a Justice Department probe covering foundation issues.

Finally, some things about the FBI and Hillary Clinton start to make sense.  The first of several former Obama administration officials and former aides to Hillary Clinton is set to be deposed Thursday [31/4/2019] after a judge ruled in January that they must answer questions under oath about the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks and the Clinton email scandal.  U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the discovery after a lawsuit was brought by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, which is seeking to uncover "whether the Benghazi scandal was one reason for keeping Mrs. Clinton's email secret."

Yeah, There Was Election Meddling From The FBI/DOJ During The 2016 Election.  [A]ll of our suspicions have been confirmed about how the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email probe, one of two highly sensitive investigations in which disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok was involved.  Strzok was a counterintelligence agent with the bureau before being demoted to human resources once his extramarital affair with Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer, was revealed two years ago.  During the 2016 election, the two sent tens of thousands of texts, most were anti-Trump, which displayed gross unprofessionalism and added to the accusations that deep state antics were targeting Donald Trump and later his administration post-2016.  The two texts that caught the eye of everyone was one where the two had a meeting with then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe on August 15, 2016, where Strzok and Page discussed an "insurance policy" against a Trump presidency.  And another where he said they would stop Trump.

Trump blasts Obama DOJ as 'corrupt machine,' as Page transcript suggests Clinton case intervention.  President Trump on Wednesday [3/13/2019] seized on new revelations contained in transcripts from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page's congressional testimony to hammer the Obama Justice Department as a "broken and corrupt machine."  Those transcripts, released by House Judiciary Committee Republicans, appeared to show Page confirming that DOJ officials during the Hillary Clinton email investigation made clear to the FBI that they should not pursue Clinton for "gross negligence" in the handling of classified information.

Judicial Watch Announces Depositions of Obama-Era Officials and Former Hillary Clinton Aides.  Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Wednesday a schedule of depositions of senior Obama-era officials, lawyers and former Hillary Clinton aides.  Thanks to the heavy lifting by Judicial Watch, Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered these corrupt Obama and Hillary officials to provide answers, under oath, to the watchdog group about the Benghazi and Hillary Clinton email scandals.

Lisa Page testimony means DOJ might want to re-open case against Hillary Clinton.  Lock her up?  More and more, it appears the Justice Department should have tried to do just that to Hillary Clinton and that only nefarious interference kept the attempt from occurring.  My colleague Becket Adams is correct in writing that newly released testimony by disgraced FBI attorney Lisa Page makes former U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch look blatantly dishonest and makes her infamous "tarmac meeting" with former president Bill Clinton look even sleazier than it already had.  Specifically, despite sworn assurances to the contrary from Lynch, Page testified that Department of Justice officials repeatedly dissuaded the FBI from building a criminal case against Clinton for "gross negligence" in her handling of classified information.

Former NYPD Commissioner Calls for Obstruction Investigation into Clinton Email Probe.  Former NYPD Commissioner Benard Kerik warned Wednesday [3/13/2019] that Americans will "never have faith" in the U.S. government until the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe is investigated for obstruction of justice.  Kerik's remarks came in response to transcripts showing former FBI legal counsel Lisa Page testified to Congress that the Department of Justice ordered the FBI not to charge Clinton with "gross negligence" for mishandling classified information.

FBI's top lawyer believed Hillary Clinton should face charges, but was talked out of it.  For most of the past three years, the FBI has tried to portray its top leadership as united behind ex-Director James Comey's decision not to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for transmitting classified information over her insecure, private email server.  Although in the end that may have been the case, we now are learning that Comey's top lawyer, then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, initially believed Clinton deserved to face criminal charges, but was talked out of it "pretty late in the process."  The revelation is contained in testimony Baker gave to House investigators last year.  His testimony has not been publicly released, but I was permitted to review a transcript.  During questioning by Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), Baker was unequivocal about his early view that Clinton should face criminal charges.

A press blackout on news top FBI lawyer James Baker wanted Hillary Clinton prosecuted.  The news is out that then-FBI director James Comey did indeed have some credible prosecutors for Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified documents during her stint as secretary of state, passing around some of the U.S. government's most secret documents on an illegal private account attached to a server in some guy's bathroom.  "No reasonable prosecutor" would take the case, Comey intoned, who then let the former secretary of state and then-presidential candidate off the hook.  Actually, there was one, at least one, and he was sitting right next to Comey: none other than FBI general counsel James Baker, who admitted in congressional testimony that he did think Clinton's dishonest act merited prosecution.

FBI scrambled to respond to Hillary Clinton lawyer amid Weiner laptop review, newly released emails show.  Newly released internal FBI emails showed the agency's highest-ranking officials scrambling to answer to Hillary Clinton's lawyer in the days prior the 2016 presidential election, on the same day then-FBI Director James Comey sent a bombshell letter to Congress announcing a new review of hundreds of thousands of potentially classified emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop.  The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid-pro-quo between the State Department and the FBI — in which the FBI would agree to downgrade the classification level of a Clinton email in exchange for more legal attache positions that would benefit the agency abroad.  There was no indication such a quid-pro-quo ever took place.

FBI General Counsel Talked to Hillary Clinton's Lawyer about Comey's Letter on Weiner Laptop Clinton Emails.  Judicial Watch announced today it received 215 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Justice revealing former FBI General Counsel James Baker discussed the investigation of Clinton-related emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop with Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall.  Baker then forwarded the conversation to his FBI colleagues.  The documents also further describe a previously reported quid pro quo from the Obama State Department offering the FBI more legal attaché positions if it would downgrade a redaction in an email found during the Hillary Clinton email investigation "from classified to something else."

New Emails Confirm FBI Tried To Work Deal With State Dept To Minimize Hillary Email Scandal.  Over two years after the fact, newly released FBI emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request confirm that James Comey's FBI attempted to work out a quid pro quo deal with the Obama State Department to help minimize the Hillary Clinton private email server scandal just weeks before the 2016 election.  Fox News's Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne first reported on the alleged deal back on October 15, 2016, but full confirmation did not come until this week when the government transparency watchdog group Judicial Watch released FBI communication related to the deal.

Judicial Watch Uncovers Email Between Clinton Lawyer David Kendall and FBI Lawyer James Baker Same Day FBI Was Forced to Re-Open Investigation.  A lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch has unearthed an email from Clinton Lawyer David Kendall to FBI chief legal counsel James Baker on the day the FBI was forced to re-open the Clinton email investigation due to the Weiner laptop.  With the passage of time the inherent issues have become somewhat clouded, and most people have forgotten many of the inherent issues that showcased how the FBI and DOJ had decided in advance not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.  However, the key takeaway from this latest FOIA finding is that Clinton lawyers directly contacted the FBI team that was investigating the Weiner laptop.

James Comey: 'Zero chance' Hillary Clinton gets prosecuted for her emails.  Former FBI Director James Comey said Monday there is "zero chance" Hillary Clinton will be prosecuted for her emails.  "There is zero chance, zero chance, on the facts in the Hillary Clinton case, that she would be prosecuted," Comey said during a town hall lecture in Sarasota, Fla.  "You are out of your mind if you don't think the FBI wanted to make a case if we could.  The facts weren't there.  Period.  Full stop."  As FBI director, Comey oversaw his agency's inquiry into the unauthorized email server Clinton used while serving as secretary of state.  In a stunning public admission in July 2016, Comey announced his agency would not recommend criminal charges against anyone involved with Clinton's private email network, even after finding that Clinton's team was "extremely careless" in handling classified emails.

Obama's FBI Ignored Lead That China Had Clinton Emails.  An Epoch Times report confirmed information first revealed by the Daily Caller and Fox News that the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) told the "FBI in 2015 that a forensic review of Hillary Clinton's emails unearthed anomalies in the metadata of the messages.  The evidence in the metadata suggested that a copy of every email Hillary Clinton sent during her tenure as the secretary of state was forwarded to a foreign third party."  Evidence proved the third party was China.

Obama Officials Ordered To Answer In Benghazi Lies, Email Scandal.  On Tuesday [1/15/2019], a federal judge, who is apparently sick and tired of deep state shenanigans, ordered Obama lackeys Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes, along with former Secretary of State Clinton staffers Monica Hanley and Lauren Jiloty, and E.W. (Bill) Priestap, an FBI official who supervised the investigation into Clinton's emails, to answer written questions in what appears to be an attempt to "hoodwink the court."  The case involves a Freedom of Information Act request issued by Judicial Watch concerning the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya.  Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that these State Department officials, and others must come clean about both the attack, and Clinton's use of an illegal private server.

DOJ Seeks to Stall Court-Ordered Discovery on Clinton Email Scandal; Cites Government Shutdown.  Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes will be deposed under oath on the Benghazi scandal.  Last week Judicial Watch submitted a court-ordered discovery plan seeking depositions from top Obama officials involved in Hillary Clinton's email scandal including Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes.  The discovery plan stems from a December, 2018 ruling by Judge Royce Lamberth ordering the State Department and DOJ to submit discovery in three areas.  Judge Lamberth called Clinton's use of the private email server "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency."

Federal Court Orders Discovery to Begin on Clinton Email Scandal — Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes Must Respond Under Oath.  Once again Judicial Watch is doing the heavy lifting.  A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that discovery can begin in Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  Judge Lamberth also ordered senior Obama officials to provide written answers to Judicial Watch under oath.  Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes will be deposed under oath on the Benghazi scandal.

Hillary Clinton Responds to Court Order-Files New Email Answers Under Oath on Private Server.  On Friday morning [12/14/2018] Hillary Clinton responded to a court order forced by Judicial Watch to answer more questions about the setting up of her private server.  Judicial Watch appeared in a DC federal court last month on a motion to compel more testimony from Hillary Clinton as well as to make public video recordings of depositions of top Clinton aides such as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

It Looks Like the 33,000 Emails Aren't Gone After All!  What if Bleach-bit didn't really make Hillary's problems go away?  Recently, Judge Lambeth gave a devastating ruling on the Hillary Clinton Email case, one which will almost certainly obligate the FBI to reopen the case.

Federal Judge Rips DOJ and State, Orders Discovery on Clinton Emails.  Royce Lamberth is an outspoken and sometimes controversial federal judge.  Appointed by President Reagan, he has shown no partiality in going after litigants he considers to be malefactors.  This time, it is the State Department and the Department of Justice.  Judge Lamberth is presiding over the lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch against the State Department, asking for emails relating to the Benghazi talking points that were promulgated after that attack.  On Thursday [12/6/2018], he issued an order blasting the federal agencies and authorizing discovery by Judicial Watch, as described below.  In his order, Lamberth sets forth a long effort to deceive Judicial Watch and the court that was orchestrated by State and DOJ.  It may be that we have not yet heard the last of the Clinton email scandal.

Federal court blasts DoJ, State Dept.; orders discovery plan to see if Hillary sought to HIDE her emails to evade law.  It's become self-evident that were in not for Judicial Watch, much of what is now known about the various political scandals involving former President Obama's administration would still be unknown.  The watchdog scored another victory for transparency in government on Thursday [12/6/2018] involving Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server to conduct official business.  According to a press release, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth "excoriated" the Department of Justice and the State Department for potentially acting in "bad faith" while colluding to "scuttle public scrutiny" of Clinton's use of a private server which many believe she did in order to hide her various dealings and activities from the 'prying eyes' of Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests, in violation of federal open records rules.

Court Rules Hillary Must Answer Additional Questions About Her Email Scandal Under Oath.  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled on Thursday [11/15/2018] that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has 30 days to answer additional questions about her email scandal.  The decision comes after Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to obtain additional information from Clinton and Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat John Bentel.  The watchdog group also wanted top Clinton aides and State Department officials, including Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills', deposition videos made public.  The lawsuit was part of a broader Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that came about in October 2016 when Clinton refused to answer several of Judicial Watch's questions, saying she "does not recall."

Hillary Clinton Ordered To Answer Additional Questions Under Oath About Private Email Server.  A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton to respond to further questions, under oath, about her private email server.  Following a lengthy Wednesday [11/14/2018] court hearing, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (who is also presiding over [former] National Security adviser Michael Flynn's case), ruled that Clinton has 30 days to answer two additional questions about her controversial email system in response to a lawsuit from Judicial Watch.

State Department provided 'clearly false' statements to derail requests for Clinton docs, 'shocked' federal judge says.  In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday [10/12/2018] in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing "clearly false" affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth also said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

DOJ New Benghazi Probe:  Five Hillary Clinton Emails That Led to Ambassador Chris Stevens Death.  As the Department of Justice slow-walks it's [sic] new probe into the criminal enterprises of the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons' collusion with Russia on the Uranium One Deal, according to an observer of the Deep State and Democratic Party shenanigans.  "There may yet be an indictable offense Hillary and others will.face," said former counter-terrorism unit police detective, James Briggs.  Five emails were discovered among the thousands obtained or destroyed concerning an issue Hillary hoped would just go away:  The Battle of Benghazi!  In an email previously released regarding Hillary's Benghazi investigation — and one totally ignored by her propagandists in the national news media — there was one specific message that detailed the exact location of the late Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.

Judge could put the squeeze on Hillary Clinton for testimony on emails.  A conservative watchdog group seeking to compel testimony from Hillary Clinton will get a hearing in federal court on the matter Wednesday afternoon [11/14/2018].  Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan will hear the case, which stems from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit regarding the controversial employment status of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin, who was granted a "special government employee" designation to accept outside employment while she was working at the State Department.  Clinton submitted written testimony under oath in October 2016, but Judicial Watch took issue with her answering that she "does not recall" for multiple questions regarding her Clinton.com, non-state.gov email system.

Tom Fitton:  We Have a Specific Request for Hillary Clinton to Come In and Testify Under Oath.  Judicial Watch is relentless and is unwilling to give Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and other conspirators a pass on their lawlessness.  A federal court judge, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, is also upset about the abuses of the Clinton email cover-up.  In his opening remarks during a hearing last Friday (October 12), Judge Lamberth strongly criticized the U.S. Department of State:  "The information that I was provided was clearly false regarding the adequacy of the [Clinton email] search and... what we now know turned out to be the Secretary's email system."

Hillary Clinton's security clearance removed 'at her request,' Judiciary Committee reveals.  Hillary Clinton had her security clearance removed over the summer "at her request," the Senate Judiciary Committee, who received confirmation from the State Department, revealed Friday [10/12/2018].  The news comes as part of an update from the State Department of "its ongoing review of the mishandling of classified information related to the use of Clinton's non-government email server," a news release from the committee said.

Clinton Spox:  Hillary Gave Up Security Clearance as Protest Against Pres.  Trump Revoking John Brennan's Clearance.  Hillary Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said late Friday night that the former secretary of State voluntarily gave up her security clearance in August after reports that she lost the privilge amid her email scandal.  Merrill said it was a show of support following the op-ed by former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Admiral William McRaven offering to surrender his security clearance in protest of President Donald Trump revoking the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.

Hillary Clinton Loses Security Clearance Amid Email Scandal.  Hillary Clinton lost her security clearance according to an announcement from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday [10/12/2018].  Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley revealed that Hillary Clinton's aide (who magically became her lawyer) Cheryl Mills along with four others also no longer have clearance.

Hillary Clinton's security clearance withdrawn.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton no longer has a security clearance.  Clinton had her security clearance withdrawn in August "at her request," State Department official Charles Faulkner wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in a letter released Friday [10/12/2018].  Five other individuals whom Clinton had designated as researchers had their clearances withdrawn in September.

The Editor says...
Why wasn't her security clearance withdrawn the day after Trump was sworn in?

Judicial Watch Uncovers More Classified Material on Hillary Clinton's Unsecure Email System.  Judicial Watch announced today [10/10/2018] that it received 288 pages of newly uncovered emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that were transmitted over her unsecure, non-"state.gov" email system, three of which contain classified information.

GOP Operative Secretly Raised at Least $100,000 in Search for Clinton Emails.  A veteran Republican operative and opposition researcher solicited and raised at least $100,000 from donors as part of an effort to obtain what he believed to be emails stolen from Hillary Clinton, activities that remain of intense interest to federal investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller's office and on Capitol Hill.

Hillary Clinton & Google Created [a] Covert Server to Hide Classified Benghazi Emails from Congress; FBI Never Probed.  Following the Benghazi consulate attack in 2012, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secretly worked with Google to reroute email traffic away from her private computer server and use public Google Gmail servers instead.  That clandestine move served to cloak her inner circle's communications from lawmakers, public scrutiny and would-be criminal investigators, according to intelligence sources who provided documents to True Pundit.  These bombshell revelations shatter Clinton's repeated claims and testimony that she solely used her private server in her Chappaqua NY home to conduct government business at State.  But it also reveals that previously undisclosed computer servers were employed by Clinton and her aides for conducting official government business.

Intelligence Officials Refuse To Do Damage Assessment Of Clinton Email Hacks Even After U.S. Agents Captured & Terminated.  Fact:  During Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State a dramatic spike in U.S. agent captures/deaths took place in China.  Fact:  To date, U.S. intelligence agencies have refused to do a damage assessment of Hillary Clinton's hacked email server — hacks which many are convinced were carried out by the same Chinese government that then used that information to identify and eliminate deeply embedded U.S. agents in China.  Fact:  The above scenario appears to confirm that Mrs. Clinton, the Obama White House, and the Obama-era Deep State, have a lot of blood on their hands.

Chinese company reportedly hacked Clinton's server, got copy of every e-mail in real time.  A Chinese state-owned company reportedly hacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server, then inserted code that forwarded them a copy of virtually every email she sent or received after that — a revelation President Trump is demanding be investigated.  The Daily Caller reported that the firm operating in the D.C. area wrote code that was then embedded in the server and generated a "courtesy copy" for almost all her emails — which was then forwarded to the Chinese company.  The code reportedly was discovered in 2015 by the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), which then warned FBI officials of the intrusion.

China Reportedly Hacked Clinton's State Dept.  Emails — Did The FBI Cover That Up, Too?  More than three years after Hillary Clinton admitted that she'd used an unsecured private email server to handle classified emails while secretary of State, and two years after the FBI exonerated her, we finally learn what we should have known all along.  That China apparently had unfettered access to all her emails, including many that were highly classified.

Sources:  China Hacked Hillary Clinton's Private Email Server.  A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton's private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.  The Chinese firm obtained Clinton's emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.  The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton's residence in upstate New York.  The code generated an instant "courtesy copy" for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.

FBI Hero John Robertson Discovered Hillary Clinton Emails on Computer During Child Sex Investigation.  It is worth noting that FBI hero John Robertson discovered the Hillary Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner's computer in a child sex investigation.  FBI agent John Robertson is proud of the work he does exposing and arresting child predators.  John was assigned to the Anthony Weiner case, a top Democrat married to Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin.  During his investigation of Weiner's computer John discovered thousands of Hillary Clinton emails and blew the whistle on the Comey-McCabe and Strzok cover-up of evidence.

Chinese company reportedly hacked Clinton's server, got copy of every email in real-time.  A Chinese state-owned company reportedly hacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server, then inserted code that forwarded them a copy of virtually every email she sent or received after that — a revelation President Trump is demanding be investigated.  The Daily Caller reported that the firm operating in the D.C. area wrote code that was then embedded in the server and generated a "courtesy copy" for almost all her emails — which was then forwarded to the Chinese company.  The code reportedly was discovered in 2015 by the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), which then warned FBI officials of the intrusion.

Sperry: FBI Only Read 3,000 Out of 700,000 Emails Found on Weiner Laptop — Contradicting Comey's Sworn Testimony.  Investigative reporter Paul Sperry dropped another bombshell this week.  James Comey sent a letter to the House Oversight Committee on October 28th 2016 stating the FBI reopened the Hillary email investigation after they found Clinton's State Department emails on pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.  Hundreds of thousands of emails were found on Weiner's laptop yet the FBI closed the second investigation after a few days claiming they magically read through all the emails.  Former FBI Director James Comey previously told Congress the FBI examined all 700,000 emails found on Weiner's laptop — it turns out that the FBI only examined approximately 3,000 out of 700,000 emails.

Report: FBI checked less than half a percent of emails on Weiner laptop.  The FBI examined just 3,077 of the 694,000 emails found on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner which was used by his wife Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, a report said.  Despite then-FBI Director James Comey's insistence that the agency had "reviewed all of the communications" discovered on the laptop, less than one half of one percent of the emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information, RealClear Investigations reported on Aug. 23.

Turns out Comey LIED about the emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop.  It turns out that Comey lied in 2016 about a full review of all the emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop as he finally closed the Hillary email scandal for good. [...] Of course we know what really happened.  Hillary's people put massive pressure on Comey and his Hillary henchmen to kill the investigation before the election.  So they did.  And of course, these same FBI agents were very busy with trying to defeat Trump so that had something to do with it too.  This is really amazing when you consider just how relentless the media attacks are on Trump these days.

Bombshell Report:  FBI Never Examined Vast Majority Of Emails On Weiner's Laptop, Despite Comey's Claims.  A damning report by RealClearInvestigations' Paul Sperry presents compelling evidence indicating that former FBI Director James Comey prematurely closed the investigation into Hillary Clinton based on political motivations and lied to the American people when he insisted days before the 2016 election that his agency had "reviewed all of the communications" found on the laptop of Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner.  Sperry notes that many wondered aloud at the time how the FBI could have possibly reviewed hundreds of thousands of emails in a matter of weeks.  It turns out, Sperry explains, that they simply didn't.  In fact, evidence suggests they didn't even come close, despite Comey's assurances that they'd fully reviewed the communications.

He lied, in other words.
Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined.  When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had "reviewed all of the communications" discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.  At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the "hundreds of thousands" of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.  Comey later told Congress that "thanks to the wizardry of our technology," the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as "duplicates" of emails they'd previously seen.  Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked "night after night after night" to scrutinize the remaining material.

Massive retaliation.  [President Trump should] get a special counsel appointed to investigate whether the use by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state of unsecured communications did any damage to the national security and national interests of the United States in any way whatsoever and to prosecute any violations of the law found in the course of that investigation, including any irregularities in past investigations.  Also investigate how, if at all, the joint income of Hillary and Bill Clinton of $85 million during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state was related to her official duties and to prosecute any illegalities therefrom.

Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined.  When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had "reviewed all of the communications" discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.  At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the "hundreds of thousands" of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.

Judicial Watch Demands Re-Opening Of Hillary Email Probe After More Classified Info Found.  On Thursday [8/16/2018], the watchdog revealed that it had received two batches, 184 pages and 45 pages, of newly uncovered emails belonging to Hillary Clinton from the U.S. Department of State sent and received over her unsecured server.  The emails were uncovered by a FOIA lawsuit filed on May 6, 2015, after the State Department failed to respond to a March 4, 2015 FOIA request seeking all emails sent or received by Clinton in her official capacity as Secretary of State, as well as all emails by other State Department employees to Clinton regarding her non-"state.gov" email address.

Computer Specialist Who Deleted Clinton Emails May Have Asked Reddit for Tips.  An army of Reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton's private email server from users of the popular web forum.  A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a "VERY VIP" individual's email address from archived content.  The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state.

FBI Logged Cyber Intrusion Analysis Request to Hillary's Email Investigation ONE DAY After 2016 Election.  On Friday, the FBI released a tranche of documents on Hillary Clinton's email investigation thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.  The documents reveal the FBI logged a cyber intrusion analysis request to Hillary's email investigation one day after the 2016 election — the FBI had already closed the investigation.

FBI Vault Release — FBI Requested Data Forensics on Huma Abedin/Clinton Laptop AFTER the 2016 Election, Not Before.  [Scroll down]  The FBI never looked at the Anthony Weiner/Huma Abedin laptop, which contained 100% of Clinton emails and blackberry text messages, for intrusion or security breaches PRIOR TO the election.  Remember the IG report?  Reading Chapter 11 of the IG Report the content of the Inspector General report as it relates to the laptop device.  Consider this from page #388: [...] FBI Agent Peter Strzok, the lead investigative authority in the Hillary Clinton MYE (Mid-Year-Exam), is explaining to the IG how they were able to process an exhaustive volume of emails (350,000) and Blackberry communications (344,000) in a few days; [Oct 30 to Nov 5, 2016]  Now, how does that square with the laptop being turned over to FBI forensics on November 9th, 2016?

If Not Russia, Who Is Hillary's 'Foreign Entity'.  I've long said Hillary Clinton is insufficiently stupid to have believed she could operate an unsecured home server without compromising the security of any data transmitted through it or stored on it.  For just as long, it has been my contention that the server was the faucet through which she pumped information she was selling (yes, selling) to foreign entities, both public and private.  I.T. security protocols would've easily flagged attempts at intrusion if targeted toward the State Department's secure servers, through which then-secretary of state Clinton ought to have conducted business.  Likewise, the transfer or copying of said information from a secure server is a detectable act with access being tightly controlled and records kept of who looked at what and when.

The FBI's Lack Of Curiosity About A Foreign Power Getting 30K Hillary Clinton Emails Is Astounding.  [Scroll down]  The thing that has always struck me about the whole Hillary Clinton email fiasco is the studious lack of curiosity by the US government over how TS/SCI documents were removed from a SCIF and transmitted via garden variety email and stored on a server that had no cyber or physical security.  No curiosity was expressed about a document that appeared to have been produced via signals intelligence sources being sent by the half-[baked] "intelligence" group headed by Sid Blumenthal and the fortunately deceased Tyler Drumheller to Clinton.  The lack of curiosity extended so far as to give immunity from prosecution to the guy managing it.  McCabe was totally incurious about what was on Huma Abedin's laptop inasmuch as it included Clinton's emails.  And when told by the ICIG that Hillary Clinton's emails had been auto-forwarded to a foreign power... no interest whatsoever.

Gohmert:  Watchdog Found Clinton Emails Were Sent To 'Foreign Entity'.  A member of the House Committee on the Judiciary said during a hearing Thursday that a government watchdog found that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails were sent to a foreign entity and that the FBI didn't follow-up on that finding.  The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found an "anomaly on Hillary Clinton's emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list," Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said during a hearing with FBI official Peter Strzok.  "It was going to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia," he added.

FBI's Strzok Was Told a Foreign Power Hacked All of Clinton's Emails and Did Nothing.  A member of the House Committee on the Judiciary said during a hearing Thursday that a government watchdog found that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails were sent to a foreign entity and that the FBI didn't follow-up on that finding.  The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found an "anomaly on Hillary Clinton's emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list," Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said during a hearing with FBI official Peter Strzok.  "It was going to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia," he added.

Gohmert:  Watchdog Found Clinton Emails Were Sent To 'Foreign Entity'.  A member of the House Committee on the Judiciary said during a hearing Thursday that a government watchdog found that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails were sent to a foreign entity and that the FBI didn't follow-up on that finding.  The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found an "anomaly on Hillary Clinton's emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list," Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said during a hearing with FBI official Peter Strzok.

FBI Ignored Hacking of Hillary's Emails by 'Foreign Entity'.  At the contentious hearing Thursday with FBI agent Peter Strzok, Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, revealed the FBI didn't follow up on a government watchdog's finding that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails were sent to a foreign entity.  Gohmert, a member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, said the Intelligence Community Inspector General found an "anomaly on Hillary Clinton's emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list."

Russian Hackers Kept DNC Backdoor Longer Than Anyone Knew.  Until today [7/13/2018], the story of the DNC hack ended promptly on June 14, 2016, when the Democrats went public with the intrusion in the pages of the Washington Post, and Crowdstrike, the security firm hired to respond to the breach, published a detailed technical account.  Today's indictment confirms every aspect of the DNC's and Crowdstrike's account, with one exception.  Both the DNC and Crowdstrike have said repeatedly that they went public only after expelling all the Russian hackers.  But buried in the new indictment is language suggesting that Crowdstrike missed a spot, and one computer infected with the GRU's malware "remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016."

Gohmert: Peter Strzok Knew 'Foreign Entity' Hacked Clinton's Emails and Did Nothing.  Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said FBI agent Peter Strzok had been made aware of a "foreign entity" — not the Russian state — intercepting over 30,000 emails sent to or received by Hillary Clinton's unauthorized personal email server through which she conducted governmental communications in her former capacity as Secretary of State.

Unsealed documents detail tactics in Clinton email probe.  Court documents approved for release in the lead-up to a massive Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email account offer fodder for both critics and defenders of the bureau's work.  The newly unsealed court filings, obtained by POLITICO, may well serve as a Rorschach test about the Clinton email probe.  They demonstrate that the FBI's investigation did not rely solely on the voluntary cooperation of those involved, since agents and prosecutors used a combination of search warrants and other court orders to gain evidence relevant to the probe.  At the same time, the records do not contradict complaints by Republicans that the FBI did not use grand jury subpoenas to demand testimony from top Clinton aides, obtain search warrants to gain access to laptops Clintons' lawyers used to review her emails, or seek the personal phones and similar devices used by her top aides.

Hillary Clinton email probe ends on cliffhanger.  After more than 450 investigators spent over a year investigating the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, the most startling thing about the new report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is how much it uncovered and how little it concluded.  "We found that several FBI employees who played critical roles in the investigation sent political messages — some of which related directly to the Midyear [Clinton email] investigation — that created the appearance of bias and thereby raised questions about the objectivity and thoroughness of the Midyear investigation," the 568-page report pronounced.

Grassley Demands Investigation Of Comey's Use Of Private Email Account.  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley instructed the FBI on Monday that they must gain access to former FBI Director James Comey's private email account to see if any laws were broken when he used the account to conduct government business.  "It is disturbing that FBI employees tasked with investigating Secretary Clinton, including the former director, appear to have engaged in strikingly similar conduct," Grassley wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Yes, Hillary Should Have Been Prosecuted.  At the risk of oversimplifying a long and complex discussion, the IG time and again noted that (among other things) the FBI focused on the apparent lack of intent to violate the law and the lack of a clear precedent for initiating a prosecution under similar facts.  It also describes how the FBI wrestled with the definition of "gross negligence" — concluding that the term encompassed conduct "so gross as to almost suggest deliberate intention" or "something that falls just short of being willful."  After reading the analysis, I just flat-out don't buy that Hillary's conduct — and her senior team's conduct — didn't meet that standard.  The key reason for my skepticism is the nature of the classified information sent and received.

The crazy reason the FBI didn't search the devices of Hillary Clinton's inner circle.  While the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's secret server where she kept official emails out of the view of the authorities until her lawyers could scrub them, for some reason, agents never searched the Blackberries or other email devices belonging to her inner circle at the State Department.  Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his team received a crazy response when they asked FBI agents on the Hillary Clinton email investigation why not.  The agents' primary excuse was to point to "the culture of mishandling classified information at the State Department which made the quantity of potential sources of evidence particularly vast".

FBI agent fast-tracked Clinton email case to 'stop' Trump from being elected.  FBI agent Peter Strzok put the Trump-Russia investigation on a fast track during the 2016 election season at the same time he was sending text messages to his lover condemning the Republican presidential candidate as an "idiot" and vowing to "stop" him.  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in a voluminous report, singled out as troubling Mr. Strzok's decision to move quickly from working on Hillary Clinton's email case to investigating Mr. Trump.

Bongino Slams Obama for Denying Early Knowledge of HRC Email Server.  Dan Bongino slammed former President Barack Obama for past comments he made denying early knowledge of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  His criticism comes shortly after the release of the scathing report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which found fired FBI Director James Comey was insubordinate and criticized his handling of the Clinton email probe.  Obama said in a 2015 interview with CBS News that he first learned of Clinton's use of the private server "at the same time everybody else learned it through news reports."  "That's nonsense," Bongino said Saturday on "Fox & Friends."  "Obama's clearly not telling the truth here."  [Video clip]

Obama's silky lie and FBI bias in the Clinton investigation.  [Hillary] Clinton had endangered top secret information by using an unsecured, home-brew email server when she was U.S. secretary of state.  Any other American who dared risk top government secrets on a basement server would have faced federal prosecution and prison.  Obama's lie was told in 2015, when Obama was asked by CBS' Bill Plante when he learned Mrs. Clinton had used an unsecured email server.  "The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports," Obama said.  He was so silky that you couldn't even hear his tongue rustling along his teeth.  He waxed on about how his administration was all about "transparency."  But Obama did not learn about Clinton's home-brew server like "everybody else."

They must be joking when they claim political bias was not what guided Obama's DoJ and FBI.  No political bias?  O.K., then, let's take them at their word.  As Hillary used to say: 'What difference does it make' why they did it?  They obviously targeted Trump and let anyone associated with his opponents, top Democrats President Obama and Hillary Clinton off.  That is evidence on its face that the FBI and Justice Department were political arms of Obama, just as the media was.  Everybody protected everybody.  Except for the American people.

Court Sets Hearing on Motion to Compel Email Testimony from Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch announced a federal court ordered a hearing for Thursday, October 11, 2018, on a motion to compel testimony about the email practices of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  The order was issued by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.  The development comes in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit, which seeks records regarding the authorization for Abedin to engage in outside employment while employed by the Department of State, was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.

Pardoned Sailor Files Lawsuit Against Obama, Comey for Unequal Prosecution of Clinton Email Case.  Former Navy seaman Kristian Saucier, who was sentenced to one year in federal prison for taking pictures aboard a nuclear submarine in 2009, is suing former President Barack Obama and former FBI Director James Comey for unequal protection under the law.  Saucier alleges he was unfairly punished while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was left to walk for her unauthorized use of a private email server, the Washington Times reports.  President Donald Trump pardoned Saucier in March this year.  Saucier's attorney says the lawsuit now plans to highlight the political nature of his client's prosecution compared to Clinton's.  In 2016, when Saucier's case was being litigated, prosecutors rejected any comparison to the Clinton case.

Lawmakers Warn IG Being Pressured to Slow Roll Clinton FBI Report.  The Department of Justice and the FBI are deliberately attempting to slow roll and redact significant portions of DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz's report on the bureau's handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation, according to numerous congressional officials and investigators.  The 400-page report, which was completed several weeks ago and addresses Clinton's use of her private server for government business, is currently being reviewed by the DOJ and FBI.  According to sources, individuals mentioned in the reports are also allowed to review the document.  It is expected to be "long and thorough" and will criticize the handling of the investigation by former FBI Director James Comey, who has spent the better part of the past several months promoting his book A Higher Loyalty.

Hillary Clinton [is] not off the hook just yet.  As Robert Mueller continues his special counsel investigation to nowhere, at least one government watchdog group is keeping up the pressure on Hillary Clinton.  "After uncovering the Clinton email scandal," Judicial Watch's president, Tom Fitton, said in a written release, "[we] now want a full accounting of the Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop."

Andrew wants immunity for testimony on Clinton email probe — or he'll plead Fifth.  The former No. 2 guy at the FBI wants immunity.  The attorney for Andrew McCabe, who was fired as FBI deputy director, told Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, that his client "is eager" to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Grassley leads.  The panel wants Mr. McCabe to testify on a Justice Department inspector general's report that recommended that he be fired for leaking information about an investigation of Hillary Clinton and then lying about it to James B. Comey, then the FBI director.  But either he gets immunity or takes the Fifth, attorney Michael Bromwich wrote in a letter to Mr. Grassley, according to Fox News Channel.

There's a huge difference between the Trump and Clinton probes.  Clinton's core wrongdoing was publicly established fact from the start — whereas the Trump investigation has always been an effort to find out if there was any wrongdoing.  It was actually the House Select Committee on Benghazi that started asking questions after a hacker unveiled Clinton's e-mails with Sidney Blumenthal.  Some of those e-mails were related to the 2012 Benghazi attack yet had never been handed over to investigators in all the many Benghazi probes.

Why the Mueller probe is really five scandals, not one.  [Scandal #2]  The extraordinary deep state defense of Hillary Clinton, combined with the systematic avoidance of exposing and dealing with her illegal behaviors while protecting her staff members when they support and participate in her illegality, is beyond anything we have seen in American history.

Huma email horror returns to haunt FBI brass, in IG report on Clinton case.  Ever since she lost the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly blamed her defeat on the FBI's decision to reopen the probe into her email use after messages were found on the laptop of confidante Huma Abedin's estranged husband.  But now that laptop and those emails are back in the spotlight, this time causing problems for FBI leaders as part of a forthcoming inspector general report.  The probe is expected to fault bureau officials for sitting on those emails in the first place.

House GOP sets three FBI interviews in Clinton probe.  House Republicans are preparing to conduct the first interviews in more than four months in their investigation into the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe.  A joint investigation run by the Judiciary and the Oversight and Government Reform committees has set three witness interviews for June, including testimony from Bill Priestap, the assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division, and Michael Steinbach, the former head of the FBI's national security division.

IG report on Clinton case expected to hit FBI leaders for sitting on emails in 2016.  A highly anticipated report from the Justice Department's internal watchdog reportedly is expected to hit FBI leaders for moving too slowly to review a batch of Hillary Clinton emails discovered toward the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.  Offering a glimpse at the contents of the closely held inspector general review, The Associated Press cited people familiar with the findings in reporting Monday that the investigation would criticize the bureau for its handling of that incident.

Report: Inspector General Will Declare FBI, DOJ Broke Law in Clinton Email Probe.  A new report suggests an imminent Inspector General (IG) report may rule that FBI and Justice Department officials broke the law in their handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Investigative reporter Paul Sperry said Thursday [5/17/2018] that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has "found 'reasonable grounds' for believing there has been a violation of federal criminal law in the FBI/DOJ's handling of the Clinton investigation/s," adding that the top watchdog official has "referred his findings of potential criminal misconduct to Huber for possible criminal prosecution."

DOJ inspector general completes long-awaited review of Hillary Clinton probe.  The completion of a long-awaited watchdog report on the FBI and DOJ's Hillary Clinton investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign has put Washington on edge, as the clock counts down to its potentially explosive release.  "We're all anxiously awaiting this report," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News' "Hannity."  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced the draft report was done in a letter to members of Congress on Wednesday.  He did not say when the results of the review will be officially released to the FBI, DOJ and congressional committees.

The Clinton reckoning is tiptoeing in.  This is a historic moment of bated breath and tight sphincters all over Clintonworld.  After decades of skating on their grifts, abuses, and outright crimes, a reckoning is coming.  And not just for the Hillary Clinton, but for her enablers.  The leaks begin about the I.G. report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation[.]  Until Wednesday [5/16/2018], there had been virtually no genuine leaks coming out of the inspector general's office at the Department of Justice — the sign of a probe with integrity.  But that silence ended when the I.G.'s office circulated relevant portions of its report to people named in it, for their comments, which would be included when the report is published.

IG Report on Clinton Investigation "extremely long and thorough".  The Department of Justice Inspector General has sent what is described as an "extremely long and thorough draft" of the much anticipated report on the FBI and DOJ's investigation and handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe, this reporter has learned.  The detailed report on the FBI's decision making process into the Clinton investigation could lead to possible criminal referrals for some of the officials involved in the case.  Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report, which is expected to be released within the next three to four weeks to the public, has been turned over to current and former officials for review, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.  The draft, however, does not include any recommendations for criminal prosecution.  If there was any evidence collected by the Inspector General's office of criminality, Horowitz would then refer the matter to the Department of Justice and submit a criminal referral to prosecutors.

FBI inspector general's report on the agency's handling of the Hillary email probe is ready.  Washington is on edge as it awaits the release of the highly-anticipated watchdog report on the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, a potentially explosive document that is expected to be highly critical of former FBI director James Comey and other officials.  The Department of Justice Inspector General's report is expected to address multiple questions that have lingered about the FBI's actions leading up to the 2016 presidential election, in which Clinton found herself exonerated and then subject to another investigation in the days before voters went to the polls.  In addition to Comey, a number of high-profile names could be featured when the report, written by Michael Horowitz, makes its debut.

Obama DOJ and FBI Leadership Referred for Criminal Prosecution for Clinton Email Cover-Up.  As we reported earlier Thursday, a long-awaited report by the Department of Justice's internal watchdog into the Hillary Clinton email investigation has moved into its final phase, as the DOJ notified multiple subjects mentioned in the document that they can privately review it by week's end, and will have a "few days" to craft any response to criticism contained within the report, according to the Wall Street Journal.

DOJ inspector general's testimony postponed, amid new leads in Clinton case review.  Inspector General Michael Horowitz's widely anticipated testimony next week before the House Oversight Committee has been postponed, as the Justice Department IG has pursued new leads in his review of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, according to a congressional letter and sources familiar with the matter.  "It is of the utmost importance that your review be as fulsome, complete and unimpeded as possible," Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chairman of the committee, wrote in a recent letter to Horowitz obtained by Fox News.  Horowitz was scheduled to appear before the committee on May 8.  But Gowdy told Horowitz he wants to reschedule his testimony "as close to the day the report is finalized as is practicable."

IG Horowitz Postpones Testimony to Pursue New Leads in His Review of Hillary Clinton Email Investigation.  The Office of Inspector General is very close to completing a comprehensive report on how the FBI and DOJ handled Hillary Clinton's email investigation.  Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein said on Friday [5/4/2018], IG Horowitz will have a complete report "within the next few weeks."

Did Obama's Justice Department pressure FBI to end the Clinton Foundation investigation?  A key House Republican on Tuesday asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate whether former President Barack Obama administration officials pressured the FBI to "stand down" from its probe of the Clinton Foundation that was ongoing during Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency.  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said in a letter to Sessions that he wants an investigation into Sally Yates, who Obama appointed to serve as the deputy attorney general at the time.  Goodlatte wants to know if Yates ordered her principal associate deputy attorney general, or PADAG, to call the FBI and ask for the probe of the Clinton Foundation to end.

FBI Never Investigated Abedin/Clinton Laptop Emails In October 2016.  As many people are aware, CTH has decided to go back through two years of documents, releases, reports, testimony, media interviews; including interviews with fired FBI Director James Comey; question all prior assumptions; re-examine the entire framework within all the known granular DOJ and FBI activity; and finally contrast it all against the full scope of released messaging between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.  Within this project some breakout discoveries need to be highlighted.  One of those discoveries pertains to the Fox News interview with James Comey and Bret Baier.

FBI Delays Release of Communications With Firm That Examined DNC Servers.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has pushed back the estimated completion date of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents pertaining to its communications with the security firm that examined the Democratic National Committee's hacked servers to October.  The Washington Free Beacon submitted the FOIA request in July 2017 with the FBI seeking all communication between the bureau and CrowdStrike, Inc., the California-based cyber security firm that examined the DNC's servers following the infiltration that led to the release of John Podesta's emails.  The FBI said in December the documents should be available by March.  The FBI, which was never granted access to the DNC's servers for inspection, instead relied on the third-party firm that was brought in by the DNC for information regarding the compromised network who concluded that Russia was behind the hack.  The FBI previously awarded an unrelated $150,000 contract to CrowdStrike in July 2015.  Details and communications between the firm and the bureau regarding that past contract were requested as part of the FOIA.

The Clintons and 'the Jews'.  In its never-ending pursuit of revelatory records meant to expose corruption, fraud, waste — and evil generally — in the Deep State, Judicial Watch published an interesting set of records today received from the government in its glacial response to demands for Hillary Clinton's emails. [...] Judicial Watch published an interesting analysis of this most recent batch of records, rightly focusing again on Hillary Clinton's dangerous abuse of national security information by trafficking it on her unsecure "home-brew" server.

New Clinton Emails Reveal Classified Docs, Clinton Foundation Connections.  Judicial Watch today released 281 pages of newly uncovered emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the U.S. Department of State sent and received over her unsecure, non-"state.gov" email system.  The emails, dated 2010 through 2013, contain classified information and detail collusion between the Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation.  Ten emails contain classified information redacted "in the interest of national defense or foreign policy," including confidential sources, and concern Israel and the Middle East.  Most of the emails include exchanges with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  The emails show Hillary Clinton conducted classified and sensitive negotiations about the Israel-Arab conflict on her unsecure, non-governmental server.

Goodlatte, Gowdy Strike a Deal to Review Long-Sought Documents on FBI's Clinton Email Probe.  Republican lawmakers examining the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation say they have reached an agreement with Justice Department officials to review and obtain documents they have been requesting for months.  Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said they "look forward to reviewing the information to better understand the decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 and 2017."

We Need A Special Prosecutor — For Hillary Clinton.  Nearly a year has passed since Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation launched, and "Russian collusion" remains more fantasy than fact.  As Democrats and their media allies fear-monger for political reasons, they face an inconvenient truth:  There is still no smoking gun.  While Russian actors appear to have interfered with the 2016 election, the Mueller team — stacked with Clinton and Obama donors — has presented no evidence that President Donald Trump helped orchestrate any of the interference.  In Tucker Carlson's words:  "Almost no information has come out to justify the [Russia] obsession.  None has come out to justify the claim that there was collusion."  Desperate for the evidence to justify its existence, the Mueller investigation has now seemingly transitioned to President Trump's personal life — yet another distraction for ratings-obsessed media elites.

James and the Giant Preach.  James Comey loves to preach to us lesser mortals about ethics and such. [...] Comey's contribution to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, for now, is this classic:  "No reasonable prosecutor would bring such charges."  The idea that Comey has a clue of what defines reasonableness is itself impugned each time he opens his mouth.

New emails bolster GOP claims of FBI, DOJ 'coordination' on Clinton case response.  Emails reviewed by Fox News from February 2016 suggest the FBI and DOJ worked together to craft a response to a key development in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, amid newly raised Republican concerns about a "concerning level of coordination" between the two agencies during the probe.  The emails concern the period after 22 messages with "Top Secret" information were found on the former secretary of state's personal email server.  Republican Rep. Mark Meadows cited them in a letter earlier this week claiming former FBI Director James Comey's testimony to Congress — in which he downplayed FBI-DOJ coordination on the Clinton case — may be at odds with documents suggesting "frequent" coordination.

Meowing Media Fuel Mass Delusion of Russian Collusion.  Some background:  In March 2015, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that, while in office, she diverted some 66,000 emails to a server in the basement of her house.  As the Associated Press would determine, the server was "vulnerable to hackers" and the setup was "the subject of U.S. government and industry warnings at the time over attacks from even low-skilled intruders."  After the diversion was discovered, Clinton returned roughly half of the stolen emails.  The other half, she claimed, related to private matters and were deleted.  Some, it turned out, were destroyed while under subpoena.  Despite the deletions, there was a chance that the stolen emails might be found because Russia and other adversaries probably had their own copies.

New emails show Hillary-FBI-DOJ coordination.  Newly uncovered emails containing 22 messages with "Top Secret" information found on former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's personal email server indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) "coordinated" efforts to devise a response to a major development in her email probe.  The recent discovery bolsters Republicans' newly raised allegations that there was a "concerning level of coordination" between the FBI and DOJ during Clinton's private email investigation.  "Republican Rep. Mark Meadows cited [the accusations] in a letter earlier this week claiming former FBI Director James Comey's testimony to Congress — in which he downplayed FBI-DOJ coordination on the Clinton case — may be at odds with documents suggesting 'frequent' coordination," Fox News announced.

Comey is a Pink-Hatted Women's-Marcher.  It doesn't matter how James Comey voted when he discharged his duties as FBI director as a partisan campaign operator for Team Clinton.  As his book reveals, his actions were all directed toward electing Hillary Clinton and discrediting her opponent.  He wrote a letter exonerating Clinton long before he interviewed her and her campaign associates.  His October surprise, reopening the Clinton email investigation, was not to hurt Clinton, but instead to exonerate her before the election.  He read the polls, knew she would win, and wanted to clear the decks for her presidency by declaring the email issue dead and buried.  I wonder what Mr. and Mrs. Comey discussed in the year before the election?  He was supposed to be nonpartisan in his position, but she certainly didn't have to be.

McCabe got the order to shut down Hillary investigation from...Obama?  Rush Limbaugh on his April 19 show said the important news in the report of Inspector General Horowitz's report is the August 12, 2016 call to McCabe from the Obama DOJ regarding the Clinton Foundation investigation. Limbaugh believes that it was Sally Yates, of the Obama DOJ, who called McCabe to tell him they were "concerned" about the investigation. [...] While Mueller searches in vain for the nonexistent collusion and obstruction of justice by President Trump, there is clear evidence in the Horowitz report of obstruction of justice to interfere with the 2016 election by the Obama DOJ.

Oops: Comey Accidentally Reveals Someone is Concealing Hundreds of Thousands of Clinton Emails.  Thanks to the tireless Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, we now know that there are roughly 200,000 or more previously unknown Hillary Clinton emails that were hidden by the Obama administration from a federal judge.  During his utterly boring interview on 60 Minutes, the egomaniacal former FBI director accidentally blurted out the truth: [...]

Comey's Hubris Will Be His Demise.  [Scroll down]  In the aftermath of his bizarre statement to the press regarding the Hillary Clinton email investigation, more than 100 field agents of the FBI, and roughly half a dozen attorneys from the DOJ, made public through a source their total disbelief and disagreement with his assessment.  In a lengthy statement read to the cameras, Comey laid out as clear a picture of wrongdoing as could be made, before jettisoning the issue by claiming "no prosecutor" would've brought a criminal indictment and been successful.  At the time — and before the 106 agents and attorneys who worked the case came forward — I had several notable prosecutors in New York City tell me face to face that they could've prosecuted it and won a conviction.

Comey: I Announced the Hillary Investigation Because Polls Showed Her Ahead.  In his new book "A Higher Loyalty," former FBI Director James Comey says the reason he announced that the FBI had re-opened its investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server was polling.  Yes.  Seriously.  In late October of 2016, just days before the presidential election, polling was skewing in Clinton's favor.  Comey says this subconsciously influenced him to send a signed letter to Congress announcing that the bureau had re-opened its investigation into the former secretary of state.

Here Are 8 Things You Need To Know About The FBI's Raid on Michael Cohen's Offices.  [#7] The FBI Never Treated Hillary Clinton This Way:  This is perfectly obvious.  Hillary wasn't merely allowed to delete 33,000 documents from her computer server three weeks after revelations that she had a private computer server, she was protected by the DOJ and the FBI, which allowed her personal attorney, Cheryl Mills — who was also under investigation — to invoke attorney-client privilege to stop the FBI from investigating Hillary's email scheme

FBI doubles staff in response to subpoena for alleged FISA abuse, Hillary Clinton email probe documents.  FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday [3/27/2018] that he is doubling the number of FBI staff to handle House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte's records request related to the panel's inquiry into alleged bias at the Justice Department, as well as the investigation into the handling of the Hillary Clinton private emails probe.  "Up until today, we have dedicated 27 FBI staff to review the records that are potentially responsive to Chairman Goodlatte's requests.  The actual number of documents responsive to this request is likely in the thousands," Wray said in statement, revealing he is doubling the number of staff to 54.  "The staff will work two shifts per day from 8 a.m to midnight "to expedite completion of this project," he said.

The FBI Gets The Attention Of The AG And Courts Over Ignoring Subpoenas.  Morale Possibly Ruined.  Late last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte hit Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with a subpoena for documents related to several investigations, such as the Clinton email investigation.  What brought this on was stonewalling of the committee's document requests by the FBI.

House subpoena rattles Justice Department; Sessions 'angry' at slow response.  The FBI is promising swift action on a House subpoena covering three politically charged investigations after word that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has grown angry with the bureau's slow-walking of congressional requests for information.  Last week the House Judiciary Committee sent a subpoena to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein demanding documents from the Justice Department and the FBI "regarding charging decisions in the investigation surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server, potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe," according to a committee press release.

Was the FBI's Investigation of Hillary Clinton a 'Sham'?  This should be big news.  In fact, this should have led the evening news on Sunday night, and there should be some kind of media investigation of this planned today, but there wasn't, and there won't be.  The reason this story didn't lead the news yesterday, and that the media won't be investigating it today (or ever) is because it doesn't fit the liberal narrative.  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) appeared on the Fox News Channel Sunday morning to continue his call for a second special counsel to investigate the FBI's behavior during the 2016 elections.

House Judiciary Committee Subpoenas 1.2M Documents Reviewed by DOJ IG.  Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has run out of patience with the U.S. Justice Department and is now subpoenaing 1.2 million DOJ documents, including decisions made by former FBI Director James Comey not to prosecute former Secretary of State Clinton and other matters leading up to and beyond the 2016 election.  The DOJ inspector-general also is investigating the FBI's handling of the Clinton case.  "Well, we want to see everything that the inspector general has seen, which is, we understand, about 1.2 million documents," Goodlatte told Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Monday.  He said the documents are critical to his committee's oversight of the FBI and DOJ.

Judge Nap on Push for Clinton Email Probe Records: 'The Excuse for Her Exoneration Is Not Credible'.  Judge Andrew Napolitano said it's "very unusual" that the Justice Department has been slow to release documents related to how the FBI handled its investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server.  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) on Sunday said he is prepared to subpoena the DOJ to obtain more than one million missing documents related to the case.  "It's very unusual that a Republican Department of Justice is resisting the efforts of a Republican House of Representatives judiciary committee to find out what happened when the Democrats ran the Department of Justice," Napolitano said on "Fox & Friends First."

DOJ: Inspector General Examining Whether McCabe Was Promised Promotion to FBI Director by Hillary Clinton.  Andrew McCabe may have revealed to his inner circle an inside plan to replace his friend James Comey as FBI director if and when Hillary Clinton was elected president of the United States, according to top officials in the Justice Department. [...] If those discussions about a promotion to FBI director with co-workers and McCabe's inner circle were anything more than bravado, that certainly is troubling.  And given the fact that McCabe's wife Jill was given more than $1.25 million in Hillary-backed campaign donations to run for state senate in Virginia, it could spell additional legal woes for her husband.  McCabe was in charge of the Hillary Clinton email investigation at the FBI at the same time his wife ran for office.  At the same time he and his wife struck a deal to run for office with Hillary consigliere and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who was allegedly under investigation at the time by the FBI for a public corruption case.

Rod Rosenstein's Wife Represented Bill Clinton Shortly After Rod Cleared Hillary As A Prosecutor.  Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein's wife Lisa Barsoomian represented then-President Bill Clinton in a 1998-99 civil case in federal court.  Rod Rosenstein worked as a Whitewater prosecutor.  In this role, he was in charge of the "FBI Travel Office" case, in which it was found that the Clinton White House illegally seized FBI files from White House travel office employees, including the Clintons' travel director.  Rosenstein interrogated Hillary Clinton on January 14, 1998, and was seen as responsible for clearing her of potential charges in the case.  By that time, Rosenstein had already been picked to work for the U.S. Attorney's office in Maryland in the Clinton administration.  When he applied to the Senate to become deputy attorney general, he falsely stated the dates he worked for Starr's team, saying he ended his employment with Starr in 1997 (before his friendly 15-minute interrogation of Hillary Clinton).

Rod Rosenstein Submitted False Documents To Senate Concerning His Interrogation of Hillary Clinton.  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave a resume to the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation to be Deputy Attorney General.  In that resume, provided under oath, he falsely stated the dates at which he worked for Ken Starr's investigative legal team.  Rosenstein testified to the Senate that he worked on Starr's team beginning in 1995 and ending in 1997.  Rosenstein said that he began working at the U.S. Attorney's office in Maryland for the Clinton administration in the year 1997.  However, records show that Rosenstein interviewed Hillary Clinton for Ken Starr in the Whitewater case on January 14, 1998.  Rosenstein's official interview with Hillary Clinton lasted fifteen minutes and cleared her of charges stemming from the seizing of FBI documents on the former Clinton White House travel director.

Pardoned Sailor Kristian Saucier Says Obama DOJ Used Him As A Hillary 'Scapegoat'.  Kristian Saucier, the U.S. Navy sailor pardoned by President Trump Friday [3/9/2018], harshly criticized the Obama administration during a Saturday morning interview with Fox News' Pete Hegseth.  Saucier was charged and jailed in October 2016 for taking photos onboard a nuclear submarine in 2009.  He believes his case was an attempt by the Obama administration to "take the heat" off of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server at the State Department.

DiGenova: Strzok, Clapper Ignored Possible Hack of Hillary's Server 'With Consent of Obama'.  Former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova said Tuesday that key Obama administration officials ignored reports of a possible breach of Hillary Clinton's private email server in order to protect the 2016 presidential candidate.  DiGenova said that not only did FBI Agent Peter Strzok and then-Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper ignore the possible hack, but that they did so "with the consent of the president (Obama)."  Tucker Carlson said technicians found discrepancies in metadata contained in the email server, which may indicate it was hacked or tampered with.

FBI agent Peter Strzok was told of possible breach into Clinton's server but didn't follow up, sources say.  During the final months of the Clinton email investigation, FBI agent Peter Strzok was advised of an irregularity in the metadata of Hillary Clinton's server that suggested a possible breach, but there was no significant follow up, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.  Sources told Fox News that Strzok, who sent anti-Trump text messages that got him removed from the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, was told about the metadata anomaly in 2016, but Strzok did not support a formal damage assessment.

FBI Interviewed Huma Abedin About Clinton Emails Even After Investigation Was Closed.  FBI agents interviewed Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin in December 2016, more than a month after the official close of the Clinton email probe and much more recently than previously believed.  The Washington Post reports that agents were interested in how Abedin and Clinton emails wound up on a laptop used by Abedin's husband, Anthony Weiner.  The FBI discovered Abedin and Clinton emails on the laptop while conducting an investigation into Weiner's contact with an underaged girl in September 2016.  The Clinton email probe, which had been closed in July 2016, was reopened on Oct. 28.  It was closed again on Nov. 6, two days before the election, after FBI officials determined that none of the emails on the laptop would warrant criminal charges.

Senator seeks answers on why FBI waited weeks to act on Weiner laptop in Clinton case.  A Republican senator is pressing for answers on why the FBI waited weeks to act after the 2016 discovery of thousands of emails on ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop that potentially were relevant to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., fired off a letter Thursday to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asking about the timeline, citing texts between two key FBI investigators.  The messages, first reported by The Wall Street Journal in late January, indicate that top bureau officials were aware of the discovery of thousands of emails from Weiner well before the FBI sought a search warrant in late October, and effectively revived the Clinton probe right before the election.

Here's a Guy Who Might Know How the FBI Clinton Email Probe Was Sabotaged.  FBI veteran John Giacalone served as executive assistant director of the FBI from June 2014 through February 2016, working from the Washington, D.C., headquarters.  His Linkedin profile indicates that during this period he "manage[d] the strategic risks associated with the FBI's counterterrorism, counterintelligence and weapons of mass destruction programs in close coordination with domestic and international partners."  Giacalone was also centrally involved in the FBI investigation into Clinton's mishandling of classified information — a serious felony crime — and he resigned suddenly, for reasons not yet fully understood.  Evidence now tumbling into the public domain suggests Giacalone may have exhausted his tolerance for a rigged inquiry late in January 2016.

FBI, Hillary scandals could have a ripple effect on Wall Street.  Again, if you are investing in US financial markets, keep a close eye on developments regarding the FBI and the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation.  The markets don't like chaos, and that's what we are headed for.  There have been a lot of major developments recently, although most big media organizations are ignoring them.  They will soon regret that.

FBI Missed Clinton Emails Openly Marked Classified, Wanted To Conclude Probe Before IG Caught Mistake.  The FBI didn't notice that some emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server were marked classified with a "(C)" when they were sent — something that seemingly would have been one of the first and most obvious checks in an investigation, and one that FBI agents instantly recognized put the facts at odds with Clinton's public statements.  The Intelligence Community Inspector General spotted it after the FBI missed it, texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, reveal.  "Holy cow," Strzok wrote, "if the FBI missed this, what else was missed?"

IG poised to reignite war over FBI's Clinton case.  Few people have heard of Michael Horowitz, but that's about to change.  Horowitz, the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general, is an increasingly critical player in the controversy surrounding the FBI, President Trump and the Russia investigation.  With little fanfare, he has been conducting a sprawling probe of the FBI's handling of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  His full report, which could set off shockwaves, is expected by the early spring.  A political appointee in both the Bush and Obama administrations, Horowitz's yearlong investigation already reportedly contributed to the early resignation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.  And his work has been felt in other ways.

Comey Wasn't Snookered, He Knew Russian Doc Was Fake, But Used It As Excuse Anyway.  Earlier this week we reported that because the FBI received a secret Russian document describing an email indicating that the Justice Dept. would not try to hard to win the case against Hillary Clinton, then-FBI director Comey was snookered into making his speech that Ms. Clinton was probably guilty but no prosecutor would press charges against her.  The Washington Post had reported the document was not only unreliable but possibly a Russian ruse "according to people familiar with its contents."  Now CNN reports that Comey wasn't snookered, he knew the document was fake BEFORE he made the speech letting HRC off the hook.  He snookered the FBI, the Justice Dept., and congress by using it as an excuse for making the speech.

Other Secrets of the FBI.  It is a crime to make even an unsworn false statement to the FBI under 18 USC §1001, the False Statement Act.  Oaths are not necessary under this act.  Moreover, oaths are not administered by FBI agents.  It is doubtful that they even could be.  Thus, Mrs. Clinton remains liable under the False Statement Act for any false statements made to the FBI — and not only to the FBI, inasmuch as the statute actually covers statements made to other agencies as well.  For instance, Mrs. Clinton stated to the Inspector General of the State Department that she turned all her government emails over to the Department of State.  Yet the FBI found she did not turn over 17,000 of them.

The Center of the Web.  The conduct of Lynch, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, and others did not occur in a vacuum.  There was a purpose and direction to it.  The first question is, who benefits?  The answer is, Hillary and Obama. [...] This is the worst political scandal in our history.  The president and presidential candidate of the Democratic Party used the FBI and DOJ to help Hillary and attack Trump.  Comey, Strzok, McCabe, Lynch, and others are the "buffers," assisted by much of the media, protecting Obama and Hillary.  The Democrats and their media friends have circled the wagons.

Clinton-Obama Emails:  The Key to Understanding Why Hillary Wasn't Indicted.  From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton-emails caper was President Barack Obama's call — not the FBI's, and not the Justice Department's.  The decision was inevitable.  Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.  These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama's own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton-Obama emails.  If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

Texts surface; FBI officials worried abt being too tough on Hillary during email investigation.  After reports surfaced earlier this week that five months of text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page disappeared and several difference excuses later as to how it could have occurred, the DOJ's Inspector General reported earlier today that the text messages are in the process of being recovered.  The result, additional text messages from October 2016 revealed that former FBI Director, James Comey thought that Andrew McCabe should recuse himself from the Clinton investigation... for starters.  Talk about a can of worms.  In the meantime, Progressives are becoming more bitter and hateful by the hour, a true sign of their desperation.

Grassley Releases Strzok-Page Texts Showing FBI Was 'Pulling Punches' In Clinton Probe.  A text message exchange between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page is evidence that the FBI was "pulling punches" in its investigation into Hillary Clinton, a top Republican senator is alleging.  In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, drew attention to a Feb. 25, 2016 text message exchanged between Strzok and Page.  The message was included in seven pages of messages that Grassley released on Thursday.  The Justice Department recently provided six congressional committees with 384 pages of text messages between the pair.

Andrew McCarthy Discusses Why Clinton Email Scandal Was Protected By President Obama Communication.  W.H. "Bill" Priestap is the FBI Head of Counterintelligence.  Priestap was one of the first FBI officials who caught our attention (spring of 2017) because FBI Director James Comey mysteriously pointed a finger upon him during testimony to congress on March 20th, 2017 [Although Comey didn't use Bill Priestap's name, only his position].  James Comey said last year the reason the FBI did not inform congress of the ongoing eight month counterintelligence investigation (required by congressional intelligence oversight), which began in July 2016 into candidate Donald Trump, was because Bill Priestap specifically told Director Comey not to inform congress or intelligence oversight.

The Clinton investigation revisited.  Since early on in the phony baloney Clinton email investigation, Andrew McCarthy has insisted that Madam Hillary was never to be charged.  The rationale is overdetermined, but she would never be charged in part because President Obama was himself implicated in her misconduct.  McCarthy noted that Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Clinton over her own non-secure email account.  Today [1/24/2018] McCarthy draws on the latest tranche of Strzok/Page text messages released by Senator Johnson yesterday to revisit and reiterate this basic point.

New Documents Reveal More Instances of Classified Information on Hillary Clinton's Unsecure, Non-'State.gov' System.  Judicial Watch today [1/19/2018] released 78 pages of new documents from the U.S. Department of State containing emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent and received over her unsecure, non-"state.gov" email system.  Three of the email exchanges include classified information.  The emails also reveal that Clinton had detailed knowledge about the security issues with in her non-State Department email system.

GOP House investigators want James Comey to testify on Clinton email investigation.  House Republicans are preparing to ask former FBI Director James Comey to testify as part of the Republican-led probe into the FBI and Justice Department handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Comey's testimony, if he appeared, would raise the stakes of the joint Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into the decision not to charge the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee over classified emails on her private server — and the rare step for Comey to publicly announce Clinton would not be charged — as the probe has become a proxy battle on Capitol Hill between Democrats and Republicans over special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.  Several Republicans told CNN that Comey is a key witness for the investigation, although it's not clear how soon he would be asked to testify.

The FBI Takes a Mulligan.  Last week the FBI announced that it was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private unsecured email system while she was secretary of state and separately reviving the investigation into possibly illegal actions by her and her staff related to donations to the Clinton Foundation in those same years.  It's no wonder that the FBI wants to "take a Mulligan" on both.  The FBI's — meaning then-FBI director James Comey's — bizarre exoneration of Clinton in the former and the Bureau's burial of the latter investigation have done more damage to the FBI's reputation than any other incidents in its history.  A Justice Department Inspector General investigation into the Clinton email mess will soon highlight the ugly facts.  That is probably the reason for the revivals.

The FBI's Dubious Probe of Hillary's Emails.  The FBI did everything but drive Hillary's getaway car.  Former secretary of state Clinton is a free woman largely thanks to the tender loving care that the FBI provided her and her conspirators during its probe of her illegal, unsecure email server and related abuse of government secrets.  GOP lawmakers concluded this after grilling FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe on December 21, behind closed doors, according to John Solomon's molar-grinding exposé in Tuesday's [1/2/2018] The Hill.  "For the first time, investigators say they have secured written evidence that the FBI believed there was evidence that some laws were broken," Solomon reported.  This proof includes what Solomon calls revelations of "irregularities and contradictions" in the FBI's inquiry.

Congressional investigators find irregularities in FBI's handling of Clinton email case.  That evidence includes passages in FBI documents stating the "sheer volume" of classified information that flowed through Clinton's insecure emails was proof of criminality as well as an admission of false statements by one key witness in the case, the investigators said.  The name of the witness is redacted from the FBI documents but lawmakers said he was an employee of a computer firm that helped maintain her personal server after she left office as America's top diplomat and who belatedly admitted he had permanently erased an archive of her messages in 2015 after they had been subpoenaed by Congress.  The investigators also confirmed that the FBI began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton of any crimes while evidence responsive to subpoenas was still outstanding and before agents had interviewed more than a dozen key witnesses.

Now We Know:  FBI Ignored Lawbreaking To Exonerate Hillary Clinton.  Each new revelation about how the FBI handled — or, more appropriately, mishandled — the Clinton email scandal makes it that much clearer that politics trumped law enforcement, even when it involved matters of national security.

New Evidence Found That FBI Investigators Believed "Laws Were Broken" by Hillary Clinton.  In what could be a major black eye for the deep state and yet another nail in the Clinton legacy coffin, The Hill's John Solomon reports that Republicans on key congressional committees say they have uncovered new irregularities and contradictions inside the FBI's probe of Hillary Clinton's email server.

Now We Know:  FBI Ignored Lawbreaking To Exonerate Hillary Clinton.  Each new revelation about how the FBI handled — or, more appropriately, mishandled — the Clinton email scandal makes it that much clearer that politics trumped law enforcement, even when it involved matters of national security.  The Hill's John Solomon reported on Wednesday [1/3/2018] that congressional investigators have turned up evidence that the FBI believed laws had been broken when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides exchanged a multitude of classified information via email over Clinton's unsecured, home-brew server.

DOJ prepares new probe of Clinton's email server.  The Trump administration is launching another probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state, a new report said Thursday.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions hopes to uncover new details on how Clinton and her aides handled classified material, The Daily Beast reported, citing a source close to the former Alabama senator.  The new probe was prompted by President Trump's repeated calls on Twitter and elsewhere for another FBI investigation into "Crooked Hillary," the source said.

Justice Department reopens Hillary Clinton email investigation.  The Department of Justice has caved to pressure from the White House and is reportedly reopening the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  According to the Daily Beast, there is a new effort in the department to get new details on how Clinton and her aides — including former top aide Huma Abedin — handled classified material.  The effort will look at how much classified information was on her private email server, and how that information got there.  President Trump has continually questioned if and when the Justice Department would reopen its investigation into Clinton.

Congressional investigators find irregularities in FBI's handling of Clinton email case.  Republicans on key congressional committees say they have uncovered new irregularities and contradictions inside the FBI's probe of Hillary Clinton's email server.  For the first time, investigators say they have secured written evidence that the FBI believed there was evidence that some laws were broken when the former secretary of State and her top aides transmitted classified information through her insecure private email server, lawmakers and investigators told The Hill.  That evidence includes passages in FBI documents stating the "sheer volume" of classified information that flowed through Clinton's insecure emails was proof of criminality as well as an admission of false statements by one key witness in the case, the investigators said.

Republicans claim to have found written evidence that proves the FBI found 'criminality' during the probe of Hillary Clinton's email server.  Republicans have reportedly found written evidence that proves the FBI found 'criminality' during the agency's 2016 probe of Hillary Clinton's email server.  A new report by The Hill claims Republicans on key congressional committees have secured written documentation that the FBI believed there was evidence that some laws were broken when Clinton and her top aides sent classified information through her private email server.  The evidence reportedly includes FBI documents stating the 'sheer volume' of classified information that was transmitted through Clinton's insecure server was proof of criminality.

Jail Hillary and Huma, Not Kristian Saucier.  Most Americans are not familiar with the name of Kristian Saucier, but they should be.  He is the U.S. Navy sailor sentenced to prison for taking pictures inside the nuclear submarine he served in.  He was not a spy for a foreign power.  He had no intent, to coin a phrase, to do anything with these photos except keep them as personal memories of his proud and honorable service. [...] No doubt Saucier watched with bitterly ironic interest as the email scandals involving former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and aide Huma Abedin unfolded with tales of private servers, mishandled classified emails, smashed devices, and scrubbed hard drives.  After all that, despite laying out a case for Hillary's indictment and incarceration, FBI director James Comey, who was writing her exoneration memo before even conducting a sham of an investigation, said no prosecutor worth his salt would bring a case because Hillary lacked "intent" even though the law regarding mishandling of classified information does not require intent.

FBI Knew The 'Bleach Bit' Computer Guy Lied In Clinton Email Testimony, Gave Him Immunity.  The Hill published a story today based on leaks from a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting where FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed elements of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Republicans on the committee say McCabe outlined some irregularities that suggest the outcome of the investigation was rigged in Clinton's favor.  Among the new findings is that an unnamed tech specialist who used Bleach Bit to wipe Clinton's server after a congressional subpoena was issued admitted lying to the FBI.

Time to Give Clinton's Server Technician the Mueller Treatment.  New Year's Eve gets people thinking about resolutions.  Alas, when a year passes, a mothballed prosecutor finds himself thinking about the statute of limitations.  As 2018 beckons, it has me thinking about Paul Combetta — the Platte River Networks technician who used the "BleachBit" program to destroy thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails when they were under congressional subpoena and preservation orders.  It is not just the tick-tock of the criminal clock that has me thinking about Combetta — about how much longer his obstructive destruction of government files in March 2015 could still be subject to investigation and prosecution.  The statute of limitations is five years.  Time's a-wastin', but there could still be a live case for a while.  The other reason Combetta leaps to the front of the mind is ... Robert Mueller.

Revenge Of The Email Server.  There is more than a little irony in the criticism special counsel Robert Mueller's office is taking over how it came into possession of thousands of emails from the Trump transition team.  After all, the route to Mueller's appointment began with Hillary Clinton's misbegotten decisions to house her own emails as secretary of state on a private server, and then to obliterate some 30,000 that she and her lawyers deemed "personal" before turning over the balance to their rightful owner, the U.S. government.  A series of hacks, blamed by U.S. intelligence on Russian operatives, targeted various Democratic officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, and at one point Trump himself seemingly encouraged hackers from Russia (or anywhere else) to retrieve and disclose those 30,000 missing emails if they could.  It never happened, but there were enough other embarrassing disclosures to prompt Democratic accusations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, which ultimately led to Mueller's appointment.

The quiet probe into Clinton email investigation could be a landmine for Robert Mueller.  In early January, news that the Justice Department's inspector general launched an investigation into the government's disputed handling of the Hillary Clinton email inquiry was quickly overtaken by the chaotic run-up to President Trump's inauguration.  Nearly a year later, Inspector General Michael Horowitz's wide-ranging review of the FBI and Justice's work in the politically-charged Clinton case now looms as a potential landmine for Russia special counsel Robert Mueller.  For months, Horowitz's investigation — which has amassed interviews with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey and other key officials — had been grinding on in near anonymity.  That is, until earlier this month when the inspector general acknowledged that Mueller was alerted to a cache of text messages exchanged between two FBI officials on his staff that disparaged Trump.

Facing Republican attacks, FBI's deputy director plans to retire early next year.  Andrew McCabe, the FBI's deputy director who has been the target of Republican critics for more than a year, plans to retire in a few months when he becomes fully eligible for pension benefits, according to people familiar with the matter.  McCabe spent hours in Congress this past week, facing questions behind closed doors from members of three committees.  Republicans said they were dissatisfied with his answers; Democrats called it a partisan hounding.  McCabe, 49, holds a unique position in the political firestorm surrounding the FBI.  He was former director James B. Comey's right-hand man, a position that involved him in most of the FBI's actions that vex President Trump and in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state, a matter that still riles Democrats.

The Scheme to Exonerate Hillary Clinton Blows Wide Open:  Comey, McCabe and Strzok Implicated.  The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has discovered that edits made to former FBI Director James Comey's statement exonerating Hillary Clinton for transmitting classified info over an unsecured, private email server went far beyond what was previously known, as detailed in a Thursday letter from committee chairman Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to FBI Director Christopher Wray.  The letter reveals specific edits made by senior FBI agents when Deputy Director Andr ew McCabe exchanged drafts of Comey's statement with senior FBI officials, including Peter Strzok, Strzok's direct supervisor, E.W. "Bill" Priestap, Jonathan Moffa, and an unnamed employee from the Office of General Counsel (identified by Newsweek as DOJ Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson) — in what was a coordinated conspiracy among top FBI brass to decriminalize Clinton's conduct by changing legal terms and phrases, omitting key information, and minimizing the role of the Intelligence Community in the email investigation.  Doing so virtually guaranteed one thing:  That then-Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton would not be prosecuted for her criminal actions.

Yes, Investigate the Investigators.  Everything that has happened in the Trump probe stands out against a backdrop of leniency in the Clinton investigation.  While Mueller has prosecuted two Trump associates for lying to the FBI, the Obama Justice Department gave a pass to Mrs. Clinton and her subordinates, who gave the FBI misinformation about such key matters as whether Clinton understood markings in classified documents and whether her aides knew about her homebrew server system during their State Department service.  Mueller's team conducted a predawn raid at gunpoint in executing a search warrant on Paul Manafort's home while Manafort was cooperating with congressional committees.  When it came to the Clinton case, though, the Justice Department not only eschewed search warrants, or even mere subpoenas, but they never even took possession of the DNC server alleged to have been hacked by Russian operatives.  The irregularities in the Clinton-emails investigation are breathtaking:  the failure to use the grand jury to compel the production of key physical evidence; the Justice Department's collaboration with defense lawyers to restrict the FBI's ability to pursue obvious lines of inquiry and examine digital evidence; immunity grants to suspects who should have been charged with crimes and pressured to cooperate; allowing subjects of the investigation to be present for each other's FBI interviews and even to act as lawyers for Clinton, in violation of legal and ethical rules; Comey's preparation of a statement exonerating Clinton months before the investigation was complete and key witnesses — including Clinton herself — were interviewed; and the shameful tarmac meeting between Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch and Mrs. Clinton's husband just days before Mrs. Clinton sat for a perfunctory FBI interview (after which Comey announced the decision not to charge her).

Mueller's 'Right-Hand Man' on Russia Probe Represented Clinton IT Aide Who Set Up Unsecure Server.  Yet another key member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe appears to have deep ties to the Democratic Party.  Aaron Zebley served previously as Mueller's chief of staff at the FBI and as a senior counselor in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice.  He also served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security and Terrorism Unit in Alexandria, Virginia.  He is often referred to in the media as Mueller's "right-hand man."  Also, in 2015 when he was a lawyer, he represented Justin Cooper, the IT staffer who personally set up Hillary Clinton's unsecure server in her Chappaqua home, Fox News' Tucker Carlson revealed on his show Thursday [12/7/2017].

New documents reveal FBI's Clinton cover-up.  In Washington, the ostensible story is rarely the real story.  We know, for example, that former President Clinton engineered a meeting with President Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch, on the tarmac of the Phoenix Airport on June 27, 2016.  That's the official story, replete with the charming and intentionally disarming detail that all they talked about was their grandchildren.  It was just coincidental, don't you know, that at the time the FBI was looking into Hillary Clinton's use of a "personal" email server to send, receive and store classified information.  And it was also simply coincidental that just a few days later, the director of the FBI — who served under Attorney General Lynch — announced that he wouldn't recommend a prosecution of Hillary Clinton.

Tom Fitton:  We're Going to Find Out the FBI and DOJ Were Ruined Trying to Protect Hillary Clinton.  President of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton dropped a truth bomb — the FBI and DOJ were ruined trying to protect Hillary Clinton.  The root of this evil is Hillary and Obama.

Hillary lackeys warned she would fire me as soon as she was elected for blowing whistle on her secret server reveals government inspector.  Former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III said his job security had been threatened after he exposed Hillary Clinton for having 'Top Secret' emails on her unsecured server.  'I was told that we would be the first two to be fired with her administration,' McCullough said of himself and a colleague to Fox News, in an interview that aired Monday [11/27/2017].

Obama IG guy flags 'strategic coordination' of State, Clinton on emails.  Here's something you don't hear every day — but an inspector general who was actually appointed by Barack Obama told Tucker Carlson of Fox News that there was "strategic coordination" taking place among the State Department, Campaign Team Hillary Clinton, certain key legal minds and politicos on Capitol Hill, regarding the behind-scenes talk of The Emails.  Yes, those emails — the ones that were marked classified and top secret and that were found on Clinton's private and unsecured email system.

Intelligence Community Chief Inspector General Outlines Politicization of Clinton Email Investigation.  Inspector General Charles McCullough III was the top of the IG office in direct oversight of 17 intelligence agencies including Treasury and FBI.  In his position Mr. McCullough was directly responsible for oversight of the Hillary Clinton email investigation from the position of reviewing any potential risk to the entire intelligence community.  McCullough's direct boss was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), James Clapper.  McCullough informed Clapper of the "above top secret' content of Hillary Clinton's emails.  However, soon after sharing that information McCullough received instructions to stop briefing James Clapper.  Continued briefing would remove the necessary 'plausible deniability' Clapper, James Comey (FBI) and John Brennan (CIA) would later use to defend their actions in the investigation.

'Blowback': Clinton campaign planned to fire me over email probe, Obama intel watchdog says.  A government watchdog who played a central role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation during the Obama administration told Fox News that he, his family and his staffers faced an intense backlash at the time from Clinton allies — and that the campaign even put out word that it planned to fire him if the Democratic presidential nominee won the 2016 election.

House Conservatives Call for Full Review of DOJ Handling of Clinton Email Probe.  If House conservatives get their way, Congress will soon be investigating whether the Justice Department gave 2016 Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton special treatment during its investigation into her improper use of an unsecure email server while secretary of state.  Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) announced on Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" Friday that he and his colleagues (presumably from the House Conservative Caucus) are calling for "a full review by the Judiciary Committee of the processes and procedures that potentially gave Hillary Clinton a different process and a different standard of justice than would be applied to any other American."  Gaetz said that the evidence now shows that the FBI gave the Clinton email probe "special status."

New Classified Clinton Emails.  While there are now belated rumbles in Washington about a Department of Justice investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices, we continue to steadily discover for you and the American people the nature of the corruption going on behind the scenes at her State Department.  This week we released 109 pages of Hillary Clinton emails from her tenure as secretary of state.  The documents include two email exchanges classified confidential and a 2011 exchange with Sid Blumenthal about "serious trouble for the Libyan rebels."  The newly produced emails were part of 72,000 pages of documents the FBI recovered last year in its investigation into Clinton's use of an unsecure, non-government email system.  The records include emails Hillary Clinton attempted to delete or did not otherwise disclose.  These emails are also available on the State Department's website.

The Trump Collusion Case Is Not Getting the Clinton Emails Treatment.  [Scroll down]  Lest we forget, President Obama had endorsed Mrs. Clinton, his former secretary of state and his party's nominee, to be president.  Moreover, Obama had knowingly participated in the conduct for which Clinton was under investigation — using a pseudonym in communicating with her about classified government business over an unsecure private communication system.  Obama prejudiced the emails investigation.  Long before it was formally ended, he publicly pronounced Clinton innocent.

Federal judge tosses suit, says FBI did all it could on Clinton emails.  A federal judge tossed a lawsuit Thursday [11/9/2017] that would have pushed the State Department and FBI to do more to try to track down Hillary Clinton's emails, ruling the government has done all it reasonably could to locate the former secretary of state's messages.  Two watchdog groups, Judicial Watch and Cause of Action, had sued in 2015 demanding the government recover all of Mrs. Clinton's emails, saying she violated open-records laws by not preserving her messages.  U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, though, said the FBI did what it could, and did manage to recover thousands of messages Mrs. Clinton didn't return herself.  "Those efforts went well beyond the mine-run search for missing federal records ... and were largely successful, save for some emails sent during a two-month stretch.  Even then, the FBI pursued every imaginable avenue to recover the missing emails," wrote Judge Boasberg, an Obama appointee to the court.

House to investigate Justice Department's handling of Hillary Clinton email scandal.  A pair of senior House Republicans have opened a joint investigation into the Justice Department's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the lawmakers announced Tuesday [10/24/2017].  The probe will be conducted by two congressional panels responsible for overseeing the Justice Department and government operations in general.  The investigators will review then-FBI Director James Comey's various decisions pertaining to the Clinton investigation, such as his unusual announcement that she should not face indictment.

Judicial Watch Rips State Department for Not Releasing Clinton Emails.  Hillary Clinton might be long gone from Foggy Bottom, but a conservative watchdog group Monday accused the State Department of running interference for its former secretary.  Judicial Watch, which sued in 2015 for the release of emails related to the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private server, reacted Monday [10/23/2017] to the State Department's admission that it has yet to process 40,000 of 72,000 pages of records that investigators reviewed as part of its probe.

State Dept Admits There are 40,000 Pages of Clinton Emails They Haven't Even Looked At.  So far, the State Department has processed more than 32,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.  At a recent court hearing, however, the Department acknowledged that this isn't even half of the total number of records that they have to release.  According to a press release from the organization, the State Department admitted in federal court that they still have 40,000 pages of emails that they still have to go through.  "Secretary Tillerson should be asked why his State Department is still sitting on a motherlode of Clinton emails," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.  "It is disheartening that an administration elected to 'drain the swamp' is stalling the release of documents to protect Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration."  The State Department, for their part, said that they are dedicating additional resources to reviewing the documents, which are stored on 7 FBI discs.

Trump calls James Comey's investigation of Hillary Clinton 'obviously a fix'.  Donald Trump suggested in tweets early on Wednesday that former FBI director James Comey had decided to spare Hillary Clinton from prosecution "long before investigation was complete" into her government email practices, calling the process "a fix".  "FBI confirms report that James Comey drafted letter exonerating Crooked Hillary Clinton long before investigation was complete," Trump tweeted, continuing, "Many people not interviewed, including Clinton herself.  Comey stated under oath that he didn't do this-obviously a fix?  Where is Justice Dept?"  Trump was referring to documents released by the FBI on Monday which show that Comey had composed a draft entitled:  "Drafts of Director Comey's July 5, 2016 Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation Part 01 of 01" about two months before the statement was actually made and before Clinton was interviewed.

Gowdy wants Comey to testify again following Clinton email draft release.  Following the FBI's release of documents confirming that former FBI Director James Comey began drafting a letter on the Hillary Clinton email investigation months before completing several interviews, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. said Comey needs to testify before Congress again.  Gowdy, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and a member of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committee, told Fox News' Bret Baier on "Special Report" Tuesday night [10/17/2017] that "for a number of reasons" Comey should return to Capitol Hill and the committees needed to further examine the FBI memos before he did.

Court Will Review Clinton Emails over Objections of Tillerson State Department and Sessions Justice Department.  Judicial Watch announced today [9/28/2017] that a federal judge will personally review, in camera, redacted material from emails discussing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of iPads and iPhones during her tenure at the State Department.  Judge Kollar-Kotelly also ordered the State Department to file an affidavit addressing why it should not have to search new Clinton emails recovered.  In taking these steps, the court rejected arguments by the Tillerson State Department and its lawyers at the Sessions Justice Department.  The court will review the blacked-out information so as to better ascertain whether the government misconduct exception would require the release of the full emails.

Here's more evidence Team Hillary tried to destroy.  Something Else Happened the week of Hillary Clinton's book launch: the release of more "lost" e-mails that further highlight her corrupt ways.  The watchdogs at Judicial Watch shared 1,600 fresh e-mails released thanks to their Freedom of Information lawsuits — missives that Clinton & Co. failed to turn over from her private servers, but which the feds recovered from other sources.  The e-mails contain new examples of the Clinton Foundation requesting and receiving State Department favors, plus more cases of classified information being sent through unsecure, non-state.gov accounts.  This latest dump, notes Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, shows foundation honcho Doug Band working with Clinton aide Huma Abedin to get favors for donors, from visas to Cuba to meetings in Singapore.

The Deep State Wraps Its Protective Cocoon Around Hillary Clinton.  The Department of Justice still has a lot of Clinton people in there, and they're in there for this exact reason.  These people, they go to Ivy League schools or wherever, and they are trained and this is their purpose.  They grow up, they are raised — and then they are educated — to become part of government, to advance a particular political point of view.  And that's what they do, and they don't think twice about it.  And it would be impossible to root all of them out, in this amount of time, if it were even an objective, and I don't think that it is.  But a great example what you're talking about is somebody went to the FBI — it might have been Judicial Watch or some special interest group — and made a Freedom of Information Act request for more Hillary Clinton emails.  And the FBI said, "Nah, we don't think anybody cares.  "There's not a valid public interest, so we're not gonna make them available."  Not a valid public interest?  She had an illegal server.  She almost could have been charged with felonious criminal behavior in this, and they're saying there's not a big public interest?

'Pay-to-play' at Clinton State Department exposed in new emails, watchdog says.  Newly disclosed emails expose fresh examples of "pay to play" at the Clinton State Department, a conservative watchdog group said Thursday [9/14/2017].  The emails, from Clinton aide Huma Abedin's account, were among 1,600 documents turned over by the State Department in connection with Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.  Judicial Watch said the documents reveal Clinton Foundation friends requesting and receiving favors from the State Department.  "The emails show 'what happened' was that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin obviously violated laws about the handling of classified information and turned the State Department into a pay for play tool for the corrupt Clinton Foundation," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, in a swipe at Clinton's newly released campaign memoir "What Happened."

New Hillary Emails Warrant Special Prosecutor.  New emails unearthed by Judicial Watch confirm that the Clinton Foundation was in fact a pay-to-play influence peddling operation far more worthy of a special prosecutor than imaginary Russians colluding under Trump Administration beds.  It is time for President Trump to keep the promise he made in the presidential debate to indict Hillary Clinton for her crimes. [...] Clinton played a pivotal role in the Uranium One deal which ended up giving Russian interests control of 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is a federal crime.

Hillary Clinton Admits She Emailed Over 100 Government Employees from Private Server.  Hillary Clinton admitted in her latest memoir released Tuesday that she emailed more than one hundred government employees from her private email server, including correspondence with White House officials.  Clinton further wrote that she received assistance from the Information Technology (IT) department of the State Department when it came to using her infamous Blackberry device.  Clinton was offering the information in defense of her illicit email setup, arguing that she made no attempt to keep her private email server a secret.

New Clinton Emails Uncovered, Reveal Additional Mishandling of Classified Information.  Judicial Watch today [9/14/2017] released 1,617 new pages of documents from the U.S. Department of State revealing numerous additional examples of classified information being transmitted through the unsecure, non-state.gov account of Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff, as well as many instances of Hillary Clinton donors receiving special favors from the State Department.  The documents included 97 email exchanges with Clinton not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to at least 627 emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over, and further contradicting a statement by Clinton that, "as far as she knew," all of her government emails had been turned over to department.

Trump prods State Department to stop delaying release of Clinton emails.  The White House has been privately urging the State Department to speed up its protracted process for releasing Hillary Clinton's still-undisclosed emails. [...] The pressure from the White House may be working.  On Thursday, the State Department released a batch of Clinton-related emails that show how she honored requests from Clinton Foundation and campaign donors to pull some strings.  The department turned over to Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, 1,617 pages of documents, including 97 email exchanges not previously disclosed.

Investigation into Clinton lawyers accused of deleting emails is ordered.  A Maryland county judge has ordered the state bar to investigate three lawyers accused of deleting thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails.  Circuit Judge Paul F. Harris Jr. ruled Monday [9/11/2017] that the Attorney Grievance Commission and Office of Bar Counsel Maryland Office of Bar Counsel must look into complaints against Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson and David E. Kendall, citing "allegations of destroying evidence," according to the Washington Times.  The ruling came after Ty Clevenger, an attorney in New York City, filed the complaint.  He recently was denied files from the FBI related to Clinton's email investigation, due to what the bureau called a lack of public interest.

FINALLY: Judge Orders Probe Into Hillary Clinton Lawyers Over Destroyed Emails.  A Circuit Court judge in Maryland has ordered the state bar to open investigations into three lawyers who allegedly deleted thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails.  Overruling lawyers representing the state, Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Paul F. Harris Jr. said the complaints lodged against top Clinton lawyers David E. Kendall, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson could not be dismissed as frivolous.  "There are allegations of destroying evidence," Judge Harris said at a hearing on Monday [9/11/2017].  He said that investigations must be conducted if the allegations have merit.

Lawyer Says FBI Covering 'Rear End' By Not Releasing Clinton Emails.  Lawyer Ty Clevenger says the FBI is desperately trying to cover its tracks by not releasing former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails.  Clevenger spoke with Tucker Carlson on Fox News Thursday night [9/7/2017] about his efforts to gain access through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  That request was denied and the lawyer said he originally wondered if former president Barack Obama was still running the FBI.  The FBI told him that his request "wasn't in the public interest."  "They're saying the public doesn't care," Clevenger added.

Time For A Full-Scale Investigation — Maybe Even A Special Counsel — On Hillary, Obama, and Comey.  Last week, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) released news that they'd found evidence that in April and May 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey prepared a statement letting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton off the hook for her alleged mistreatment of classified information.  As the senators noted, "As of early May 2016, the FBI had not yet interviewed Secretary Clinton.  Moreover, it had yet to finish interviewing sixteen other key witnesses, including Cheryl Mills, Bryan Pagliano, Heather Samuelson, Justin Cooper and John Bentel.  These individuals had intimate and personal knowledge relating to Secretary Clinton's non-government server, including helping her build and administer the device."  This is patently insane.  It's particularly insane given the fact that Comey posed for years as a by-the-book, no-nonsense advocate for the law.  But the fact is that Comey knew that no matter what happened, Attorney General Loretta Lynch would exonerate Hillary Clinton, and so he decided to take the heat off of Lynch and President Obama by putting his reputation on the line on their behalf.

Comey and Clinton:  Rigged from the beginning.  Newly disclosed evidence that then-FBI Director James Comey began working on a statement to reject criminal charges against former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton months before she and other key witnesses were interviewed by the FBI shows that President Trump was right to fire Comey.  The evidence proves that Trump and his supporters were correct to say throughout the presidential campaign that Washington operates on a "rigged" crony system that serves the interests of the powerful and rewards corporate globalists to the detriment of the American people.  As evidence of the rigged system, voters sided with Trump during the campaign in often citing Clinton's apparent immunity from consequences regarding her unsavory acts as secretary of state, especially her hidden emails on a private server, as well as corrupt Clinton Foundation dealings.

Was Obama Involved in Comey's Fix on Hillary's Emails?  With the new revelation that fired FBI Director James Comey began writing the draft of the Hillary Clinton investigation and the forthcoming exoneration before concluding the investigation, it begs the question, "What did Obama know and when did he know it?"  Follow me on this.  In April, Comey began drafting his statement finding Hillary committed no crimes.  Seventeen witnesses had not even been interviewed yet.  That includes Hillary herself.

Release Clinton email probe details, judge orders FBI.  A federal judge has ordered the FBI to disclose more details on how the agency handled Hillary Clinton's secret email account.  U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg said court papers that describe the grand jury subpoenas the FBI obtained to press for information from Clinton's internet service providers can be made available to the public, the Washington Times reported.  "After reviewing the document in camera, the court concludes that it largely rehashes information already made public, thus obviating any need for secrecy," the judge said.  Two groups, Judicial Watch and Cause of Action Institute, have been pressing the government for more information about the Clinton emails, and they say the ruling is a victory for transparency.

Federal judge to FBI: Yeah, no, you have to release the Hillary e-mail documents.  [Scroll down]  I suspect that's exactly how President Trump feels about it.  We've seen since the day the president took office that the deep state bureaucracies within the executive branch have an agenda to undermine and sabotage his leadership, and it's clear that the FBI's established leadership has been looking to protect Hillary from the beginning of this matter.  That includes James Comey, by the way, who we now learn had made the decision to let Hillary skate months before the investigation was even concluded.

Judge orders feds to release details of FBI's Clinton email probe.  A federal judge ordered the FBI Thursday [8/31/2017] to disclose more details about how it handled its investigation into Hillary Clinton's secret email account.  U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg said court papers describing the grand jury subpoenas the FBI obtained to compel information from Mrs. Clinton's Internet service providers can be made public.  In doing so, he overruled objections by the Trump administration that had insisted making the information public would violate grand jury secrecy rules.

James Comey started drafting statement exonerating Hillary Clinton before FBI interviewed her, aides.  Former FBI Director James Comey started to draft a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in the bureau's investigation into her use of a private email server before the FBI interviewed her or her key witnesses, the Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday [8/31/2017].  "Conclusion first, fact-gathering second — that's no way to run an investigation.  The FBI should be held to a higher standard than that, especially in a matter of such great public interest and controversy," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a letter to the FBI.  The Judiciary Committee reviewed transcripts, which were heavily redacted, indicating Comey began drafting the exoneration statement in April or May 2016, before the FBI interviewed up to 17 key witnesses, including Clinton and some of her close aides.

Will Justice Come For IRS Lawbreakers At Last?  As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups.  But Walton didn't stop there.  He also gave the IRS until Oct. 16 to find all the records in IRS databases from May 2009 to March 2015 that are relevant to the case and to explain just why these groups were targeted.  All of this is the result of a suit against the IRS brought in 2013 by True the Vote and 38 other groups.

FBI says lack of public interest in Hillary emails justifies withholding documents.  Hillary Clinton's case isn't interesting enough to the public to justify releasing the FBI's files on her, the bureau said this week in rejecting an open-records request by a lawyer seeking to have the former secretary of state punished for perjury.  Ty Clevenger has been trying to get Mrs. Clinton and her personal attorneys disbarred for their handling of her official emails during her time as secretary of state.  He's met with resistance among lawyers, and now his request for information from the FBI's files has been shot down.

Comey botched the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  [Scroll down]  Never, I repeat never, in my 25-year career have I or any FBI agent known to me investigated a criminal case without the use of a federal grand jury, federal grand jury subpoenas, search warrants, etc.  Search warrants and/or subpoenas should have been executed at Clinton's residences in Chappaqua and Washington and at Platte River Networks.  In fact, Comey frequently cites his vast experience.  Well, I am certain that in every case with which he was involved (except this one, conveniently) he employed the use of a federal grand jury and all of the authority that encompasses.  Comey's parsing of words to justify his cowardly decision was awkward and juvenile.

Clinton email case far from closure as FBI hands over more classified documents to State.  The Hillary Clinton email fiasco isn't ending anytime soon, with State Department officials saying they have no idea when they will finish sorting though and releasing the previously hidden messages.  More classified documents that the former secretary of state improperly handled keep coming to light.  The Trump administration doesn't even know if it has hunted down every trace of the emails that Mrs. Clinton — a former first lady, U.S. senator, top diplomat and Democratic presidential nominee — sent from a secret email server stashed in her home.  "At this time, we do not have an estimate for completion of processing all of these documents," a State Department official told The Washington Times.

Federal Judge Orders State Dept To Search Hillary Aides' Accounts For Benghazi Records.  The search for State Department emails regarding the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks received a boost this week when a federal judge ordered the agency to search the government email accounts of several Hillary Clinton aides.  Washington D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, ordered State to search the accounts of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan, Clinton's top aides at the State Department, in response to a lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.  Mehta said that the State Department did not do enough to search for all emails it has on its computer systems regarding the Benghazi attacks, which left four Americans dead.

A Plea Bargain for Hillary?  The Justice Department has reopened the investigation of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified material on her private email system while she was secretary of state, and is considering offering her a plea bargain if she will agree to plead guilty to charges of breaking the law, according to a Clinton attorney.  The discussion of a plea bargain took place late last month and was offered by a high-ranking Justice Department official to the Clinton lawyer.

Federal Judge Orders State Department to Search for Clinton's Benghazi Emails.  Nine months after Hillary Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, a federal judge is ordering the State Department to make another attempt in locating Clinton's missing emails about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack. [...] Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, said the State Department's initial search was not good enough because it didn't search the email accounts of Clinton's top aides for relevant messages pertaining to Benghazi.  Mehta, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, agreed with Judicial Watch in a 10-page ruling.

Hillary's deleted emails are still floating around somewhere.  Hillary's e-mails pose several problems.  The biggest one is the fact that they are not "missing," even though everyone assumes they are.  As I've written before, a very good source says they are in the possession of American intelligence agencies.  How?  Spies spy on each other.  So the Russians stole Hillary's BlackBerry password a long time ago and were reading and copying her mail.  But the US National Security Agency was hacking the Russians while Hillary's e-mails were being taken.  In fact, as I've written before, those e-mails were offered to the FBI but then-Director James Comey turned them down.  If Congress persists on an investigation Hillary's e-mails are bound to show up.

Judge reinvigorates bar grievance against Clinton lawyers.  A Maryland judge has allowed a grievance to move forward against Hillary Clinton's lawyers, saying the bar's refusal to investigate the lawyers seems to violate the state's policy.  Ty Clevenger, the lawyer who filed the grievance, called the decision last week by Anne Arundel Circuit Judge Ronald A. Silkworth a surprise victory.  It's the latest twist in the fallout from Mrs. Clinton's secret email server, which she used during her time in the State Department.

Proliferating Scandals Make Mueller Investigation Ludicrous.  [Scandal #5] The Lynch Non-Mob:  Our previous attorney general has so much more to answer for than our current one — the tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, insisting the case of the massive Hillary email erasures was a "matter" and not an "investigation" when the alleged crimes would almost certainly send a civilian to jail for life.  This undoubtedly contributed to the bizarre behavior of James Comey and to the fact that so much about this "matter" was never truly investigated, tarnishing the FBI's reputation perhaps forever.  A lot of Republicans think this was a big-time coverup and there's more evidence for that than there is for Trump-Russia collusion, miles more.  (Comic relief:  Lanny Davis still insisting on Fox the other night that the 30,000 plus erased emails were about yoga lessons.)

The State Department said there's less urgency to release Clinton's emails due to low interest.  The State Department argued at a federal hearing Thursday that its ability to process the 100,000 Hillary Clinton emails ordered released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has been hindered by a lack of manpower due to a "hiring freeze" and that the urgency to release the documents has been diminished by the public's lack of interest in the subject, according to the watchdog group that won the lawsuit for the document's release.  But Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that sued the State Department in May 2015 for the thousands of emails and documents, isn't buying it.

What campaign wouldn't seek motherlode of Clinton emails?  The public learned on March 10, 2015 that Hillary Clinton had more than 60,000 emails on her private email system, and that she had turned over "about half" of them to the State Department and destroyed the rest, which she said were "personal" and "not in any way related" to her work as Secretary of State.  The public learned later the lengths to which Clinton went to make sure the "personal" emails were completely and permanently deleted.  Her team used a commercial-strength program called BleachBit to erase all traces of the emails, and they used hammers to physically destroy mobile devices that might have had the emails on them.  The person who did the actual deleting later cited legal privileges and the Fifth Amendment to avoid talking to the FBI and Congress.

New Information In A Bizarre Story About A Quest To Hunt Down Hillary Clinton's Deleted Emails.  Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that a longtime political operative named Peter Smith formed a team of researchers, investigators, computer experts and attorneys to obtain 33,000 emails that Clinton deleted from the email server she used as secretary of state.  Smith hoped to show that Clinton's server had been hacked, an allegation she repeatedly denied during the campaign.  The Journal report was particularly intriguing because Smith, who died in May at the age of 81, suggested to associates that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn may have been involved in the Clinton email hunt.

Hillary's Emails, The Gift That Keeps On Giving.  [Scroll down]  Adding to the cloud of suspicion that surrounds Lynch is the now infamous half-hour meeting she had with Bill Clinton on a Phoenix tarmac, just days before Hillary was scheduled to testify before the FBI. Lynch alleged that she merely discussed innocuous things like "grandchildren" and "golf." Sure she did! [...] Lynch's disquieting evasiveness on such a simple matter likely means that she had no interest or desire to review the evidence.  All that mattered was that Clinton was exonerated and she had secured a cushy spot for herself in the next administration.  But Lynch's days of obfuscation are numbered.  The Senate is now actively investigating her actions pertaining to the email probe.  On June 23, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Lynch directing her to disclose any communications she had with the Clinton campaign or DNC staffers in connection with the email investigation.  Letters were also sent to other Democratic Party insiders named by Comey[,] including Clinton staffer Amanda Renteria as well as Leonard Benardo and Gail Scovell of George Soros' Open Society Foundations.

Did Loretta Lynch Try to Stifle the Clinton Email Probe?  Senators Send Her Questions.  The Senate Judiciary Committee is probing alleged political interference by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Last Thursday [6/22/2017], two Republicans and two Democrats on the committee sent letters to four people, including Lynch.  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) signed the letters, all pointing to an April 22, 2017 New York Times report that said the FBI obtained an email or memo "written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far."

The Rise and Fall of James Comey.  [Scroll down]  During this period Hillary maintained a commanding lead in the polls in any head-to-head match-up with the Republican front runner, Donald Trump.  Virtually all the cognoscenti in Washington were convinced she would win the presidency.  Apparently so did James Comey.  For someone whose career was made on the dogged pursuit of convictions at any cost using, if necessary, the bludgeon of obstruction of justice, he was extraordinarily passive.  Particularly considering there were innumerable examples of pre-meditated destruction of evidence.  He also severely limited the FBI data searches on Clinton staff members computers then ordered them destroyed.  A technician who erased evidence and lied to the FBI even after receiving immunity was given a pass by Comey.

Judicial Watch's Fitton:  Reopen Hillary Email Investigation.  A new investigation should be launched into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server as secretary of state now that a set of new emails have been uncovered, Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog, told Newsmax TV.  "These are emails that we didn't know about before," Fitton told host Bill Tucker on Monday's "America Talks Live."  "Mrs. Clinton said she turned them all over.  Obviously she didn't, so we should be questioning whether she was telling the truth under oath to Congress.

Judicial Watch Forced to Sue Tillerson State Department to Release All Hillary Emails.  Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a motion in opposition to the Tillerson State Department's motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging its failure to take any action to recover emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other employees unlawfully removed from the agency.  The lawsuit seeks to force State Department compliance with the Federal Records Act (FRA).  The Trump administration continues to object to taking this strong action to recover Clinton's emails.  On April 30, 2015, Judicial Watch sued former Secretary John Kerry after the State Department failed to take action on a letter sent to Kerry "notifying him of the unlawful removal of the Clinton emails and requesting that he initiate enforcement action pursuant to the [Federal Records Act]," including working through the Attorney General to recover the emails.

Trump Has Dirt on Comey:  Strategic Firing of Swamp Rat James Comey.  As head of the FBI, Comey (and his lackeys in key positions) deliberately screwed up the investigation into Hillary's use of a private server and her plain violation of national security law on classified information.  The investigation was deliberately mishandled in every aspect.  Comey gave immunity to all of Hillary's lackeys, did not use subpoenas or warrants, lost evidence, allowed the destruction of evidence, failed to do any searches or seizures of evidence, did not use a grand jury, did not swear witnesses, did not record testimony, allowed attorneys to represent multiple suspects (corrupting the testimony).  Everything that could be done to ruin the FBI investigation and to cover for Hillary was done.  A "slam-dunk" case became a mess.  Immunity was given every witness even though they provided no help.  Maybe more importantly, by focusing the FBI on the email scandal, attention was drawn away from the much bigger scandal of the Clinton Foundation that could bring down a huge number of corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and even governments.

Judicial Watch obtains new classified Clinton emails.  A nonprofit legal watchdog claimed Thursday [6/1/2017] that newly unearthed documents show Hillary Clinton sent and received more classified information on her private server than previously known, and that the papers also show top aide Huma Abedin did favors for Clinton Foundation insiders.  Judicial Watch released more than 2,000 pages of documents it obtained pursuant to a May 5, 2015 court order, after filing a lawsuit against the State Department for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  The new documents included 115 Clinton email exchanges that were not previously turned over by the State Department.

Donald Trump firing Comey has Republicans calling for official investigation — into Clinton's emails.  Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey has left many conservatives hoping the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server can be reopened.  Lots of Republicans, and others on the right, were furious when Mr Comey announced last summer, that after probing her actions, he had decided against bringing criminal charges.  The decision infuriated Donald Trump and his supporters, who started to to chant "lock her up" at his election rallies.  During one of the three presidential debates, Mr Trump even vowed to investigate her behaviour if he was elected.  "If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception," he said.

Inept or crooked, Comey deserved to be fired.  While President Donald J. Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey on May 9, Barack Obama should have sacked him July 5.  Comey's behavior in the E-mailgate investigation suggests either staggering incompetence or a clumsy effort to whitewash Hillary Clinton's crimes.  During Clinton's July 2 interrogation at FBI headquarters, she was not under oath.  How could the FBI possibly reach in its probe "the last step of a year-long investigation" — as Comey described it at a July 7 House Government Oversight Committee hearing — without a potential perjury conviction hanging over her head?  Given Clinton's peanut-allergy-like aversion to the truth, not swearing her in confirmed either the FBI's grotesque ineptness or a deliberate loophole to allow her to slither free.

Obama White House counsel part of early talks on Clinton email release, notes show.  The Obama administration's White House counsel was directly involved in deliberations over the release of Hillary Clinton emails as early as spring 2015, according to handwritten FBI agent notes released by the bureau late Friday [5/5/2017].  The notes read:  "Pat Kennedy (early May '15) calls interagency MTG (meeting) re: scheduled release by JAN '16, asking quick turnarounds - WH Counsel, CIA, etc...OSD, DNI, NSC and (redacted)"  The notes offer a raw account of the case from the perspective of FBI agents.  Much of the content already had been documented in previously released FBI interview summaries, called 302s.  The reference to "Counsel," however, appears to be the earliest confirmation of White House involvement.

New Huma Abedin Emails Reveal 29 Previously Undisclosed Clinton Emails With Classified Information.  The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch released State Department documents on Tuesday [5/2/2017] revealing 29 email correspondences between Hillary Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin containing classified information.  Judicial Watch revealed new documents from the email accounts of Abedin that were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from March 18, 2015.  The emails ranged from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-"state.gov" email address.  As a result of the FOIA request, 29 previously undisclosed email exchanges including classified information were released, part of a total of 317 emails that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to turn over to the State Department.  Clinton used an unsecured private email server and private email address during her tenure as secretary of state.  Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of emails, claiming to have relinquished all relevant work emails.  But those documents did not include the emails that Judicial Watch received, which included [...]

Review this.  Hillary Clinton insisted on calling the FBI investigation into the private email system she established to conduct official business as Secretary of State a "security review."  She elaborated:  "[T]here are lots of those that are conducted in our government all the time and you don't hear about most of them."  Well, of course, as with all things Clintonian, the words are terms of art.  It depends on the meaning of "security review."  For "security review" read "criminal investigation."  The FBI doesn't do security reviews.  But "criminal investigation" also needs to be understood in a Clintonian sense.

House Committee Seeks Charges For Hillary Clinton's IT Firm.  A House committee is referring the head of a company that managed Hillary Clinton's private email server to the Justice Department for obstruction of justice and making false statements.  Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, issued the referral for Treve Suazo, the CEO of Platte River Networks.

FBI Court Filing Reveals Grand Jury Targeted Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch today [4/27/2017] released new State Department documents including a declaration from FBI Special Agent E.W. Priestap, the supervisor of the agency's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email activities, stating that the former secretary of state was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.  The declaration was produced in response to Judicial Watch's lawsuit seeking to force Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to take steps to "recover emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton" and other U.S. Department of State employees.  The lawsuit was originally filed against then-Secretary of State John Kerry.  The Trump State Department filing includes details of the agency's continuing refusal to refer the Clinton email issue to the Justice Department, as the law requires.

A Case for Congress and the Trump Justice Department, Not the Courts.  [Scroll down]  And, of course, the Clinton e-mails investigation, featuring:  Justice Department collusion with Clinton-camp lawyers; inexplicable immunity deals; suspects who received immunity permitted to appear as lawyers for other suspects; no prosecutions despite significant evidence, several immunity grants, and patently misleading statements during FBI interviews; a furtive tarmac tête-à-tête between the attorney general and the main suspect's husband (the former U.S. president who just happened to have launched the attorney general into public prominence, and who was positioned to influence whether the attorney general got to keep her job in an anticipated Hillary Clinton administration) just days before it was announced — surprise! — that there would be no indictment of Hillary Clinton; and startling public commentary by the FBI regarding an uncharged case that bore heavily on a presidential election.

Clinton email probe reportedly caused rift between Comey, Lynch.  FBI Director James Comey reportedly did not trust former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Justice Department, speculating they might provide Hillary Clinton some political cover over her email scandal during the presidential election.  Comey's so-called "go-it-alone strategy" in the Clinton investigation emerged from suspicions that Lynch and other Justice Department officials might look to down play the email probe, The New York Times reported Saturday [4/22/2017].

Book: Hillary's Sneaky Email Server Practices Began Earlier Than Initially Thought.  Hillary Clinton's sneaky email server practices began earlier than previously believed, according to a [...] new book out Tuesday about the two-time presidential candidate.  In "Shattered:  Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write that in 2008, after losing the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, then-New York Sen. Clinton "instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign's server and download the [email] messages sent and received by top staffers."  The purpose of the project was to expose staffers who Clinton believed were disloyal to her during the campaign, The Wall Street Journal writes in a review of "Shattered," which relies on more than 100 sources.

Obama Couldn't Understand Clinton's Handling Of Her Email Fiasco.  If you thought Hillary Clinton's handling of her email fiasco was puzzling, you're not alone.  Even President Obama was befuddled by the way his former adversary handled the situation, noting that it reminded him of how he beat her in the 2008 primaries.  In the new book by The Hill's Amie Parnes and Sidewire's Jonathan Allen, "Shattered:  Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," released today [4/19/2017] details what should have been a winnable election for the career politician that turned into an abject nightmare over largely avoidable mistakes.

New Huma Abedin Emails Reveal Additional Instances of Clinton Sending Classified Information through Unsecured Emails, Special Favors for Clinton Donors.  Judicial Watch today [3/29/2017] released 1,184 pages of State Department records, including previously unreleased Hillary Clinton email exchanges, revealing additional instances of Abedin and Hillary Clinton sending classified information through unsecured email accounts and contributors being given special access to the former secretary of state.  The emails, were obtained in response to a court order from a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department after it failed to respond to a March 18 FOIA request.

Report: FBI Finds Hillary Emails on Weiner's Laptop — and They're Not Duplicates.  The FBI has reportedly found emails from Hillary Clinton's private server on the laptop computer seized from Anthony Weiner — and they are not duplicates of those already found in the server probe, according to CBS News.  It was not clear, however, if the emails were related in any way to the Clinton server scandal or how many new messages were found.

Trump's huge election night changes US politics forever.  Of course, we're seeing desperate and pathetic efforts to declare the results illegitimate.  For example, Paul Krugman of The New York Times said last night that Hillary Clinton's loss was due to conscious efforts to suppress the African-American vote.  That idea is beyond preposterous and intellectually deranged.  What we saw was a national wave that turned blue states red, not a case in which voter ID laws and efforts to restrict early voting changed the balance of a state or two. [...] The other facile explanation is that James Comey is at fault for making public his examination of the new e-mails two weeks ago.  If true, the fault goes back to March 2015, when Hillary Clinton's illicit homebrew server became a matter of public knowledge and she began a Nixonian effort to lie and cover up and hide the evidence of her reckless behavior.

A Changing Investigative Landscape.  Seemingly every important player in Clinton World appeared in the emails.  They are the thread connecting many controversies — the Clinton Foundation and it satellites, Teneo Holdings, cybersecurity and penetration of servers, relations with foreign governments, payments to various Clintons and Clinton entities, suspicions of quid pro quos, big money players, Wikileaks mischief, the Russians.  The Republican Congress is likely not finished with email investigations, though the media will soon lose interest, dazzled by all the bright shiny objects of the new Trump Administration.  The courts will continue to play an important role in the fight for transparency in the emails case.  Lawsuits from Judicial Watch and others will continue to produce documents.

Good riddance, Madam Secretary.  With Hillary Clinton's electoral defeat, millions of Americans are extremely disappointed.  After all, this isn't how things were supposed to work out for Clinton.  Genuine democracy wasn't supposed to interfere with the Clintons' dynastic ambitions.  Others are breathing sighs of relief, not least because the former first lady obviously lacks the character and the judgement needed to lead the nation.  In the run-up to Tuesday's vote, Clinton's emails were back in the spotlight again.  Notwithstanding FBI Director James Comey's last-minute missive on Sunday, it's hard to imagine the email saga is truly over.  After all, when it comes to the Clintons one always wonders if more scandalous details and inconvenient facts are about to emerge.

What can we do to indict Hillary Clinton, one of the most corrupt politicians in history?  There is little doubt in the minds of the American public that Hillary Clinton probably broke a law.  After all, she seems to have little reason to abide by it.  In fact, she may be the first presidential candidate to be interviewed by the FBI as often as she is by the media.  More recently, the FBI has reopened the investigation into wrongdoing by Hillary and her aides after the FBI stumbled upon thousands of additional State Department emails that may have been improperly shared after investigating a separate incident involving disgraced former congressman (and estranged husband of Hillary's closest aide, Huma Abedin) Anthony Weiner and his involvement with underage women.  Although the FBI has determined (perhaps politically) no wrongdoing by Clinton there either, it's unlikely the illegal activity surrounding Hillary's emails — and the fraudulent nature of the Clinton Foundation — will keep her off the radar of law enforcement.

"Weiner's Laptop": Is It Hillary's "Missing Laptop"?  Was Huma Abedin hiding Hillary's supposedly "missing laptop "in her apartment in order to keep it away from the FBI — not to protect Weiner, but to protect Hillary?  Is the laptop that was seized in the FBI sweep of the Abedin/ Weiner apartment as part of the Weiner criminal probe the one that belonged to Hillary?  A laptop that's been missing for 2 years.  It sure seems like it.  Has the case of the missing laptop been solved?  That's Hillary's worst nightmare.  The laptop has been "missing" for two years and Clinton and her aides claim that they have no idea where it is.  But a week ago, the FBI announced that there were 650,000 emails on the device seized from Weiner including thousands to and from Huma and Hillary regarding State Department matters.  Why would they be on a laptop that belonged to Weiner?

Why Clinton's email mess will never go away.  So Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aides had her housekeeper printing out classified emails and venturing into her home Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility to grab classified faxes, too.  How many more shoes can drop, before or after Election Day?  The Clinton camp is already trumpeting FBI chief Jim Comey's report Sunday that nothing off the Anthony Weiner laptop changes his "no charges" finding from July.  But other ugly facts keep surfacing.  In Sunday's [11/6/2016] [New York] Post, Paul Sperry fingered at least five classified emails handled by Clinton's maid.  Material in the SCIF likely included Clinton's copies of the top-secret Presidential Daily Brief, prepared by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

State Department tells court it needs 5 years to review deleted Clinton emails.  State Department officials asked a federal court Monday to consider allowing them up to five years for their review of 31,000 pages of emails recovered by the FBI during its year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton.  During the same hearing, the State Department admitted that the FBI provided 2,100 emails from Clinton's server that her legal team either deleted or withheld.

EMAILS: Clinton Sent Classified Info To Chelsea After UN Climate Talks.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent her daughter an email after the conclusion of a United Nations climate summit that had information later deemed classified by the Department of State.  Clinton sent an email to her daughter, Chelsea, two days after she and President Barack Obama tried to negotiate an international global warming agreement at Copenhagen in 2009.  The email was sent to Chelsea's alias email account under the name, "Diane Reynolds."  Clinton forwarded Chelsea a Dec. 19, 2009 email from top State Department officials and Obama's global warming "czar" Carol Browner — a long-time Clinton ally — according to emails released by the State Department Friday [11/4/2016].

Clinton instructed her housekeeper to print out emails — including classified materials — at Washington residence.  Hillary Clinton regularly instructed her housekeeper to print government emails and documents when she was secretary of state — including classified materials, according to FBI memos.  FBI memos show Marina Santos often handled sensitive information, but didn't have the security clearance to do so, the New York Post reports.  The housekeeper was paid to look after Clinton's home in Washington, known as Whitehaven.

The Destruction of Huma Abedin's Emails on the Clinton Server and their Surprise Recovery.  Despite extraordinarily intense coverage of all aspects of Hillary Clinton's emails, all commentary to date (to my knowledge), even the underlying FBI Report, has paid little to no attention to the destruction of Huma Abedin's emails, also stored on the Clinton server.  Further, even with the greatly increased interest in Huma's emails arising from the discoveries on Anthony Weiner's laptop, speculation has mostly focused on the potential connection to deleted Hillary emails, rather than the potentially much larger tranche of deleted Huma emails from the Clinton server (many of which would, in all probability, be connected to Hillary in any event.)  Both Hillary and Huma had clintonemail accounts.  Huma was unique in that respect among Hillary's coterie.  (Chelsea Clinton, under the pseudonym of Diane Reynolds, was the only other person with a clintonemail address.)

Assange:  Clinton resisted FBI, and now they're out for payback.  FBI director James B. Comey threw a spanner into the presidential race that threatened to become a Clinton procession last week, when he claimed that the agency had potentially obtained new information pertaining to Clinton's use of a personal email server, set up shortly after she became Secretary of State in 2009, when they obtained the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the ex-husband of close Clinton aide Huma Abedin.  Weiner was being investigated for an unrelated sexting offense.  Clinton has categorically denied mishandling classified information by using a vulnerable personal email address for State Department business.  Fox News has alleged that the FBI has obtained new evidence from Weiner's computer that shows that Clinton was "very likely hacked."

Hillary Drags Chelsea Down With Her — Classified Email Sent To Her Has Been Discovered.  Another damning bit of evidence has come to light on Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  This email was released from the State Department yesterday.  Evidently, Hillary forwarded an email with classified information in it to her daughter Chelsea.  Chelsea was emailing under the pseudonym "Diane Reynolds."  What's with all the clandestine and fake names for these people?  It indicates intent to cover-up what they were doing... and that points towards them knowing it was wrong in the first place.  This would further implicate Chelsea in this whole mess and I sincerely doubt that she realized what was transpiring was illegal.  Mother of the Year, Hillary is not by any means.  She gave no thought to the consequences to her daughter over all this.  The email was labeled by the State Department as a "near duplicate."

Clinton directed her maid to print out classified materials.  As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton routinely asked her maid to print out sensitive government emails and documents — including ones containing classified information — from her house in Washington, D.C., e-mails and FBI memos show.  But the housekeeper lacked the security clearance to handle such material.  In fact, Marina Santos was called on so frequently to receive e-mails that she may hold the secrets to E-mailgate — if only the FBI and Congress would subpoena her and the equipment she used.

Hillary Deleted Email Showing She Forwarded Classified Information To Her Daughter.  Hillary Clinton deleted a 2009 email in which she forwarded classified information to her daughter, Chelsea.  The email was released on Friday by the State Department.  It is one of thousands of documents recovered by the FBI from Clinton's private email server.  The Dec. 20, 2009 email chain, entitled "Update," started with a message from Michael Froman, who served as a deputy assistant to President Obama and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs.

Hillary sent classified information to Chelsea.  Politico reports that Hillary Clinton sent her daughter Chelsea an email message that contains information the State Department deems classified.  The email, part of a new batch released today, originated with White House Deputy National Security Adviser Michael Froman and was forwarded to the former secretary of state by her policy aide Jake Sullivan.  Hillary Clinton sent it along to her daughter's email account with the notation:  "See below."

Clinton Cash Revisited, National Security Edition.  Thanks to WikiLeaks and some recent FBI revelations, it is now clear that Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified material was no casual act of inadvertence.  It was not, as she at first claimed with false naiveté, done simply as a matter of convenience by someone who was technically ill-informed and maladroit.  No, the whole process was a thoroughly calculated tactic.  Given what we know now, there is something slightly nauseating about watching clips of Clinton lie when asked about her emails.

An "avalanche of evidence" may now bury Hillary.  Americans who lived through the nightmares of both the Watergate and Lewinsky scandals recall vividly how every day seemed to produce new evidence of wrongdoing.  The drip, drip of deceptions and lies finally overflowed into a cascading pool of criminality and disgust.  The first scandal culminated in Articles of Impeachment.  The other an impeachment trial.  Is America now hurtling toward the same political abyss?  It looks like it.  So, fasten your seat belts and brace for impact.  Sources tell Fox News's Bret Baier that the FBI has uncovered an "avalanche of evidence" in the Clinton Foundation investigation.  Agents are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case," calling it a "very high priority."

FBI probe reveals Weiner's laptop DOES contain new Clinton emails — but the public won't know what's in them until long after Election Day.  The FBI has recovered emails from Anthony Weiner's laptop that are directly related to its ongoing probe into Hillary Clinton's unauthorized, homebrew email server.  The development came after federal investigators searched the disgraced former congressman's computer as part of a probe into a DailyMail.com report that he carried on a lurid sexting relationship with a 15-year-old girl.  Some of the estimated 650,000 messages on the computer are linked to Clinton's time as secretary of state, and they are not duplicates of emails the FBI has already seen, CBS News reported Thursday [11/3/2016].

Is Anthony Weiner Behind The Email Crisis?  The Wall Street Journal has up to date reporting on the mysteries surrounding Huma Abedin's newly-discovered emails.  The Journal's account answers some questions, while raising others.  First, the "device" in question reportedly is a laptop that Huma Abedin considered to be Anthony Weiner's.  This makes sense:  people like Abedin and Weiner don't share laptops, any more than they share cell phones.  They each have their own.  Thus, when Huma testified under oath that she had turned over to her lawyers, for production, all of her devices that she thought could contain relevant information, it is likely that she was telling the truth.  Reportedly, Abedin claims to be at a loss as to how her emails got onto Anthony's laptop.  That surprise could well be genuine.

Two more Clinton classified emails discovered in FBI documents.  The State Department this week deemed two more of former Secretary Hillary Clinton's emails to contain classified information, releasing redacted versions Friday, just days before Election Day.  The messages appear to contain U.S. government policy memos toward Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates, preparing Mrs. Clinton for phone calls with leaders of those two nations.  Information gleaned from foreign governments, as well as U.S. information about other governments, is supposed to be considered classified from the start.  In these instances, like nearly every other of the more than 2,500 messages now deemed classified, there were no markings at the time — a factor Mrs. Clinton's defenders say excuse her from liability for having sent them over her secret, but unprotected account.

NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails.  New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence "to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life," NYPD sources told True Pundit.  NYPD sources said Clinton's "crew" also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders.  The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state.  The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday.

Did Obama violate the Espionage Act by communicating classified information on Hillary's server?  On his radio program Thursday, Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin delivered tomorrow's news today as he explained how President Obama is now implicated in Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  We now know, Levin said, that Obama "corresponded with Hillary Clinton on his specially secured Blackberry phone."  This means that the president of the United States communicated classified discussions via Hillary Clinton's private email server — the same unsecured email server that mishandled classified information and was assuredly hacked by foreign governments.

Hillary Clinton's reopened investigation.  The FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation because it is a criminal enterprise.  Only six percent (6%) of donations to the Clintons' charity goes to charity, the remaining goes to fund the lifestyles of Bill, Hillary, Chelsea and their various aides — Huma Abedin, Sid Blumenthal, etc.  For four years, those donations also bought prime access to the U.S. Secretary of State.  That is why Hillary and her acolytes, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and the other supposed "government employees," used a private email server contrary to extant law.  The pay-for-play was so glaring it could not be on State Department emails destined for the National Archives.  Hillary undermined U.S. law as Secretary of State by hiding her communications in a private email server, thereby endangering national security, and granting access and giving favorable treatment to donors to her family's foundation.  Moreover, she disguised those facts by lying, obfuscation, and stonewalling.

Another Clinton server crisis!  Now Hillary goes to war on plane's wifi provider for leaving her in the dark about FBI's dramatic new move on her emails.  Hillary Clinton has joined the ranks of Americans who have been brought to their wit's end by their wireless provider — after her campaign's pricey communications gear was on the fritz during one of the pivotal moments of the presidential campaign — leaving the candidate completely in the dark that the was FBI reopening its investigation of her emails.  Now, Clinton's fed-up campaign team has gone public with its frustrations.  Clinton was flying from New York to Iowa Friday when the stunning bombshell rocked the political world and shook up the 2016 presidential campaign.  But one of the last people to learn the news was was the woman who at the moment could see a clear path to the presidency.  She was seated at the front of her plane, near longtime aide Huma Abedin — who as it turned out was at the center of the stunning developments which could yet see her prosecuted and jailed.

Herridge: Abedin Told FBI She Notified WH Every Time Clinton Changed Emails.  New developments in the FBI probes of former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's computer and Hillary Clinton's alleged mishandling of classified information may land Clinton aide Huma Abedin in legal jeopardy, Catherine Herridge reported.  Herridge told Brit Hume that the bureau is "going through Weiner's computer to see if there are classified records on [it]."  If agents find classified information on it, Abedin may face legal trouble because she signed a "separation agreement" to return all such data to the State Department when she left it in 2013.  President Obama may also have a "vested interest in the outcome" of the race, she said.

Secret recordings fueled FBI's desire to probe Clinton Foundation as case moves toward 'likely' indictment.  An FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment unless the Justice Department interferes, two sources familiar with the probe told Fox News.  The Clintons are accused of running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department that favored donors to their charity — a charge they have denied.  But the feds are 'actively and aggressively pursuing this case,' Fox's Brit Hume said Wednesday [11/2/2016], and they have an 'avalanche' of evidence.

Julian Assange reveals truth over Clinton emails and Russia accusations.  Julian Assange has categorically denied WikiLeaks files implicating Hillary Clinton came from Russia — but said she will still win the US election.  In a bombshell interview with Russia Today, Assange who famously does not reveal his sources, dismissed claims from the Clinton camp Putin's country was behind leaked emails.  The WikiLeaks founder who is currently living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London assured the public troves of US Democratic Party and Clinton work and staff emails released this year were not linked to the Russian Government.

Some of Bret Baier's assertions were "walked back" the next day.
Bret Baier:  FBI Sources Believe Clinton Foundation Case Moving Towards "Likely an Indictment".  Fox News Channel's Bret Baier reports the latest news about the Clinton Foundation investigation from two sources inside the FBI.  He reveals five important new pieces of information in these two short clips:  [#1] The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.  [#2]  The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them.  The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.  [#3]  Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton's secret server on Anthony Weiner's laptop.  They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.  [#4]  Sources within the FBI have told Baier that an indictment is "likely" in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, "barring some obstruction in some way" from the Justice Department.  [#5]  FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton's server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information have been taken from it.

Bret Baier:  Barring 'Obstruction,' Indictment Almost Certain In FBI Investigation.  Citing sources at the FBI, Fox News anchor Bret Baier said the FBI's renewed investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server will almost certainly end in an indictment, unless some sort of "obstruction" arises.  Baier made the claim Wednesday night [11/2/2016] during a broadcast of "On the Record" with Brit Hume.  He said that a "lot of evidence" had been recovered from Anthony Wiener's laptop, and made an eventual indictment appear very likely, even if it came months after the election.

Update:
Fox's Bret Baier Apologizes for 'Mistake' in Reporting Clinton-FBI Story.  Fox's Bret Baier apologized Friday for his damning reports about the FBI's investigations into Hillary Clinton, namely his reporting that an indictment in the Clinton Foundation probe was in the works and that her server had been breached by foreign intelligence multiple times.  Baier had reported on Wednesday about the FBI's probes into the Clinton Foundation and her use of a private email server.  The Fox anchor cited "sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations."  "Barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they [the investigations] will continue to likely an indictment," he told Brit Hume.  On Thursday morning [11/3/2016] he clarified that asserting an imminent "indictment" was "inartfully" phrased.  "That just wasn't 'inartful.'  It was a mistake, and for that I'm sorry," Baier told Fox's Jon Scott on Friday.  "I should have said, 'They will continue to build their case.'  Indictment obviously is a very loaded word, Jon, especially in this atmosphere."  He clarified that prosecutors, not FBI investigators, make the decision whether or not to pursue an indictment based on the evidence.

Emails show Clinton campaign coordinated with State Dept. official before email revelation.  Newly released emails appear to show a State Department official coordinating with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign before her use of a private email to conduct government business was revealed.  Emails from campaign chairman John Podesta show that the state official provided Clinton aides with the agency's official response to a New York Times reporter in advance of the paper's March 2015 report that Clinton had used a private email account to conduct business while serving as secretary of state.  WikiLeaks released the hacked emails Wednesday [11/2/2016] in part of a massive trove of emails disclosed by the whistleblowing website.  The site has released new Podesta emails on a daily basis since October.  WikiLeaks has indicated it intends to leak emails stolen from Podesta's account every day through the election.

Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe.  Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

Recordings Led to FBI, DOJ Battle Over Whether to Investigate Clinton Foundation.  A new report out tonight says that there were some pretty fierce internal tensions between FBI investigators and Justice Department officials over whether they had enough to pursue an "aggressive" investigation into the Clinton Foundation.  The Wall Street Journal put out this new report tonight days after the paper reported that the FBI investigation may have been shut down completely by the DOJ.

Michael McCaul on Hillary Clinton server, hacks: 'It's treason'.  Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, on Thursday [11/3/2016] said Hillary Clinton's exposing sensitive information to potentially multiple hacks from foreign actors amounts to treason.  "This is why you have security protocols — to protect classified information," Mr. McCaul said on "Fox and Friends."  "She exposed it to our enemies, and now ... our adversaries have this very sensitive information that not only jeopardizes her and national security at home, but the men and women serving overseas."  "In my opinion, quite frankly, it's treason," said Mr. McCaul, Texas Republican.

Grassley Asks Justice Department IG to Investigate the Investigators in Clinton Email Probe.  Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is asking the Justice Department's inspector general to examine whether "high-ranking" DOJ and FBI officials "compromised the public trust in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's unauthorized use of a private email server as Secretary of State and potential mishandling of classified material."  Several of those high-ranking officials had previous ties to the Clintons, he said.

Task force working in shifts to handle new email cache in Clinton probe.  A special team of analysts has been activated to sort and sift through the cache of newly discovered emails that kick-started the dormant Hillary Clinton email probe, two intelligence sources confirmed to Fox News.  The sources say the multi-agency task force was re-engaged over the weekend, with analysts working overlapping shifts covering 16 hours a day to identify new classified material.

Clinton aide left classified info behind on 2010 China trip.  An unnamed "senior aide" to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left classified information unsecured and unattended in a hotel room during a 2010 trip to China, one of several overseas lapses by Clinton's inner circle, Fox News has learned.  Confirmation of the alarming violation comes as Clinton herself is under a renewed FBI probe for mishandling sensitive information on a private server and her longtime senior aide, Huma Abedin, also faces scrutiny as part of the investigation.  It was not known which of Clinton's aides left the information exposed.

Pagliano Emails Detail Attempts to Hack Clinton Unsecure Email Server 10 Times in Two Days in November 2010.  Judicial Watch today [11/1/2016] released new State Department documents detailing repeated efforts to hack into the unsecure non-state.gov email system used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2010.  The hacks are detailed in email exchanges between State Department IT official Brian Pagliano and Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper.  The emails show the system was hacked 10 times in two days from November 27 to 29.  The documents also reveal that Pagliano warned Cooper that because of an outside service vendor relied upon by the Clinton system, "we'd be susceptible to such an attack."  Cooper subsequently informed the U.S. Secret Service of the attempted hacks, providing agents with each of the ten reports and summaries Pagliano had provided him.

Did Comey know Obama could be Hillary's star witness?  The WikiLeaks emails prove that Obama knew that Hillary was using a private email system.  As an experienced prosecutor, FBI director Comey knew that Hillary would argue in her defense that Obama knew about her using the private unsecured email system.  Obama did not stop her, did not object, and corresponded with Hillary on her system.  Given these facts, Hillary would argue she did not have the intent to violate the statutes because her superior, the command in chief, the president, conversed with her on her private email system.  Hillary would argue, How can I have the intent to violate the law when the president knows I use the private email system he uses to contact me?  Leaving aside that it is Hillary making the argument, it is a reasonable and powerful defense against the charges.

Don't Be Fooled:  Hillarygate Probe Is Now a Formal Federal Criminal Investigation.  The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal both reported on Monday morning [10/31/2016] that an FBI warrant application to a federal judge over the weekend for permission to search Huma Abedin's emails and laptop had been granted.  The application was made on the basis of the Clinton email investigation.  Necessarily, that application (as required by the Constitution's Fourth Amendment) would have been supported by FBI affidavits.  This new fact is a development of immense potential significance — both for Mrs. Clinton personally and for us as American citizens.  It is also unprecedented in American history.  At a minimum, it enables us to pierce the thick cloud of black ink and disinformation released over the weekend by Team Hillary and which is being widely misreported in the current news cycle.

FBI Release 100 Clinton Investigation Pages:  "Quid Pro Quo", "Shadow Government", and More.  The FBI has released the final batch of documents surrounding their investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her use of an unauthorized private email system.  There are numerous rather startling revelations within the released pages including: [...]

If Hillary wins, we'll have a potential blackmail target in the White House.  Last September, an FBI report noted the bureau couldn't find proof her private email server was hacked into by adversaries.  But it noted that the private server had to be shut down repeatedly because of hacker attacks and a successful attack wasn't likely to have left fingerprints.  Also, some "hostile foreign actors" were able to break into the personal email accounts of Clinton's close aides, obtaining a treasure trove of emails exchanged with her personal account.  Note that so far none of the WikiLeaks revelations have come from Hillary's personal account.  That could mean it wasn't hacked, or it could mean that "hostile" actors are waiting to make use of them.

Krauthammer: Clinton Had Secret Server Because She Anticipated Needing To Hide "Rank Corruption".  Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer says Hillary Clinton set up her private server to hide "rank corruption," in light of the latest revelations from WikiLeaks about Clinton money man Doug Band.

Why The Vast Clinton Email Corruption Case Matters.  The Clinton strategy has been one of avoidance and deflection.  All with the aid and comfort provided by Democrat cronies and quite a few members of the media.  Why do and why must the email revelations matter?  From the very first Wikileaks email revelation the silence from the Clinton camp has been noticeable.  If the emails were indeed photoshopped or falsified by other technology means, why hasn't the campaign produced evidence to back up those claims?  Answer:  Because the emails are real.

Clinton Chief Wanted 'Decoy' Leak After Email Scandal Broke.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign manager wanted to leak an announcement — presumably officially announcing her presidential candidacy — as a "decoy" after the New York Times first reported her email scandal in March 2015.  "I think we should get a credible leak out that we're announcing on the 20th.  As a decoy," campaign manager Robby Mook told Clinton adviser John Podesta in a March 12, 2015, email 10 days after the New York Times story broke.  The email was made public Monday [10/31/2016] by Wikileaks.

"Furious" FBI Agents to Leak Messages About Hillary Investigation Cover-Up.  Judge Andrew Napolitano dropped a bombshell today [10/27/2016].  According to Fox & Friends, Judge Napolitano said "leaked messages about Clinton's emails are coming from FBI agents who investigated" Hillary.  [Video clip]

Sources: Clinton emails would have been 'whitelisted' for Obama BlackBerry.  President Obama's high-security BlackBerry used a special process known as "whitelisting" that only allowed it to take calls and messages from pre-approved contacts, two former senior intelligence officials with knowledge of the set-up told Fox News — pointing to the detail as further proof the White House knew Hillary Clinton's private account was used for government business.  As the administration now acknowledges, Obama and Clinton emailed each other while she was helming the State Department.  If received on his BlackBerry, the "whitelisting" safeguard means Clinton and other contacts would have had to be approved as secure for data transmission — covering everything from emails to texts to phone calls.  The Obama BlackBerry would have also been configured to accept the communications.

Clinton Transmitted Classified Information to Her Lawyers.  As I outlined in last weekend's column, we know that Clinton's e-mails were replete with classified information.  According to the FBI, the classified e-mails included intelligence graded at the most closely guarded level: eight top-secret e-mails, and seven designated as "special access program" (SAP) information.  (While FBI director James Comey's presentation understandably left this vague, the likelihood is that seven of the eight top-secret e-mails are SAP.)  Under President Bill Clinton's 1995 executive order, top-secret intelligence is information the mishandling of which "could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."  The SAP designation is added when the unauthorized disclosure of intelligence could compromise critical intelligence-gathering methods or imperil the lives of intelligence sources.

Emails Show Obama Was Complicit in Cover-Up.  New revelations from Wikileaks seem to prove that the White House knew about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server.  President Obama previously denied that he had any prior knowledge of Clinton's "homebrew" server, but Wikileaks documents suggest that the president used a pseudonym to correspond directly with Clinton's private email address and then lied about it.

Irrefutable Proof Obama Lied to Protect Hillary Clinton's Run for the White House.  Thanks to Wikileaks, we now have the smoking gun email irrefutably proving not only did President Barack Obama know about Hillary Clinton's non-government-issued email account, he used it in correspondence with her. [...] [I]t appears the lie was a purposeful attempt to protect Clinton's upcoming bid for the presidency.  Shortly after the New York Times broke the story on March 2, 2015, of Clinton's use of a personal server to supplant the government system — and, as has been revealed, to thwart transparency — Obama announced publicly his lack of prior knowledge.

Podesta Leaks:  The Obama-Clinton E-mails.  As readers may recall, I have long maintained that the principal reason why Mrs. Clinton was not prosecuted, despite a mountain of evidence that she committed felony mishandling of classified information, is the fact that Obama engaged in the same kind of misconduct.  The president's use of a private, non-secure channel to discuss sensitive matters with high level officials may not have been systematic, as Mrs. Clinton's was.  (Obama's disturbing use of an alias, however, suggests that Clinton was not the only one he was privately e-mailing.)  Nevertheless, the fact that the president was e-mailing Clinton means he not only participated in her misconduct but also that the Obama-Clinton e-mails would have been admissible evidence in any criminal trial of Clinton.

Clinton State Department IT Official John Bentel Takes Fifth Amendment During Judicial Watch Deposition.  Judicial Watch announced today [10/24/2016] that another witness in the Clinton email matter asserted his Fifth Amendment rights during a Judicial Watch deposition today.  The deposition of John Bentel, the State Department's former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat ("S/ES-IRM"), was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.  S/ES-IRM is the office that handles information technology for the Office of the Secretary.  Mr. Bentel answered over 90 questions with "On advice from my legal counsel, I decline to answer the question and I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights."  Mr. Bentel, on advice of Obama Justice Department and personal counsel, refused to answer any questions about whether Hillary Clinton was paying his legal fees, offered him employment, or other financial incentives.  There were three government attorneys and two personal attorneys present for the deposition.

Now Trump says Obama 'knew all about' Clinton's email scandal and MUST be investigated.  Trump's remarks come after WikiLeaks released more of Hillary Clinton's leaked emails, which were sent from the private account of Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta.  One of the email exchanges details how Obama knew of the private email server — and how Democrat aides tried to cover up the mess.  Cheryl Mills, a Clinton aide, wrote to Podesta after Obama revealed he knew of the private server during a television interview in March 2015.

Also posted under Grounds for the impeachment of President Obama.

As long as you're lying, why not lie about lying?
White House:  Obama never lied about Hillary Clinton's emails.  President Obama's accounting of his email correspondence with Hillary Clinton when she was his secretary of state is "entirely factual," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday [10/25/2016].  "I can't verify the integrity of these emails," Earnest told reporters traveling with Obama as he fundraised in California, speaking of illegally obtained messages from Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, that were published by WikiLeaks and apparently show the Clinton camp challenging Obama's assertion that he didn't know Clinton was using a private email account.  Podesta's emails were "stolen," and, therefore, their authenticity cannot be verified.  Furthermore, they were released "to undermine our democracy," Earnest said.

The Editor says...
If somebody steals your car, that doesn't mean the authenticity of its ownership can't be confirmed.  If the postman reads a letter you wrote, that doesn't mean you didn't write it.  Either the Podesta emails are authentic, or someone at Wikileaks is the most prolific and most believable fiction writer in history!

What Did Obama Know and When?  When did Barack Obama learn of Hillary Clinton's "homebrew" email server, through which she funneled even the most sensitive electronic correspondence as Secretary of State?  "At the same time everybody else learned it through news reports," the president said in March 2015.  According to newly released private emails among Clinton advisors, that was not true.  "Looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news," wrote Hillary Clinton for America spokesman Josh Schwerin upon learning of Obama's contention.  "We need to clean this up," replied Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff at the State Department.  "He has emails from her — they do not say state.gov."

Team Hillary:  "Clean up" on Aisle 1600 after POTUS denial on Hillary e-mail server.  When reporters asked Barack Obama about Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server for official business, he immediately declared that he knew nothing of it: [...] That clip came from an interview Obama did with CBS News reporter Steve Plante in the immediate aftermath of the exposure of Hillary's private e-mail server.  Clearly he wanted to maintain his distance from the scandal, but his unequivocal statement sent Hillary's team into a panic.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Anatomy of a Cover-Up.  This morning, Politico released a story titled:  "Aides mulled Clinton expressing regret for private email's effect on FOIA, State records."  That's a timely and revealing headline.  But the real news is the story behind the headline — which is what prompted the revelation that Clinton had skirted FOIA by using a non-government email server and address.

Hillary's 33,000 emails might not be 'missing' after all.  In a May interview with FBI agents, an executive with the Denver contractor that maintained Clinton's private server revealed that an underling didn't bleach-clean all her subpoenaed emails, just ones he stored in a data file he used to transfer the emails from the server to Clinton's aides, who in turn sorted them for delivery to Congress.  The Platte River Networks executive, whose name was redacted from the interview report, said PRN tech Paul Combetta "created a 'vehicle' to transfer email files from the live mailboxes of [Clinton Executive Services Corp.] email accounts [and] then later used BleachBit software to shred the 'vehicle,' but the email content still existed in the live email accounts."

Hacked Email Shows Obama Knew About Clinton's Private Email While Claiming He Didn't.  The same day that President Barack Obama publicly insisted that he learned about Hillary Clinton's use of private email for government business from news reports, internal campaign emails show that Clinton staffers knew he wasn't telling the truth.  Obama was asked by CBS in March 2015 when he learned about Clinton's use of "an email system outside the U.S. government for official business" as Secretary of State.  "The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports," he responded.

Also posted under the partial catalog of Obama's lies.

Clinton campaign chair's confidante said Hillary and her lawyers never disclosed secret email server because 'they wanted to get away with it'.  A close confidante of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman was convinced she 'wanted to get away with' keeping all her official emails on a private homebrew server, according to a stolen email released Tuesday [10/25/2016] by WikiLeaks.  In the message chain, Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden told Clinton chairman John Podesta — who was also the far-left group's board chairman — that Clinton should 'immediately' move to hand her entire email archive over to the National Archives.

Clinton camp sounded alarm over emails to Obama: 'We need to clean this up'.  Hillary Clinton's campaign sounded the alarm over President Obama's statement to the press in March 2015 that he learned about Clinton's private email use from news reports, emails published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday [10/25/2016] show.  Josh Schwerin, a campaign spokesman, sent an email to high-level staffers informing them of Obama's comments just a few days after the New York Times exposed Clinton's private email use for the first time.  "POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news," Schwerin wrote, using Clinton's initials.

Wikileaks: Clinton aides scrambled to fix Obama false claim didn't know about personal email or server.  This was in March 2015.  He repeated the same thing to 60 minutes in October 2015.
    Bill Plante:  Mr. President, when did you first learn Hillary Clinton used an email system outside of the US government for official business while she was secretary of state?
    Obama:  The same time when everyone else learned about it through news reports.

In emails, aide stressed need to 'clean up' Obama's comments on Clinton's email.  A top aide to Hillary Clinton appeared to worry in March 2015 that President Obama might be accused of lying about his knowledge of Clinton's private email server.  In a brief email chain released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday [10/25/2016], Clinton allies seemed to scurry to respond to Obama's claim that he was unaware of Clinton's use of a personal email account while she was secretary of State until after it became public.

State Department aide pleads the Fifth more than 90 times.  A former State Department IT aide invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer more than 90 questions Monday [10/24/2016] during the final deposition in a lawsuit over Hillary Clinton's private emails.  John Bentel, former Director of Information Resource Management of the executive secretariat, would not answer questions about whether the Clintons had paid his legal fees or offered him financial incentives, according to Judicial Watch, the conservative-leaning group that brought the suit.

1,000 Clinton-Petraeus emails missing from records sent to State, FBI files show.  Roughly 1,000 emails between Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus were thought to be missing from the 30,000 emails provided by Clinton's team to the State Department in December 2014, according to the newly released FBI investigative files.  Additional documents obtained through a federal lawsuit by Judicial Watch show Clinton had directed Petraeus to send her emails at her personal address, which was used for all government work during her tenure as secretary of state.  In a heavily redacted FBI interview summary from Aug. 17, 2015, a State Department employee from the Office of Information and Programs and Services (IPS), which handles Freedom of Information Act requests, discussed how Petraeus' records apparently were not among the work-related emails provided by the former secretary's team.

General Cartwright is paying the price for Hillary Clinton's sins.  The Obama administration Justice Department has investigated three senior officials for mishandling classified information over the past two years but only one faces a felony conviction, possible jail time and a humiliation that will ruin his career:  former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman General James E. Cartwright.  The FBI's handling of the case stands in stark contrast to its treatment of Hillary Clinton and retired General David Petraeus — and it reeks of political considerations.

New Emails Show Hillary Clinton Contacts with Bryan Pagliano — Raise New Questions About Her Sworn Testimony.  Judicial Watch today [10/19/2016] released new State Department documents, which were uncovered by the FBI in its investigation of Clinton and her use of the clintonemail.com system.  The emails reveal direct communications between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top IT specialist, Bryan Pagliano, about clintonemail.com management problems.  Last week, Clinton claimed under oath to Judicial Watch that she "does not recall having communications" with Pagliano relating to the email system.  Clinton's emails to Pagliano, who installed and maintained the clintonemail.com computer system in the Clinton's New York home, relate to email management problems with Clinton's BlackBerry.  The FBI recovered these new emails from those not turned over by Hillary Clinton.  These new emails are government documents and not personal emails as Hillary Clinton claims in defending her decision to not turn over 30,000 emails sent or received by her as Secretary of State.

Clinton server email at heart of 'quid pro quo' controversy contained Benghazi intel.  The email at the heart of a "quid pro quo" controversy involving a senior State Department executive and the FBI contained intelligence about suspects in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, two government sources told Fox News.  Heavily redacted FBI interview summaries, known as 302s, state that Patrick Kennedy, a top lieutenant to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, wanted to deep-six the email — which was one of two on her personal server that kick-started the FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified information on her unsecured system.  The Nov. 18, 2012 email sent to then-Secretary Clinton by aide Jake Sullivan contains the subject line "Fw:FYI - Report of arrests — possible Benghazi connection."

The Editor says...
That doesn't sound like yoga classes to me.  Hillary's excuse for deleting her embarrassing emails en masse was that many of the messages pertained to personal matters, like her interest in yoga.  Now that the deleted emails are resurfacing, have there been any leaked emails that contained any discussion of yoga?

Hillary Clinton Deleted Emails With Her Email Server Technician.  Hillary Clinton deleted several emails she exchanged with Bryan Pagliano, the former Clinton campaign official who managed her private email system while at the State Department.  Judicial Watch, which released the emails on Wednesday, say that they undermine Clinton's recent claims, made under oath, that she did not recall communicating with Pagliano about her emails.  The emails are part of a trove of 30,000-plus emails that Clinton and her team failed to turn over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.  They claimed that the records were personal in nature and not work-related.

The "Fact" That 17 Intelligence Agencies Confirmed Russia is Behind the Email Hacks Isn't Actually a "Fact".  [Scroll down]  As I also covered yesterday, Glenn Greenwald exhaustively back-traced where the 'Russia-hacked-the-election' meme came from and that it was pure spin.  The original author who set the entire farce in motion later admitted it was all a mistake, and in his own 'Mea Culpa' revealed that according to the subtext of extensive emails from a Newsweek reporter pressuring him to allow the lie to live, it was US intelligence agencies pushing to spread this narrative.  The "17 agencies that actually confirmed" it was the Russians?  Well it turns out that was one guy, namely DCI James Clapper:  the head of US intelligence.  The same man who committed perjury before congress after his NSA surveillance program was leaked.

Clinton Caught Obstructing Congressional Investigation Into Private Server.  The congressional leader of a key House committee governing the use of technology announced on Thursday [10/20/2016] that Congress is taking unprecedented action to hold in contempt a computer company that supplied former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with her private email server, which was since found to contain classified information in violation of federal protocol.  Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, informed reporters that he is moving forward with procedures to hold in contempt Platte River Networks, a security firm that helped maintain Clinton's private servers.  Smith announced that he is in possession of emails that show Clinton's lawyer instructed companies involved with the server to thwart an official investigation by Congress.

Clinton server email at heart of 'quid pro quo' controversy contained Benghazi intel.  The email at the heart of a "quid pro quo" controversy involving a senior State Department executive and the FBI contained intelligence about suspects in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, two government sources told Fox News.  Heavily redacted FBI interview summaries, known as 302s, state that Patrick Kennedy, a top lieutenant to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, wanted to deep-six the email — which was one of two on her personal server that kick-started the FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified information on her unsecured system.

More Clinton classified email emerges in State Department document dump.  The State Department released another batch of emails from former Secretary Hillary Clinton's secret email server Friday [10/21/2016] and at least one of them is a new message not released before, but which contains sensitive classified information.  The Jan. 26, 2010, message was sent by top personal aide Huma Abedin to Mrs. Clinton relaying a conversation someone named "Jeff" had with the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates.  All of the information is redacted in the message, and is classified as "confidential" — the lowest level of secrecy.  It was flagged because it containts information gleaned from foreign sources and about U.S. foreign policy operations.

Missing From Hacked Emails:  Hillary Clinton Herself.  One person conspicuously absent so far in the thousands of hacked emails showing the internal workings of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid is Hillary Clinton herself.  Time and again, it is Mrs. Clinton's top aides who in a round robin of emails debate and shape major campaign speeches and strategy.  When Mrs. Clinton is heard from, it typically is second hand:  through an email sent by a confidante to other aides.

WikiLeaks: White House Knew 'POTUS And HRC Emailed'.  The White House knew President Barack Obama had emailed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email account that was run out of an unsecured server in her New York home, according to emails released by WikiLeaks.  Obama told CBS News in March 2015 he learned of Clinton's private server the way basically all Americans did, "through news reports."  But emails hacked from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's Gmail account suggest the White House already knew about Clinton's private email server.

WikiLeaks: Obama Knew About Hillary Clinton's Private Email.  President Barack Obama did know that Hillary Clinton was using a private email address, despite his assertion that he learned about it "through news reports."  The president's answer was a problem for Clinton aide Philippe Reines, who flagged the issue for top Clinton aides as well as White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri in an email.  "It's not unreasonable to assume that Josh [Earnest] is going to get asked how this was possible, and he should have the factset," Reines wrote on March 8, 2015.

Clinton Emails with Petraeus Reveal Her 'BlackBerry Blues;' Clinton Tells Then-CENTCOM Commander to Use Her 'Personal Email Address'.  Judicial Watch today [10/20/2016] released new State Department documents containing email correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus, in which she had what she termed "blackberry blues" over her inability to use her BlackBerry inside her secure office.  The FBI recovered these new emails from those not turned over by Hillary Clinton.  These emails are government documents and not personal emails, as Clinton claims in defending her decision to not turn over 30,000 emails sent or received by her as secretary of state.  The emails also show she knew about the security issues of her BlackBerry use (and yet denied recalling anything about it or refused to answer questions).

Clinton Campaign And Harry Reid Worked With NYT To Smear State Dept Watchdog.  The Clinton campaign coordinated with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid to use The New York Times to smear the State Department's deputy inspector general as State's internal watchdog was investigating Clinton aide Huma Abedin, The Daily Caller can report.  The scheme is revealed in a series of emails hacked from the Gmail account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.  The most damning message is a Nov. 13, 2015 email that Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon sent to Phil Schiliro, a former White House official and longtime Democratic operative who has helped the Clinton campaign in various capacities.

FBI: 6 Ways the Corrupt Obama State Department Tried to Cover Up Hillary's Illegal Email Activities.  [#3] Like the Rose Law Firm files, some critical emails "disappeared":  Clinton's legal team at first informed the State Department that it had prepared 14 banker boxes of printed emails for production to the government.  However, when officials arrived at her lawyer's office to retrieve the emails, they found only 12 boxes... [those] 12 boxes that did end up in State Department custody contained 52,455 pages of emails, packed into the boxes "with no folders or known method of organization."

Hillary Clinton's email problems just came roaring back.  For the past few months, Hillary Clinton's decision to exclusively use a private email server while at the State Department has receded as a campaign issue as Donald Trump's comments about women have come to dominate the daily chatter about the 2016 race.  On Monday [10/17/2016], however, the various issues associated with Clinton's email setup came roaring back.  According to emails released by the FBI, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy asked the FBI to ease up on classification decisions in exchange for allowing more FBI agents in countries where they were not permitted to go.  The words "quid pro quo" were used to describe the proposed exchange by the FBI official.

FBI agents let Hillary's aide offer to bribe them to tamper with evidence in probe.  Fox News' senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano had a hard-hitting question for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in response to the release on Monday [10/17/2016] of over 100 new documents related to the probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  One of documents appears to prove the undersecretary of state purportedly offered a deal to the FBI in exchange for the bureau agreeing to reclassify documents in order to protect Hillary Clinton, a "quid pro quo" as described by an FBI agent.  Appearing on "America's Newsroom," Napolitano said the document points to several potential offenses.  "I've never seen this in my career, where an effort is made to change a document after it is evidence in a criminal prosecution," he said.

Ecuador ordered Assange's internet cut off to tilt election toward Clinton, experts say.  While both WikiLeaks and Ecuadorean officials have only made sparse comments on the cutting of Assange's internet access, there is speculation that President Rafael Correa is looking to repair the icy relationship between his country and the U.S. and he is hedging his bets that Clinton will win the race for the White House.  "It may in part have to do with Correa thinking that to assist the campaign of Donald Trump would be unconscionable," Eric Hershberg, the director of American University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, told Fox News Latino in reference to the idea that the WikiLeaks' releases are helping the GOP nominee's run for the White House.

Does night follow day?
Did Ecuador Take Away Assange's Internet to Protect Hillary?  Holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in Great Britain four four years, the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange had is internet access was shut down by the government of Ecuador after leak two weeks Assange leaking the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign head John Podesta. [...] The removal of Assange's internet access did not stop the podesta emails from going out.  Monday's was delayed, but Tuesday's batch went out in the morning as usual.

Trump's servers show glaring security flaws.  Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Hillary Clinton's use of a private email system while serving as secretary of State, but the Republican presidential nominee's corporate enterprise appears to be equally vulnerable to cyberattacks.  A digital security architect on Monday evening [10/17/2016] discovered several weaknesses in the Trump Organization's email servers, which appeared to be outdated and not patched for security flaws.

The Editor says...
Nice try, but this entire story is a non sequitur and a red herring, most likely intended to benefit Hillary Clinton on the basis of "See?  He does it, too!"  If Trump's servers have security holes, that's not really our problem, and has no comparison to Hillary's clandestine email server, because [#1] Trump's server doesn't contain national security secrets, and [#2] Trump's servers were not set up for the purpose of information from the government and the public by dodging the Freedom of Information Act.

State Department tried to bribe FBI to unclassify Clinton emails.  A top State Department official offered a "quid pro quo" to an FBI investigator to declassify an e-mail from Hillary Clinton's private server in exchange for allowing the bureau to operate in countries where it was banned, stunning new documents revealed Monday [10/17/2016].  The FBI documents show that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy pitched the deal to the unnamed agent, allegedly as part of an effort to back up Clinton's claim that she did not send or receive classified documents on the server in her Westchester home.

The great Clinton cover-up:  FBI's Hillary email files are covered in redactions which leave some pages unreadable.  The FBI released a trove of information on its investigation of Hillary Clinton on Monday — but it would take a forensic investigation to try to make sense of many of the heavily-redacted documents.  Some pages that were technically released have their contents entirely redacted.  Others are redacted piecemeal so as to make them almost completely unreadable.  The documents consist of summaries and notes from the agency's long investigation into Clinton's private email server and whether she mishandled classified information.

Intelligence Chair Calls for 'Abuse of Power' Investigation in State Dept.  Handling of Clinton Email Classification.  House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R.-Calif.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R.-Utah) wrote to the inspector general of the State Department today calling for him to "initiate an inquiry into apparent abuse of power by senior State Department personnel trying to influence classification determinations for emails sent or received by Secretary Clinton."

Whatever it takes to keep the dirt under the carpet until after Election Day...
Ecuador cut off Assange's internet at U.S. request, WikiLeaks says.  Wikileaks said Tuesday [10/18/2016] that Secretary of State John Kerry asked Ecuador to stop WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, from publishing leaked emails that could disrupt peace negotiations with a guerrilla group in Colombia.  Assange, who has been in refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London for more than four years, saw his access to the internet cut over the weekend.

New WikiLeaks Release Contains Clinton Campaign Emails on Benghazi, Israel.  Ed Henry reported on "America's Newsroom" today about the latest WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton campaign emails.  Henry said that the 11th dump of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails, which came out Tuesday morning, contains interesting details on the campaign's narrative on the Benghazi terror attack and strategy for showing support for Israel.

Obama Says 'Not True' FBI And State Made Deal on Clinton E-Mails.  President Barack Obama said claims that officials at the State Department and FBI discussed a quid pro quo agreement over the classification of an e-mail on Hillary Clinton's private server were "just not true."  "Some of the more sensational implications or appearances aren't based on actual events," Obama said Tuesday [10/18/2016] during a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the White House.

The Editor engages in mocking derision:
If Barack H. Obama says so, it must be true!

Is this for real?  The emails below were forwarded to me just before the holiday started.  I cannot vouch for their authenticity, but if they are true, wow....

Anonymous email

The FBI's Own Investigation Summary Proves Hillary Clinton Broke The Law.  According to documents released today [10/17/2016], Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy pressured a senior FBI official into unclassifying emails sent from Hillary Clinton's illegal private server.  The FBI official notes that Kennedy contacted the organization to ask for the change in classification in "exchange for a 'quid pro quo.'"  More specifically, "State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden," according to a conversation relayed by The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who broke the story this weekend.  The FBI did not take Kennedy up on his offer.

Hillary's Henchmen Pressured FBI on Classification of Documents.  Today [10/17/2016] the FBI released another 100 pages relating to its investigation of Hillary Clinton's conduct as Secretary of State.  Why it has taken so long for the agency to review, redact and publish a very small quantity of documents is inexplicable.  Be that as it may, the documents released today are explosive.  You may have seen headlines to the effect that Hillary's State Department tried to pressure the FBI to say that various documents located on Hillary's insecure home server were not classified.  This was critical, obviously, because one of Hillary's lines of defense was to claim, falsely, that she never sent or received classified documents on her off-the-books email system.

It's 'felony corruption!' Trump demands resignation of State Dept. undersecretary at the center of FBI firestorm.  Donald Trump told a screaming crowd of supporters in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Monday night [10/17/2016] that electing him is the best way to end the 'corruption' exhibited in the Hillary Clinton investigative documents released by the FBI earlier in the day.  And he called for the ouster of Patrick Kennedy, the State Department undersecretary at the center of Monday's firestorm.  Calling Clinton-related corruption 'magnitudes worse than Watergate,' Trump castigated Kennedy for trying to persuade the bureau to declassify one of Hillary Clinton's emails related to the 2012 Benghazi, Libya terror attack.

FBI confirms:  Officials discussed deal to cover up Clinton emails.  Newly released documents from the FBI's year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton's server indicate a State Department official proposed a "quid pro quo" aimed at getting the FBI to cover up classified emails discovered on Clinton's server.  In return, an unnamed FBI official said it might be open to a deal if the State Department could agree to boosting the FBI's presence in Iraq.  The FBI notes released Monday [10/17/2016] show that Patrick Kennedy, State's undersecretary for management, pressured the FBI to change the classified markings on an email that had been upgraded to "secret."

Pressure Cited Against Marking Clinton E-Mails Classified.  A State Department team responsible for determining which records should be kept secret felt "immense pressure" not to label any of about 300 e-mails found on Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server as classified, according to interview summaries released by the FBI.  Officials from the State Department's Information Programs and Services office began a review in March 2015 of 296 e-mails that were set to be turned over to a House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.  "IPS felt immense pressure to complete the review quickly and not label anything as classified," according to interview notes from a State Department official whose name wasn't disclosed in the FBI summary.

Top Clinton aide offered FBI a funding 'quid pro quo' if agents helped him bury a Benghazi email — 'never to be seen again'.  A senior State Department official pressured the FBI to declassify one of Hillary Clinton's emails related to the Benghazi terror attack so he could use a loophole in the Freedom of Information Act to make sure it would never see the light of day, according to notes from an FBI interview released Monday [10/17/2016].  State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, the FBI file shows, discussed the possibility of approving the FBI's request for funding 'to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden.'  The FBI agent who interviewed him during the investigation into classified documents housed on Clinton's now-infamous secrt email server called the proposal a 'quid pro quo.'

The Editor says...
Apparently there was something in that email message that Hillary Clinton wanted to permanently suppress, and it had something to do with Benghazi.

Hillary Answers Judicial Watch Under Oath — "Does Not Recall" Most Of Her Tenure As Secretary Of State.  Back in August, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted Judicial Watch the right to ask 25 questions of Hillary Clinton about the creation of her private email server which she was required to answer under oath.  This morning Hillary filed her response to those 25 questions which can be best summarized by the following stats:
      Occurrences of the phrase "Does Not Recall":  20
      Occurrences of the word "Object" or "Objection":  84
To summarize the 23-page response, Hillary "does not recall" the majority of her tenure as Secretary of State and "objects" to everything that she does recall.

Wikileaks: Clinton Sent Intelligence Info To Podesta's Hacked Email Account.  Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton sent a lengthy Middle East intelligence breakdown in an email to longtime ally and lobbyist John Podesta while he was working in the White House.  "With all of its tragic aspects, the advance of ISIL through Iraq gives the U.S. Government an opportunity to change the way it deals with the chaotic security situation in North Africa and the Middle East," Clinton wrote to Podesta in an August 2014 email obtained by WikiLeaks.

The Most Explosive WikiLeaks Clinton Revelations (So Far).  [#7] Collusion with State Department on managing Clinton's email scandal:  It's pretty clear from these emails that Clinton's team knew she broke the law, but they were (justifiably) confident they could trump the rule of law with politics... and plenty of help from their good friends in the Obama Administration.  Other emails illustrate the Clinton team's conviction that all Democrat scandals can be overcome with distractions and delaying tactics, counting on that 90% Democrat media to be easily distracted, and to stay quiet while stonewalls are constructed.

Hillary Clinton's new health woe: email Alzheimer's.  Call it "email Alzheimers": Hillary Clinton's remarkable failure to recall much of anything touching on how she managed to grossly violate security protocols in her years heading the State Department.  Clinton this week had to supply written, sworn answers to 25 questions from the good-government group Judicial Watch about her home-brewed email setup.  On 21 of the 25, she came up with one version or another of, "I forget."  Which, as any lawyer will tell you, is the best way to avoid both self-incrimination and perjury.

Judicial Watch Releases New Hillary Clinton Email Answers Given under Oath.  Judicial Watch today [10/13/2016] released received responses under oath from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning her email practices.  Judicial Watch submitted twenty-five questions on August 30 to Clinton as ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.  The new Clinton responses in the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before Judge Sullivan was first filed in September 2013 seeking records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.

Fox: Clinton Camp Was Worried About Emails Between Hillary and Obama After Server Scandal Broke.  Fox News' Ed Henry reported Friday [10/14/2016] on newly released emails from WikiLeaks that showed President Obama may have known more about Hillary Clinton's private email server than was initially known by the public.  This is part of the weeklong release of emails that belonged to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta after they were hacked.

'Does not recall': Clinton dodges email questions in court submission.  Hillary Clinton filed written responses this week to a conservative watchdog group's inquiries into the private and unauthorized email server she maintained when she was secretary of state, but nearly every one of her answers included the phrase "Secretary Clinton objects to Interrogatory" or "Secretary Clinton does not recall."  Judicial Watch submitted 25 specific questions to the Democratic nominee on Aug. 30, 2016.  Clinton and her legal team answered their inquiries point-by-point.  The watchdog group's interrogatories mostly involved either Clinton's public comments on her server or what the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it found in its review of her email habits.

Clinton answers written questions under penalty of perjury in email lawsuit.  Hillary Clinton submitted formal answers under penalty of perjury on Thursday [10/13/2016] about her use of a private email server, saying 20 times that she did not recall the requested information or related discussions, while also asserting that no one ever warned her that the practice could run afoul of laws on preserving federal records.  "Secretary Clinton states that she does not recall being advised, cautioned, or warned, she does not recall that it was ever suggested to her, and she does not recall participating in any communication, conversation, or meeting in which it was discussed that her use of a clintonemail.com e-mail account to conduct official State Department business conflicted with or violated federal recordkeeping laws," lawyers for Clinton wrote.

Clinton changes story, admits she didn't have permission for secret email server.  Hillary Clinton admitted under oath this week that she doesn't recall asking anyone for permission to use a secret server and email account during her time in the State Department, contradicting previous public pronouncements that she had received approval.  Mrs. Clinton said she didn't recall seeing a 2011 warning about increased hacking attempts on senior department officials' private accounts and that she didn't actually write another warning that was sent under her name.  "Secretary Clinton states that she does not recall being advised, cautioned, or warned during her tenure as Secretary of State about hacking or attempted hacking of her clintonemail.com e-mail account or the server that hosted her clintonemail.com account," she said in sworn testimony dated Monday and filed in federal court Thursday [10/13/2016].

Emails reveal Clinton camp's scramble to craft, defend server story.  Hillary Clinton's top aides privately debated whether to joke about her emerging email scandal, if they should shift some blame to former secretaries of state and how to frame, explain and defend her use of a homebrewed server in a series of purported March 2015 emails revealed by WikiLeaks this week.  The emails, which originated on the Gmail account of Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, paint a portrait of a political team alternately worried and defiant in the face of their boss' mushrooming email disclosure.  Through the early days of the email revelations, and even throughout the summer as further discoveries turned up the heat, Clinton's group sweated the minutiae of her carefully crafted responses in an attempt to keep the campaign's preferred narrative on track.

Wikileaks Dump Provides More Evidence of Clinton Camp and State Dept. Cozy Coordination Over Emails.  The fourth round of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were released on Wednesday morning [10/12/2016] by Wikileaks.  The new emails shed more light on the apparent cozy relationship between the Clinton campaign and the State Department and provide the strongest evidence to date of direct coordination in the release of Hillary Clinton's emails.  On Tuesday LawNewz.com wrote about a March 2015 email that showed that a Clinton top aide and lawyer named Heather Samuelson received a heads up about a pending release of emails in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.  Samuelson left the State Department in 2013 along with Clinton and her other top aides, so some questioned how she managed to get ahold of the information about the release before Judicial Watch, or the general public.

This Man Did What Hillary Did With Classified Information, And He's In Jail.  Last week, a person was arrested for allegedly having classified documents at home without authorization.  No, it wasn't Hillary Clinton — but it makes you wonder, why not?  Police executed a warrant to search Harold Thomas Martin III's home and found classified documents.  Did police execute a warrant to search Clinton's home?  No, of course not.  What is the evidence against Martin?  First, they found documents that "contained highly classified information of the United States, including Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (SCI)."  Hillary Clinton's server also contained eight email chains of Top Secret information and had emails classified as Special Access Programs an even more restricted subcategory of Sensitive Compartmented Information.

Emails show Clinton aides discussing home server.  Hacked emails show Hillary Clinton's campaign team was eager to move past the controversy over her use of a homebrew email server last year as it debated how to respond to the issue.

The New FBI Investigation Clinton Faces.  On July 5th, 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced to the world that Hillary Clinton would not face criminal repercussions for her private email server.  Many thought Clinton was home-free, ready to race for the White House and declare herself president.  Yes, the FBI investigation into her email server was over, but as Ed Klein's new book, Guilty as Sin, reveals, there is another FBI investigation of Clinton brewing, and it is going to be a lot harder for her to shake this one.  The Associated Press, not exactly a bastion of conservative propaganda, reported in late August that "more than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation."

Leaked emails reveal Clinton campaign's attempts to distract from email scandal.  In one conversation from March of last year, for example, Podesta suggested distracting from the email saga by focusing on the congressional Benghazi inquiry.  "My perspective is that we want the fight to be about Benghazi, not about servers in her basement," Podesta wrote to Cheryl Mills, a board member at the Clinton Foundation.  The House Select Committee on Benghazi had uncovered the existence of Clinton's private server weeks earlier, and was at that time pursuing her testimony in a closed-door meeting.  That never happened, and it was not until October of last year that members of the committee were able to question Clinton in a highly-anticipated public hearing.

Contradicting FBI view, Clinton's leaked speeches portray her as computer savvy.  Contrary to views collected by the FBI that Hillary Clinton was a technophobe unsophisticated in the use of computers, her paid speeches indicate that she was well aware of the dangers of computer hacking and penetration and that diplomats would be "totally vulnerable" without extreme precautions.  Excerpts from Clinton's speeches, which she refused to release during her hard fought primary campaign against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, were among some 2,050 private emails published Friday [10/7/2016] by the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks, after what the Obama administration says was a Russian intrusion that obtained the data.

New Emails Show From Day #1 Obama Administration Involved In Managing Clinton Email Scandal.  Now newly released emails reported on by The Wall Street Journal show that from day one senior White House officials, including one headed for the campaign, and one of Clinton's own attorneys who received immunity from prosecution, were coordinating responses with senior State Department officials about how to "manage" the growing Clinton email scandal These emails further raise questions about the integrity of officials at the highest levels of government in handling this matter.

White House Coordinated on Clinton Email Issues, New Documents Show.  Newly disclosed emails show top Obama administration officials were in close contact with Hillary Clinton's nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private email server.

WSJ: Docs Reveal White House Coordination on Clinton Emails.  Byron Tau of the Wall Street Journal writes that the Obama administration was aware of Hillary Clinton's private email server problems in early 2015 and coordinated with her staff on the matter.

Sen. Jeff Sessions:  Senate Must Investigate FBI's 'Breathtaking' Destruction of Evidence, Immunity to Cheryl Mills.  Sen. Jeff Sessions tells radio talk show Howie Carr he's lost confidence in FBI Director James B. Comey Jr.  The Alabama Republican adds that he thinks the Senate should investigate how the FBI granted immunity to Clinton Foundation director Cheryl Mills and destroyed evidence under congressional subpoena.  "I was a U.S. attorney and an assistant U.S. attorney before that and I have been through a lot of these issues," Sessions says.

A Banana Republic, If We Choose to Keep It.  ## That Hillary remains in the running at all is the most concrete affirmation of our descent into lawlessness.  Not only did the FBI grant immunity to key witnesses in the Clinton email scandal, many of whom promptly returned the favor by asserting their Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress — when they weren't completely ignoring a congressional subpoena — but the Bureau agreed to destroy the laptops of former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson.  Just as revealing, the FBI agents limited their search to documents authored before January 2015, relinquishing "any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton's unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State," stated a letter sent to the Attorney General Loretta Lynch by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA).  It gets worse.  This side deal was made despite the reality the laptops could have been obtained via a subpoena with no conditions attached.  And when classified government documents are found on a computer, that computer legally becomes government property.  Furthermore, Mills — despite being the subject of a criminal investigation — was allowed to participate as one of Clinton's lawyers, with the concomitant assertion of attorney-client privilege, during Clinton's holiday weekend "interview" with the FBI.

Republicans blast FBI for 'astonishing' agreement to destroy Clinton aides' laptops.  Top-ranking Republicans on Wednesday [10/5/2016] escalated their inquiry into a controversial FBI agreement to destroy the laptops of two Hillary Clinton aides questioned in the email scandal investigation, pressing Attorney General Loretta Lynch for answers and suggesting the deal obstructed congressional investigators.  The agreement to destroy the computers, the lawmakers wrote Wednesday in a letter to Lynch, "is simply astonishing given the likelihood that evidence on the laptops would be of interest to congressional investigators."  The letter, signed by four Republican committee chairmen, follows allegations Monday that immunity deals for former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices.

How the FBI wound up destroying evidence.  Welcome to the Twilight Zone:  Under immunity deals given to two key Hillary Clinton aides in the e-mail probe, the FBI wound up destroying evidence.  Once they were done searching two laptops used to store Clinton's e-mails, the agents had to destroy them.  They also had to limit their search to include nothing after January 2015 — that is, before news broke of the whole home-brewed-server business.  Meaning the FBI investigation had that much less chance of stumbling across fresh proof of obstruction of justice.

What Sort of Immunity Deal Includes Destruction of Evidence?  Has such an immunity deal ever been offered to a non-Clinton associate in the history of the Republic?

Please Tell Me These FBI/DOJ 'Side Deals' with Clinton E-Mail Suspects Didn't Happen.  According to House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), the immunity agreements struck by the Justice Department with Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two top subjects of the FBI's Clinton e-mail investigation, included "side agreements."  Pursuant to these side agreements, it was stipulated that (a) the FBI would not scrutinize any documents dated after January 31, 2015 (i.e., about five weeks before the most disturbing actions suggestive of obstruction of justice occurred); and (b) the FBI — in an investigation critically involving destruction of documents — would destroy the computers after conducting its search.

How did Cheryl Mills get immunity if she was also acting as Clinton's lawyer?  GOP lodges formal complaint with D.C. bar.  The Republican Party has filed a formal complaint with the D.C. bar seeking disciplinary measures against longtime Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills for allegedly having a 'conflict of interest' when representing Clinton during her FBI interview in connection with her emails scandal.  Mills has represented Clinton as she fielded questions from FBI investigators as well while also fielding questions from congressional staff and lawmakers about whether she mishandled classified information and broke record keeping laws with her private email server.

FBI Colluded with Democrats, Team Clinton on Email 'Prosecution'.  The clueless Republicans — like most Americans — simply cannot bring themselves to realize what sort of government we are now living under. [...] The Obama administration has corrupted and weaponized the major enforcement agencies of the federal government, including the IRS and the FBI, and now is reaching down to the local level in order to bring municipal police forces under Washington's control.

Corrupt: FBI Agreed to Destroy Laptops of Clinton's Top Aides in Immunity Deal.  The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of two of Hillary Clinton's top aides as part of their immunity deals, House Judiciary Committee sources revealed on Monday [10/3/2016].  The side agreements were made with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson and also limited the FBI's search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015.  In other words, investigators could not review documents after the server became public, "preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice," according to the sources.

Russian server co. head on DNC hack: 'No idea' why FBI still has not contacted us.  Blaming Russia because servers are from here is "absurd," Vladimir Fomenko, owner of the Russian server company implicated in the DNC hack, told RT adding that they are ready to help any special service in investigating the attack.  Fomenko's web hosting service, King Servers, was identified by American cybersecurity company ThreatConnect as the platform for the attack on emails of the Democratic National Committee.  Six out of the eight IP addresses used by the hackers were hosted on King Servers, ThreatConnect claimed in September.

FBI agreed to destroy immunized Clinton aides' laptops, sources say.  Sources said the arrangement with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson also limited the search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015.  This meant investigators could not review documents for the period after the email server became public — in turn preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice, sources said.  The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee fired off a letter Monday [10/3/2016] to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking why the DOJ and FBI agreed to the restrictive terms, including that the FBI would destroy the laptops after finishing the search.

DOJ Reached 'Side Agreements' To Limit Search Of Clinton Lawyers' Laptops.  As part of its immunity deals with Hillary Clinton's lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the Justice Department agreed to destroy laptops the attorneys turned over to federal investigators and to limit searches of the devices to documents created before Jan. 31, 2015.  The perplexing "side agreements" are revealed in a letter that Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte sent to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday [10/3/2016].  Investigators with the House Judiciary Committee, which Goodlatte chairs, were able to review the DOJ's agreements with Mills and Samuelson, who worked as aides to Clinton at the State Department before taking jobs as her lawyers.

The FBI director can't defend immunity for Hillary Clinton's aides — which says volumes.  Two revealing, if largely unnoticed, moments came in the middle of FBI Director Jim Comey's Wednesday testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.  When combined, these moments prove that Mr. Comey gave Hillary Clinton a pass.  Congress hauled Mr. Comey in to account for the explosive revelation that the government granted immunity to Clinton staffers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson as part of its investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton had mishandled classified information.  Rep. Tom Marino (R., Pa.), who was once a Justice Department prosecutor and knows how these investigations roll, provided the first moment.  He asked Mr. Comey why Ms. Mills was so courteously offered immunity in return for her laptop — a laptop that Mr. Comey admitted investigators were very keen to obtain.  Why not simply impanel a grand jury, get a subpoena, and seize the evidence?

FBI Docs:  Hillary Deleted Nearly 1,000 Emails With David Petraeus.  A potentially explosive nugget from the FBI's Friday document dump of investigatory notes from the Clinton email probe has been all but ignored by the media.  And that is the revelation that Hillary Clinton deleted 1,000 work-related emails between herself and General David Petaeus from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

It's Alive:  FBI files reveal how Clinton server was created in K Street lab.  If Hillary Clinton's 'homebrew' server ever got the Mary Shelley treatment, IT specialist Bryan Pagliano would make a fine Dr. Frankenstein — FBI documents reveal new details about how he painstakingly created the machine over a series of months while working in a room along Washington's storied K Street.  According to files released last Friday evening, Pagliano worked to design and build the now-infamous server inside a room once used as part of Clinton's campaign headquarters.

Reps: Clinton aides who got immunity deals directed email scrubbing.  The tech specialist who scrubbed Hillary Clinton's email archive and was recently found to have sought help on Reddit for how to hide a certain "VIP's" email address was acting at the behest of Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, a top House Republican charged Wednesday [9/28/2016].  "The clincher:  just last week, he's going online and trying to delete these Reddit posts," Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said of Colorado-based tech specialist Paul Combetta, who reached a limited immunity deal with the Justice Department.  "He's trying to cover up his tracks, he's trying to cover up the cover up."

Issa: FBI Can Now Choose To Look 'Less Effective' Or 'Corrupt'.  House Judiciary Committee member and Republican California Rep. Darrell Issa says the Federal Bureau of Investigation got nothing out of punting the Hillary Clinton classified e-mail probe but a "bad reputation."  "The FBI can now choose between looking like a less effective investigative organization or they can look corrupt," Issa told The Daily Caller Wednesday night.  "Because either they gave too much or too little along with the Justice Department."

FBI Director Comey Took Millions From Clinton Foundation Defense Contractor.  Is anyone surprised by this corruption?  When FBI Director James Comey said that the organization would not be seeking to bring charges against Hillary Clinton over her illegal email server, anyone paying attention knew there was a deep level of corruption.  Now, it's been made clear.  James Comey received millions of dollars from the corrupt Clinton Foundation, and his brother's law firm also does the Clinton's taxes.

Congressman: Cheryl Mills 'Lied To Everybody' About Hillary's Server.  FBI Director James Comey made excuses for Hillary Clinton's former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills on Wednesday when asked about conflicting statements she made to federal investigators about when she learned of the former secretary of state's private email server.  "Having done many investigations myself, there's always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central [to the investigation], some of which are peripheral," Comey told Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

The FBI's Hillary email probe is looking even more like a coverup.  It's bad enough that FBI Director James Comey agreed to pass out immunity deals like candy to material witnesses and potential targets of his investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's illegal private email server.  But now we learn that some of them were immunized despite lying to Comey's investigators.  In the latest bombshell from Congress' probe into what's looking more and more like an FBI whitewash (or coverup) of criminal behavior by the Democratic nominee and her aides, the Denver-based tech who destroyed subpoenaed emails from Clinton's server allegedly lied to FBI agents after he got an immunity deal.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Hillary's Security Clearance Should Have Been Revoked Long Ago.  When debate moderators get tired of asking Donald Trump about Barack Obama's birth certificate or the Miss Universe pageant, they might want to pose a question to Hillary Clinton that is actually worth asking.  Namely:  "Why did you fail to take any of the mandatory training courses on how to handle classified material — required to keep your security clearance — while you were Secretary of State?"  The fact that Clinton didn't get this training has now been firmly established, thanks to the dogged work of the Daily Caller, which has been suing the State Department for documents what would indicate if Clinton had.

Congressman Drops Bombshell Says FBI Gave Broader Immunity to Clinton Aides Than First Disclosed.  FBI Director James Comey appeared on Capitol Hill on Wednesday [9/28/2016] where he testified before the House Judiciary Committee and further discussed the Bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server.  During one exchange with Congressman Darrell Issa, Issa let out a pretty big revelation about the scope of immunity granted to Clinton aides.  Issa claims it was much broader than first disclosed.  He claims that Clinton top aide Cheryl Mills also received immunity for destroying documents.

FBI Director James Comey Admits "Stonetear" is Paul Combetta During Hearing.  It has been 10 days since we originally presented the Stonetear Revelations on September 19th.  Yesterday [9/28/2016], Ohio Representative Jim Jordan questioned FBI Director James Comey about the "Stonetear" Reddit posting.  Director Comey admits that Stonetear is in fact Paul Combetta, and the "VERY VIP" was, indeed, Hillary Clinton.

FBI Director:  An FBI Agent Would 'Be In Big Trouble' If They Did What Hillary Did.  FBI director James Comey on Wednesday [9/28/2016] said that an FBI agent who operated a private email system similar to Hillary Clinton's would be "in big trouble" at the bureau.  Comey was responding in a House Judiciary Committee hearing to an allegation from Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot that the decision to not charge Clinton with mishandling classified information showed a "double standard."  Comey said that he disagreed with that characterization.  But he added that she would not get off scot-free.

Dem lawmaker wears Hillary pin during House hearing on Clinton email probe.  Wearing a candidate's campaign pin is hardly out of the ordinary this election season.  But doing it while conducting congressional oversight at a hearing where that candidate's conduct is front-and-center — that's another matter.  Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, raised eyebrows Wednesday when she showed up wearing a gold Hillary Clinton campaign pin to a House Judiciary Committee hearing dealing with the FBI probe regarding Clinton's private email server.  The committee heard testimony from FBI Director James Comey on the agency's decision not to pursue charges and a newly revealed set of controversial immunity deals given to Clinton's staff.

Behind the Clinton Immunity Deals.  Immunity deals are granted precisely to prosecute a case and, in the absence of utter corruption, would never be issued unless prosecutors had other more valuable targets they intended to put away in return for letting some of the smaller fry go.  That this did not happen in the Clinton email case is another factor that makes the decision so utterly fraught.  Just as unusually, the five immunized witnesses apparently were not required to cooperate with federal authorities or with Congress in return for their deals, other than providing a limited amount of immunized information.

Obama's Conflict Tanked the Clinton E-mail Investigation — As Predicted.  [Huma] Abedin knew an insurance policy when she saw one.  If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Thanks to Friday's FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau's year-long foray ("investigation" would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama's conflict of interest. [...] It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.

Surprise, It Looks Like Obama Lied; He Knew Hillary Was Using an Illegal Email Server.  President Barack Obama used a pseudonym when communicating with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by email, and at least one of those emails ended up on Clinton's private email server, new FBI documents reveal.  The FBI dumped a large batch of documents Friday [9/23/2016] concerning its investigation into Clinton's private email server.  The heavily-redacted documents include numerous notes the Bureau made of interviews with Clinton aides and Department of State officials concerning her private email server.

The Immunized Five:  Meet the People Covering For Hillary.  The Justice Department has granted immunity to a grand total of five individuals involved in the Hillary Clinton email scandal.  On Friday [9/23/2016], the FBI, in response to a subpoena, gave the House Oversight Committee information about immunity agreements reached as part of the Clinton email investigation.  The list included a total of five names, including two Clinton attorneys.  Here are their histories and their roles in the never-ending Clinton email fracas.

How's the Coverup Going, Hillary?  Yesterday the FBI did another Friday afternoon document dump, consisting of more documents relating to its investigation of Hillary Clinton's email security breaches.  The Washington Examiner spotted this hilarious item from an interview of a Platte River Networks employee who referred in 2014 to "the Hilary coverup operation."

FBI Clinton Email Report Review — Six Concerning Revelations.  [#1] One IT Worker Joked That A 60-Day retention Policy For Clinton Would Be A "Coverup Operation."  "But one IT worker took a somewhat cavalier attitude, joking in one interview that a new 60-day retention policy was a 'Hillary coverup operation' — which sparked the Trump campaign's anger."

Obama used pseudonym in emails with Clinton.  President Obama used a pseudonym in emails to Hillary Clinton, documents from the FBI released Friday show.  The FBI released a large batch documents related to its investigation into Clinton's private email server Friday afternoon.  The files include notes from interviews with several top Clinton aides, including longtime adviser Huma Abedin.  The FBI said in its notes from an Abedin interview that the address on a Clinton email chain "is believed to be a pseudonym used by the President."  Abedin said she didn't recognize the name and "expressed her amazement" that Obama used a pseudonym.

Obama reportedly used pseudonym to email with Clinton on her private server.  President Obama used a pseudonym when sending or receiving emails through the private server system Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state, according to nearly 200 pages of documents released Friday [9/23/2016] by the FBI.  Included in the documents are notes from an April 2016 interview with long-time Clinton aide Huma Abedin, conducted in connection with the FBI's two-year investigation into Clinton's use of the private server for official correspondence.

FBI DOCS: Surprise, It Looks Like Obama Lied; He Knew Hillary Was Using an Illegal Email Server.  President Barack Obama used a pseudonym when communicating with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by email, and at least one of those emails ended up on Clinton's private email server, new FBI documents reveal.  The FBI dumped a large batch of documents Friday concerning its investigation into Clinton's private email server.  The heavily-redacted documents include numerous notes the Bureau made of interviews with Clinton aides and Department of State officials concerning her private email server.  One of those interviews is with Clinton aide Huma Abedin.  During the interview, the FBI presented Abedin with an email exchange between Clinton and a person she did not recognize.  Eventually, the FBI revealed the unknown person's name was believed to be a pseudonym used by Obama.  The revelation provoked consternation from Abedin.  "How is this not classified?" she said, before asking for a copy of the email herself.  The FBI documents do not reveal what Obama's pseudonym was, or what was in the text of the email.

FBI Release 189 Pages of Investigative Notes Into Clinton Email — Platte River Network and "Stonetear".  All of the current headlines pushed by the MSM are shiny thing distractions from this after hours drop of FBI reports on a Friday before the presidential debate.  The timing of the release this evening by the FBI is yet again evidence the operational leadership within the DOJ are attempting to diffuse the content to the benefit of Hillary Clinton.  Against the "stonetear" revelations the heavily redacted investigative reports released today carry an increased dynamic.  Here is just one excerpt of importance. [...]

FBI gave top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills immunity in email probe, rep says.  Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and two other staffers were granted immunity as part of the now-closed FBI probe into the former secretary of state's email practices, according to a top House Republican who questioned whether the numerous deals hindered the bureau's ability to build a case.  "This is beyond explanation," House oversight committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said in a statement Friday.  "The FBI was handing out immunity agreements like candy.  I've lost confidence in this investigation and I question the genuine effort in which it was carried out."  The arrangements detailed by Chaffetz bring the total number of publicly known immunity deals in the Clinton case to five.

Clinton Email Scandal:  New Revelations Of Cover-Up Spell Trouble For Hillary.  No doubt, Hillary Clinton and her avid supporters had hoped the email scandal that has plagued her all year was finally beginning to die down.  No such luck.  Polls show Americans still care about it — and it remains a major issue in her campaign.  The most recent revelation to show the duplicity and outright lying of Clinton about the email scandal was the discovery that her outside tech specialist, Paul Combetta of Platte River Networks, sought in July 2014 help on the Reddit forum to delete email addresses from the files of a "very VIP" client before shipping them to others.  Combetta used the screen name "stonetear," a name he had foolishly used elsewhere on the web, so it was directly traceable to him.

State Department reveals FBI uncovered 2,800 emails Clinton never turned over.  The State Department said Friday it likely has more than 2,800 new emails former Secretary Hillary Clinton never turned over but were recovered by the FBI, and will begin releasing them in batches beginning next month.  But only a small percentage will be processed before the election, the department said in court, arguing its resources are stretched too thin to get them done.  All told, the FBI turned over 15,171 emails it recovered that involved Mrs. Clinton, and of those about 60 percent have been deemed purely personal.  That leaves some 5,600 that are work-related, but based on a sample of data, nearly half of those are duplicates, leaving the 2,800 or so that are new.

Five Clinton aides received immunity deals in FBI probe.  Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, received an immunity deal from the Justice Department during the year-long FBI investigation of Clinton's server.  Two other State Department staffers, John Bentel and Heather Samuelson, were also given immunity agreements, bringing the total number of witnesses who were protected by deals to five.  Bryan Pagliano, Clinton's former IT aide, and Paul Combetta, an employee at the firm hired to manage her server after she left the State Department, received such protection through deals that were reported previously.

Hillary Clinton's lawyer was given immunity 'like candy' by the FBI so they could access her laptop during secret server probe.  A congressman says Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and two other staff members were granted immunity deals in exchange for their cooperation in the now-closed FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state.

FBI Gave Hillary Aide Cheryl Mills Immunity During Investigation.  House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) revealed that the FBI gave Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills immunity as they investigated her private email server.  This kind of news explains why the FBI recommended the DOJ not prosecute Hillary despite overwhelming evidence.

What Happens When You Can't Trust the FBI and the Department of Justice?  In a stunning Friday (isn't it always?) revelation, we found out that yet another key figure from Hillary Clinton's "rat pack" — her former chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills — was given immunity in the email server investigation.  As Ed Morrissey points out, that makes "at least five" — who knows how many there really are — who have received this treatment.  So far that's techies Bryan Pagliano and Paul Combetta (more of him in a moment), John Bentel of the Office of Information Resources Management, and Heather Samuelson, an aide to Mrs. Clinton.  How much the public knows of their immunized testimony is clear — nothing.

State Department convinces udge to delay release of 14,900 new Hillary Clinton emails until after Election Day.  The president of a government transparency group lashed out at the U.S. State Department on Friday after a federal judge ruled that a trove of Hillary Clinton's emails can be released to the public after Election Day.  That means the majority of messages recovered during an FBI investigation into Clinton's classified email scandal won't see the light of day until well after Americans pick a new president, raising the possibility that an 'October surprise' might pop up in December or January.  'This is an absolutely corrupt process the State Department has come up with,' Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told The Wall Street Journal on Friday [9/123/2016], blaming the Obama administration for slow-walking the release.

Day #4 — The "stonetear" Investigation — Chairman Jason Chaffetz Sends Preservation Notice To Reddit.  On Sunday September 18th, researcher Katica discovered Hillary Clinton's email custodian, Paul Combetta, had an alias "stonetear" used on a 2014 Reddit forum asking for assistance in altering archived server records for Hillary Clinton.  We published the archive and discovery at 4:30 am Monday Sept 19th.  Within hours Combetta scrubs his prior posting and attempts to delete his web-footprint.  However, the information is viral as the internet shares the story.

'Hillary's Coverup Operation': Bombshell emails from her IT geeks.  In an important scoop in Sunday's [New York] Post, Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein revealed a host of bombshells from internal emails at Platte River Networks, the company that managed Hillary Clinton's private email servers after she left the State Department.

House panel holds Clinton IT aide in contempt.  Members of the House Oversight Committee voted Thursday [9/22/2016] to hold Hillary Clinton's former IT aide in contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a subpoena for documents and testimony.  Bryan Pagliano, the aide who set up Clinton's private email server, failed to appear before the committee on Sept. 13 and declined to provide a copy of the immunity agreement given to him by the Justice Department during the year-long FBI investigation of Clinton's email network.  "Subpoenas are not optional," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the Oversight Committee, at a hearing Thursday to consider Pagliano's fate.

House panel recommends holding former Clinton IT aide in contempt.  The House oversight committee voted Thursday [9/22/2016] to recommend holding the former State Department IT specialist who set up Hillary Clinton's private server in contempt of Congress, after he again ignored a subpoena to appear before the panel.  The resolution to hold Bryan Pagliano in contempt goes next to the full House, which would ultimately decide whether to hold the controversial figure in the Clinton email case in contempt.  "Subpoenas are not optional," committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said.  "This committee cannot operate, it cannot perform its duty ... if subpoenas are ignored."

DOJ reportedly granted immunity to computer expert who deleted Clinton emails.  The Department of Justice reportedly gave immunity to a computer expert who deleted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails during its investigation into her private email server despite being ordered by Congress to keep them.  The New York Times reported Thursday [9/22/2016] that the Justice Department's immunity deal with Paul Combetta likely means that Republican lawmakers' calls for federal authorities to investigate his deletions will go unheard.  The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, had asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Clinton, her lawyers or Combetta obstructed justice when the emails were deleted in March 2015.

GOP subpoenas FBI to turn over Clinton email docs.  House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, subpoenaed FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday [9/20/2016] for documents and information related to the security of the private email account and server Hillary Clinton used when she led the State Department.  Smith asked Comey for the documents in a Sept. 9 letter, but then issued the subpoena after Comey failed to comply with the request.

Rep. Lamar Smith Demands Interview With "Stonetear" aka Paul Combetta.  Hillary Clinton's IT technician Paul Combetta has been confirmed by all reasonable inquiry to be online user "stonetear" as originally discovered by Katica.  The Clinton camp is scrambling and took the day off today [9/20/2016] in a transparent attempt to come up with a coordinated strategy.  Today, the House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith is demanding answers.

Hillary's I.T. Guy Paul Combetta, aka: "stonetear" — The Reddit and The Timeline.  When Paul Combetta aka "stonetear" woke up yesterday morning, it's doubtful he would have suspected a two year old archive written under his Reddit pseudonym would have been on his mind. [...] However, someone must have alerted him asap because within hours of our story hitting the web (04:45am EDT) Combetta began furiously deleting his Reddit postings, user information, and various media forum histories.

House Committee Threatens To Subpoena Clinton Email Tech Who Sought Reddit Advice.  A congressional committee is threatening to subpoena the tech firm that managed Hillary Clinton's server after it was revealed on Monday [9/19/2016] that one of that company's technicians sought advice on the website Reddit on how to strip the former secretary of state's email address from her emails.  "Yesterday, new information emerged regarding the role of a key Platte River Networks employee in managing Secretary Clinton's private email server," Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, wrote to Platte River Networks (PRN) attorney Kenneth Eichner.

Rep. Chaffetz follows the Clinton 'Email Trail'.  This past week, for the first time, we heard public testimony from technicians who helped set up Hillary Clinton's email systems when she was Secretary of State then helped permanently delete emails after they were subpoenaed.  Which meant that the FBI couldn't review them.  This week, The Republican-led house oversight committee held hearings.  Sharyl Attkisson sat down with Chairman Jason Chaffetz to talk about the investigation.

Inside the scramble to cover up Clinton's private email server.  The FBI report noted there were many hacking attempts into the system, both while Clinton was secretary of state and afterward when Platte River Networks took over the administration of the home server.  The agency said none had been successful, and it never named the hackers or their points of origin.  But multiple internal Platte River emails reviewed by The Post show that computers in China tried on three occasions in 2014 to log into Clinton's server and a computer in Russia tried once in 2013.

FBI Botched Clinton Investigation:  Never Disclosed Hillary, Aides Used Covert Google Server to Hide Benghazi Emails.  It's like a bad spy movie involving a third-world government.  Or perhaps a slap stick comedy.  The Secretary of State of the United States reading, sending, receiving sensitive emails with national security secrets, threats and classified or top secret intelligence over Google's public Gmail.  We expect this from chatting soccer moms but not from the top diplomat of the United States and her aides.  But it gets even worse.  The FBI either never discovered this blatant and clandestine violation of federal laws or did and simply covered it up.

Government Corruption and Incompetence:  The Continuing Saga.  It is a stunning, disturbing and persistent pattern of incompetence, corruption, and possible obstruction of justice.  After reading and reviewing the FBI's publicly released 11-page 302 report on its interview with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the FBI's 47-page summary of its investigation into the State Department email scandal, it's difficult to come to any other conclusion.  These reports indicate that the Obama Administration has engaged in an alarming pattern of misbehavior despite the President's statement that "A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency."  Abundant evidence of incompetence and a lack of accountability by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and State Department issues forth from the handling of the investigation into private email servers and top-secret, classified information.

Oversight threatens to subpoena IT firm for Clinton server records.  The House Oversight Committee is threatening the IT firm that managed Hillary Clinton's private email server with a subpoena if it fails to turn over related documents.  Earlier this month, the panel asked that the Denver-based Platte River Networks turn over all documents and communications relating to Clinton's server, as well as specific information on the 2015 deletion of an email archive.  The firm did not respond by the Tuesday deadline set by Oversight.  Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Wednesday extended the deadline to Friday, "otherwise, the Committee will be required to issue a subpoena to obtain those materials."

DNC Discovers Emails Were Hacked... So They Emailed Everyone New Passwords.  These techie superstars probably considered changing their password to... "password"

DNI Declines Required Damage Assessment of Clinton's Leaked Email Secrets.  The U.S. intelligence community declined to conduct a required assessment of the damage to national security caused by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton sending and receiving secrets on a private email server.  "ODNI is not leading an [intelligence community]-wide damage assessment and is not aware of any individual IC element conducting such formal assessments," Joel D. Melstad, a spokesman for the of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said.  The most sensitive classified information leaked and possibly obtained by foreign intelligence services included ultra-secret information on U.S. drone strikes, according to American intelligence officials.

Facing Clinton stonewall, Congress ponders next move.  The House Government Oversight Committee subpoenaed three key figures in the Hillary Clinton email scandal to testify at a hearing Tuesday.  Two declined to testify, citing their Fifth Amendment rights.  A third refused to show up at all.  One of those who took the Fifth was Paul Combetta, a technician at Platte River Networks, the company that handled Clinton's email system.  Combetta is the man who actually deleted Clinton's email archives in March 2015, using the now-notorious BleachBit program.  The Justice Department reportedly gave Combetta immunity in its investigation, yet he still refused to talk to Congress.

Powell warned Clinton not to make him fall guy over email scandal, leaked messages reveal.  Colin Powell attempted to persuade Hillary Clinton and her aides to not use him as a scapegoat for the controversy surrounding Clinton's private email server, according to leaked emails hacked from Powell's Gmail account.  In the emails, which were leaked by the website D.C. Leaks, Powell wrote to at least one confidant about his repeated warning to Clinton not to blame him for the scandal.  "I told her staff three times not to try that gambit.  I had to throw a mini tantrum at a Hampton's party to get their attention.  She keeps tripping into these 'character' minefields," he wrote, according to The Intercept.  He reportedly had tried to settle the matter in a meeting with Clinton aide Cheryl Mills.

Clinton Email Tech Assistant Had No Security Clearance.  The aide who set up former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private servers and email apparently had no security clearance, according to the findings of a congressional committee Tuesday [9/13/2016].  Clinton aide Justin Cooper turned heads concerning the Department of State records preservation practices during a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  Cooper is the same aide who also sometimes destroyed Clinton's BlackBerry phones, "breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer," the FBI investigative summary report said.

Hillary's IT guru says GOP is trying to harass and humiliate him.  The State Department official who set up Hillary Clinton's private email server will not comply with a congressional subpoena seeking his testimony at a House hearing on Tuesday [9/13/2016], claiming that he is being targeted for public harassment and humiliation.  Bryan Pagliano's lawyers informed the House Oversight Committee on Monday of his plans not to attend the session, according to The Washington Post.  "Any effort to require Mr. Pagliano to publicly appear this week and again assert his Fifth Amendment rights before a committee of the same Congress, inquiring about the same matter as the Benghazi Committee, furthers no legislative purpose and is a transparent effort to publicly harass and humiliate our client for unvarnished political purposes," Pagliano's lawyers at the Beltway firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld wrote in a letter to the Oversight Committee, which is chaired by Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz.

Lawmaker Subpoenas FBI Official For ALL Hillary Case Records During House Hearing.  In a dramatic moment during a House hearing on Monday, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz slapped an FBI official with a subpoena for all documents related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  "Will the FBI provide to Congress the full file with no redactions of personal identifiable information?" Chaffetz asked Jason Herring, the FBI's acting assistant director of legislative affairs, during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing.  "I cannot make that commitment sitting here today," Herring said.  Chaffetz has sought all of the records related to the FBI's Clinton email investigation, including all interview notes, which are referred to as 302s.  Earlier this month, the FBI released a heavily-redacted report of its conclusions from the investigation.

Clinton's Email Eraser Takes the Fifth.  Paul Combetta, the guy from Platte River Networks who used BleachBit to forever delete thousands of Clinton emails after they had been subpoenaed, took the Fifth today [9/13/2016] before Congress.  Uhh, people who were involved with a presidential candidate taking the Fifth.  It's Watergate redux, and yet Hillary Clinton remains a viable candidate.  Meantime, the dude who maintained Clinton's private server, Brain Pagliano, ignored the call to testify before Congress altogether.

Platte River Networks Employee Expressed Concern About Clinton Emails.  Yesterday, two witnesses who worked for Platte River Networks, the Colorado-based firm that managed the Clinton server after Hillary left the State Department, pleaded the Fifth before the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing titled "Examining Preservation of State Department Records."  In March of 2015, Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton deleted Clinton's archives even though they were aware of a court order and a congressional subpoena to preserve the records.  The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Tuesday [9/13/2016] released an email dated August 19, 2015, that was sent between Platte River Networks employees.  The email expressed deep concern over the destruction of the records.

FBI Director Comey refused to testify on Clinton emails.  FBI Director James Comey refused to attend a classified briefing with the House Oversight Committee despite receiving an invitation to testify about the bureau's reluctance to disclose thousands of pages of evidence compiled in its year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email use.  Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee's top Democrat, said Monday that Comey had declined to appear at the meeting because he had "already bent over backwards" to explain the FBI's decision-making in the Clinton email case.

Ex-Hillary Clinton aide refuses to appear at email hearing.  Two outside information technology consultants involved in handling Hillary Clinton's private email setup repeatedly invoked their 5th Amendment rights at a House hearing Tuesday, while a former State Department information technology official defied a subpoena and failed to show up for the session.  However, a former close aide to Bill Clinton who played a key role in setting up Hillary Clinton's email system — Justin Cooper — testified publicly on the arrangement for the first time at the House Oversight Committee hearing.

Clinton Email Tech Assistant Had No Security Clearance.  The aide who set up former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private servers and email apparently had no security clearance, according to the findings of a congressional committee Tuesday [9/13/2016].  Clinton aide Justin Cooper turned heads concerning the Department of State records preservation practices during a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  Cooper is the same aide who also sometimes destroyed Clinton's BlackBerry phones, "breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer," the FBI investigative summary report said.

Clinton Aide Subpoenaed Over Server Won't Appear Before Congress.  An aide who helped Hillary Clinton maintain her private e-mail server didn't show up for a congressional hearing Tuesday [9/13/2016] despite a subpoena, while two other witnesses who worked for a company hired by the Clintons invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions.  Bryan Pagliano, a former staffer on Clinton's 2008 presidential bid who was granted immunity by the Justice Department during a probe of the server, has twice before invoked his Fifth Amendment rights on the matter and didn't attend the session.  The latest call for Pagliano to testify furthered "no legislative purpose and is a transparent effort to publicly harass and humiliate" him "for unvarnished political purposes," Pagliano's lawyers wrote in a letter to the committee's chairman, Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah.

Trump calls Hillary's email crisis 'a far bigger scandal than Watergate' as IT expert who set up her notorious homebrew server pleads the Fifth Amendment.  Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that Hillary Clinton's broadening classified email scandal is 'a far bigger scandal than Watergate,' as a trio of witnesses in the case cited their Fifth Amendment rights and refused to talk to Congress about it.  'Hillary Clinton made 13 phones disappear, including with a hammer, so the FBI couldn't see them,' Trump told an audience of supporters in Clive, Iowa.  'She "bleached" her emails after a Congressional subpoena — that's after the subpoena — came!'  'Now the people who destroyed the emails are all pleading the Fifth Amendment in front of Congress today,' Trump fumed.

Judge Nap: 'Inexplicable' That Clinton Staffers Were Granted Immunity by DOJ.  Congress is ramping up its investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, and they're focusing on a Clinton staffer who set up the server and a computer technician who used a software program to delete backups of her emails.  The Justice Department has apparently granted immunity to those two men, Bryan Pagliano and Paul Combetta.  Now, the House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), wants to know what they told the FBI in exchange for their immunity.

House probe targets Clinton contractor who deleted subpoenaed email; refused to answer key question from FBI.  The chairman of the House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to the company that handled the technical side of Hillary Clinton's private email server.  Rep. Jason Chaffetz wants to know why an employee of Platte River Networks (PRN), which was under contract with Clinton to handle the server, deleted large amounts of email after the Clinton team received a congressional subpoena for the material, and why a PRN technical employee, apparently the one who performed the actual deletions, asserted a legal privilege and refused to tell the FBI what was said on a conference call he took part in with Clinton's attorneys on March 25, 2015, around the time the deletions were performed.

Clinton's experience with classified data contradicts 'unsophisticated' excuse.  "She doesn't come into this as your average person.  She comes in as someone who served on the Armed Services Committee, who has been privy to classified information in the past before she became secretary of state, and, by the way, she was a former first lady," said Sen.  Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican who sits on the same committee, and who said she found Mrs. Clinton's explanation to be incredible.  The latest evidence confounding those trying to understand Mrs. Clinton's handling of emails comes from the FBI, which released notes of its criminal investigation last week showing the former secretary remarkably unaware of her own classification powers as secretary.

Clinton Faces Probe for Obstruction of Justice.  The chairman of the House oversight panel on Tuesday [9/6/2016] formally requested the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia investigate Hillary Clinton for obstruction of justice.  Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips citing the investigative files the FBI turned over last week. [...] In asking for the obstruction probe, Chaffetz cited evidence that a contractor working for Clinton deleted email archives in March 2015, despite knowing they were the subject of a congressional subpoena.

House GOP Leader Asks US Attorney to Investigate Clinton for Destruction of Evidence.  The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Republican Jason Chaffetz of Utah, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Channing Phillips, requesting that he investigate Hillary Clinton for potential destruction of evidence.  This was based on information disclosed by the FBI that a tech firm that Clinton hired to manage her private server deleted thousands of emails.  In the letter, Chaffetz said that "the Committee has identified a sequence of events that may amount to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence by Secretary Clinton and her employees and contractors."

Federal Prosecutor Called On to Investigate Hillary Clinton for 'Obstruction of Justice'.  Hillary Clinton was let off the hook earlier this summer when The Department of Justice hastily dropped the mysterious case of the missing emails.  The flurry of activity coinciding around that curious decision was punctuated by an odd press conference delivered by FBI Director James Comey, followed by a pronouncement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that 'of course, she'd be taking the advice of the FBI and would cease investigation of Mrs. Clinton posthaste.'  As is always the case with the Clintons, there is more to the story.  Signaling that a Hillary Clinton presidency would truly be a historically fractious one, the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has now issued a call for the federal prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton for "obstruction of justice."

Based on her FBI interview, Hillary is either a total liar or the dumbest person alive.  Sometimes I feel like I'm flogging a skeleton, telling you day after day what a gigantic liar Hillary is.  Even when the things we learn make it clear the reality is worse than anyone previously realized, it's almost as if people have become desensitized to it.  Sure, she's a total liar, but we've known that for years.  So what?  But it's more than just that.  It's also the extent to which others who should have been holding her accountable bent over backwards to avoid doing so.  Specifically I'm thinking about the director of the FBI and the news media, both of whom have access to extensive evidence of Hillary's dishonesty, and both of which have declined to take the actions they should have taken with the information they had.

Clinton email had 'multiple' classified markings, challenging her claim to FBI.  New details about the emails on Hillary Clinton's personal server that contained classified markings call into question her claim to the FBI that she didn't know what the markings meant — and even believed they represented an alphabetical listing of paragraphs.  A government source told Fox News that virtually every paragraph in one mail contained so-called portion markings used exclusively for classification purposes.  These classified codes are found on the left-hand side and reflect the classification of the intelligence contained in each paragraph.  The Clinton email has one paragraph marked "C" for "confidential," which is the lowest level of classification.  And the source said "multiple paragraphs (on the same email) are marked, SBU," which means "sensitive but unclassified."  Both codes are there so the reader knows what is classified intelligence.

Justice Dept.  Granted Immunity to Specialist Who Deleted Hillary Clinton's Emails.  A computer specialist who deleted Hillary Clinton's emails despite orders from Congress to preserve them was given immunity by the Justice Department during its investigation into her personal email account, according to a law enforcement official and others briefed on the investigation.  Republicans have called for the department to investigate the deletions, but the immunity deal with the specialist, Paul Combetta, makes it unlikely that the request will go far.  Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to investigate whether Mrs. Clinton, her lawyers or the specialist obstructed justice when the emails were deleted in March 2015.

Clinton Email Scandal:  What Hillary Tells Voters Isn't What She Told The FBI.  Since her first news conference on the topic in March 2015, Clinton has claimed there was no classified material on her server. When classified information started turning up in abundance in her email chains, she modified her claim to say that none of the emails was marked classified.  It's a claim she has made ever since.  But just because Clinton keeps saying something doesn't make it true.  And in this case, what she's saying is intentionally misleading.  FBI Director James Comey made it clear that more than 100 emails that Clinton sent or received contained classified information "at the time they were sent or received."  Eight contained Top Secret information.  Whether these emails were marked or not is entirely irrelevant, a point Comey reiterated in his statement on the case."

Hillary Clinton refuses to explain what she told the FBI about how a concussion impaired her memory.  Hillary Clinton dodged a question on Thursday [9/8/2016] about FBI interview notes that suggested she attributed memory lapses to a 2012 concussion.  The FBI released agents' summaries on Friday from a sit-down with Clinton that came just days before the agency recommended against any criminal prosecution related to her lengthy classified email scandal.  'Can you clarify what you told the FBI about your concussion?' DailyMail.com asked as Clinton walked away from her podium on the tarmac in White Plains, N.Y.  'Read the reports,' she responded, offering no explanation.

Colin Powell DID teach Hillary Clinton how to use private servers and personal email to 'do business with foreign leaders'.  Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton how to use private servers to 'do business' without 'going through State Department servers,' newly released emails have revealed.  Last month Powell claimed that Clinton had been Secretary of State for a year before he told her how he used his personal email accounts while in the same position.  But emails released Wednesday [9/7/2016] by Congressional Democrats show her inquiring about restrictions on her BlackBerry on January 23, 2009, two days after beginning as Secretary of State — and Powell replying.

Rebuttal:
Colin Powell's Outrageous Behavior Is Not a Clinton Defense.  Liberals are gleefully parading around what purports to be an e-mail from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. [...] The main thing to remember is that Powell was not Clinton's boss, professor, mentor, or instruction-giver, and that his intentional misbehavior does not give sanction to hers.  It simply cannot be used (credibly) to defend Mrs. Clinton.

Trump Tears Into Clinton Over Emails: 'People Who Have Nothing to Hide Don't Smash Phones'.  Donald Trump went off on Hillary Clinton over her emails during a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina tonight [9/6/2016].  "People who have nothing to hide don't smash hammers with phones, they don't," he said.  "People who have nothing to hide don't bleach... their emails or destroy evidence to keep i from being publicly archived, as required under public law."  She said Clinton gets treated better than basically everyone else and said there's no parallel to this kind of thing in history.

Chaffetz: Clinton bought used Blackberrys on eBay.  Reckless users and antiquated technology represent the federal government's most critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities, House Oversight Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz said on Wednesday, a problem he said was exemplified by Hillary Clinton's practice of buying Blackberry devices from eBay.  "We have a huge problem with personnel," Chaffetz said at a forum in Washington, D.C.  "I don't want to get into this too much, but part of what was happening with the secretary of state was, she was acquiring technology that wasn't even supported by Blackberry.  You couldn't buy it.  She was actually buying this stuff off of eBay because somebody was selling their old machine.  That's what she liked, so she did.  It creates this huge vulnerability.  And it's unnecessary."

Hillary Clinton's People Knowingly Destroyed Emails They Knew Were Under Congressional and Legal Subpoena.  The story is thus:  Hillary's emails were broadly under subpoena by Congress.  The State Department agreed to provide them.  Hillary had — and this is problematic in itself — a policy of automatically deleting all emails older than 60 days.  This was obviously a way to avoid the Official Records Act, which requires the permanent retention of all work related records.  But after the New York Times story about Hillary's illegal email system broke, an employee at Platte River realized he had not been deleting emails older than 60 days.  In other words — gasp! — a lot of emails, much older than 60 days, had built up in Hillary's account, without being deleted.

EmailGate and the Mystery of the Missing GAMMA.  Last week's Federal Bureau of Investigation release of materials relating to their investigation of Hillary Clinton has reignited the political firestorm surrounding EmailGate.  How the Democratic nominee mishandled her emails while she was secretary of state is again front-page news, which is bad news for Hillary.  Particularly because the FBI's data dump demonstrates clearly that Clinton is either dumb or dishonest — and perhaps both.  Although Team Clinton has responded in their customary fashion, with lawyerly lies and evasions — nothing was "marked" classified, this is really about over-classification, classification is too complex for anybody to understand anyway — the FBI's assessment has thoroughly debunked all of them.  Hillary's professed inability to even recognize classified information, thinking the "C" (for Confidential) meant alphabetical order, will now enter the pantheon of laughable Clinton infamy, alongside her husband's debating the meaning of "is" while under oath.

FBI 'Unable to Acquire' Any of Clinton's 13 Mobile Devices; Aide Says He Smashed 2 With Hammer.  The FBI says its investigation identified "13 total mobile devices" associated with Hillary Clinton's "two known" phone numbers, both in the D.C. area code 212.  All 13 of those devices "potentially were used to send emails" through Clinton's personal email server, but the FBI was unable to acquire or examine any of those devices, at least two of which apparently were smashed by a hammer.

Hillary Clinton Originated State Department Cables With Classified Designation.  [Scroll down]  Hillary Clinton authored the content of the cables (as described); and she herself has originating autonomy to designate material as "classified" or "confidential".  Assange is essentially reminding everyone that Secretary Clinton assigned that designation personally.  It is ridiculous for Secretary Clinton to state she doesn't know what the "(c)" designation is, she used it herself.

Hillary: The Joe Isuzu of American Politics.  The past as they say, is prologue.  The lies Hillary told in the past were merely precursors to the present lies.  Hillary lied about having one device and a private server for "convenience".  She had 13 devices and multiple servers, some physically destroyed.  Perhaps her campaign song should be "If I Had A Hammer".  The setting up of the server, the switching of devices, some destroyed, some lost, implies intent to circumvent laws and regulations, no matter what FBI Director Comey says.  She lied about Colin Powell okaying her perfidy in advance.  She lied about knowing what the "C" on classified documents meant, even though it's the contents and not the markings that make them classified.  She lied about sending and receiving and sending classified documents.  She lied about turning over all work-related documents in her possession.  She lied to the American people, she lied to the American people, and she lied to the FBI.

FBI: Gen. Petraeus Crossed Out 'Classified' Mark On Hillary Clinton Meeting Document.  Newly released documents from the FBI reveal that former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus admitted to "crossing out" a classification marking in a document concerning a meeting that he had with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  These new files were actually released on August 26th, exactly one week before the FBI released the Clinton email investigation summary and interview notes, but, so far, have not received much media attention at all.

DOJ Official Who Led 'Independent' Clinton Email Probe Is An Obama Donor.  One of the Justice Department officials who interviewed Hillary Clinton in July as part of the government's investigation into her email practices has contributed to President Obama's presidential campaigns, The Daily Caller can reveal.  David H. Laufman is named in the notes taken during Clinton's July 2 interview.  Since December 2014 he has served as chief of the counterespionage section of the Justice Department's National Security Division. [...] But Federal Election Commission records show that Laufman has at least some political leanings.

Giuliani on Clinton: 'You're either stupid or you're lying'.  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is not pleased with Hillary Clinton, claiming she lied to the FBI during its investigation into her private email server.  The former secretary of state did actually know the "C" on an email meant "confidential," the Donald Trump surrogate said in an appearance on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning [9/6/2016].  "She said she thought it had to do with alphabetical order.  But the FBI didn't go and ask her, 'was there an A, a B, a D, an E, an F?'  How come she just saw a C?  So now if you can't figure out that 'C' doesn't mean confidential and you're the secretary of state, you're either stupid or you're lying.  I don't think she's the first.  I don't think she's stupid," Giuliani said.

Here's What Probably Led to Blow Up During Cheryl Mills' FBI Interview.  With the release of the Clinton's FBI 302 interview form last Friday, we finally learned that Mills was listed as one of Clinton's four attorneys present at the July 2 interview.  According to the FBI 302 interview form, "Present, for the interview were CLINTON attorney's David F. Kendall, Catherine M. Turner, Chervl D. Mills, Heather Samuelson and [name redacted]."  Thus, it appears as though the Department of Justice agreed to treat Mills as both Clinton's lawyer and fact witness.

Meet the mastermind behind Clinton's massive email coverup.  Newly released FBI documents detailing the bureau's investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails reveal the aide who would likely follow her into the White House as chief counsel was central to a cover-up of evidence sought by investigators.  Yet despite signs Clinton's former chief of staff Cheryl Mills obstructed efforts by investigators to obtain Clinton's emails, the FBI invited Mills to attend Hillary's interview at FBI headquarters as one of her lawyers.  "It's absolutely outrageous," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.

The Curious Case of Cheryl Mills.  The FBI's Labor Day weekend document dump regarding its investigation of Hillary Clinton gives those who thought the result was predetermined much to complain about.  The FBI's notes confirm that her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was among the several lawyers representing Clinton in her FBI interview.  Mills was hip-deep in the events at the heart of the FBI's criminal investigation and was herself a material witness who had previously sat for her own interview.  Yet not only was she allowed by the Department of Justice to participate as counsel in Clinton's interview, her communications with Clinton and other material witnesses also were actively protected by the Department of Justice throughout the criminal and civil investigations.  Typically, the DOJ would look askance where a material witness sought to act as a lawyer for the subject of a federal criminal investigation.  In Mills's case, Justice lawyers went out of their way to accommodate this highly unusual dual-hat role.  For those who wonder whether Clinton's FBI interview was all for show, Mills's participation as a lawyer should be Exhibit A.

Pelosi: Clinton emails [are just] a technicality.  Nancy Pelosi dismissed Hillary Clinton's growing email scandal as a series of "technicalities" Monday [9/5/2016], brushing aside FBI and congressional investigations.  The House minority leader said voters shouldn't get "bogged down in some technicalities" and added, "it's really much ado about nothing, but too much ado."  Pelosi, on CBS' "This Morning," had been asked about an FBI report released last week, in which Clinton repeatedly said she couldn't recall key details and events related to classified information procedures.

CNN Fact Check Confirms Clinton Aide Destroyed Mobile Devices With Hammers.  CNN confirmed live on air Friday [9/2/2016] that a Hillary Clinton aide destroyed some of the former secretary of state's used mobile devices with hammers, affirming information contained in the FBI's investigation of Clinton's private email server.  The discussion of mobile devices being destroyed by State Department personnel came after the FBI released on Friday [9/2/2016] files from its investigation, including notes from a lengthy interview with Clinton.

FBI: Clinton withheld 17,500 emails.  FBI agents said they recovered 17,448 "unique work-related and personal" emails from Hillary Clinton's private server that were not provided by her legal team.  The revelation came in notes released Friday by the FBI related to the investigation of Clinton's email system.  Agents said 81 email chains discovered in the course of their year-long probe should have been considered classified at the time they were written, contrary to Clinton's claims that everything sensitive was retroactively classified.

Hillary Deleted Subpoenaed Emails Related to Benghazi Terror Attack.  The Benghazi emails were subpoenaed by Congress on March 4, 2015.  It appears she had deleted them the previous December.  However, the State Department had asked her to turn over her work-related correspondence on October 28, 2014.  At the very least this strongly suggests that she willfully mishandled classified information, and that she perjured herself to cover it.  Even a half-serious attempt at justice would likely place her behind bars.

Guess Who Paid for Hillary's 'Private' Server.  Not many people object to the federal General Services Administration cover the costs of a former president's pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel — because most of the time these are fairly minor expenses.  For example, each president gets $96,600 per year for staffing that they can divide as they see fit; they could have one staffer making the full amount or three making about $32,000 per year, et cetera.  Politico's report notes George H. W. Bush has four people on his taxpayer-funded staff, while Bill Clinton has 10.  In other words, the GSA funding was used to boost salaries of Clinton staffers making money from other sources — i.e., the Foundation.  I know this will stun you, but foreign governments and individuals will still be able to give to the Clinton Foundation in a Hillary Clinton presidency — even with the "reforms" the Clintons promised.

Latest email disclosure is just more proof that Clinton lied.  On Tuesday [8/30/2016], The [New York] Post's Daniel Halper broke the news that Hillary Clinton continued recklessly mishandling classified information even after stepping down as secretary of state.  The revelation is bracing — but hardly surprising.  We already knew Clinton's email practices remained a national security vulnerability after she left the State Department at the end of President Obama's first term.  For nearly two years, she maintained the servers through which her unauthorized, non-secure homebrew communication system had operated.  As we now know, about 62,000 emails were stored on those servers, over 2,000 of which contained classified information, including some of the most sensitive national defense secrets — and the highly classified sources and methods for acquiring those secrets — maintained by our government.

John Kerry's Chief Of Staff Thought People Were 'Obsessed' With Clinton Email Story.  "Obsessed."  "Truly stupid."  "Embarrassing."  Those are a few of the comments that Secretary of State John Kerry's chief of staff Jonathan Finer made in email exchanges in the days and weeks after the Hillary Clinton email scandal blew up on the national stage last year.  The emails, which the State Department gave The Daily Caller in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show the candid remarks of a high-ranking State Department official regarding the Clinton email fiasco as it was unfolding.

Taxpayers forked out $ to set up Clinton's secret server.  Taxpayer funds intended to allow ex-presidents maintain an office after they leave the White House helped pay a Bill Clinton aide who set up the family's infamous email account, a new analysis reveals.  The funds, about $97,000 per year per president, are part of an allocation that helps former presidents maintain an office after they leave public service.  In Clinton's case, the president apparently elected to split the funds among numerous staff aides — and then supplement their incomes with additional work on behalf of the Clinton Foundation and a private firm closely linked to Clinton and some of his top hands.

Clintons dispute report on Bill Clinton's use of ex-presidents program money.  A new report detailing how Bill Clinton spent federal dollars to set up his personal office after leaving the White House is fueling ongoing speculation about the links between the former president, the Democratic nominee and the Clinton Foundation.  The report, an investigation published Thursday [9/1/2016] by Politico, lays out how Clinton used money available to him through the Former Presidents Act to pay and provide benefits to members of his personal staff, many that also worked for his foundation, and to purchase supplies, including a server, for his office.

Bill Clinton used tax dollars to subsidize foundation, private email server.  Bill Clinton's staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family's foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife's private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.  Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

FBI found extensive evidence Hillary emails violated federal records laws.  Though it was not their primary mission, FBI agents who investigated Hillary Clinton's email collected significant evidence suggesting she and her team violated federal record-keeping laws, including persisting to use a private Blackberry and server to conduct State Department business after being warned they posed legal and security risks, government sources tell Circa.

FBI releases documents related to its Clinton email investigation.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation released a summary [9/2/2016] of the July 2 interview it conducted with the Democratic presidential candidate, as well as other details of its investigation into her use of a private email server while heading the State Department.

FBI releases Clinton investigation documents.  Several dozen pages of documents released Friday from the FBI's Hillary Clinton email probe show the former secretary of state repeatedly claimed to have little training or understanding about the classification process — despite leading the department that handled such information on a regular basis and having a security clearance.  The document dump also revealed the gaps that remain in the record.  Not only were numerous sections — and entire pages — redacted, but the files showed the FBI could not obtain 13 Clinton mobile devices that may have been used to send emails from her personal email address, in addition to two iPads.  And they showed Clinton claiming she could not recall numerous details.

Report: Clinton Emailed More Classified Info Than Previously Known.  Hillary Clinton may have sent more classified information than was previously known while she was secretary of state.  At least one of the seven DVDs of Clinton's emails from her private server that the FBI sent to the State Department contained classified material, Vice News reported Wednesday [8/31/2016].  What the classified information discussed is unknown.

Hillary Clinton may have sent even more classified info through email.  A Justice Department attorney made the disclosure during a hearing Wednesday [8/31/2016] in US District Court in Washington, DC, part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit VICE News filed against the FBI for a wide range of records the bureau recovered from Clinton's server.  During the 45-minute hearing, DOJ attorney Jennie Kneedler said the FBI sent the State Department two DVDs on July 21: one containing 14,900 documents, and the other containing an unknown number of classified records.  It's unclear whether any of those classified documents are the same communications that have already been identified and reviewed by the State Department, or if they're an entirely new batch of records.

Why did the 30 Benghazi emails FBI discovered escape destruction?  Everyone is wondering what's in the 30 previously unknown emails related to Benghazi the FBI managed to discover on Hillary's server and turned over to the State Department for potential redaction.  But the manner by which they escaped destruction may tell us a lot, no matter how much redaction takes place.  The very fact that the emails were recoverable has got Hillary and her team of lawyers in a lot of trouble.

Classified: Email Hillary Clinton sent after leaving State Department partially redacted.  An email that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton sent almost four months after she left the State Department was partially redacted before being publicly released, raising questions about whether she conveyed classified information as a private citizen.  The May 2013 email, which the Republican National Committee obtained under a Freedom of Information Act and provided Wednesday, joins more than 2,000 messages that the former secretary of state sent or received through her private server during her tenure that have been labeled "confidential," a low level of classification.

Clinton emailed classified information after leaving State Dept..  Hillary Clinton continued sending classified information even after leaving the State Department, The [New York] Post has exclusively learned.  On May 28, 2013, months after stepping down as secretary of state, Clinton sent an email to a group of diplomats and top aides about the "123 Deal" with the United Arab Emirates.  But the email, which was obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of Information Act request, was heavily redacted upon its release by the State Department because it contains classified information.

Mark Cuban:  It's Not Hillary's Fault Her Email Server Wasn't Set Up Right.  Monday night [8/29/2016] on "CNN Tonight," supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, said Clinton did nothing wrong because the person who set up her email should have set up "filters and alerts that said any email that came with a classified header."

The Editor says...
Of course Mark Cuban knows what he's talking about, from the technical side.  But his argument doesn't explain or excuse the underlying purpose of setting up a private email server in the first place — which apparently was deception, obscuranticity, and the evasion of FOIA.

Hillary Clinton to explain to court who 'recommended' secret email account.  Among the questions are who "recommended" that she use a secret email account in the first place, whether she ever told the officials responsible for archiving records that she had the secret account, and what steps she took after attempts to hack her account.  Mrs. Clinton could also have to answer whether she destroyed work-related emails.

A fresh reminder that the Clintons never play by the rules.  How about that:  Among the 14,900 "new" Hillary Clinton e-mails uncovered by the FBI are 30 or so that concern the Benghazi attack — the most controversial single episode in Clinton's four years running the State Department.  So much for Clinton's claim that she'd handed over all her work-related e-mails.  [Indeed]:  So much for any remaining illusion that she even tried to provide a complete record.  But, as someone once asked:  What difference, at this point, does it make?  Can Hillary's "trust deficit" get any deeper?  In part, that depends on what's actually in the e-mails, which may not be released until the end of September.

Judicial Watch Submits Email Questions Hillary Clinton — Written Answers, Under Oath, Due September 29.  Judicial Watch today [8/30/2016] announced it submitted questions to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning her email practices.  Clinton's answers, under oath, are due on September 29.  On August 19, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted Judicial Watch further discovery on the Clinton email matter and ordered Clinton to answer the questions "by no later than thirty days thereafter...."  Under federal court rules, Judicial Watch is limited to twenty-five questions.

The 25 questions Clinton must answer under oath on her secret server — including whether she directly ordered the destruction of thousands of missing messages.  Here's a document Hillary Clinton almost certainly wishes she could just delete:  a 30-page list of interrogatories about her private email server that the former secretary of state must answer under court order.  The questions, prepared by attorneys for conservative open government group Judicial Watch, were transmitted to Clinton on Tuesday [8/30/2016].  Under an order by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, Clinton must respond by Sept. 29th.

FBI to release notes of agents interviewing Hillary Clinton about her secret email account.  The FBI plans to hand over some of its notes from its interview with U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton regarding her use of private email while secretary of state to news outlets that requested them, CNN reported on Tuesday [8/30/2016].  However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will not yet release other notes from the law enforcement agency's interviews with Clinton aides or turn over other investigative material, CNN said, citing unnamed sources.

A Clinton scandal even the media can't ignore.  Judicial Watch says the court has mandated that the State Department review the emails and turn over responsive records by September 13th.  In a court statement last week, the State Department admitted that it found documents related to the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack among the 14,900 Clinton emails and attachments uncovered by the FBI that Mrs. Clinton had deleted and withheld from the State Department.  "She thought she'd destroyed them," reports Chris Farrell, director of investigations at Judicial Watch.  "She thought that she hid them from the public, but nearly 15,000 more emails have been recovered."  He asserts that these are records the presidential candidate certainly does not want made public.

Now 30 Benghazi-related emails have been recovered from Hillary's server — and they weren't in the batch she turned over to the State Department.  The State Department's lawyer said it would need until the end of September to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before they are released.

Dozens of Hillary Clinton Emails About Benghazi Found in 15,000 Messages She Kept from FBI.  The State Department says about 30 emails that may be related to the 2012 attack on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, are among the thousands of Hillary Clinton emails recovered during the FBI's recently closed investigation into her use of a private server.

Hillary's Hacked Emails and Blackmail.  When an undercover agent's identity and mission is divulged to his/her adversaries, it can be properly said that the agent has been "compromised."  When a nation's secrets are provided to its enemies it may be said that the nation's security has been compromised.  Finally, people may also be compromised also when they act in a nefarious way and others become aware of their conduct.  This sort of compromise creates a vulnerability for that person and can leave such an individual open to blackmail or other covert coercion.  This is the world in which Hillary Clinton now resides as a direct result of her conduct — or rather, misconduct.

'Hillary Show' episodes entertaining.  Julian Assange of WikiLeaks promised on Fox this week that the next releases of embarrassing emails that Hillary Clinton futilely tried to deep six will be "quite interesting, some even entertaining." Entertaining?  For my money, the ones already released have been more fun than a barrel of monkeys.  The Hillary Show comes across as a sort of cross between Leona Helmsley and "I Love Lucy."  I mean, this is a woman who calls Harriet Tubman a "homegirl."  She has a pseudonym for her own daughter.  (Diane Reynolds.)  She orders aides to find out the times of TV shows, as well as the frequency of radio stations.

1/3 of Abedin Emails [were] 100% Redacted.  Judicial Watch's release this week of 725 pages of State Department emails involving Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin demonstrates the Obama administration considers a large percentage of the emails sent through Clinton's private server too sensitive for Congress or the American public to read.  Of the 725 pages, more than 250 pages were 100 percent redacted, many with "PAGE DENIED" stamped in bold.  Judicial Watch said the new cache includes previously unreleased email exchanges in which former Abedin "provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state."

Judicial Watch:  Hillary Clinton Withheld Or Deleted Benghazi Related Documents.  Among the 14,900 federal documents Hillary Clinton is said to have failed to turn over to the State Department in 2014 are some related to the Benghazi attacks, according to Judicial Watch.  The conservative watchdog group says that government lawyers admitted in court papers filed on Tuesday that the nearly 15,000 pages of Clinton records recovered by the FBI included some which "satisfied the [Benghazi-related] search terms."  That suggests that Clinton withheld or deleted records which referred to the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks which left four Americans dead.

Gowdy Lays Out What Answers Clinton Hasn't Given on Private Email, Deletion Practices.  Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked Gowdy, a career prosecutor, what questions he would have asked during the FBI interview of Clinton.  "The direct evidence would be, Madam Secretary, why did you set up this email server this way?  Why did you not take a state-dot-gov email address?" Gowdy asked.  "And her response was, and it always has been, convenience.  And then that's when you press and say, well, what could be more convenient than just doing a state-dot-gov email address?"  The "labyrinthine" efforts she used to have a home-brewed server were actually inconvenient, Gowdy said.  "I would then ask, why did you delete emails that you kept for a year and a half?  Keep in mind these personal emails, she didn't bother to delete them for a year and a half," Gowdy said.  "It was the fall of 2014, a year and a half after she left the State Department, that she decided to start deleting emails.  Why didn't you delete them the month you left?  Why didn't you delete them six months after you left?  And the other question they should have asked her is, Madam Secretary, why didn't you turn your emails over the day you left service?  Why did you hold onto them for almost two years?"

Court Orders New Clinton Email Production by September 13.  Judicial Watch today [8/25/2016] announced that a federal court has ordered the State Department to review newly found Clinton emails and turn over responsive records by September 13.  And, in two other Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, the State Department is scheduled to release additional emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's non-state.gov email system beginning September 30.  In a court filing this week, the State Department admitted it had found Benghazi-related documents among the 14,900 Clinton emails and attachments uncovered by the FBI that Mrs. Clinton deleted and withheld from the State Department.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Hillary's 'Apology' Doesn't Cut It.  After 18 months of repeatedly making false claims and phony excuses about her email setup while secretary of state, Hillary Clinton offered what looked like a straight-on apology.  But it's only an apology in the Clinton sense of the word — one made out of desperation, not as an act of contrition.

Clinton's inescapable cloud of corruption.  As the drip, drip, drip of information highlighting the intersection between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department surfaces, the political fallout for Hillary Clinton is unavoidable.  The newly exposed emails demonstrate another lie told by the Clinton campaign.  Despite her lawyers stating that only 30,000 emails on her server were related to work, the 15,000 puts that number closer to 45,000.  But more importantly, it paints a clearer picture of what Hillary Clinton was attempting to hide by setting up private servers in the first place and attempting to wipe them clean.

Chaffetz claims FBI gave Congress conflicting documents on Clinton email probe.  House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) says he has a "couple problems" with the documents provided by the FBI from its investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, including several differences between sets of documents in two separate binders.  One issue, Chaffetz explained on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," is the "high level of redactions."

Tom Fitton:  State Department Stonewalling Release of 15K Newly Discovered Hillary Clinton Emails.  The FBI announced on Monday [8/22/2016] that it has discovered fifteen thousand previously undisclosed Clinton emails — a stash nearly half the size of the work-related emails Clinton actually turned over to the State Department.  If Clinton was trying to keep this material hidden until after the election, it appears she might have succeeded.

One Lie Too Many for Hillary?  [Scroll down]  This is no defense; it's an indictment.  Secretary Clinton had, according to [Joe] Conason's reporting, already determined that it was in her best interest to use a private server for her electronic communications.  That server was used for all Clinton's correspondence, including sensitive and classified emails related to American national and diplomatic security — despite Powell's explicit warning against doing just that.

Clinton's pathetic 'Colin Powell made me do it' defense.  The influence that Colin Powell has over Hillary Clinton is something to behold.  His word is her command.  When he tells her to break the law and endanger the nation's secrets, she doesn't hesitate.  She salutes smartly and does as she is told.  Clinton has been desperate for the moral cover of Colin Powell for her email arrangement since the scandal first broke last year.  Now we've learned that Clinton told the FBI that Powell advised her to use private email as secretary of state at a dinner in 2009.  This escalates Clinton's email defense from, "Hey, Colin Powell did it, too," all the way to, "Colin Powell made me do it."  The Powell defense has given Clinton shills something to say on TV, but doesn't make much sense.

Rice has 'no recollection' of Clinton-Powell email conversation.  Another former Secretary of State — Condoleezza Rice — has been drawn into the fray over who advised Hillary Clinton to use a private email server while she was America's top diplomat.  An aide to Rice told CNN that Rice has "no recollection" of a conversation between Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell that reportedly took place at a 2009 dinner party of former Secretaries of State, during which Powell allegedly recommended that Clinton use a private email account.  The Daily Caller was first to report that Rice had commented on the issue.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Is Hillary's Cover-Up Unraveling?  Now that the FBI has found nearly 15,000 more emails and documents missing from Hillary Clinton's server, the strategy is clear:  Clinton will admit to nothing even as more emails dribble out, then when the pattern of criminality becomes clear in October or early November, her campaign will sing that it's "old news" or blame others.  And Big Media will ignore it.

Judge orders expedited release of 15,000 Hillary Clinton documents found by FBI.  At a heated hearing Monday [8/22/2016], a federal judge pressed the State Department on when it would release the 15,000 documents uncovered by the FBI during its investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server.  Initially, the State Department attorney would not answer Judge James Boasberg's repeated questions about the number of emails recovered by the FBI. The judge urged the State Department to expedite its review of what is called "Disc 1," which is one of two discs handed over from FBI to the State Department in late July.

FBI found 14,000 new Clinton emails.  The FBI found nearly 15,000 emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never turned over to the government after she left office — despite her insistence she'd handed in all her work-related messages.  The Obama administration revealed the messages in a court hearing Monday [8/22/2016].  The 14,900 emails are just part of thousands the FBI has turned over, after it took control of Mrs. Clinton's secret email server.

Tim Kaine Just Realized He's in Over His Head with Hillary.  It seems as though Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine has finally realized what he's gotten himself into by having to come to the defense of his running mate Hillary Clinton.  Kaine crumbled, as Newsbusters pointed out, on the TODAY show this week when Savannah Guthrie "actually grilled him" on Clinton's lies that were perpetrated for years about her personal e-mail usage while secretary of state.

Judge orders Clinton to provide written answers to questions on private email use.  A federal judge Friday [8/19/2016] ordered Hillary Clinton to answer questions from a conservative watchdog group about her use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state.  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan issued the order as part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.  The group had sought to question Clinton under oath and in person, but the judge ruled she would only have to answer questions in writing.

Federal judge gives Hillary Clinton 30 days to come up with lies in response to lawsuit questions.  Hillary Clinton has taken a couple days off recently, but that's understandable because Friday [8/19/2016] was Bill's birthday, so she probably had to stay home to turn away all the strippergrams.  But it's also possible her campaign team needed time to reinforce their lies about the emails and server in light of a federal judge's ruling.

Hillary's Done... And She Knows It.  [Scroll down]  She knows any day between now and November 8th... Julian Assange and Wikileaks will drop a bombshell that will destroy her presidential run, political career and legacy all in one.  She knows what's coming, because she knows what's in those emails.  If Wikileaks has what Hillary thinks they have, her future involves the "Big House," not the White House.

Colin Powell has had enough of Hillary 'pinning' email scandal on him.  Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has had enough.  Since the Hillary Clinton email scandal first surfaced, she and her team of apologists have been bringing up Gen. Colin Powell, the Republican-ish former Secretary of State who, according to Clinton, was the Neil Armstrong of personal email use.  "Clinton did nothing different than what Colin Powell did," was the constant refrain from Hillary's defenders.  Of course, that argument has been completely destroyed by the facts.

Colin Powell claims Hillary Clinton is falsely trying to blame him for email scandal.  Colin Powell says Hillary Clinton's camp is trying to falsely blame him for her email scandal.  In a three-and-a-half-hour interview with the FBI provided to Congress this week, Clinton claimed Powell, Secretary of State under George W Bush, told her to use a personal email account for official business.  But speaking to Page Six Saturday, Powell said that she had been using her personal email for a year before he told her he used to do the same thing.

Colin Powell Goes under the Clinton Bus.  To the list of victims, common folks, and politicians left in the wake of that runaway bus of crime and corruption known as Clinton, add one more — former Secretary of State Colin Powell. [...] Of course, even assuming Powell made such a comment, he certainly did not have in mind that Hillary would establish a private server in her home, and Powell in his documented comments on the use of private email was clear to specify it was only for unclassified material.  Hillary, of course, used it for both.  And Powell didn't operate a phony private charitable foundation to line the pockets of his family and a host of cronies during his tenure, manipulating American foreign policy to that end.  If he had, he might have needed such a private server to keep his corruption secret and avoid jail, like Hillary.

Facebook Falsely Claims Colin Powell Cleared Hillary In Email Case.  Facebook's "Trending Topics" section is at it again.  Saturday morning [8/20/2016] the site ran a headline in the section declaring, "Colin Powell:  Former Secretary of State Confirms He Recommended Using Personal Email to Hillary Clinton."  The only problem is Powell made no such declaration and he denied Clinton's claim.

Powell: 'No recollection' of dinner party email advice to Clinton.  Colin Powell rejected Hillary Clinton's assertion to the FBI that he had advised her during a 2009 dinner party to use a personal email account.  "General Powell has no recollection of the dinner conversation," the former secretary of state's office said in a statement Friday [8/19/2016].

Hillary Told FBI That Colin Powell Recommended She Use Personal Email.  Hillary Clinton told FBI investigators last month that Gen. Colin Powell, her predecessor as secretary of state, suggested that she use a personal email account for State Department business.  The New York Times also reported that Clinton asked Powell about his email practices in a 2009 email exchange.  A person with knowledge of the contents of notes taken during Clinton's three-and-a-half [hour] interview with the FBI shared the information with The Times.  The FBI gave those notes, which are known as 302s, to Congress earlier this week.  They have not been made public, though Clinton's campaign has expressed concern that they will be.

Hillary To FBI: My Email Abuse was Colin Powell's Fault.  This is ridiculously stupid for two basic reasons... [#1] Colin Powell's private email was hacked [and] [#2] It doesn't remotely matter what Powell did or said.  There were basic laws in place.  Hillary and her people violated them.

Republicans blast FBI for format of Clinton email documents.  Republican lawmakers are expressing annoyance that, although the FBI has passed Congress the documents detailing the investigation into the Clinton email scandal, the documents are not actually readable due to the format in which they were handed over.  According to Fox News, the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Republican Chuck Grassley claimed that documents handed over by the FBI are largely unreadable because they published classified material together with unclassified material, so only a select few have the clearance to read the evidence.

House to hold Clinton perjury hearing.  Members of the House Judiciary Committee are set to question FBI officials next month about allegations of perjury involving Hillary Clinton's conflicting statements to Congress last year.  Witnesses at the hearing could include FBI Director James Comey, according to USA Today, which first reported the panel's plans.  A Judiciary Committee spokeswoman confirmed the hearing to the Washington Examiner and said lawmakers plan to approach the issue at an FBI oversight hearing the panel holds each year.

House panel to probe claims of Clinton perjury.  Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are planning to press officials from the FBI in a hearing scheduled for next month on allegations that Hillary Clinton committed perjury.  A GOP committee aide confirmed to The Hill that lawmakers intend to question the FBI about the lawmakers' charges during an oversight hearing planned at some point in September.

Kaine Crumbles When NBC Actually Presses Him on Hillary E-Mail Scandal.  During an exclusive interview aired on Wednesday's NBC Today, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine struggled to respond to Hillary Clinton's ongoing e-mail scandal as co-host Savannah Guthrie actually grilled him on the topic.  She pressed:  "This is something that dogs Hillary Clinton, whether or not people trust her.  If you look at what she said over the past year or so about her e-mail, I can count at least four statements that just turned out not to be true.  Has she earned that mistrust?"

Three Pinocchios:
Bill Clinton's misleading claim about 'marked classified' information in Hillary Clinton's emails.  Bill Clinton is correct that Comey "amended" his statement in the hearing, to provide more details about what the FBI had found.  But Comey did not say Hillary Clinton "had never received any emails marked classified."  Two of three emails that had portion markings were call sheets that were improperly marked, and State Department considers the markings no longer necessary or appropriate at the time they were sent.  Comey acknowledged that Clinton may not have known what the little-C marking meant.  The whole dispute over the little "c" versus big "C," portion markings versus header, and so on, is the political equivalent of three-card monte.  Democrats, like Bill Clinton, have cherry-picked Comey's comments from the five-hour hearing to declare Hillary Clinton vindicated.  But what they conveniently sweep under the rug are the 110 emails — which were not a part of the 2,000 that were retroactively classified — that were found to "contain classified information at the time they were sent or received."

Congressional Dems furious GOP may 'leak' (i.e. tell the public) what's in FBI's Hillary files.  You've heard by now that the FBI is turning over its notes from the Hillary e-mail interrogation to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  Republicans on the committee want to see if Hillary's answers in the interviews were consistent with what she said under oath when she testified before them earlier this year, and whether there is any basis for a perjury case against her.  FBI Director James Comey was very careful in telling the committee that Hillary did not lie "to the FBI."  That doesn't mean she didn't lie to anyone.  A comparison of the FBI interview with her congressional testimony should be very interesting.  Now remember:  The Clintons' entire world revolves around keeping things secret if they possibly can.  This is why Hillary ran the schlock, homebrew e-mail server in the first place — to keep the contents of her e-mails out of public view in the event of subpoenas or Freedom of Information Act requests.  And because protecting Hillary means keeping information about her away from your prying eyes, Democrats on the committee are hopping mad at the FBI for turning over their notes to the committee.  Why?  Because they fear the worst, the worst being that the public will actually be shown the information.

GOP Lawmakers Lay Out Perjury Case Against Clinton.  The Republican chairmen of the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees laid out the case for perjury charges against Hillary Clinton in a letter sent to the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. on Monday [8/15/2016].  Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairs of Oversight and Judiciary, respectively, say that Clinton may have violated 18 U.S.C. § 1621 and § 1001, federal laws which govern perjury and false statements, respectively, during her Oct. 22, 2015 testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  In a letter to U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips, the lawmakers point to four inconsistent statements Clinton made regarding her private email system during that hearing.

House Panels Lay Out Case That Clinton Perjured Herself.  Two House committees sent a letter to the Department of Justice Monday laying out their case for why they believe Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton committed perjury during a hearing in Congress last year.  The letter to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips from the Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary committees provides four specific examples of times they believe Clinton lied under oath about her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of State.  The letter said Clinton made several false statements during her testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi on October 22, 2015.

FBI sends documents on Clinton probe to Congress.  The FBI has provided documents to a House committee on its investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server for government business, in an unusual step taken in response to requests from lawmakers seeking insight into why Director James Comey did not recommend criminal charges.  A brief letter sent Wednesday [8/10/2016] from the bureau to House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said the FBI was providing for review "a number of documents related to this investigation."  The FBI, in its letter, said the materials cannot be shared without the bureau's permission.  The files include material that is "non-public," containing "classified and other sensitive" information.

GOP lays out case for charging Clinton with perjury.  A pair of leading House Republicans on Monday [8/15/2016] laid out detailed instructions for the Justice Department to file perjury charges against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.  More than a month after first requesting the department open a criminal probe into Clinton for alleged misstatements she made under oath, the GOP heads of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees told a federal prosecutor specifically where they believed Clinton had lied to Congress about her email setup at the Department of State.

All Clinton Emails The FBI Recovered Will Be Made Public.  All the emails then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent or received that the FBI uncovered will be released by the Department of State, a conservative non-profit government watchdog group announced Tuesday [8/16/2016].  "The American people will now see more of the emails Hillary Clinton tried to hide from them," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.  "Simply put, our lawsuits have unraveled Hillary Clinton's email cover-up."

House Republicans detail perjury allegations against Clinton.  House Republicans have detailed perjury allegations against Hillary Clinton, citing the apparent conflict between her 2015 congressional testimony about her email practices and the FBI's conclusions announced in July, according to a letter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.  "The four pieces of sworn testimony by Secretary Clinton described herein are incompatible with the FBI's findings," House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., wrote to U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips.  "We hope this information is helpful to your office's consideration of our referral."

FBI will hand over notes on Clinton email investigation to Congress: report.  The FBI plans to hand over to Congress notes taken during the agency's interview with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her exclusive use of a private email server to handle classified documents, according to a Sunday [8/14/2016] report.  CNN anchor Jake Tapper cited sources who said that notes taken by an FBI agent during the interview would be turned over to Congress, adding:  "This email story, it's just not going away."  Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who heads the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked for all documents related to Mrs. Clinton's FBI interview, including transcripts, notes and analysis.

Congress WILL get to see notes from Hillary Clinton's three-hour interview with the FBI.  Members of Congress will receive notes from Hillary Clinton's interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CNN is reporting.  Clinton spoke to the FBI on July 2, just three days before the bureau's director James Comey announced that he would recommend the former secretary of state not be charged with a crime in the private email server case.  Comey did, however, label Clinton's homebrew email setup 'extremely careless.'

FBI defends Clinton handling of classified material, says markings weren't conclusive.  The FBI went to bat for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday [8/16/2016], saying that handling emails with classified information — even when it's marked — isn't enough to prove she had "knowledge or intent" to break the law.  In a letter to congressional investigators, the FBI's chief liaison to Capitol Hill said Mrs. Clinton did handle three messages with a "(C)" mark next to paragraphs, "ostensibly indicating" the following information as classified.  But Jason V. Herring said that's not enough to show she was negligent.

Clinton Scandal: 44 More Lies Turn Up In Hillary's Emails.  Judicial Watch, which has been doing all the heavy lifting to expose the extent of Hillary Clinton's scandalous use of a private email account while secretary of state, released dozens of emails on Tuesday that shouldn't exist.  For more than a year, Clinton insisted that she didn't use her private email account until after March 18, 2009, since those were the earliest emails she turned over to the State Department.  According to Clinton, before that date, she was using an old Blackberry email account, to which she no longer had access.

'They Hanged Him?  What Difference at this Point Does it Make?'.  [Scroll down]  The difference it makes, by the way, is not only that Hillary Clinton's reckless mishandling of sensitive information might have gotten a friendly agent killed, but it will also make it difficult if not impossible to recruit other foreign nationals to spy for the United States.  Who will risk his life for us when Hillary Clinton, if she is elected or appointed to any position that has access to intelligence information, might blow his cover with a careless word?

Feds debate releasing Clinton's FBI interview.  The Obama administration is urgently debating how to respond to congressional demands for the official report on Hillary Clinton's three-and-a-half-hour interview at FBI headquarters, as some inside and outside government raise concerns about giving lawmakers access to politically sensitive records of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email system.  During congressional testimony last month, FBI Director James Comey promised to respond promptly to lawmakers' requests for the interview summaries known as "302s" for Clinton and other witnesses, as well as other information gathered in the course of the year-long FBI probe.

As Hillary Clinton goes after Donald Trump, her own email troubles undermine her attacks.  Once again, Hillary Clinton's carefully laid campaign plans have been disrupted by old emails.  On a day in which Clinton was hoping to inflict considerable damage on Donald Trump — this time, by ripping into his economic agenda — her campaign was on the defensive, scurrying to clean up the latest damaging revelations in years-old messages that were sent by Clinton and her staff and released as the result of a lawsuit.  The ongoing email dispute undermined the potency of a speech for which Clinton's campaign had been laying groundwork all week, one in which she presented her economic agenda in full and tried to brand her self-styled populist rival a fraud.

Hillary's State Dept.  Aides Ignored Requests For Her Emails In 2012.  The American public may have learned much earlier than it eventually did that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account.  But two of her State Department aides intervened in late 2012 and early 2013 to block a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records for Clinton's email accounts.  On Wednesday, Judicial Watch released two emails which show that Clinton insiders Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were made aware of a "significant" FOIA request seeking those records.  The liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had filed the request on Dec. 6, 2012.

Testimony: Clinton aides worried about her email system after Guccifer hack.  Aides to Hillary Clinton worried about the potential impact on her private email system after a hacker gained access to the email account of one of her longtime advisers in early 2013, according to testimony made public Wednesday [8/10/2016] in connection with a pending lawsuit.  Former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills acknowledged in written answers to questions from the conservative group Judicial Watch that when emails from Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal began appearing online via a Romanian hacker called Guccifer, Mills discussed the issue with Bryan Pagliano, a tech specialist who worked both at the State Department and for the Clintons.

The first casualty of Hillary Clinton's server.  Exactly how damaging the classified information is that was discovered on Hillary Clinton's server became clear this weekend when the Iranian government executed an alleged spy.  He had been mentioned in at least one email from an aide to Hillary, which called him "our friend."  The deceased Iranian was the nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri, who was executed for allegedly passing on information to the United States.  Amiri had been in and out of the news since 2009 when he first defected, eventually turning up on our shores.

Rudy Giuliani clobbers Clinton for naming executed Iranian in private-server emails.  Rudy Giuliani suggested on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton caused the death of Shahram Amiri, an Iranian national who was hanged on Sunday in the Islamic republic for 'revealing secrets to the enemy.'  Hillary Clinton used her private email server to discuss details of the Iranian nuclear scientist who was put to death for giving information to the CIA.

Death and Hillary Clinton.  Despite FBI and Leftmedia attempts to keep Americans as uninformed as possible about Hillary Clinton's history of corruption and lies, there is new information about the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist named Shahram Amiri.  Normally, the death of a foreigner wouldn't catch the attention of many Americans.  But in this case, Amiri was in contact with Clinton via email, and the circumstances and timing of his death are more than suspicious.  Who was this man that was just publicly hanged shortly after returning to Iran?

Judicial Watch releases private emails Clinton did not turn over.  They cover Clinton's first three months as secretary of state in early 2009, a period for which Clinton did not turn over any emails to the State Department last year.

GOP Congressman:  Clinton Should Be "In Jail Right Now," Not Running.  Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, an early Congressional backer of Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton should be in prison, not running for president.  "The fact is that her information was compromised," Hunter said on Kilmeade and Friends on Monday [8/8/2016].  "That's why you don't use a personal server to send our sources names through email.  That is why you don't do that.  That is the exact reason why she should not have done what she did and why she should be in jail right now as supposed to running for president."

'Hanged scientist's blood is on Hillary Clinton's hands'.  The Iranian hanging of scientist Shahram Amiri — referenced in Hillary Clinton's e-mail exchanges — could be just the beginning of the "human cost" of Clinton's private e-mail server, a Donald Trump surrogate said Monday [8/8/2016].  "Hillary Clinton's extreme carelessness in the use of private devices and a private server has placed US national security at high risk," retired Lt. Gen.  Michael Flynn told Fox News.  "It's just sad and it's just tragic and we are going to see more of these kinds of things come up in the coming weeks and months just because of Hillary Clinton's extreme carelessness in what she did."

Rudy Giuliani Would Have Prosecuted Clinton Over Emails as Secretary of State.  FBI Director James Comey did not recommend charges against Clinton for her handling of classified information and use of a private email server during her tenure at the state department, saying, "Although there is evidence of potential violations regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."  Giuliani strongly disagreed, saying he would have brought a case against Clinton.  "Many reasonable prosecutors have come to the conclusion that they would have brought such a case, I would have brought such a case.  I would have won such a case," Giuliani, who is also a former New York City mayor, said on ABC's "This Week."

Clinton stands by her email claims despite the evidence.  Mrs. Clinton again defended her email server during a press conference Friday [8/5/2016], directly contradicting FBI Director James B. Comey in saying no messages bearing "classified" markings passed through her account during her four years as secretary of state.  The former first lady, who has apologized for her email habits but simultaneously has maintained she did nothing wrong, also admitted that she may have "short-circuited" when she claimed last week that Mr. Comey agreed that she'd fully told the truth to the American people.  Mr. Comey, however, did no such thing, and in congressional testimony earlier this year, he explicitly said Mrs. Clinton was wrong when she said she'd never sent or received any classified material in her private account.

Cotton: Clinton discussed executed Iranian scientist on email.  Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday [8/7/2016].  "I'm not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman," he said on "Face the Nation."  Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran's nuclear program.  The senator said this lapse proves she is not capable of keeping the country safe.

Clinton's private server held emails about Iranian nuclear 'spy' who was executed today.  Hillary Clinton used her private email server to discuss details of the Iranian nuclear scientist who has executed for giving information to the CIA.  Shahram Amiri, who was hanged on Sunday [8/7/2016] for 'revealing secrets to the enemy', was in the US and allegedly informing on Tehran's extensive nuclear program during the Democrat's controversial reign as Secretary of State.  At the time she stressed researcher had been there of his 'own free will' and was described as 'our friend' in correspondences.  But he maintained he had been kidnapped by intelligence agents.

Iranian scientist gives info to US on Iran nuke program, Hillary discusses him in emails, Iran hangs him for treason.  Must be nice to be above the law and never have to suffer any consequences for your actions — and indeed, to be on the verge of being rewarded with the Presidency of the United States after years of treasonable carelessness (at best).

Did Clinton Emails Get Iranian Scientist Killed?  Senator Tom Cotton fielded an explosive charge this weekend:  that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exposed one of America's spies and got him killed.  Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri was hanged by the Iranian regime after a secret trial.  His original sentence was reported to be ten years, although it was not officially proclaimed as the Iranian regime often issues secret sentences.  Secretary Clinton's emails discussed, in an unclassified and unsecure format, the fact that he had provided "useful information" to the United States.

State Department dodges questions on Clinton emails about executed Iranian scientist.  A State Department spokeswoman dodged questions Monday about whether the discussion of Shahram Amiri, an Iranian scientist who was executed by the Iranian government for working with the U.S., in a pair of Hillary Clinton's private emails may have played a role in his recent fate.  "We're not going to comment on what may have led to this event," said Elizabeth Trudeau, a State Department spokeswoman.  "I couldn't speak to Iranian judicial procedures related to this specific case," Trudeau said.  "We've made our concerns known writ large around Iranian due process."

Republican senator:  Clinton's emails about Iranian nuclear scientist show she's reckless.  Republican Senator Tom Cotton questioned Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's qualifications to hold the United States' top office, saying Sunday that emails on her private server about an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed for spying for the US show she's "reckless."  A spokesman for Iran's judiciary said on Sunday that the country had executed Shahram Amiri, who was detained in 2010 when he returned home from the United States, after a court convicted him of spying for Washington.

Tapper Shuts Down Clinton Surrogate on Clinton's Email Talking Points.  Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm was shut down by CNN's Jake Tapper when she used Hillary Clinton's talking points on Clinton's private email server.  Granholm called the Democratic presidential nominee honest and blamed the media for continuing to talking talk about Clinton's emails while misconstruing the story against her, Tapper called her out.  "Governor, with all due respect, I didn't misread anything or misrepresent anything," Tapper said.  "Every fact checker agrees with me, what she has been saying is not true and I do think a candidate's honesty is important."

Clinton contradicts FBI again, says no emails were 'marked classified'.  For the second time in a week, Hillary Clinton on Friday again directly contradicted FBI Director James Comey, defending her use of a private email server while secretary of state and telling an audience of journalists that "I never sent or received anything that was marked classified."  Speaking at a joint conference of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Democratic presidential nominee refused to admit that she'd mishandled classified information in her private email account.  While she again apologized for using a private server, she doubled down on her central defense — that she never sent or received any emails that were marked classified at the time, even though the FBI chief has told a different story.

CNN's Tapper Calls Out Clinton For Emails Lies:  You're Not Entitled 'To Your Own Facts'.  In a video made by CNN and FactCheck.org, Tapper destroyed Clinton's recent claim on "Fox News Sunday" that FBI Director James Comey's testified that her statements about her private email server were true.  Tapper said, "No.  That is not true.  According to her campaign aides, what Hillary Clinton was referring to was Director Comey testifying, 'We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.'  But Clinton's comments to the FBI are different from what Chris Wallace was asking about, which were Clinton's comments to the American people."

Why Hillary Clinton continues to be the queen of deception.  [Scroll down]  Last week, William Binney, a 30-year career official at the National Security Agency turned whistleblower, revealed the unthinkable.  Binney, who devised the software that the NSA has used to capture the contents of emails and cellphone conversations of all in America but resigned from the NSA because of the unlawful and unconstitutional manner in which the software was used, told a Philadelphia radio audience that the DNC hacking was most likely done by NSA agents.  Why would the NSA hack into DNC computers, and why would the NSA leak what its agents saw?  Here is where the deep state meets the political world.

Dems Want to Investigate Trump, but Clinton has the Real Unseemly Russia Connections.  Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware (D-DE) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have asked former Trump rival Ted Cruz (R-TX), to investigate Trump's comment to determine if laws were broken.  Cruz chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight subpanel, the body tasked with investigating such claims.  Trump's comment came against the backdrop of Hillary Clinton's gross mishandling of classified data while secretary of state through the use of an unsecured, home-brewed bathroom server.  Despite her efforts to delete the emails, some of which constituted government property, the FBI was able to retrieve all but 30,000 of them.  Given the reckless manner in which she mishandled classified data, it is very possible, indeed probable, that the irretrievable emails are currently in possession of an unknown third party.

Report: FBI Sat on Russia Suspicions in DNC Hack for Months.  When the FBI began investigating the infiltration of the Democratic National Committee's computers last fall, they neglected to tell the DNC that they suspected Russian hackers.  In fact, they kept that information to themselves for months, sources told Reuters.  The FBI first contacted the DNC last fall, giving them a heads up to look for any suspicious network activity.  The Committee's staff didn't notice anything unusual, and when they asked for more information, a source says the FBI wouldn't give it to them.  Reportedly, it wasn't until March of this year that the DNC understood the nature of the cyber-attack.  During the months in between, the DNC and FBI had multiple discussions, but the feds never disclosed their suspicion of Russian actors.

Hillary Clinton is delusional.  Hillary Clinton sent and received classified information on her home-brewed email server.  "From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received," FBI Director James B. Comey said last month, in conclusion of the agency's investigation into her server. [...] But not according to Mrs. Clinton.  When asked about her home-brewed server in an interview with Chris Wallace on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton maintained she did nothing wrong and her previous statements were consistent with what Mr. Comey said.

Exclusive: Hillary Completed No Security Briefings Or Courses At State Dept.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completed no security briefings or courses on the proper handling of classified materials and how to conduct secure communications while at the Department of State, according to new Obama administration legal filings before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  The surprise admission was released late Friday and could reignite the controversy over Clinton's "careless" handling of classified materials as asserted by FBI Director James Comey, which has already been a central part of the presidential race.

Fournier: Senior Clinton Officials Say 'Trust Doesn't Matter,' She's 'Knowingly Misleading' About Email.  On Tuesday's [8/2/2016] broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," National Journal Senior Political Columnist Ron Fournier said that senior officials for Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have told him "trust doesn't matter," and that she's "knowingly" deceiving the public about her email.  Fournier said he "pulled out the last of my hair" watching Clinton's interview on "Fox News Sunday" because "she was parsing, she was talking about the fact that he said she didn't lie to the FBI.  And I'm like, you know, this is not the day and age to be parsing, and a parse is another word for a lie, because she's knowingly misleading.  She did violate policy.  We know that.  She did expose US secrets on a rogue server.  We know that."

NSA whistleblower says spy agency has all of Hillary Clinton's deleted emails in government database.  An NSA whistleblower is claiming that the agency likely has all of Hillary Clinton's emails from her private server — and the FBI could have gotten access to them had investigators wanted.  William Binney, one of the 'NSA four' whose revelations and warnings about government mass surveillance predates those of Edward Snowden, sat down with Breitbart's Aaron Klein on his eponymous radio show 'Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.'  Binney, a 30-plus year veteran of the NSA and a 'legendary crypto-scientist' according to the Nation magazine, had helped design one of the NSA's systems to collect date that had built-in privacy protections.

Hillary Clinton slapped with dreaded 'Four Pinocchios' rating for false claim that the FBI director said she told the truth about her classified emails.  FBI director James Comey testified in a July 7 congressional hearing that multiple statements the Democratic presidential nominee made to the public were untrue.  But in a rare Fox News Channel interview on Sunday [7/31/2016], Clinton claimed that Comey 'said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people.'  The [Washington] Post's fact-checker pored over the record and found 'Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative' about why she sent and received classified documents on a private email server in her house.

Clinton Takes Lying To A Whole New Level.  Maybe it's because she has gotten away with it for so long, but Hillary Clinton seems to get more brazen in her mendacity as she gets closer to the White House.  Case in point is her interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News over the weekend.  At one point, Wallace asks Clinton about claims she made about her use of a private, unsecured email server while secretary of state, which the FBI investigation determined were completely false.

Bizarre: Clinton Mocks Trump For Wanting More Secure Military Communications.  Just weeks after the FBI issued an indictmentless indictment of Hillary Clinton over her "extremely careless" behavior using a private email server to both send and receive classified information, the Democratic nominee has decided it would be funny to mock Donald Trump for wanting more secure military communications. [...] What a bizarre issue to attack Trump on given Clinton's own problems with secure communications as secretary of state, not to mention the recent hacks of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as well as her own campaign.

Clinton camp refutes FBI: 'Not true' she sent classified info.  Hillary Clinton's campaign manager on Monday rejected the FBI's findings that Clinton sent and received information that was classified at the time on her private email server while she was secretary of state.  Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook defended his boss before an MSNBC panel that said Clinton essentially forced State Department employees to send her classified information on her private server because there was no other way to communicate with her.

Exclusive — NSA Whistleblower:  Agency Has All of Clinton's Deleted Emails.  The National Security Agency (NSA) has "all" of Hillary Clinton's deleted emails and the FBI could gain access to them if they so desired, William Binney, a former highly placed NSA official, declared in a radio interview broadcast on Sunday [7/31/2016].  Speaking as an analyst, Binney raised the possibility that the hack of the Democratic National Committee's server was done not by Russia but by a disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker concerned about Clinton's compromise of national security secrets via her personal email use.  Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program.  He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency.

Mook Juke:  Hillary's Deleted Emails Are 'Not A Relevant Discussion'.  Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, argued on Sunday that the emails she deleted are "not a relevant discussion" anymore.  Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," host Chuck Todd asked Mook if the Clinton campaign would "encourage" the release the 33,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from her time that she was secretary of state.  "This is settled over now," Mook replied.  "Secretary Clinton went in and testified for 11 hours in front of a Congressional committee.  They asked her a lot of questions about this.  They came up with nothing.  The FBI has concluded their look at this issue and so we're moving on. [...]"

The Editor says...
The assertion that the FBI "came up with nothing" is obviously untrue.  The FBI didn't take any action, but it's not because they "came up with nothing."

It's time to disbar Hillary.  FBI Director James Comey's statements before Congress proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Hillary not only lied, but jeopardized national security, and mishandled classified material.  At a minimum, that means Hillary has committed acts of professional misconduct that should be taken up by the state of Arkansas.  According to the code of ethics for the American Bar Association, which happens to coincide with the dictates of Arkansas' rules for professional conduct, Hillary is guilty of failing to 'maintain the integrity of her profession' as outlined in rule 8.4.

Clinton fact-checked on 'truthful' claim in email scandal.  Hillary Clinton is getting hammered for saying on "Fox News Sunday" that FBI Director James Comey confirmed her statements on her email scandal were "truthful" — with one prominent fact-checker giving the claim four "Pinocchios."  The former secretary of state cited Comey when asked to account for her repeated claims that she never sent or received material marked classified on her personal email account.  When host Chris Wallace noted that Comey said those things were not true, Clinton disagreed.

The Coming Election Fraud.  There is much talk about the very real probability that the Russians or other foreign entities have possession of the 33,000 missing Clinton emails from her tenure as Secretary of State.  The talk centers around whether these emails will be released before the election to damage her or if she is elected President to be used as blackmail.  Although Putin and the Russians are extremely adept at manipulating information for their benefit I believe they have totally underestimated the Clintons.  In either case Hillary Clinton will not be influenced by the threat of any type of exposure or blackmail because she has demonstrated that she does not care what information comes out.

State Dept.  Opposes Media's Attempt to Get Taped Depositions in Clinton Email Case.  The United States Department of State is opposing the media's attempt to gain access to taped depositions taken of Hillary Clinton's aides.  The depositions were taken as part of a FOIA lawsuit filed by conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch.  The group is trying to figure out if FOIA laws were circumvented by Clinton's use of a private email server.  Judicial Watch has recently deposed Cheryl Mills, who served as Clinton's chief of staff, Bryan Pagliano, who is believed to have set up Clinton's private server, and Huma Abedin, as well as others.

Hillary Clinton Battles Chris Wallace Over Emailgate:  That's 'Not What I Heard' Comey Say.  Former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took to Fox News Sunday for her first post-convention interview, and after host Chris Wallace made Secretary Clinton feel right at home by grilling her about Benghazi, he segued into a chunk of questions about the now-completed investigation into Clinton's emails, which revealed no criminal wrongdoing.  Wallace confronted Hillary with bits of FBI Director James Comey's testimony before Congress, and suggested that he contradicted many of her claims.  Hillary saw it somewhat differently:  [Video clip]

Confirmed: Hillary [was] hacked by same state-sponsored group as DNC!  After weeks of saying she wasn't hacked, it turns out the Clinton campaign was indeed targeted by hackers who breached their security. [...] U.S. officials have confirmed that it was probably the Russians.

FBI warned Clinton campaign of cyberattack by foreign government.  The FBI warned the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in March that its computers had been the object of a foreign-government cyberattack, Yahoo News reported Thursday evening.  However, according to Yahoo News, when the FBI requested that the Clinton team turn over email logs and staff addresses, the campaign's lawyers refused.  At the time, Mrs. Clinton was being investigated by the FBI for possible criminal offenses in her setting up and using a private email server to conduct government business and handle classified information.

Private Servers Were 'Recommended,' Clinton Says For First Time.  The revelation — highlighted in a Judicial Watch lawsuit against the State Department — raises new unanswered questions about who may have suggested or influenced Clinton's decision to relay sensitive and classified State Department information on private channels.  Clinton used a private email address and server located in her New York home throughout her tenure as the nation's chief diplomat.  An FBI investigation confirmed that contrary to her previous claims Clinton sent and received highly sensitive classified information on the server and that she did not turn over to the State Department thousands of emails concerning official business.

The Democrats' Email Scandal:  Hillary Clinton Corrupts Everything She Touches.  The news that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, manipulated the levers of power at the DNC to ensure that Hillary Clinton would win the Party's nomination for President should not really come as a surprise to anyone.  What is surprising is that she actually resigned when she was outed through the release of thousands of emails stolen from the Democrats' email system, allegedly by Russian hackers.  Among the more than 19,000 messages released by the WikiLeaks website, reports The Wall Street Journal's Harriet Torry, are signs of bias in favor of Hillary Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign, undermining the DNC's stated objective of broad-based support for Democrats seeking office.

Chaos at the Democratic National Convention.  Perhaps the Russians are behind the DNC hacking.  It would be worth considering the fact that it's the Obama/Clinton/Kerry disaster of the past seven-and-a-half years that ushered in a new Cold War between the United States and Russia, including cyber-intrusions into every part of our government, ranging from the Office of Personnel Management to the White House itself.  Mrs. Clinton pointing a crooked finger at Mr. Trump for this disaster is the equivalent of blaming a YouTube video for the Benghazi massacre, a gay hate crime for the Orlando terrorist atrocity, and workplace violence for the Fort Hood terrorist attack.

Rudy Giuliani:  Hackers could release Hillary Clinton emails before election or extort, threaten her.  Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday predicted that hackers could release incriminating emails from Hillary Clinton before the November election, or extort or threaten Mrs. Clinton if they decide to hang onto them.  "I would be surprised ... if the Russians haven't hacked all of Hillary's emails way back when they were sitting in [a] garage," Mr. Giuliani said.  "That server of hers was less secure than the DNC server that was hacked — considerably less secure."

Another Clinton Email Scandal.  [Scroll down]  Did a foreign country hack Clinton's homebrewed server?  Did her deleted emails, the thousands unrecovered by the FBI, include any embarrassing information now in the hands of another country?  If the answer is yes to either one of those questions, October might come with a surprise.

Clinton practically handed her email password to the Russians.  Clinton was so careless when using her BlackBerry that the Russians stole her password.  All Russian President Vladimir Putin's gang had to do was log into Clinton's account and read whatever they wanted.  They had to be laughing [a lot].  So you can add the Russians to the list of people who know bad and personal things about Clinton that the Democrats will wish remain hidden.  FBI Director James Comey said a few weeks ago that Clinton had been "extremely careless" with her e-mails, but he added that he didn't think the server she'd been using had been hacked by "hostile actors."

Julian Assange Says Hillary Clinton Should Be Worried About Next Wikileaks Release.  The DNC seems to believe what Wikileaks published was simply a curated selection of years worth of communication.  They don't know, officially, whether the hackers — and Wikileaks — have any more private emails at their disposal.  Julian Assange, Wikileaks's founder, insists that they — and their candidate Hillary Clinton — have something very serious to worry about.  In an exclusive interview with ITV, Assange insisted that he had more to drop on the Democratic nominee, including, possibly, information related to her private email server.  The dump, Assange claims, will contain "enough evidence" to indict the former Secretary of State.

The Missing Man at the Center of Hillary Clinton's Email Scandal.  Of all the characters in the political drama of Hillary Clinton's private email server, none has been more mysterious — and potentially more important — than a 40-year-old technology specialist named Bryan Pagliano.  Pagliano didn't just set up the now infamous "homebrew" server in the basement of Clinton's New York home, which she used for official business while serving as secretary of state.  Pagliano has been the former secretary's go-to IT guy for the past several years.  He's also the only person in the entire investigation of Clinton's email who got an immunity deal, protecting him from possible criminal prosecution.  That was Pagliano's demand for telling FBI investigators about Clinton's unorthodox system — a system that he apparently knows more about than anyone else.

Lawyer: Clinton already answered every question on email use.  Hillary Clinton's lawyer told a federal judge Monday [7/18/2016] that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has already answered enough questions about her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.

Hillary's sophisticated staff.  [Scroll down]  Here is the continuing mystery:  how did the confidential, secret, and top secret information (contained in then classified 52 email chains) jump the gap from the realm of secure classified computer networks onto Hillary's unclassified servers?  There are several ways this could happen.  If we take Mr. Comey's assertions at face value, these methods were all well beyond Hillary's grasp, but in fact they can easily be accomplished by anyone who can manage to make his own color copies at Staples.  The original classified information could be captured by printing a hard copy, then scanning it into the unclassified system.  Or by retyping the text.  Or by downloading the source document onto removable media like a thumb drive.  Each of these actions is a felony violation of federal law regarding the proper handling of classified information.

Judicial Watch chief:  Slowly but surely, the Clinton email cover up is unraveling.  [Scroll down]  What is notable is that the State Department finally admits that Clinton's practice of supposedly emailing other State officials using her non-state.gov account was not an "appropriate method of preserving federal records or making them available for searches under FOIA."  Second, it is both significant and disturbing that Hillary Clinton now asserts a private "claim of right" over her non-state.gov email account, including any of the 55,000 pages of federal records she returned to the State Department.  She further claims that these and other emails, including emails that may have contained classified information, have "never been the property of or in the possession or control of the State Department."

State Dept. to release deleted Clinton emails uncovered by FBI.  State Department officials plan to publish all work-related emails discovered on Hillary Clinton's private servers by the FBI once agents turn over the records Clinton withheld from the government.  "Just as we processed the material turned over to the department by former Secretary Clinton, we will appropriately and with due diligence process any additional material that we receive from the FBI to identify work-related records and make them available to the public," agency spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday [7/13/2016].  Clinton had previously stated her legal team provided everything that could possibly considered related to her State Department work to the agency in late 2014.

Clinton legal team moves to block deposition in email lawsuit.  Lawyers for Hillary Clinton are going to federal court for the first time to block efforts to force her to testify in a civil lawsuit related to her private email set-up.  Clinton's attorneys submitted a legal filing Tuesday morning in a bid to shut down a conservative group's request for an order forcing her to submit to a deposition in the midst of her presidential campaign.  Clinton's legal team said her testimony was unnecessary and superfluous in light of her questioning before the House Benghazi Committee last October and several State Department inquiries into the issue.

Clinton blames aides for email problems, says server now in hands of FBI.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed her aides for bungling her emails, telling a federal court Tuesday that department employees knew she was using a secret account and they should have been the ones to police her.  Mrs. Clinton, through her lawyers, begged the court not to order her to have to testify under oath about her emails, saying she no longer has any of them and she didn't set the system up to try to thwart open-records laws, so she has little to add to the ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Romanian hacker with access to Clinton emails found dead in jail cell.  Christian Times Newspaper has learned that Guccifer, the Romanian hacker currently being held on charges for hacking Hillary Clinton's personal email server, has been found in his Virginia jail cell, dead of an apparent suicide.  Guccifer, also known as Marcel Lazar Lehel, was extradited to the United States to face charges after openly admitting to repeatedly hacking Hillary Clinton's email server.  This claim occurred in the midst of an FBI probe that was concluded this morning [7/5/2016] by Director Comey. [...] Comey, in his statement Tuesday morning, alluded to the fact that American enemies and individual actors most likely accessed Hillary Clinton's emails, but Guccifer was the only person to come forward with knowledge of their contents.

Also posted in The Clinton Body Count.

Former CIA Interrogation Expert Finds Clinton 'Willfully Engaging in Deception' About Emails.  There was an almost surreal element to the Capitol Hill hearing, in which Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asked Director Comey about the truthfulness of several statements Secretary Clinton had made about the matter.  "Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received," Gowdy said.  "Was that true?"  "That's not true," Comey responded.  "There were a small number of portion markings on I think three of the documents."  "Secretary Clinton said, 'I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.  There is no classified material,'" Gowdy continued.  "Was that true?"  "There was classified material emailed," Comey replied.  Gowdy was on a roll.  "Secretary Clinton said she used just one device.  Was that true?"  "She used multiple devices during her four-year term as Secretary of State," Comey responded.  "Secretary Clinton said all work-related emails were returned to the State Department," Gowdy said.  "Was that true?"  "No," Comey said.  "We found work-related emails, thousands, that were not returned."

Naturally:
DNI Clapper Denies Paul Ryan Request to Block Clinton From Classified Intel Briefings.  Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan's request to block Hillary Clinton from receiving classified intelligence briefings was denied by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Monday [7/11/2016].  In a letter to Ryan, Clapper wrote that he did "not intend to withhold briefings from any officially nominated, eligible candidate."  A spokeswoman for Ryan, AshLee Strong, said in a statement that "We obviously disagree with the decision and want to know what precautions will be taken and what assurances the director can give that Secretary Clinton won't mishandle classified information.  She has proven herself untrustworthy."

Breaking: GOP Congressmen Call for Hillary Clinton Perjury Investigation.  The chairmen of two House committees are formally requesting the U.S. attorney in D.C. conduct a perjury investigation into Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton will have to testify under oath if federal judge agrees to petition.  Prosecutors decided last week not to charge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her secret email server, but a federal court could still force her to testify under oath after a conservative law firm petitioned the judge to force her to talk.  Judicial Watch, which has been pursuing Mrs. Clinton's emails for years through more than a dozen open-records lawsuits and has already subjected her top aides to depositions, petitioned Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Friday to order Mrs. Clinton to talk.  The group said there are questions only she can answer about how she handled her messages.  "It was her system.  She was the primary driving force behind it and was its principal user," Judicial Watch said in its court filing.  "Without Secretary Clinton's testimony, there can be no fair, rightful and conclusive answer to the court's questions."

Clinton email scandal made into a movie, Huma, Mills depositions top billing.  Phelim McAleer's "Clinton Email On Film" is based on depositions given by top Clinton aides to the watchdog group Judicial Watch, the latest from adviser Huma Abedin.  "It's compelling viewing — as she is in turn petulant, defiant and then apologetic," he said.  McAleer's films show actors re-enacting the real depositions, which were filmed but sealed from public view.  "We only made these re-enactments because Hillary's lawyers managed to persuade the judge to seal the tapes until after the election.  That's just not good enough, and by spreading these films you are helping to end censorship," he said of his productions.

Here Are 35 Email Lies Hillary Is Still Telling On Her Campaign Website.  A 4,000-word "fact sheet" on Hillary Clinton's campaign website contains 35 lies, half-truths, obfuscations, evasive statements and falsehoods about her private email setup, a Daily Caller analysis shows.  Clinton and her campaign have long referred to the "fact sheet" in response to questions about her use of a personal email account and private server.  Her team of elite attorneys even hid behind the document earlier this year when the State Department's inspector general sought to interview Clinton about her email practices.  IG Steve Linick said during a House hearing last week that Clinton's team declined an interview request and referred him to her "fact sheet."

Hillary Has A New Defense For Sending Classified Information.  In the wake of the FBI investigation which found 110 classified emails that were classified at the time of sending, Hillary Clinton said on Friday [7/8/2016] that at the time, she did not "believe" they were put under that category.  In an interview with on CNN's "The Lead," Wolf Blitzer asked Clinton if she would "acknowledge you were extremely careless" with her private server email setup while secretary of state.

Embarrassing: Hillary Spox Still Insists She Didn't Tell A Single Email Lie.  With the Summer Olympics just around the corner, Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon just brought home a gold medal in abject hackery.  Prodded by CNN's Wolf Blitzer about the many indisputable lies his boss has told for more than a year about what the FBI and State Department Inspector General has characterized as an "extremely careless" improper email scheme that constituted the very "definition of negligence," Fallon flatly denies the established truth.

Congress To Ask FBI To Investigate Hillary For Lying Under Oath.  Rep. Jason Chaffetz said on Thursday [7/7/2016] that he would ask the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton's sworn testimony before Congress in which she falsely said that she did not send or received classified information via email.

Texas Rep. Hurd:  Americans Risked Their Lives for Intel on Clinton's Server.  Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX) directly challenged FBI Director James Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, questioning if the Bureau understood the lengths human intelligence assets went to in order to collect information that was simply left unsecured on a server in Clinton's basement.  Hurd also challenged Democratic representatives' assertions that the hearing was political theater and pointed out that Americans risked their lives to gather the information.

Clinton Spokesman Called Out for Incomplete Investigation of His Boss.  Brian Fallon, the press secretary for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was called out by Bloomberg's Mark Halperin on Thursday [7/7/2016] for defending the FBI investigation of Clinton.  Halperin asked Fallon about how thorough of an investigation the FBI and FBI Director James Comey had completed.  Halperin pointed out that FBI did not read every email sent to them by Clinton and he asked Fallon if the Clinton campaign misrepresented the thoroughness of the investigation. [...] In addition to looking at headers and doing keyword searches for a wide range of terms that would capture any work related correspondence, they did read a large number of them," Fallon said.

Chaffetz's FBI referral on Hillary perjury a time bomb?  It was an astonishing moment when FBI Director James Comey told the House Oversight Committee that his "comprehensive" investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices had not bothered to consider her sworn testimony before Congress.  Testimony that was odds with the conclusions reported by Comey.  Rep. Chaffetz spoke derisively:  "Do you need a referral from Congress to investigate her statements under oath?" Chaffetz asked, to which Comey responded, "Sure do."  With a chuckle, Chaffetz said, "You'll have one.  You'll have one in the next few hours."  And so another FBI investigation of Hillary Cinton criminality is underway.

Senate Judiciary Chair: 'FBI Tried to Gag Its Agents With Non-Disclosure Agreement' on Clinton Probe.  In a strongly worded letter to FBI Director James Comey about his handling of the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said he was troubled that "the FBI tried to gag its agents with a non-disclosure agreement on this matter, in violation of whistleblower protection statutes."  Noting the many "inconsistencies" in Comey's announcement on Tuesday that he would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton, Grassley's July 6 letter stated that "in light of these inconsistencies, it is even more troubling that the FBI tried to gag its agents with a non-disclosure agreement on this matter, in violation of whistleblower protection statutes.

Email Scandal:  Was The Fix In For FBI's Investigation Of Hillary?  It's now evident that the FBI fumbled its investigation into Hillary's Clinton's misuse of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.  It found evidence of crimes but refused to prosecute.  Whether it was dereliction, incompetence or something far more sinister are the only real questions that remain to be answered.  Comments by FBI Director James Comey to Congress Thursday underscore just how badly our justice system performed in the Clinton investigation.  Not only did the FBI fail to put Clinton under oath during her 3½ hours of questioning last week, he said, but the FBI has no recording or transcript of it.  Apparently, apart from personal recollections of those who questioned her, there is no record of what she said — or whether, in the end, it was truthful.  This extraordinary bungling by the Justice Department and FBI can be no accident.

Judicial Watch Asks Federal Court for Additional Discovery:  Seeks Testimony of Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch announced today [7/8/2016] that it submitted a request for permission to depose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; the Director of Office of Correspondence and Records of the Executive Secretariat Clarence Finney; and the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat John Bentel.  Today's request arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.

Clinton's emails weren't just highly sensitive.  They were federal government property — but she destroyed them anyhow.  Despite all the evidence against her, the FBI won't arrest Hillary Clinton for putting national security at risk, and literally destroying the property of the federal government — those emails she sent on her private email server.

While Clinton tries to change the subject, Republicans pounce on email criticism.  Hillary Clinton came here Wednesday in an attempt to turn the spotlight away from her handling of classified emails and back on rival Donald Trump's controversial business practices.  But Republicans back in Washington began assembling the political machinery to keep the email issue at center stage through the presidential election.  The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee focused intently on everything but the email issue, with a speech bashing Trump and a major policy shift toward the free-college pledge promised by her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Now The State Dept.  Is Blaming 'Human Error' For Marked Classified Emails Found On Hillary's Server.  State Department spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that "human error" was responsible for emails that were marked classified ending up on Hillary Clinton's email server.  Kirby was addressing questions about FBI director James Comey's announcement on Wednesday that investigators recovered emails that had classified markings on them when they were sent to Clinton.  "Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information," Comey said during a press conference.

ABC8 Virginia Poll: 82% Say Hillary Clinton Should Be Criminally Prosecuted.  Over July 4th weekend, ABC8 in Richmond Virginia conducted a poll surrounding the ongoing FBI investigation and recent interview with Hillary Clinton.  Out of 1,645 respondents:  82% said Ms. Clinton should be criminally prosecuted, 16% said she should not.

Clinton Still Insists She Sent No Classified Material on Private Server, Won't Say Who Advised Her to Use It.  Hillary Clinton continued to insist she never sent nor received classified information on her private email server at the State Department after her long-awaited FBI interview on Saturday [7/2/2016].  Clinton met with the FBI for three-and-a-half hours at the agency's headquarters to face questioning over her private email server as secretary of state.  The scandal has hung over her campaign for more than a year, furthering public notions Clinton is not trustworthy and plays by her own set of rules.  She told MSNBC's Chuck Todd she was eager to take the meeting and bring the "review" to a conclusion, although this is a criminal investigation.

Biden: 'I Find It Hard to Believe' Hillary Would Do Anything 'Intentionally Wrong'.  In an interview with NPR's "Weekend Edition," Vice President Joe Biden discussed the upcoming presidential, in particular the "cloud" over presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.  Biden told NPR's Rachel Martin that while he couldn't comment on the situation specifically, he said he found it hard to believe she "would do anything intentionally wrong."

Senator Admits The FBI Is "About To Ask Putin For His Copies Of Hillary's Emails".  It is well known that the FBI still does not have roughly 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from her private server due to Clinton categorizing them as personal and not work related.  We have also reported that Russia may be in possession of those emails, and according to Judge Andrew Napolitano, there is a debate going on in the Kremlin about whether or not to release them.  Given that the FBI still doesn't have the emails, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who is a Trump supporter and also serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has become so frustrated that Cotton suggests the FBI is about to ask Putin for his copies.

WikiLeaks Releases Over 1,000 Clinton Iraq War Emails.  WikiLeaks has released 1,258 of Hillary Clinton's emails in relation to the Iraq war, preceding the British Chilcot report on the conflict set to be released later this week.  WikiLeaks tweeted a link to their email archive from their official Twitter page today.  Wikileaks appears to have a substantial amount of information on Clinton, having already released a large archive of Clinton's emails earlier in the year.  Breitbart has previously reported on Julian Assange's claims that Google is complicit in the managing of Clintons online media campaign.

Republican National Committee:  Hillary Clinton Becomes First Major Party Candidate to Sit for FBI Criminal Interview.  The Republican National Committee (RNC) said that Hillary Clinton's meeting Saturday [7/2/2016] with the Federal Bureau of Investigation makes her the first major party presidential candidate to sit for an interview with an FBI criminal investigation about her own conduct.  RNC chairman Reince Priebus remarked upon the historical significance of such an interview.  Breitbart News has extensively reported on the potential Espionage Act violations committed by Clinton and her top aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

Hillary's Strange Security Adviser.  Hillary Clinton's campaign has been forced to acknowledge over the past week that the former secretary of state did not, as she had claimed, turn over all her work-related email to the State Department.  The new story is that her deletion of these emails was an oversight.  Team Clinton is hoping therefore that you won't hear the story of Rajiv K. Fernando, which would suggest the oversight tale to be yet another untruth.

Clinton email scandal grows ahead of convention.  Hillary Clinton's email woes are reaching new heights just a few weeks before the Democratic national convention.  From the release of a scathing report on Benghazi, to a dust-up over her husband's private meeting with the attorney general, to Saturday's news that she was interviewed for several hours by FBI investigators, Clinton stumbled through a difficult week by remaining largely silent.  But her highest hurdles may still lie ahead as the Justice Department prepares to issue a decision on whether the presumptive Democratic nominee will face criminal charges for her mishandling of sensitive material in an unclassified environment.

Indicted or not indicted, Clinton could lose politically.  No matter how the FBI investigation into the handling of sensitive information on Hillary Clinton's personal computer server ends, it likely will hurt her presidential bid.  If she is indicted, she will face further questions about her honesty and perhaps even calls for her to step aside.  If she isn't indicted, as many legal experts predict, critics will accuse the Obama administration of letting her escape charges merely because they want her to win the White House.  Clinton was interviewed by the FBI Saturday for three-and-half hours at its headquarters in Washington, according to her campaign, suggesting the inquiry is nearing its end.  "Secretary Clinton gave a voluntary interview this morning about her email arrangements while she was secretary," Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement.  "She is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion."

Maybe It's Time to Stop 'Thinking about Tomorrow'.  With the investigation into his wife's wrongdoings while Secretary of State drawing to a close [...] Bill Clinton hopped aboard a government plane on the tarmac in Phoenix.  Aboard that plane was Attorney General Loretta Lynch, tasked to decide on whether to indict Hillary.  The meeting stirred up a raft of speculation about the odorous half-hour discussion they held in private and her continuing role in the matter.  For example:  How is it that Lynch and Bill Clinton were both in Phoenix on the tarmac at the same time?  The most credible accounts I can find indicate they both flew there separately.  She was in Phoenix to give a speech on the administration's (unprecedented) intrusion into local police operations aka "community policing".  His presence there was never credibly explained.  Yes, there were reports he was there to play golf but it was over 100 degrees and he is in poor health so that seems unlikely.

More about the Phoenix incident can be found on this page.

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton's emails packed with America's secrets were stored by company 'wide open to hackers' and run by 'morons' whistleblowers reveal.  Hillary Clinton is facing damaging new revelations about the lax security surrounding her emails.  A Daily Mail Online investigation has found that a second firm — hired to store a back-up of Clinton's secret server — was so lax in its security employees failed to change passwords frequently and left computers logged in, unattended for extended periods and its own clients stumbled upon other clients data.  Datto Inc, the company in question, was hired to store Hilary's emails by Platte River, the mom-and-pop company contracted to maintain her 'homebrew' email system.

Russia to release Clinton emails?  U.S. intelligence agencies are said to be closely watching Russian online blogs and other postings for any signs that Moscow hackers have covertly obtained the bulk of Hillary Clinton's email messages stolen from her private email server and are preparing to make them public.  A U.S. intelligence official told Inside the Ring that the indications of the email release are being closely watched, although the veracity of at least two postings on the matter could not be confirmed as authoritative.

State Department Won't Release Clinton Foundation Emails for 27 Months.  Department of Justice officials filed a motion in federal court late Wednesday [6/29/2016] seeking a 27-month delay in producing correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's four top aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a closely allied public relations firm that Bill Clinton helped launch.  If the court permits the delay, the public won't be able to read the communications until October 2018, about 22 months into her prospective first term as President.  The four senior Clinton aides involved were Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Fuchs, Ambassador-At-Large Melanne Verveer, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin.

State Department seeks 27-month delay for release of Clinton Foundation emails.  The State Department has sought to delay the court-ordered release of emails between four of Hillary Clinton's top aides and officials at the Clinton Foundation and a closely associated public relations firm.  The motion, filed in federal court by the Justice Department late Wednesday, seeks to put off the release of the emails by 27 months.  It was first reported on by The Daily Caller.  In the filing, the State Department says it originally estimated that approximately 6,000 emails and other documents were exchanged between the aides — identified as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Fuchs, former Ambassador-At-Large Melanne Verveer, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin — and the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a communications shop that former President Bill Clinton helped launch.

FBI director takes center stage in Clinton email case.  FBI Director James Comey is now firmly in the driver's seat of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, after Attorney General Loretta Lynch pledged she would accept whatever course of action his bureau and career prosecutors recommend.  Lynch's influence will continue to be felt throughout the department, and her refusal to fully remove herself from the case ensures that she will continue to be briefed about its developments.  Prosecutors within her department — not the FBI — will ultimately decide whether or not to press ahead with charges.

More about Lois Lerner.

Hillary Clinton questioned by FBI on emails.  US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been questioned by the FBI over her use of emails while she was secretary of state, her campaign says.  A spokesperson said it was a voluntary interview.  The FBI is investigating Mrs Clinton and her aides over whether they mishandled classified information on a private email server she used while serving as secretary of state.  Mrs Clinton denies handling classified information in her private emails.

Hillary Clinton Interviewed by FBI About Private Emails While Secretary of State.  Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was questioned by the FBI in a long-awaited interview Saturday over the use of her private email server, she said.  The purpose of the interview, which was voluntary, was to delve into whether Clinton mishandled classified information submitted on her private email system while she served as secretary of state.  Her top staffers have already given testimony.  The interview happened at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on the Saturday morning of the long holiday weekend, and lasted approximately three and a half hours, sources said.

Ex-DOJ Official:  Don't Get Your Hopes Up For a Hillary Indictment, Peons.  Appearing on The Rush Limbaugh Show yesterday, former Department of Justice official J. Christian Adams did his best to quash hopes for a well-deserved indictment as it pertains to Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  Aside from all sorts of impropriety on the part of the administration — from Barack Obama pooh-poohing Clinton's mishandling of classified emails to Loretta Lynch meeting with the target of an FBI investigation — Adams outlines the reality for those working inside the bureaucracy.

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton Scheduled To Meet With FBI On Saturday.  Former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to meet Saturday [7/2/2016] with the FBI, a source close to the investigation into her private email server tells The Daily Caller.  The source went on to suggest the interview may take place at her Washington, D.C. home.  The bureau's interview with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is believed to be the final step in its investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information on Clinton's private email server.  Hundreds of now-classified documents — some of them "Top Secret" — were sent and received through Clinton's private server, which she housed at her New York residence during her tenure at the State Department.

Record keeper pleads ignorance in Clinton private server case.  A senior State Department official in charge of record-keeping during Hillary Clinton's time in office said he did not know whether Clinton was authorized to use a personal email account.  Patrick Kennedy, the agency's undersecretary for management, said he did not realize the significance of Clinton's private email use during her tenure.  He admitted to exchanging more than two dozen emails with Clinton on her personal account.  Kennedy was deposed by attorneys for conservative watchdog Judicial Watch Wednesday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over personnel files from Clinton's time in office.

Hillary Clinton to Meet With FBI Investigators Tomorrow.  Possibly triggered by the highly controversial, clandestine meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, the FBI has announced that it has finally scheduled an interview with Hillary Clinton regarding her ever-expanding email scandal.

New analysis shows 160 emails missing from Clinton's disclosure to State.  [Scroll down]  But disclosures over the past several weeks have revealed dozens of emails related to Clinton's official duties that crossed her private server and were not included in the 55,000 pages of correspondence she turned over to the State Department when the agency sought her emails in 2014.  At least 160 such emails have come to light so far, many of them through public-records lawsuits brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch.  In one email released by Judicial Watch on Monday, Clinton queried aide Huma Abedin and another staffer about how her official records were being maintained.

Hillary Clinton's email story continues to get harder and harder to believe.  On Monday night [6/27/2016], the Associated Press published a piece noting the release of an additional 165 pages of emails Hillary Clinton sent from her private email address while serving as secretary of state.  These were emails that had never been previously released and only were made public because of a court order in response to a request from a conservative group.  And yet again, the emails poke holes in Clinton's initial explanation for why she decided to exclusively use a private email server for her electronic correspondence while serving as the nation's top diplomat.

Why Hillary Is Stalling Her FBI Interview.  James Comey, the straight-arrow director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is eager to wind up his investigation of Hillary's use of an unsecure email system, but he can't do that until he and Justice Department prosecutors sit down with Hillary and interview her.  Hillary says that neither she nor her campaign have been contacted by the FBI.  But that is not true.  Negotiations have been going on for quite some time between the FBI and Hillary's attorney, David Kendall, who went to law school with Hillary and defended Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial.

Former U.S. Attorney says Hillary Clinton Could Face Criminal Charges in 60 Days.  If former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova's prediction is true, Hillary Clinton will most likely no longer be a contender for the 2016 presidential race.  He told Fox News' Gretchen Carlson that he thinks Hillary Clinton and some of her staff may be indicted within the next 60 to 90 days.  "They (the FBI) are going to make a recommendation that there is going to be charges against a series of people," DiGenova said on the program.  "What I know is that the FBI has been building a compelling — an unassailable case against Hillary and her surrounding group inside the State department," he said.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Is The Cover-up Worse Than The Crime?  Bad news about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while Secretary of State keeps dribbling out.  The latest is that she failed to turn over dozens of work-related emails, many of which just happen to completely undercut key claims she's made over the past year.

Judge Napolitano Warns of Massive FBI Rebellion on Eve of DNC: "Saturday Night Massacre".  Fox News senior legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano speculated there could be a serious storm brewing in Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's future, and the timing couldn't be worse.  He referred to a possibly incriminating email Clinton failed to release to the State Department that was of "critical importance."  The judge appeared on Fox Business Network's "Mornings With Maria," [6/28/2016] where he explained that the email in question was from Clinton aide Huma Abedin to the then-secretary of state and her inner circle.  It said that they had been hacked and that technology staffers were temporarily disabling State Department security features to accommodate Clinton's private server.

Here's even more of the emails Hillary Clinton deleted because they were 'private' but which a judge says are government related.  An additional 165 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton's time at the State Department surfaced Monday [6/27/2016], including nearly three dozen that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee failed to hand over last year that were sent through her private server.  The latest emails were released under court order by the State Department to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch.  The batch includes 34 new emails Clinton exchanged through her private account with her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin.  The aide, who also had a private email account on Clinton's home server, later gave her copies to the government.

New Clinton Emails Produced by State Department; Clinton Email Shows She Was Concerned About Records.  Judicial Watch today [6/27/2016] released 165 pages of new State Department records that include a previously unreleased March 22, 2009, email of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealing that she was concerned about how her records were being handled and had "no idea how my papers are treated at State.  Who manages both my personal and official files?"  Clinton top aide Huma Abedin responds:  "We've discussed this" and promises to explain it again.

Huma Abedin, Patrick Kennedy to Testify in Hillary Clinton Email Case.  Judicial Watch today [6/27/2016] announced the scheduled depositions of Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's deputy Chief of Staff, and Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary for management at the State Department, regarding their involvement with the clintonemail.com record system.  The deposition of Abedin is scheduled for June 28, and Kennedy is to give his deposition on June 29.

Only thing transparent about Hillary is her dishonesty.  [Scroll down]  It was November 2010, and [Huma] Abedin had urged the secretary to get onto the state.gov e-mail system or look at "releasing your email address to the department" because State's spam filter was blocking messages from clintonemail.com.  No, came Clinton's reply:  "Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible" — almost certainly meaning, accessible to Freedom of Information Act requests.  And it directly contradicts her repeated claims that she relied on the private account purely to avoid having to use more than one device.

With Clinton at helm, State Dept. got 'prestigious' award for record-keeping.  At the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was storing emails on a personal server in violation of the rules, her department twice received a "prestigious" award for its record-keeping practices — an honor that, in retrospect, has watchdogs scratching their heads.  The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gave the so-called Archivist Award to the State Department in 2010 and again in September 2012, toward the end of Clinton's tenure.  During the 2012 ceremony, NARA Chief Records Officer Paul Wester described the honor, also bestowed upon the Treasury Department, as "prestigious."

Clinton Campaign Admits Hillary Didn't Turn Over Mysterious Email Exchange With Top Aide.  Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is acknowledging that the former secretary of state failed to turn over a cryptic work-related email that she sent to her aide Huma Abedin while she was in office. [...] One such email is from a Nov. 13, 2010 exchange in which Abedin asked Clinton if she wanted to begin using a State.gov email account.  Clinton, who used only a personal account, indicated she was open to the idea, but said "I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible."

State Dept:  Clinton failed to hand over key email.  The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Smoking Gun: Hillary Did Not Turn Over Email Showing She Hid Information.  Hillary Clinton did not turn over an important email about the problems caused by her use of a private email server for classified information.  Clinton sent an email to her deputy chief of staff stating that she did not want some of her emails to be "accessible," presumably to Congress or to the State Department itself.  That email helped form the basis of a scathing inspector general report that found Clinton violated rules.  Now, we know that Clinton did not hand over that email to State Department investigators, proving that Clinton violated her sworn statement that she handed over all of her emails.  Her inability to hand over this email could also provide more evidence that she violated the Espionage Act by allowing national defense information to be "lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed" through gross negligence.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Latest Batch Exposes Two Big New Problems For Hillary.  First, it turns out that Clinton managed to avoid turning over one key email, despite her repeated promises that she gave the State Department every single work-related email from her private email server.  As the Associated Press reported, in the missing email, Clinton admits that her private setup was a problem. [...] Another email released this week reveals that State had set up an official government email account for Clinton to use, and then gives a clue as to why Clinton never used it.

Hillary's secret server aide invokes Fifth Amendment One Hundred and Twenty Five times as he is questioned.  The State Department aide who set up Hillary Clinton's private server inside her home invoked his Fifth Amendment right 'more than 125 times' in a case involving the email system. [...] Pagliano worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and set up her basement server as she transitioned to the State Department in 2009.  He simultaneously took on an official role at State.  In his disclosure forms, he did not disclose that he was being paid by Clinton to keep tabs on the server.

Clinton staff disabled security of private email server: report.  Tech staffers at the State Department temporarily disabled crucial security features on Hillary Clinton's private email server in 2010 — leaving a trove of sensitive information vulnerable to hackers.  Anti-virus software was turned off after Clinton and aide Huma Adebin experienced problems sending emails, it was revealed Wednesday in documents released under court order to Judicial Watch, the conservative advocacy group suing the State Department for access to public records from Clinton's tenure as secretary.  State staffers were desperate to resolve the problem, according to their own emails to each other.

Emails: Key security features disabled on Clinton's server.  State Department staffers wrestled for weeks in December 2010 over a serious technical problem that affected emails from then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's home email server, causing them to temporarily disable security features on the government's own systems, according to emails released Wednesday [6/22/2016].

Documents show State Dept. tried to give Clinton official email.  A collection of records made public Wednesday indicates State Department officials attempted to give Hillary Clinton a government email account to use while she was secretary of state, contradicting previous claims from agency officials that no such account was ever set up.  But the email account, SSHRC@state.gov, went unused after a State Department official warned one of Clinton's aides in Aug. 2011 that messages sent to and from the address would be "subject to [Freedom of Information Act] searches."  The records, which were referenced but not published in an inspector general report released last month, were obtained by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch.

Clinton IT specialist invokes 5th more than 125 times in deposition.  Hillary Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano invoked the Fifth more than 125 times during a 90-minute, closed-door deposition Wednesday [6/22/2016] with the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, a source with the group told Fox News.  The official said Pagliano was working off an index card and read the same crafted statement each time.  "It was a sad day for government transparency," the Judicial Watch official said, adding they asked all their questions and Pagliano invoked the Fifth Amendment right not to answer them.  Pagliano was a central figure in the set-up and management of Clinton's personal server she used exclusively for government business while secretary of state.  The State Department inspector general found Clinton violated government rules with that arrangement.

Clinton IT Witness' Testimony Scheduled for Wednesday, June 22.  Judicial Watch today [6/20/2016] announced that the deposition of Bryan Pagliano, the Clinton State Department IT official who reportedly provided support for the Clinton email system, is scheduled for Wednesday, June 22.  U.S District Court Judge Sullivan recently ruled that Pagliano's deposition can be videotaped.  The video will be kept under court seal for now, but the transcript will be publicly available.

The Coming Constitutional Crisis Over Hillary Clinton's EmailGate.  Suddenly things were aligning perfectly for Hillary Clinton in her quest for the presidency.  After months of embarrassing inability to vanquish Senator Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old socialist who represents a state with just two-tenths of a percent of the American population, she wrapped up her party's nomination for the White House.  The Democratic convention in Philadelphia next month will be a formality, no matter how loudly Bernie Bros stomp their feet.  To cap that triumph last week, President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton as their party's nominee for 2016.  While this, too, was a formality, since Mr. Obama was eventually going to endorse her — no matter how much bad blood lingers between them from the 2008 race — it was satisfying to her supporters, if perhaps overdue.

Hillary Clinton:  Could She Really Be Blackmailed By Vladimir Putin Over Hacked Emails?  Hillary Clinton's email is now very likely in the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin.  It is also likely Putin is not the only one reading their own hacked copy.  Romanian Hacker Guccifer told Fox News hacking Hillary's server was easy.

When Will Wikileaks Release Clinton's Deleted Emails?  Is Putin Involved?  [Scroll down]  For years it has been widely reported that Putin despises President Obama.  Thus, the pending release of Clinton's "deleted" emails (likely through a third party such as Wikileaks) provides Putin with a golden opportunity to humiliate Obama in two ways.  First, Putin proves that while Clinton served as Secretary of State, her communication system was an open door to U.S. secrets allowing access to the emails of everyone with whom she communicated, including Obama.  Second, Putin could damage Obama's chosen successor.  If Putin is complicit in allowing Clinton's "deleted" emails to be released and the emails prove that Clinton violated numerous U.S. laws, there is a good chance that she will be forced to withdraw from the presidential race.

Has FBI Director Comey Waited Too Long on Clinton Scandals?  We have regularly cited the various scandals still hanging over Mrs. Clinton's head.  They include the mishandling of classified materials, obstruction of justice, the public corruption scandal in which she used the State Department as leverage for benefitting the Clinton Foundation as well as her family, and Benghazi.  Contrary to President Obama's assertion that he is allowing a non-partisan and full investigation, by endorsing Mrs. Clinton he has placed his hand on the scale of justice and made his wishes more than clear to federal investigators.  The question is, will Director Comey and the FBI follow the President's direction?

Federal Judge Orders Videotaping of Clinton IT Witness' Testimony.  Judicial Watch today [6/14/2016] announced that a court order was issued by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan requiring the testimony of Bryan Pagliano, the Clinton State Department IT official who reportedly provided support for the Clinton email system, be videotaped during his upcoming deposition and that the transcript be made public.  The court also confirmed that a Justice Department criminal investigation is underway related to the Clinton email issue.

Sources: Russian Government Intercepted and Will Release Hillary's Emails.  Sources are reporting that the Russian government is prepared to release private emails that it obtained from Hillary Clinton's email server, proving Clinton allowed classified information to end up in the hands of foreign adversaries.  Intelligence sources are bracing for the Russian release of Clinton's intercepted emails, according to a report in the trade publication Oilprice.com.

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FBI's Probe Of Clinton Email Server Is A 'Criminal Investigation,' Judge Says.  The FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server is "criminal" in nature, U.S. District Court judge Emmet Sullivan said in a court filing on Tuesday [6/14/2016].  Sullivan was responding to a plea from attorneys for former State Department information technology specialist Bryan Pagliano who asked that details of an immunity deal he made with the FBI to discuss Clinton's server be kept secret.

Team Hillary's final e-mail defense: mass amnesia.  It was another week of news poking fresh holes in Hillary Clinton's tattered e-mail defense.  At this point, the only cover she has left are all the ongoing stonewalls.  One landmark event came Wednesday, when presidential spokesman Josh Earnest for the first time referred to the FBI's probe of the e-mails as a "criminal investigation."  Then came a Wall Street Journal scoop:  One thing making it criminal is that top State Department aides sent her e-mails on "born classified" discussions of drone strikes in Pakistan.  The record already shows that Secretary Clinton's inner circle knew full well that her private account was run off a home-brewed server — their e-discussions are full of notices that she's "off e-mail" while the server gets restarted, and even that it's been taken down because of possible hacker attacks.

Republicans fear 'bias' in Clinton email probe after Obama endorsement.  President Obama's decision to endorse Hillary Clinton Thursday reignited concerns that the administration could shield the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer from any legal consequences that emerge from an FBI investigation into her private email use.  Republicans were quick to point out the conflicts of interest at play after Obama pledged his support to Clinton in a video message to her supporters.  "President Obama's official endorsement of an individual whose actions are the subject of an FBI criminal investigation is as disturbing as it is inappropriate," Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner.

Trump:  Obama is 'protecting' Clinton from 'going to jail'.  Hillary Clinton uses the term "radical jihadism" rather than "radical Islamic terrorism" because she is "probably afraid" of President Barack Obama, Donald Trump said Monday [6/13/2016]. [...] Alluding to the ongoing FBI investigation into the private server Clinton used for official business at the State Department, Trump remarked that Clinton's decision to call it by that name as a calculated move.  "He's protecting her from going to jail, so she's not going to use it," Trump said.  "But I bet you that ... she would love to use to those words, because almost everybody agrees that those words should be used."

White House confirms 'criminal' probe over Clinton emails, 'shreds' campaign claim.  Perhaps it was an unguarded moment, but the White House has seemingly confirmed that the Justice Department is conducting a "criminal investigation" regarding Hillary Clinton's personal email use — despite persistent claims from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee that investigators are pursuing a mere "security inquiry."  Press Secretary Josh Earnest used the term at Thursday's [6/9/2016] briefing, after being asked by Fox News about whether President Obama's newly unveiled endorsement of Clinton might apply pressure to investigators assigned to the Clinton case.  Earnest rejected the premise, saying the job of career prosecutors is to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion.

Major Updates on Email and Clinton Foundation Scandals.  As Donald Trump readies his anti-Clinton barrage on Monday [6/13/2016], he has plenty of fresh material to work with.  Hillary famously claimed that her bootleg, unsecure email server contained "no classified material."  This was comprehensively false.  Thousands of classified emails passed through her improper server — including more than 100 she personally sent herself, and dozens that contained information at secret, top secret, and 'beyond top secret' levels.  Intelligence experts this week told the Associated Press that some of these messages could have compromised the identities of CIA assets, and now the Wall Street Journal reports that at least some of her emails pertained to planned US drone strikes in Pakistan.

A 'Special Prosecutor' Is Still a Bad Idea in a Criminal Investigation of Clinton.  Special prosecutors are unconstitutional if truly independent, and counterproductive if not so.  They are a poor excuse for avoiding the Constitution's remedy for corrupt public officials:  impeachment and disqualification.  Moreover, it is simply not true that Obama's endorsement of Clinton meaningfully ratchets up his conflict of interest; that conflict was already profound because we have known for months that Obama is implicated in Clinton's lawlessness.

6 in 10 Americans Believe Hillary Clinton is Lying About Emails.  A majority of Americans believe that Hillary Clinton is lying about the handling of her emails on a private server during her tenure as secretary of state, a new poll shows.  A survey released by Fox News on Thursday [6/9/2016] found that 60 percent of registered voters believe that Clinton "is lying about how her emails were handled while she was secretary of state," while 27 percent think she is addressing the situation truthfully.  Thirteen percent of those polled said they remain uncertain.  The poll result is essentially consistent with an identical survey released last September, which found that 58 percent of Americans believed Clinton to be lying about her emails.

Despite Clinton claims, 2012 email had classified marking.  Hillary Clinton, from the moment her exclusive use of personal email for government business was exposed, has claimed nothing she sent or received was marked classified at the time.  But a 2012 email released by the State Department appears to challenge that claim because it carries a classified code known as a "portion marking" — and that marking was on the email when it was sent directly to Clinton's account.  The "C" — which means it was marked classified at the confidential level — is in the left-hand-margin and relates to an April 2012 phone call with Malawi's first female president, Joyce Banda, who took power after the death of President Mutharika in 2012.

Viral picture of Clinton on her Blackberry started her secret server scandal — because started State Dept officials didn't know she had email until they saw it.  The photo of Hillary Clinton on her Blackberry that birthed the 'Texts from Hillary' meme and softened her image is turning out to be less of a blessing and more of a curse for the former secretary of state.  A State Department official testified this week she didn't know Clinton even had an email address until she came across that photo, as the address was not provided through the federal government.  State Director of Executive Secretariat Staff Karin Lang said she was told when Clinton started that she would not use an 'official account.'  And she didn't.

Bombs away!  Drone emails could sink Clinton.  After huge victories in the California and New Jersey primaries, Hillary Clinton has all but locked up the Democratic nomination for the 2016 presidential election.  There's just one thing that remains that could stop her — a federal indictment over her misuse of government secrets while secretary of state.  Just one day after the White House publicly admitted that Clinton was under criminal investigation, new reports reveal the FBI is focusing on a series of emails sent between 2010 and 2011.

Emails in Clinton probe dealt with planned drone strikes — WSJ.  Emails between U.S. diplomats in Islamabad and State Department officials in Washington about whether to challenge specific U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are at the center of a criminal probe involving Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday [6/9/2016].  The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the "low side" — government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters — as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a CIA drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law enforcement officials briefed on the FBI probe, the Journal said.

White House refers to Clinton email probe as 'criminal'.  White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Thursday [6/9/2016] referred to the probe into Hillary Clinton's private email system as a possible "criminal investigation," which Republicans quickly seized on as a critical slip just moments after President Obama endorsed Clinton for president.  Earnest was asked whether the FBI might be pressured to go easy on Clinton in the investigation in light of Obama's endorsement, and used the term "criminal investigation" in his answer.

Emails at center of Clinton FBI probe focused on drone strikes, report says.  A series of emails between American diplomats in Pakistan and Washington over drone strikes are the focus of the criminal probe involving presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information, according to a report Thursday [6/9/2016] by The Wall Street Journal.  The emails in 2011 and 2012 were sent through a "computer system for unclassified matters" that gave the State Department input into whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went forward, congressional and law enforcement officials briefed on the FBI probe told the Journal.  Some of those emails were then sent by then-Secretary of State Clinton's aides to her personal email account and private server, officials told the Journal.  The vaguely worded messages, however, didn't mention the "CIA," "drones" or details about the targets, the Journal reported.

Hillary Clinton's Truth Problem.  Unless she has been given a back-channel briefing on the investigation, which would be highly unusual and unethical, Clinton does not know for certain what the FBI has uncovered or what the Department of Justice might do. [...] She cannot know what the inspector general wants to talk about because she has refused to meet with him, despite promising to do so.

Was this photo the beginning of the end for Hillary?  State Department officials in charge of public records were not aware Hillary Clinton was using e-mail during her tenure there until they saw a viral image of the then-secretary of state looking at her BlackBerry on a satirical blog called "Texts from Hillary."  Speaking under oath in a lawsuit brought against the department by a conservative legal watchdog, a State Department official said the office in charge of processing open-records requests at the agency had no idea Clinton was using e-mail.  So when "Texts from Hillary" made the Clinton image ubiquitous in 2012, the department decided to check whether she still had no official account.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Experts Say She Likely Exposed CIA Agents.  Since becoming the Democratic Party's de facto nominee, Hillary Clinton has been adamant that the email scandal that has dogged her since last March will amount to nothing.  But news this week suggests that, if anything, an indictment has become more likely.

State Dept:  FOIA officers didn't know, didn't ask about Clinton use of private email.  A State Department official produced to answer questions in a civil lawsuit probing Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server said no officials responsible for handling public records requests knew of her private email account while she was secretary, but she was instructed not to answer whether the department's top legal office knew, according to a transcript released Thursday [6/9/2016].  In a deposition Wednesday, answers provided by Karin M. Lang seemed to corroborate several defenses raised by Clinton and her aides in the handling of the controversy while challenging other explanations given in a lawsuit by the conservative group Judicial Watch that examines whether Clinton's email setup thwarted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

WH Denies Endorsement Will Intimidate FBI Investigators; Obama Meets Privately with AG Lynch.  White House press secretary Josh Earnest insisted that President Obama's endorsement of Hillary Clinton will not "sway" the ongoing FBI investigation into Clinton.  The statement came after Obama released a video endorsing Clinton for president of the United States.  Later this afternoon [6/9/2016], according to the White House, Obama is meeting with the attorney general.  The meeting is "closed press."

State Dept.  Official Undermines Key Clinton Email Claim In Judicial Watch Deposition.  In a deposition given to the watchdog group Judicial Watch on Wednesday [6/8/2016], Karin Lang, the State Department's director of Executive Secretariat staff, said that it would not have been "reasonably possible" to obtain Hillary Clinton's emails through the Freedom of Information Act before she turned the records over in Dec. 2014 — nearly two years after she left office.  That conflicts with Clinton's longstanding claim that her email practices were above board — and not an attempt to skirt FOIA requirements — because the "vast majority" of her emails were available to the State Department through other officials' government email accounts.

The Facts Keep Undermining Hillary's E-mail Tales.  Before we go on, let's revisit Clinton's words from August 26, 2015.  Back then, she declared that, "I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know whether something is." This was a classic Clintonian defense, resting as it did on a largely irrelevant straw man — if she did not receive information "marked" or "designated" classified, and such designations are "the way you know" something is classified, then she never knowingly mishandled classified information.  Yet as I (and many others) have pointed out before, Clinton's actual legal obligation was to safeguard marked and unmarked classified information, and to fulfill that obligation she would necessarily have to know the classification of everything she handled, whether it was marked or not.

'When Clinton Ordered The Deletion Of 30,000 Emails, That Was A Federal Crime'.  This is a true must watch clip.  I never post long clips but this is a unique case.  The first 15 minutes are nothing but bombshells, one after another.  At a panel hosted by Judicial Watch last month, former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova discusses the criminal aspect of Hillary's email scandal.  Hillary's hitman at the State Department Patrick Kennedy is singled out for destruction multiple times.  DiGenova is convinced there is a grand jury in this case which would explain Bryan Pagliano's immunity, and he predicts the FBI will recommend charges against everyone in Clinton's inner circle including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Patrick Kennedy and Hillary Clinton herself.  [Video clip]

Found: At Least One Pagliano Email Sent Directly to Clinton.  The State Department announced Monday [6/6/2016] that the agency found no emails to or from Bryan Pagliano, Hillary Clinton's IT specialist, while Clinton was secretary of state.  However, an email already released by the State Department does show an email from Pagliano to Clinton at Clinton's clintonemail.com address, the email that Pagliano himself set up.

State Department will release these Clinton emails after everyone who sent them is dead.  It will take about 75 years to fully compile and release the emails sent by Hillary Clinton and three of her top aides during her tenure in the Obama administration, the State Department said this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing requesting the records.  "Given the Department's current FOIA workload and the complexity of these documents, it can process about 500 pages a month," the agency calculated, bringing the final deadline to somewhere around 2091. Following the predictable uproar over such a lengthy timeline, which would be completed years after the death of everyone involved, State spokesman Mark Toner defended the estimate Tuesday [6/7/2016] by arguing that it is not "outlandish" because of the "enormous amount of FOIA requests" that are "very complex."

Hillary Clinton's TPP Emails Could Reveal Damning Information About Her.  Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump demanded that the State Department immediately release the emails of Hillary Clinton regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnerships, which he claims threatens the U.S. economy.  In a statement, Stephen Miller, senior policy advisory of Trump, said that Hillary Clinton's support to the TPP will "permanently undermine U.S. workers and sovereignty."  "Hillary is 100 percent controlled by corporate interests, including foreign corporate interests, and it is essential these emails see the light of day," the statement added.  Apparently, the State Department is dilly-dallying on the request to release Hillary Clinton's emails in connection to the TPP, at least after the presidential elections.

Clinton Aide Will Plead Fifth in Court, Attorneys Cite 'Sufficient' Risk of Self-Incrimination.  Attorneys for a tech aide to Hillary Clinton defended his right to plead the Fifth Amendment in an upcoming deposition, arguing that an immunity deal he struck with the Department of Justice would not protect him from self-incriminating comments about the email server that he might make in the civil case.  Bryan Pagliano, the IT aide who set up Clinton's email server, has been summoned to a deposition in a public records lawsuit brought by the watchdog group Judicial Watch against the State Department.  Pagliano's attorneys have said the former Clinton aide will not answer questions due to concerns about potential self-incrimination.  They defended the legal basis for this position in a court filing on Tuesday evening [6/7/2016].

'People Really Go To Jail For Breaking This Law': Clinton Email Scandal May Have Finally Crossed The Line.  Emails stored on Hillary Clinton's unsecured personal server may have put Central Intelligence Agency personnel at risk, according to security experts.  At least 47 of the 55,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department contained the words "B3 CIA PERS/ORG," the Associated Press reported Wednesday [6/8/2016], indicating that the email contained information on CIA personnel or the agency itself.

FBI: Records from Clinton's email server being held as 'evidence'.  FBI agents have confirmed that they recovered records from Hillary Clinton's private server and other electronic devices, but won't reveal any details about those records because that information is being treated as "evidence" in a "pending investigation."  "[A]ll of the materials retrieved from any electronic equipment obtained from former Secretary Clinton for the investigation are evidence, potential evidence, or information that has not yet been assessed for evidentiary value," the FBI said in documents filed with a federal court Monday [6/6/2016].

Hillary Clinton and the 'FBI Primary'.  [Bradley] Blakeman says the FBI has deliberately waited to interview Hillary Clinton until after the primaries because the bureau did not want to interfere with the nominating process.  He thinks the FBI is "likely" to recommend to the Department of Justice whether or not she should be indicted for violating what she says are agency rules and what others call the law between now and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which begins July 25.  If she is indicted before the convention, Blakeman says, it will give the party an opportunity to make changes in the rules that could result in an alternate nominee.  Here is the intriguing part about Blakeman's scenario:  "If a grand jury is empaneled, or if she were to be indicted before the convention, the Democrats would have to let her go."  If an indictment were to come after the convention, he says, it presents a different problem because each state needs to certify their ballots before November.  If an indictment occurs after the states have certified their ballots, it would be nearly impossible to replace Hillary Clinton with another candidate.

State Dept.  Claims It Would Take 75 Years to Compile Clinton Emails.  The State Department claims it would take 75 years to compile the 450,000 pages of emails between Hillary Clinton and her top aides, meaning it will be able to satisfy two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits from the Republican National Committee no later than 2091. [...] This should conclusively refute the State Department Inspector General's accusation that the department constantly provides slow, inaccurate, and incomplete responses to FOIA requests — delays that always seem to have the magical result of producing vital information after the November elections.

Bryan Pagliano's Lawyers Provide New Details About Immunity Agreement With Justice Department.  Lawyers for Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department information technology specialist who managed Hillary Clinton's email system, provided new details in a federal lawsuit on Tuesday about an immunity agreement he has with the Justice Department.  They also argued that Pagliano should be allowed to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in a pending deposition with the watchdog group Judicial Watch because he has information that could "furnish a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute" in the Clinton email investigation.

Clinton tech aide asks court to keep immunity deal secret.  A former technology adviser to Hillary Clinton is seeking to keep under wraps an immunity deal the aide reached with the Justice Department in its investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state.  A lawyer for Bryan Pagliano submitted a sealed motion and exhibits to U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan Tuesday afternoon, less than two hours before the 5 p.m. deadline Sullivan set for the filing of Pagliano's immunity agreement.

FBI offers second secret filing in Clinton email suit.  The FBI is offering a federal judge a second secret glimpse into the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.  The Justice Department asked a federal judge Monday to accept "additional details" under seal about how the FBI conducted its search for records a Vice News journalist requested under the Freedom of Information Act from the law enforcement agency about the probe it is conducting into Clinton's email set-up and how classified information came to reside in the Democratic presidential candidate's account.

Judicial Watch Releases Clinton Email Deposition Testimony of Amb.  Stephen Mull, Former Executive Secretary for State Department.  Judicial Watch today released the deposition transcript of Ambassador Stephen D. Mull, executive secretary of the State Department from June 2010 to October 2012, who suggested that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be issued a State Department BlackBerry, which would protect her identity and would also be subject to FOIA requests. [...] Amb.  Mull now serves as the State Department's lead coordinator for Iran nuclear implementation.  Amb.  Mull's testimony and other discovery arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.

Exclusive: Emails Show State Dept.  Officials Were Warned Of Hillary Clinton Email Spin.  Newly released State Department emails show that in the days after Hillary Clinton's exclusive personal email use made international news, officials with the agency's legal department were urged by the former head of that division to make it clear that the bureau did not sign off on the former secretary of state's arrangement.  But that advice, which came from John Bellinger, the State Department's Legal Adviser during the George W. Bush administration, appears to have gone unheeded, at least publicly.  The State Department never publicly clarified that Clinton self-approved her personal email system.

Former US attorney:  Clinton aides' legal strategy is 'red flag'.  Four central figures in the FBI's criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices are all using the same lawyer, a move described as a "red flag" by a former U.S. attorney who now runs a government watchdog group.  Lawyer Beth Wilkinson is representing:  Clinton former chief of staff Cheryl Mills; policy adviser Jake Sullivan; media gatekeeper Philippe Reines; and former aide Heather Samuelson, who helped decide which Clinton emails were destroyed before turning over the remaining 30,000 records to the State Department.  "I think it would be a real red flag," Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, told Fox News, in reference to the legal defense.  He suggested having a single lawyer would help the four Clinton aides align their stories for FBI interviews.

Secretary without honor.  Apologists for Hillary Clinton's alleged criminal mishandling of classified documents say that it doesn't matter, that she really did nothing wrong, or nothing significant.  But the real question is not so much what she did as how she has responded to being found out.

It's the Server, Stupid.  The State Department inspector general's conclusion that Hillary Clinton violated federal records law should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the controversy.  The IG report, released in late May, is devastating to Clinton's constantly shifting defenses of her misconduct.  And while the inspector general does not opine on the legality of her home-brewed email server under federal criminal law, the report outlines the factual predicate for criminal prosecution.

Did the FBI contact Clinton?  Hillary dodges question and answers that the agency hasn't requested an interview yet.  Hillary Clinton side-stepped a question this morning [6/5/2016] when asked if she had been contacted by the FBI regarding the agency's ongoing investigation into her emails.  'I have not been asked to come in for an interview,' Clinton told ABC 'This Week' host George Stephanopoulos, eschewing answering the original query of whether contact had been made.

Exclusive: General Jerry Boykin on Hillary Exposing Intelligence Sources: 'Lives Have Been Endangered... Punishable By Jail Time'.  Bush administration Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence General Jerry Boykin said that Hillary Clinton posting the names of CIA-protected intelligence agents on her private email server means that she must be indicted.  "What Hillary Clinton has done, I can tell you, it is... punishable by jail time.  I think ultimately she's going be indicted.  She has to be.  This cannot stand," Boykin said on Breitbart News Saturday [6/4/2016] [...]

Former defense official:  Clinton is the real 'danger'.  Former Defense Intelligence Agency Director retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn faulted Hillary Clinton's foreign policy experiences, classifying all of them as failures during a Thursday night [6/2/2016] interview on Fox News.  Flynn told host Greta Van Susteren he would describe presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump as a "more secure" commander in chief because Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, has a record of lying to the public.  "She talked about people who are dangerous.  I mean, a secretary of state who lies to the American public, a secretary of state who uses an unsecure email server to send and receive highly classified national security information, knowing that she is not doing the right thing," Flynn said.

Top Hillary aide suffers memory loss in deposition.  Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff during her four years as secretary of state, demonstrated a repeated inability to recall key information about her former boss's private, unsecured email server in a deposition with Judicial Watch, according to a 270-page transcript released Tuesday.  In testimony Friday [6/3/2016] that lasted seven hours, three attorneys representing Mills and four from the Justice Department interrupted Judicial Watch attorneys approximately 250 times, shouting "objection" to argue why Mills should not answer the question posed.  When Mills finally did answer, she responded "I don't recall" 40 times and "I don't know" to another 182 questions.

Judge Orders The Release Of More Emails From Hillary's Private Server.  Things are not looking up for Hillary Clinton.  After receiving a damning report from the Inspector General that she violated state policies by using an unsecured home-based email server while she was the Secretary of State, a federal judge has now ordered the Obama administration to release new emails before the Democratic Convention.  Judge Kitanji Brown released an order on Wednesday telling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to hand over to the Republican National Committee (RNC) whatever they can by July 11.  This is in response to the RNC's public records lawsuit, which aims to find out whether the Clintons had an influence on USAID.  After handing over the documents, USAID is expected to cooperate with the State Department to examine hundreds of pages of other documents.  The information could be made public in the future.

Pathetic excuses and endless stonewalls:  The Clintons' version of the truth.  In her sworn testimony made public this week, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills proved that Team Hillary won't give up an ounce of truth without a fight. [...] In fact, the record's clear that [Hillary] "went home-brew" precisely to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requests.  Worse, Clinton and her inner circle all signed agreements promising to safeguard classified info — then winked as the private server put those secrets at risk.  The rest of Mills' testimony was just as tendentious, including 40 answers of "I don't recall" and 182 of "I don't know."

Federal Judge Orders Clinton IT Witness To Produce Reported Immunity Agreement, Legal Basis for Fifth Amendment Claims.  Judicial Watch today [6/3/2016] announced that a court order was issued by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan requiring Bryan Pagliano, the Clinton State Department IT official who reportedly provided support for the Clinton email system, to produce to the court his reported immunity agreement and the legal basis for the Fifth Amendment claims he planned to assert in Judicial Watch's discovery into the Clinton email system.  The order delays Mr. Pagliano's deposition, which had been scheduled for Monday, June 6.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Hillary Could Face A 10-Year Prison Stint If Her Server Was Hacked.  [Scroll down]  In her early March press briefing, she had the following exchange:  Question:  "Were you ever ... specifically briefed on the security implications of using ... your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president?"  Clinton:  "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.  There is no classified material.  So I'm certainly well aware of the classification requirement and did not send classified material."  This is plainly a lie, since the initial investigation by Charles McCullough, the intelligence agencies' inspector general, found at least 1,000 classified documents on Clinton's server, with some two dozen of those classified as either Top Secret or SAP.  For those who don't know, SAP is even higher than Top Secret, and involves the most sensitive secrets the nation has.

Federal Judge Orders Clinton IT Witness To Produce Reported Immunity Agreement, Legal Basis for Fifth Amendment Claims.  Judicial Watch today [6/3/2016] announced that a court order was issued by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan requiring Bryan Pagliano, the Clinton State Department IT official who reportedly provided support for the Clinton email system, to produce to the court his reported immunity agreement and the legal basis for the Fifth Amendment claims he planned to assert in Judicial Watch's discovery into the Clinton email system.  The order delays Mr. Pagliano's deposition, which had been scheduled for Monday, June 6.

Cheryl Mills would prefer not to.  Kim Strassel has read the transcript of the deposition of Cheryl Mills in the case brought by Judicial Watch against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act.  Although the transcript runs to 270 pages, it can't have taken long to review.  It also can't have been a pleasant experience.

Bad sign:  Republicans release signed documents from Clinton aides.  Senior Hillary Clinton aide Jake Sullivan and former tech support staffer Brian Pagliano each signed agreements with the government pledging not to disclose classified information, according to government documents released Thursday [6/2/2016] by Republicans.  Both men signed the nondisclosure statements swearing to protect 'marked or unmarked classified information, including email communications,' according to documents released by the Republican National Committee.

Does Bryan Pagliano Pleading The Fifth Mean Hillary Is More Likely To Be Deposed in Judicial Watch Case?  Bryan Pagliano's decision — revealed on Wednesday [6/1/2016] — to plead the fifth in a Judicial Watch deposition scheduled for next week leaves a huge void in the watchdog's efforts to get to the bottom of Hillary Clinton's private email arrangement.  But could it open up the door to the federal judge handling the lawsuit to allow the deposition of the former secretary of state?  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan approved limited discovery of several Clinton aides and State Department officials earlier this year in the Judicial Watch suit.

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton Posted Names of Hidden Intelligence Officials On Her Email.  Hillary Clinton posted and shared the names of concealed U.S. intelligence officials on her unprotected email system.  Federal records reveal that Clinton swapped these highly classified names on an email account that was vulnerable to attack and was breached repeatedly by Russia-linked hacker attempts.  These new revelations — reminiscent of the Valerie Plame scandal during George W. Bush's tenure — could give FBI investigators the evidence they need to make a case that Clinton violated the Espionage Act by mishandling national defense information through "gross negligence."

Dark Clouds Gather Over Hillary Clinton.  Dan Metcalfe teaches secrecy law at American University's Washington College of Law.  He served as Director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy for more than 25 years, during which time he handled information-disclosure policy issues on dozens of Clinton Administration scandals.  He's a registered Democrat who says he will vote for Hillary Clinton in November "if she escapes indictment and manages to become the Democratic presidential nominee."  Metcalfe believes, however, that Clinton will be indicted, and should be, over the email scandal.

Hillary Clinton's chief email defense is false.  Hillary Clinton's chief defense of her email behavior is that she tried to forward her messages so they were captured by the State Department — but a Washington Times analysis found she clearly did that only a quarter of the time when she was corresponding with someone outside the department.  More often than not, when Mrs. Clinton was exchanging thoughts or policy memos with outsiders, their correspondence ended up in the digital black hole of her secret email system and were never forwarded to anyone else in the State Department.

Clinton aides promised to protect 'marked and unmarked' classified info.  The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Thursday released classified nondisclosure agreements signed by a pair of Hillary Clinton's State Department aides in which they promised to protect classified information.  The release of the documents from Jacob Sullivan and Bryan Pagliano comes hours before Clinton is set to deliver a major national security address attacking presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, and appear to be designed to undercut her claims to be the most responsible steward of American power.

Mastermind behind Hillary's email server won't answer questions.  Former State Department employee Bryan Pagliano, who set up Hillary Clinton's infamous home email server, will refuse to answer questions in an ongoing civil lawsuit and doesn't want to be videotaped invoking his Fifth Amendment rights, according to court documents obtained by The [New York] Post.

Clinton IT aide Pagliano to plead Fifth in email case.  The man who set up Hillary Clinton's private email server will assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refuse to answer questions over an open records lawsuit, according to court documents obtained Wednesday [6/1/2016] by Fox News.  Bryan Pagliano declined to answer questions from watchdog group Judicial Watch during his deposition scheduled for Monday, according to his lawyers.  His lawyers also asked a federal judge to block Judicial Watch from recording his deposition, stating that a written transcription should be enough.

Judge orders Obama administration to release new Clinton emails.  A federal judge has ordered the Obama administration to release new emails connected to Hillary Clinton before Democratic National Convention in July.  In an order late on Wednesday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson told the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to hand over to the Republican National Committee (RNC) whatever records it could as part of an RNC's open-records lawsuit on July 11.  After that, USAID will need to consult with the State Department about hundreds of other pages of documents, which could be released at some point in the future.

Hillary's Potential Email Felonies.  While Hillary Clinton likes to appear unconcerned about her email scandal, her actions have the potential to invite serious Federal issues. [...] The contents of the Clinton private server have yet to be fully investigated.  However, if Hillary made any contact with any foreign agent or officer, such as booking speeches by Bill Clinton, she committed a Federal felony.  The FBI seem to be looking into the connections between her Charitable Foundation and her actions as Secretary of State.  And when she "allowed" Russia to control 20% of Canadian uranium in return for donations to the entity of her foundation, even indirectly, she violated §201.  The penalty for each offense is to be fined or imprisoned for two years or both.

Clinton IT aide to plead Fifth in email case.  The man believed to have set up and maintained Hillary Clinton's private email server will assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refuse to answer questions as part of an open records lawsuit against the State Department.  Bryan Pagliano will decline to answer questions from Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group, during a deposition scheduled for Monday, his lawyers wrote in a court filing on Wednesday afternoon [6/1/2016].  The move forecloses the possibility that Pagliano would break his months of silence about the server issue, even as scrutiny has intensified on his role.

Cheryl Mills Deposition — Clinton Email Was Not Subject to FOIA Inquiry.  Cheryl Mills testimony covered Clinton's use of emails; whether FOIA searches were done of Clinton emails, information about the set-up of the Clinton email server; Mills' communication with Clinton email witness Bryan Pagliano; Mills' involvement in prior Clinton email controversies; and the handling of politically sensitive FOIA responses.  Mills' attorneys directed her not to answer many questions.

Lawyers for Clinton aide block questioning on IT specialist who set up server.  Lawyers for senior Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, during a nearly five-hour deposition last week in Washington, repeatedly objected to questions about IT specialist Bryan Pagliano's role in setting up the former secretary of state's private server.  According to a transcript of the deposition with watchdog group Judicial Watch released on Tuesday, Mills attorney Beth Wilkinson — as well as Obama administration lawyers — objected to the line of questioning about Pagliano, who has emerged as a central figure in the FBI's ongoing criminal probe of Clinton's email practices.  "I'm going to instruct her not to answer.  It's a legal question," Wilkinson responded, when asked by Judicial Watch whether Pagliano was an "agent of the Clintons" when the server was set up.

Clinton's chief of staff is quizzed about her secret email server — but can't answer questions because she is now Hillary's lawyer.  Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff discussed the Democratic hopeful's secret email server with the IT aide who set the system up, but can't talk about it because she's now Clinton's lawyer.  Aide-turned-attorney Cheryl Mills testified for five hours on Friday [5/27/2016] as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit launched by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which has been trying to get access to Clinton's emails during her tenure as secretary of state.

Former Top Clinton Aide Refuses to Answer Deposition Questions In FOIA Lawsuit.  The deposition transcript of Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff at the State Department was released on Tuesday [5/31/2016] by the legal watchdog group Judicial Watch.  Cheryl Mills sat for her deposition last Friday to answer questions as part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch that seeks to determine whether the State Department acted in good faith in responding to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Judicial Watch Releases Former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills Deposition Testimony.  Judicial Watch today [5/31/2016] released the deposition transcript of Cheryl D. Mills, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff throughout her four years as secretary of state. [...] Mills testimony covered Clinton's use of emails; whether FOIA searches were done of Clinton emails, information about the set-up of the Clinton email server; Mills' communication with Clinton email witness Bryan Pagliano; Mills' involvement in prior Clinton email controversies; and the handling of politically sensitive FOIA responses.  Mills' attorneys directed her not to answer many questions.

Report: Intel Community Concerned About Double Standard in Clinton E-Mail Investigation.  A new report on Monday [5/30/2016] that longtime Hillary Clinton aide, Cheryl Mills, kept her top secret security clearance despite sending classified information to the Clinton Foundation and to Clinton's private e-mail server has some current and former Intelligence Community and State Department personnel deeply concerned that a double standard is at play as it relates to the investigation into Clinton's e-mail.  According a Fox News report, in her position as Clinton's State Department chief of staff, Mills often forwarded e-mails to Clinton's personal account, including a Jan. 23, 2011 e-mail that contained classified information, as well as foreign government information that is considered "born classified."  Under normal circumstances, intelligence officials say it is standard practice to suspend a clearance pending the outcome of an investigation, yet Mills was allowed to maintain her top secret security clearance, according to congressional letters obtained by the network.

Hillary's Latest Excuse Is Her Worst Yet.  Clinton had long suggested that she wasn't the first government official to use a private e-mail address to conduct official business.  But in a memo sent over the weekend to big donors, Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, claimed that Clinton thought she was just following State Department tradition when setting up her home-brew server in the basement of her New York home.  "She believed she was following the practices of other Secretaries and senior officials," Podesta wrote in the memo, which BuzzFeed News obtained.  Podesta doesn't offer any evidence as to how Clinton arrived at this belief, presumably because there is none.

Lawyers for Clinton aide block questioning on IT specialist who set up server.  Lawyers for senior Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, during a nearly five-hour deposition last week in Washington, repeatedly objected to questions about IT specialist Bryan Pagliano's role in setting up the former secretary of state's private server.  According to a transcript of the deposition with watchdog group Judicial Watch released on Tuesday [5/31/2016], Mills attorney Beth Wilkinson — as well as Obama administration lawyers — objected to the line of questioning about Pagliano, who has emerged as a central figure in the FBI's ongoing criminal probe of Clinton's email practices.

'I'd Expect More From You': Wallace Battles Guest on Hillary's Email Defense.  Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) joined Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" today, and things got heated while discussing the scathing IG report on Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  The State Department audit found Hillary Clinton and previous secretaries of state at fault for their use of private email.  Lankford said that Clinton neither asked nor received permission to use a private server, adding that her violations were exacerbated by the fact that she conducted 100 percent of her electronic communication on the unapproved device.

Former State Dept. watchdog debunks central Clinton email claim.  The State Department's former top watchdog, in an interview with Fox News, rejected Hillary Clinton's repeated claims that her personal email use was in line with her predecessors' — while saying he would have immediately opened an investigation if he caught wind of a secretary of state using such an account.  Howard Krongard, a George W. Bush administration appointee who served as the State Department inspector general from April 2005 to January 2008, cited his own experience in challenging Clinton's insistence that her practices were nothing out of the ordinary.

Hillary and Staff May Have Blown Counterterrorism Ops With 'Sloppy' Communications.  A retired senior State Department military adviser claims that Hillary Clinton's "sloppy communications with her senior staff" when she was secretary of state may have compromised at least two counterterrorism operations.  Bill Johnson, who was the State Department's political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, in 2010 and 2011, says secret plans to eliminate the leader of a Filipino Islamist separatist group and intercept Chinese-made weapons components being smuggled into Iraq were repeatedly foiled.

Feds fight to prevent Clinton deposition in email case.  The Obama administration is trying to prevent former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from being deposed in an ongoing open records case connected to her use of a private email server.  Late Thursday evening [5/26/2016], the Justice Department filed a court motion opposing the Clinton deposition request from conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch, claiming that the organization was trying to dramatically expand the scope of the lawsuit.  Judicial Watch is "seeking instead to transform these proceedings into a wide-ranging inquiry into matters beyond the scope of the court's order and unrelated to the FOIA request at issue in this case," government lawyers wrote in their filing, referring to the Freedom of Information Act.

State Dept.  Tries to Block Deposition of Hillary Clinton.  Attorneys for the U.S. Department of State are trying to block the deposition of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in a FOIA case that is making its way through federal court.  State Department attorneys believe the request to depose Clinton is "wholly inappropriate" given a ruling in another case.  This case involves a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog organization.  The group had filed FOIA requests seeking information and talking points about the attacks of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya.  In their response to a proposed order for discovery, the State Department contends that many of the depositions that the group is seeking would overlap with depositions scheduled to take place in another lawsuit filed by the same group.

Hillary Clinton should quit presidential race as email scandal engulfs her campaign.  On Thursday [5/26/2016], Joe Scarborough, the former Republican Congressman, was absent on his MSNBC morning show "Morning Joe."  His co-host, Mika Brzezinski, instead led a panel of guests including herself, Chuck Todd, and Andrea Mitchell — all of whom are far from excessively adversarial to the Clinton campaign.  In fact, I've criticized those very panelists often for being outrageously biased in their support of Clinton. [...] From the very beginning of the segment, it was clear that the report issued by inspector general of the State Department on the scandal, and the subsequent excuses issued by the Clinton campaign, had completely taken the wind out of Mika and the team.  They were equal parts miffed, exasperated, and disgusted — and sustained these emotions throughout the entire segment.

State Department official thought Clinton used personal email for 'family and friends'.  In a two-hour deposition with the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch last week, Lewis Lukens also said he offered to set up a "stand-alone" computer for Clinton to check her personal email account, only to be told that she "does not know how to use a computer to do email."  Lukens' testimony was released Thursday [5/26/2016], the day after the State Department inspector general released a report criticizing Clinton's email setup, saying that it violated federal records rules and cybersecurity guidelines.  The FBI is investigating possible mishandling of classified information that passed through the server, which was set up in the basement of Clinton's Chappaqua, N.Y. home.

Shocking Deposition:  Hillary Clueless On Using Computer Emails.  As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton never used a password to protect her computer emails, and she was clueless about how regular emails work on a conventional computer, according to a deposition of a foreign service officer at the State Department.  She also continued to push for the use of her personal Blackberry phone in the Secretary's highly-secured government suite even though National Security Agency (NSA) regulations barred its use in that office.

Guccifer may have Hillary emails stashed online.  The Romanian hacker known as Guccifer has agreed to plead guilty to cybercrime, likely as part of deal with federal prosecutors.  Guccifer, whose real name is Marcel Lazar, revealed in early 2014 to a reporter for The Smoking Gun that he had stored large numbers of documents on Google Drive.  The TSG reporter subsequently reviewed these files, which contained email messages, photos, videos and other documents which he had stolen from several high profile people.  Lazar also hacked into Hillary confidante Sidney Blumenthal's email account and revealed the existence of Hillary's private email server.  Lazar also claimed to have hacked into Hillary's email server, but thus far has not offered any proof of doing so.  It may be that Lazar has additional files on Google Drive or other web servers where he stored Hillary's emails that he can now share with the FBI as part of the plea deal.

Hacker who claims he breached Clinton server pleads guilty, strikes deal with feds.  The Romanian hacker who claimed he easily breached Hillary Clinton's email server pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to two counts of computer hacking charges, as part of a deal with the Justice Department.  In exchange for a reduced sentence, Marcel Lehel Lazar — also known as Guccifer — has agreed to cooperate with federal authorities in the future.  Lazar pleaded guilty to the unauthorized access of a protected computer and aggravated identity theft, counts tied to his illegal intrusion into systems belonging to former U.S. government officials, including former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Under the deal, Lazar faces seven years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines.

Does this DOJ memo hint that criminal action against Hillary is forthcoming?  A new filing by the Justice Department contains a key phrase that some might construe as a hint that criminal prosecution is being planned for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.  Last week, Vice News reporter Jason Leopold formally protested the classification of an FBI declaration that provided details about the investigation into how sensitive information ended up on Clinton's private email server.  The Justice Department submitted the declaration as part of "a secret filing," but a U.S. District Court judge ordered them to publicly submit a redacted copy of the document or at least "show cause why" that isn't possible.

Romanian hacker who says he breached Clinton server finalizing plea deal.  It is not publicly known whether the deal being worked out has a provision for cooperating with federal authorities — and whether that has anything to do with the investigation into Clinton's exclusive use of a private email server for government business while secretary of state.  But an intelligence source familiar with the FBI probe said if Guccifer pleads guilty to compromising Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal's AOL account — which is one of the nine charges — it will show that Clinton's use of a personal server put sensitive information outside secure government channels and made it accessible to foreign hackers.

Hillary Clinton Should Testify Under Oath.  Our investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email system entered a significant new phase this week.  We announced a schedule of depositions of her top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, as well as top State Department official Patrick Kennedy, and former State IT employee Bryan Pagliano.  Their testimony is about the creation and operation of Clinton's non-government email system.  The first witness, Lewis A. Lukens, a deputy assistant secretary, was deposed on May 18. I can't say much about the testimony at this point, other than to tell you that it was not helpful to either Mrs. Clinton or the Obama State Department.  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan set this historic evidence gathering in motion.  Judge Sullivan granted us "discovery" into Clinton's email system, noting that "based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary."

Will Obama Indict Clinton to Save his Party?  [Scroll down]  I don't believe for a moment that Obama has any personal investment in Hillary Clinton becoming President — he'd personally be just as happy with Bernie if not more so.  Moreover, his own Justice Department is allegedly threatening open mutiny if action is not taken against Clinton after the probe into her private email server is completed.  If Clinton were in a strong position for the general election, no doubt Obama would order Lynch to softpedal any action that lands on Clinton herself, no matter what the facts say.  However, Obama can read the polls as well as anyone, and he knows that Sanders would walk all over Donald Trump, whereas Clinton might well find herself in a dogfight.  At this point, an indictment of Clinton might well seem like an escape hatch for President Obama.

Judicial Watch President:  State Dept.  Official's Deposition Was 'Embarrassing' For Hillary.  The president of the watchdog group Judicial Watch says that information that a former State Department official provided about Hillary Clinton and her private email system in a lawsuit deposition conducted on Wednesday [5/18/2016] will be embarrassing for the former secretary of state.  Tom Fitton, whose group is suing the State Department, says he is restricted in what he can legally say about an interview conducted with Lewis Lukens, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state and the executive directory of the secretariat during Clinton's tenure.  But the Judicial Watch president did tell The Daily Caller that Clinton will not be pleased with the information he provided.  "The testimony was not helpful for Clinton or the State Department," Fitton told The [Daily Caller] in a phone interview.

13 Incompetent Failures in the Obama Administration.  The former secretary of State not only stored classified email on an insecure server (thus making it much more likely that foreigners would be able to hack sensitive intel), but she also lied and continues to lie about it.  As more and more details came out in the past year or so, the scandal has appeared gravely criminal, but media outlets continue to misrepresent the situation.

Ex-Clinton aides to give depositions in email server lawsuit.  Cheryl Mills, the former chief of staff, and Huma Abedin, her deputy chief of staff, are among depositions set up by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act case.  U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ruled May 4 that the conservative group could depose six current and former senior Clinton and department aides in the group's lawsuit in a 2013 public records request for information about Abedin's employment.

Judicial Watch Announces the Schedule for Deposition Testimony in Clinton Email Lawsuit.  Judicial Watch announced today [5/17/2016] that it has scheduled the depositions of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's top aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, as well as top State Department official Patrick Kennedy, and former State IT employee Bryan Pagliano regarding the creation and operation of Clinton's non-government email system.  The first witness, Lewis A. Lukens, will be deposed on Wednesday, May 18.

"Crooked Hillary" Hides Email Deletions Behind Attorney-Client Privilege.  Hillary is apparently now claiming attorney-client privilege about her covert decision to delete certain emails from her server and retain others.  She doesn't want us to know what criteria she used to determine which emails disappeared and which ones she decided to make public.  She clearly doesn't want us to see those emails that she deemed to be personal — if they are personal.  How do we know that?  Because Cheryl Mills walked out of her FBI interview last week after an FBI agent had the nerve to ask about how the decision was made about deleting the emails.  Mills claimed that there was an agreement not to ask her about it because of the attorney-client privilege.  She came back, but was not required to testify about the deletions.  It's important to remember that only the client can invoke attorney-client privilege — and that's clearly what Hillary has done.

Hillary Clinton's Long History of Hiding Documents.  It doesn't matter.  That's what some in the media have insisted about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's decision to use her own private server and email address to avoid public scrutiny for her entire tenure.  David Brock, wild-haired henchman for Hillary Clinton at the Clinton-backed Media Matters for America, appeared on MSNBC today [3/4/2015] to play defense.  He demanded that The New York Times retract their story on Hillary's hidden emails.  "There is no violation of law here, Joe, that I can see whatsoever," Brock insisted.

Depositions Start This Week In Hillary Email Lawsuit.  The first interview will be conducted on Wednesday [5/18/2016] with Lewis Lukens, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and executive director of the Executive Secretariat.  Next week, on May 27, Judicial Watch's lawyers will depose Clinton's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.  Bryan Pagliano, the information technology specialist who managed Clinton's email system, will be deposed on June 6 and Huma Abedin, Clinton's "body woman," will be interviewed on June 28.  The watchdog will interview two other State Department officials — former executive secretary of state Stephen Mull and under secretary for management Patrick Kennedy — next month.

Is Obama's Stonewall Strategy Blowing Up In Hillary's Face?  As we have observed many times, the Obama administration's response to scandals, investigations and inquiries has been invariable:  it stonewalls them.  And the Obama Stonewall Strategy has been highly successful. [...] But in the dying days of the Obama administration, one of its chief obstructionists, Hillary Clinton, may finally pay a price for the administration's chronic lack of transparency.  On May 4, Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan signed an order permitting Judicial Watch to take depositions of Hillary's key aides in Judicial Watch, Inc. v.  Department of State.

CNN: Email Investigation Worries Clinton Campaign Most Because They Can't Control It.  CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny said Sunday that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server has her campaign worried the most because it has no control over the outcome.  CNN anchor John Berman asked Zeleny whether the new movie version of Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cash debuting at the Cannes Film Festival would concern the Clintons.  The movie brings Schweizer's book and its allegations against the Clinton Foundation as an unscrupulous slush fund to the big screen.

You Know Those Missing Hillary Emails? Russia Might Leak 20,000 of Them.  Hillary Clinton sits at the center of a raging firestorm concerning her arrangement of a private email account and server set up in her home — from which top secret information may have been deleted.  But despite Bernie Sanders' apparent annoyance with the "d*** emails," the scandal just exponentially intensified, when Judge Andrew Napolitano revealed on Monday that Russia has possession of around 20,000 of Clinton's emails — leaving open the possibility her deletions might not have been permanent after all.

Group seeks to force Hillary Clinton to testify under oath about emails.  A conservative legal group asked a judge Monday to order Hillary Clinton to face deposition under oath about her role in creating the secret email account she used as secretary of state at the State Department.  Judicial Watch had previously won the right to question her top aides, but the group says it now wants to question Mrs. Clinton herself about her decision to use a non-State.gov account to conduct all of her official business.

Hillary Clinton, the Conveniently Negligent Queen.  As a bewildered, polarized nation awaits, may Attorney General Loretta Lynch lay down the law — sort of; "We do all our reviews, investigations of any matter carefully, thoroughly, and efficiently.  And when the matter is ready for resolution, a recommendation will be made and we'll come to a decision at that time and I'm not able to give you a prediction.  Sorry."  Sorry indeed.  Spare a thought for the army immersed in the Hillary Clinton subterranean server FBI saga, dissecting a web of tens of thousands of cyberspace "transactions".  Yet the True Detective-style plot boils down to two investigative highways:  mishandling of classified information; and those eyebrow-raising sums — tens of millions of dollars — feeding the Clinton Foundation's piggy bank while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, a phenomenon Clintonistas would arguably define as a "grey area".

Clinton E-mail Trove Likely in Russian Hands.  Thousands of e-mails from Hillary Clinton's private, unsecured server, created while she served as Secretary of State, are reportedly in the possession of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). The SVR is said to have gained access to the e-mails, of which it made copies, through its monitoring of a Romanian computer hacker named Marcel Lazăr Lehel (aka Guccifer).  Guccifer had learned about the existence of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail account after accessing the e-mails of her close confidante and informal adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, with whom Hillary had extensive correspondence during her term as Secretary of State.

Clinton E-mails:  Is the Fix In?  There was an extraordinary report in Tuesday's [5/10/2016] Washington Post about the Clinton e-mail investigation.  It involved the government's interview of longtime Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills.  It details how Justice Department attorneys made an agreement with Mills's attorney to cut off questioning about a key aspect of the case.

Former Top DOJ Official:  Clinton Likely Committed 'Biggest Violation of Federal Records Act in History'.  When most people hear the phrase, "violates the law," or "is contrary to law," or perhaps even the word "unlawful," they tend to think that the conduct involved is a violation of some criminal law for which there are criminal penalties.  But some laws and legal obligations are only civil in nature, for which there exist only monetary or administrative sanctions at best.  Such is the case with federal records laws such as the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, which govern the conduct of federal employees and officials, even that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  What's more, the civil sanctions provided in these laws can be applied only to people who still remain federal employees at the time at which their violation is discovered and acted upon.  In other words, if you violate these laws and then leave government service quickly enough, you are beyond the reach of their penalties.

Interpreting the Latest Clinton Email Scandal Tea Leaves.  The most recent revelatory tea leaves available to interpret in the Clinton email scandal give us a bit more to go on.  Those recent events are the Cheryl Mills FBI interview and FBI Director James Comey's recent comments on Clinton's characterization of the investigation as a "security inquiry."  In order of probability we can assume the following from these events: [...]

Video: Jake Tapper fact checks Hillary Clinton on her email server claims — brutally.  [Scroll down]  The rules allowed for some communications in other channels, but as Jake [Tapper] points out, they also required that all such communications be stored inside government control.  That never happened until 21 months after Clinton left office when the server became public knowledge.  And even if such a thing wasn't flatly prohibited it was still unusual in the extreme and "frowned upon."  Of course, that only applies to the original decision to use a private server as her sole channel of communications.  Failing to store all the communications inside the government system takes it to another level.

DNC Chairwoman Schultz claims Clinton 'not the target' of FBI probe.  Even in the face of the FBI boss scoffing at Hillary Clinton's description of the "investigation" into her email practices as a "security inquiry," the head of the Democratic Party is now insisting the front-running Democratic presidential candidate isn't even a focus of the probe. "Secretary Clinton isn't even a target of this inquiry, investigation, whatever 'I' word you want to use," Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Fox News on Friday [5/13/2016].  Asked to back up her statement, Schultz said she's "repeatedly been told that" — though she did not say who might have told her.

DOJ that donated tens of thousands to Hillary certain to treat her crimes with the utmost of objectivity.  In what appears to be a super-sized potential conflict of interest, Clinton, a pathological, self-serving liar who doesn't mind if Americans die to further her political ambitions, has accepted almost $75,000 in campaign contributions in the current election cycle from employees at the Justice Department, the cabinet bureau that will eventually decide whether to prosecute the Benghazi bungler for her use of a hacker-friendly home-brew email server while top U.S. diplomat.  The server is at the heart of the 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, almost four 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.

Stephanopoulos Claims Hillary 'Turned Over All the E-Mails in Her Possession'.  While grilling Donald Trump during Friday's [5/13/2016] Good Morning America on whether he would release his tax returns, co-host George Stephanopoulos laughably held up his former boss Hillary Clinton as a model of transparency:  "...you said you would release your tax returns when Secretary Clinton released her e-mails.  She has turned over all the e-mails in her possession."  Trump countered:  "She didn't turn over all, there's plenty missing.  I read yesterday where there are a lot of e-mails missing.  Don't — I know she's a good friends of yours and I know you worked for them and you didn't reveal it.  But you know, she did not turn over her e-mails.  There are a lot of e-mails missing."

Ex-DoJ Official:  FBI has more than one way to bag Clinton associates.  The FBI is probably going to be successful in seeking charges against at least some of Hillary Clinton's associates, according to a former Justice Department official, if not Clinton herself.  If it isn't because of classified information, he suggested, it will be because they talk too much and are ill-equipped to defend against charges of public corruption.  "My sense is that the bureau will refer a criminal case over," Matthew Whitaker, who served as a U.S. attorney under President George W. Bush, told the Washington Examiner.  "I don't know if it's going to be against Hillary Clinton or others in the inner circle who were actually doing the work of taking classified documents and stripping off information, but my sense is that there will be people charged in this case."

Is Hillary's E-mail Nightmare About to Explode?  Negative headlines about Clinton's e-mails have seemed to be reaching critical mass in recent days.  On Monday [5/9/2016], the State Department revealed that it couldn't find any e-mails from Bryan Pagliano, Clinton's senior I.T. staffer when she was secretary of state.  Pagliano had been responsible for setting up Clinton's private server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, making his testimony and communications central to the F.B.I. probe into any potential wrongdoing, yet four years' worth of his e-mails had mysteriously disappeared.

FBI's Comey:  Not a 'security review' of Clinton server, it's an investigation.  FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday he feels "pressure" to complete the federal investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server competently and quickly.  However, Comey said the pressure is similar to other high-profile cases the bureau handles such as terrorism investigations.  "We want to do it well and we want to do it promptly.  I feel pressure to do both of those things," Comey told reporters during a roundtable at FBI headquarters.  "As between the two things, we will always choose 'well.'"

Watchdog: New Emails Show Clinton Knew About Security Risks of Private BlackBerry.  Emails obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch indicate that Hillary Clinton was aware of the security risks of communicating over a private BlackBerry, the organization said on Thursday [5/12/2016].  Judicial Watch released nearly 300 pages of State Department records on Thursday, including an email that showed Clinton acknowledging security restrictions on her BlackBerry use and another in which Clinton declined to use a secure line to talk to an aide.  In a Feb. 27, 2009, email from Clinton to Dr.  Mark Hyman, a health care advocate, the secretary of state told him that she had not replied to a prior email because she was not allowed to use her BlackBerry in her State Department office.

New Clinton Emails Reveal Clinton Knew about Security Risk of Private Blackberry, Avoided Use of Secure Phone.  Judicial Watch today [5/12/2016] released 296 pages of new State Department documents, including a February 27, 2009, email in which the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized to health care activist/physician Mark Hyman for failing to respond to a message because, "no blackberry contact permitted in my office."  The new documents also contain a February 22, 2009, email exchange between Clinton and her then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, trying to communicate over a secure line after Clinton returned from a trip (evidently to Asia). Unable to set up a secure communication, Clinton told Mills, "I called ops and they gave me your 'secure' cells... but only got a high-pitched whining sound."  When Mills suggested that Clinton try the secure line again, the former secretary wrote back, "I give up.  Call me on my home #."

Former DOJ Official:  Email Case Against Hillary Clinton 'Stinks To High Heaven'.  Hillary Clinton is coming under pressure, as federal investigators question her top aides about the private email scandal that is haunting the former Secretary of State's campaign for the presidency.  Clinton is still reeling from news that her former staffer Bryan Pagliano's emails are not in the possession of the State Department.  Pagliano, who installed Clinton's private server, pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination in the growing criminal investigation.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Now A Key Witness' Emails Have Mysteriously Vanished.  The latest twist is news that four years' worth of State Department emails from Clinton's top IT staffer, Bryan Pagliano, can't be found.  "The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano's email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton's tenure," said State's Elizabeth Trudeau.  State was, however, able to find Pagliano emails for his "recent work at the Department as a contractor, but the files are from after Secretary Clinton left the Department."

Guess who's covering up the tracks of Hillary's email scandal?  The emails that the State Department yesterday [5/9/2016] told the Republican National Committee cannot be found are the ones sent and received by Clinton former aide, Bryan Pagliano — the person who set up Clinton's private server and email apparatus who was granted immunity to testify in March, 2016.  Having been granted the immunity he sought, his emails go missing?  How convenient!

Cheryl Mills walks out on interview with FBI and Justice Department over Hillary's emails.  There are tantalizing signs that the FBI struck a nerve during an interview with close Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, conducted jointly by the FBI and Department of Justice.  And that the Department of Justice is acting on Hillary's behalf to quell the flames.  The account of the incident by Matt Zapotosky of the Washington Post, which broke the story, was frustratingly vague.

Cheryl Mills walked out on FBI interview after question about email sorting procedure.  [Scroll down]  The fact that the procedures used to sort Clinton's email is such a big secret is certainly not without irony.  Clinton may not have devoted much thought or care to keeping her correspondence secure from hackers, at least one of whom has claimed he gained access to the site, but she certainly put a lot of thought into making sure no one could gainsay her decisions about those deleted emails.

Comey rebuffs Clinton claim FBI only conducting 'security inquiry' on emails.  Hillary Clinton for months has downplayed the FBI investigation into her private email server and practices as a mere "security inquiry."  But when asked Wednesday [5/11/2016] by Fox News about Clinton's characterization of the bureau's probe, FBI Director James Comey said he doesn't know what "security inquiry" means — adding, "We're conducting an investigation. ... That's what we do."  The FBI director reiterated that he's "not familiar with the term security inquiry" when told that is the phrase Clinton has used.  As for the timeline for the investigation, Comey, during a briefing with reporters, said he prefers doing the investigation "well" over promptly and said he's not "tethered" to a schedule.

State Department says it can't find emails from Clinton IT specialist.  The State Department told the Republican National Committee that it could not find any emails to or from Hillary Clinton's former IT specialist, who managed her private email server during her tenure as secretary of state before going on to work for the agency, according to a court filing made public Monday [5/9/2016].  The government's revelation in U.S. District Court in Washington came in answer to a lawsuit by the Republican National Committee.  The RNC had sued over its public records request for all work-related emails sent to or received by Clinton's former aide, Bryan Pagliano, between 2009 and 2013, the years of Clinton's tenure as America's top diplomat.  The lawsuit also pressed for other State Department records from the Clinton era.

AG Lynch says she cannot make 'prediction' about timing of Clinton probe.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday she could not make any "prediction" about the timing of a final resolution to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Asked at a news conference if the clock had run out against taking action against Clinton in light of the advanced election schedule, Lynch replied, "We do all our reviews, investigations of any matter carefully, thoroughly, and efficiently.  And when the matter is ready for resolution, a recommendation will be made and we'll come to a decision at that time and I'm not able to give you a prediction.  Sorry."

Source: Clinton IT specialist revealing server details to FBI, 'devastating witness'.  Former Hillary Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, a key witness in the email probe who struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department, has told the FBI a range of details about how her personal email system was set up, according to an intelligence source close to the case who called him a "devastating witness."  The source said Pagliano told the FBI who had access to the former secretary of state's system — as well as when — and what devices were used, amounting to a roadmap for investigators.

The Editor says...
I'll be deeply disillusioned about the FBI if it turns out that the FBI actually learned something from Mr. Pagliano that they didn't already know.

Sid Blumenthal Continues To Assist Clinton:  Won't Say If FBI Has Interviewed Him.  Hillary Clinton's longtime friend and off-the-books intel provider Sidney Blumenthal claimed in an interview on Monday [5/9/2016] that he is all in favor of transparency, but refused to say if he has been interviewed by the FBI as part of its ongoing investigation into the former secretary of state's private email server.  "Have you been interviewed by the FBI yet on this matter?" MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews asked Blumenthal, who sent and received hundreds of the emails contained in the State Department's release of Clinton emails.  "Well, I'm — you know, I really don't want to talk about an ongoing inquiry right now," stammered Blumenthal, who worked at the Clinton Foundation and several other Clinton-linked organizations while Hillary Clinton was in office.

From Whitewater to Benghazi:  A Clinton-Scandal Primer.  Back in early March, The New York Times reported that the FBI would be interviewing Hillary Clinton and her top aides about her private email server within the coming weeks.  A source told the paper the investigation would probably conclude by early May, at which point the Justice Department would be left to decide whether to file charges against Clinton or anyone else, and what charges to file.  The final decision rests with Attorney General Loretta Lynch.  Then things went quiet for a while.  On Monday [5/2/2016] — fully two months after the Times report — Clinton even told Andrea Mitchell that the FBI hadn't contacted her for an interview about the server.  What gives?

Emails From Hillary Clinton's IT Director at State Department Appear to Be Missing.  The State Department said today [5/9/2016] it can't find any of Bryan Pagliano's emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's senior information technology staffer during her tenure there.  Pagliano would have been required to turn over any official communications from his work account before he left the government.  State Department officials say he had an official email account, but that they can't find any of those records and continue to search for them.

Hillary's latest email lie didn't even last a week.  On Tuesday [5/3/2016], MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked her outright:  "Have you been contacted — or your representatives contacted — by the FBI to set up an interview" over her e-mail mess?  Clinton gave a flat "no."  Two days later, news broke that the FBI has already interviewed Clinton's closest confidant, Huma Abedin, and other top aides.  And officials close to the probe say Hillary's to be interviewed in the next few weeks — which means she's surely been contacted.

Hillary to Face FBI Interrogators Within Weeks.  As CBS reports, a source has confirmed that Hillary Clinton will be interviewed by the FBI within the coming weeks, in connection with the investigation into her private email server.  As reported last night, Hillary's top aide, Huma Abedin was interviewed by the FBI at its Washington field office in April.  The FBI and Justice Department have been investigating whether sensitive information that flowed through Clinton's email server was mishandled.

Clinton's Mother's Day present?  FBI close to end of investigation.  At one point in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private bathroom email server, reporters were able to coax an unnamed "FBI official" into saying that Hillary Clinton was "not the target" of the investigation.  It's a line which all of her defenders, including the White House, have stuck to like glue.  But now the end days of this long process appear to be upon us and that line of defense is crumbling quickly.

Romanian hacker who claims he breached Clinton server says he spoke with FBI at length.  The Romanian hacker who says he easily breached Hillary Clinton's personal email server also claimed, in a series of interviews with Fox News, that he spoke with the FBI at length on the plane when extradited from Romania to Virginia last month.  "They came after me, a guy from the FBI, from the State Department," 44-year-old Marcel Lehel Lazar, who goes by the moniker "Guccifer," told Fox News during a jailhouse phone interview. [...] A government source confirmed that the hacker had a lot to say on the plane but provided no other details.  Lazar was flown to the U.S. to face separate cyber-crime charges.

The real reason the FBI interviewed Hillary's closet aide.  Fox News has confirmed that the FBI has interviewed Huma Abedin, top aide to Hillary Clinton, as part of its investigation into Clinton's use of a private email and whether classified information was willfully transmitted on her unsecured network. [...] Abedin is a valued source of information because she apparently used an email on Clinton's private system.  She may have voiced concerns about whether the server was violating the law or, equally important, discussed how the law could be circumvented.  She and other staffers were surely questioned about the 2,200 classified communications contained on the server, including the 22 documents that were "top secret".  How did they end up on the unauthorized system?  Did the aides have clearance to read them?  Didn't they know they were classified?  Were classified markings erased?  Who decided to delete thousands of emails which were government property?  Who ordered the server to be "wiped clean"?

Get ready for a report about 'Hillary Clinton:  Inadvertent Lawbreaker'.  According to reports on the progress of the Clinton investigation, by the time it's all over she might get a new kickass campaign slogan out of it:  "Hillary 2016: She'll only break laws accidentally!" [...] Obviously the final determination has yet to be made, but I won't be surprised if it goes along the "she didn't willfully break the law" path.  That's been the Clintons wheelhouse for decades.

Officials: Scant evidence that Clinton had malicious intent in handling of emails.  Prosecutors and FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server have so far found scant evidence that the leading Democratic presidential candidate intended to break classification rules, though they are still probing the case aggressively with an eye on interviewing Clinton herself, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.  FBI agents on the case have been joined by federal prosecutors from the same office that successfully prosecuted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui — and who would handle any Edward Snowden case, should he ever return to the country, according to the U.S. officials familiar with the matter.  And in recent weeks, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia and their FBI counterparts have been interviewing top Clinton aides as they seek to bring the case to a close.

Federal judge says Hillary might have to answer server-gate questions under oath: 'The deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary'.  Hillary Clinton could be called on to testify about her secret server and email set-up just as she enters the home stretch of her fight for the Democratic nomination.  A federal judge ordered senior State Department aides to deliver statements under oath about the unusual arrangement and whether they acted in 'good faith' during a Freedom of Information Act Request by potentially omitting emails from the clintonemail.com system.  Judge Emmet Sullivan also said 'based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary.'

Clinton aide interviewed in email investigation.  The FBI has interviewed Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, as part of a federal investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state, a person familiar with the probe said Thursday [5/5/2016].

Judicial Watch Lawsuit Uncovers More Hillary Clinton Emails Withheld from State Department.  Judicial Watch today [5/5/2016] released new State Department emails (one batch of 103 pages, the second of 138 pages) that again appear to contradict statements by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that, "as far as she knew," all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department and that she did not use her clintonemail.com system until March 18, 2009.  Judicial Watch recently released Clinton State Department emails dating from February 2009 that also call into question her statements about her emails.

Did NBC Sit on Guccifer Claims on Hacking Hillary Server?  Romanian hacker Marcel Lazar AKA "Guccifer" told FNC's Catherine Herridge that accessing Hillary Clinton's server was "easy.  For me, for everybody."  But Herridge, who appeared on Wednesday's [5/4/2016] Kelly File to discuss the bombshell accusation, wasn't the only reporter with the story.  A May 5 NBC News online story reported the Romanian hacker revealed "in an exclusive interview" with correspondent Cynthia McFadden that Clinton's server was "like an open orchid on the Internet."  However, as PowerLine's Scott Johnson pointed out, "NBC interviewed Guccifer during his pre-extradition detention in Romania.  That means the reported interview took place at least a month ago."

Hillary Clinton Is A Danger To The United States.  On Wednesday [5/4/2016], the Romanian hacker "Guccifer" (aka Marcel Lehel Lazar) said that he had breached Hillary Clinton's private email server.  "As far as I remember, yes, there were... up to 10, like, IPs from other parts of the world," said Lazar.  He said that Hillary's server was "completely unsecured... like an open orchid on the internet."  Hillary, a criminal who should be making claims from her prison cell, quickly fought back, with her team stating, "There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell."  They added, "It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims."  In other words, the Clinton camp won't even maintain that the emails were secure.  They simply say that the fact that the emails aren't public shows that they were never hacked — an insanely stupid defense that must have lawyers everywhere cringing.

Huma and Hillary: sign of conflict in newly released email?  Judicial Watch released more Hillary emails that were withheld from State Department after she claimed to have turned over all of them.  This contradicts earlier sworn statements and raises potential legal issues.

Why was news just leaked that Huma Abedin was questioned by FBI a month ago?  The Clinton spin machine went into high gear yesterday [5/5/2016].  A series of leaks to the media cascaded out a day after Catherine Herridge of Fox News broke the story that Romanian hacker Guccifer told her that he had easily been able to hack into her private email server, and browse through the emails that we now know contained material of the highest classification.  Notably, NBC News had access to this information earlier, but sat on it for weeks, leaving the scoop to Fox News, which is bizarre behavior for a purported news organization.  But then again, other mainstream media largely have ignored the Fox scoop.

Romanian hacker Guccifer:  I breached Clinton server, 'it was easy'.  The infamous Romanian hacker known as "Guccifer," speaking exclusively with Fox News, claimed he easily — and repeatedly — breached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's personal email server in early 2013.  "For me, it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody," Marcel Lehel Lazar, who goes by the moniker "Guccifer," told Fox News from a Virginia jail where he is being held.

Deadlines loom for answers in Clinton email probe as U.S. judge sets discovery.  A federal judge on Wednesday [5/4/2016] directed State Department officials and top aides to Hillary Clinton to answer questions under oath by June 29 about whether they intentionally thwarted federal open-records laws by allowing Clinton's use of a private email server throughout her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Judge orders top Hillary Clinton aides to answer questions about secret emails.  A federal judge on Wednesday [5/4/2016] ordered Hillary Clinton's top aides to answer questions about her secret email server, including detailing who made the decision to set it up and whether it was intended to thwart open records laws.  Top Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl D. Mills will be deposed, as will Bryan Pagliano, who reportedly maintained the clintonemail.com server and Mrs. Clinton's email account tied to the secret system.  Mrs. Clinton herself could also have to answer questions in the open records case brought by Judicial Watch, according to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan's order — though he said a decision on that would be made later.

Bernstein: There Will Be 'Very Damaging' Leaks From Hillary Email Investigation, Her Actions Reckless and Entitled.  On Wednesday's [5/4/2016] "CNN Tonight," Journalist and author Carl Bernstein stated that there would be "very damaging" leaks from the investigation into Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email, and described her conduct as "what she did was an act of recklessness, and entitlement, that there's no excuse for."  Bernstein began by stating that in the general election "all bets are off," including the usual GOP-Dem breakdown as an important factor, celebrity might be more important than ideology, and "TMZ, Drudge, new media, [are] going to have a huge role in this, much more than the usual, fact-based media."

Clinton Campaign Made Payments to Hard Drive and Document Destruction Company.  The Hillary Clinton campaign made multiple payments to a company that specializes in hard drive and document destruction, campaign finance records show.  The payments, which were recorded in February and March of 2016, went to the Nevada-based American Document Destruction, Inc., which claims expertise in destroying hard drives or "anything else that a hard drive can come from."  "Our hard drive destruction procedures take place either at your site or at our secure facility in Sparks, NV," the company's website states.  "This decision is yours to decide based on cost and convenience to you.  In either situation, the hard drive will be destroyed by a shredding."

Clinton emails 'far more egregious' than data breach that has Marine officer facing dismissal.  A Marine officer fighting dismissal for mishandling classified material on his computer has filed a complaint in federal court.  He charges that Marine generals unfairly singled him out, citing statistics that show Marines often wrongly stored classified information and went unpunished.  Marine Reserve Maj. Jason Brezler's lawsuit does not mention Mrs. Clinton, whose handling of secrets on her private server as secretary of state is under FBI investigation.  But legal observers say that if the military can impose harsh punishment on a war veteran for keeping secrets in the wrong computer, then the FBI, in fairness, should cast a critical eye on Mrs. Clinton and her stash of information that the intelligence community says contained top-secret data.

Hillary Clinton's Damning Emails.  [Scroll down]  During an interview last September, [Edward] 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."  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.

Lynch: No deadline for Clinton email probe.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch said there's no deadline for concluding the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, and said setting a deadline would only make the probe less thorough.  "People have to have confidence that we treat every case the same, no matter who's last name is involved, no matter how much publicity it gets," Lynch said in an interview on PBS' "Charlie Rose."

Hillary Clinton's Unencrypted Personal Email Server May Have Led to Benghazi Attack.  There's an important article over at Consortium News by longtime CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who prepared Presidential Daily Briefings for presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and which highlights an interesting point I hadn't come across before.  Namely, that Hillary's use of an insecure personal email server — that was almost certainly hacked by America's enemies — could very well have exposed Ambassador Steven's lack of security in his Benghazi compound, thereby leading directly to the terror attack that killed four Americans.

Report: Clintons Are Paying Legal Bills For Aide Who Registered Private Email Address.  The Clintons have paid "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to cover the legal bills for a Bill Clinton aide who sits at the center of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.  That's according to Washington Times opinion editor Monica Crowley who reports in a new column that a knowledgeable source tells her that the Clintons are covering legal expenses for Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to the former president.  Such an arrangement would raise questions over whether the Clintons are paying Cooper's bills in order to ensure that they have some oversight of his interactions with federal investigators.  It would also raise questions about whether the Clintons are paying other aides' legal costs.  Cooper registered clintonemail.com in his own name on Jan. 13, 2009.

DOJ Claims Revealing FBI Declaration Will Jeopardize Clinton Email Investigation.  Attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice say they cannot make public a classified FBI declaration because it would "adversely affect the ongoing investigation" into Hillary Clinton's private email server.  The recent filing by DOJ attorneys, obtained by LawNewz.com, is significant because it not only acknowledges the ongoing federal probe, but also asserts that if the declaration is made public, it could "reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings."  The DOJ's memorandum is part of a FOIA lawsuit that was originally filed in federal court by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.  Leopold is seeking Clinton's emails that the DOJ obtained from her private server.  He is also seeking correspondence between the FBI and Clinton referencing the Clinton email server.

Are Bill Clinton and his team the key to the FBI's Hillary investigation?  Was Hillary Clinton's unsecure, private email server set up by her husband's top political operative in order to turbocharge their own political and financial interests?  Justin Cooper may hold the answer.  Mr. Cooper is a central player in the shadowy worlds of Bill and Hillary Clinton — serving as Mr. Clinton's top aide since 2015, when his predecessor, former right-hand man and "surrogate son" Doug Band, resigned from the Clinton Foundation — yet he has largely escaped notice.  The obscure Mr. Cooper may, in fact, be the linchpin of the case swirling around the Clintons.

State: 'Administrative error' caused Clinton email confusion.  The State Department said a clerical error on its end is to blame for the confusion that arose Tuesday [4/26/2016] over when officials first withheld an email that revealed Hillary Clinton was using a private email address.  Tuesday morning, the watchdog group Judicial Watch said it got a letter from State that said it withheld that email in November, 2014.  That prompted Judicial Watch to claim that State appears to have withheld the email to keep it from seeing Clinton's private email address.  The group noted that State's failure to release the email in late 2014 meant everyone had to wait until early March, 2015, when Clinton's private email was first reported.

State Dept.  Delayed Releasing Email That Could Have Blown Lid Off Hillary Email Scandal.  The State Department withheld an email that would have shown — months before it was eventually reported — that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account to conduct State Department business, a conservative watchdog group claims.  Judicial Watch says that it received a letter from the State Department last week in which agency officials said that a September 2012 email had been completely withheld from a production of documents that the watchdog demanded as part of a Freedom of Information Act seeking records containing Benghazi talking points.

State Department Hid Key Clinton Benghazi Email from Judicial Watch.  The Obama State Department last week admitted it withheld a key Benghazi email of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Judicial Watch since at least September 2014.  If the State Department disclosed the email when first supposedly found, Clinton's email server and her hidden emails would have been disclosed nearly two years ago, before Clinton authorized the alleged deletion of tens of thousands of emails.

State Dept.  Withheld Key Email From Clinton's Private Server in FOIA Lawsuit.  The State Department has now acknowledged that it withheld a key Benghazi e-mail in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in July 2014.  The State Department acknowledged finding the e-mail in 2014, but it was withheld in its entirety until last week.  This latest admission comes in a FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group, that seeks records related to the drafting and use of the Benghazi talking points.

Most Transparent Administration Ever Withheld Incriminating Hillary Emails From Federal Courts.  It would seem that the only group interested in performing oversight of the Obama administration is an independent watchdog group, not the Republican-controlled Oversight committees in Congress.  Those committees appear to be either complicit, incompetent or (more likely) both.  Instead, we are left to groups like Judicial Watch (an organization that I have financially supported in the past thanks to my generous readers) to perform oversight on the most lawless administration in modern American history.

Busted!  Obama hiding Benghazi emails.  The Obama administration defied a federal court order and refused to release a key Hillary Clinton email concerning the 2012 attacks on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.  By holding back the information, the administration wasn't just protecting Clinton from Benghazi fallout — they may have been trying to hide the fact that Clinton maintained a private email account while secretary of state.

What Did Hillary Crony Admit That Everyone Already Knows?  While being interviewed on WMAL radio in Washington, D.C., Lanny Davis, a longtime Clinton fixer — has any political family ever need more fixing? — told the hosts that he wouldn't be surprised if Clinton's private email server had been hacked.  It was such a startling admission that host Larry O'Connor had to ask Davis again to make sure that he had not misunderstood him. [...] Indeed, a high-ranking former KGB officer told John R. Schindler, a former national security affairs professor at the Naval War College, that "of course" the Russian foreign intelligence "service got it all" from Clinton's email, and it didn't even have to work hard for it.  "I don't know if we're as good as we were in my time," Schindler's source told him, "but even half-drunk the SVR" — today's version of the KGB — "could get those emails, they probably couldn't believe how easy Hillary made it for them."

The Clinton E-mail Case Transcends Hillary's Presidential Campaign.  When friends ask me about the 2016 presidential campaign, my answer is always the same:  It is a matter of "if," not "when," exploding bombshells from the Clinton e-mail investigation quickly transform the current political landscape.  One could argue that the future integrity of our nation rests on how the Justice Department resolves the case.  The political bombs will begin to explode when the outcome of the FBI investigations are announced or leaked.  Finally, there will be concrete answers to questions that have dogged Clinton's presidential campaign for over a year.

FBI Director Says Hillary Email Investigation Could Stretch Past DNC Convention.  FBI director James Comey said Thursday [4/21/2016] that he has no set timetable for wrapping up the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server and that the probe could even extend beyond the Democratic National Committee's convention in July.  Comey was asked about the status of the investigation during an interview at the Aspen Security Forum in London.  "There's no timetable on any investigation," Comey said, adding that he has been asked if the Democratic National Convention is "a key date" for wrapping up the investigation, which centers on whether classified information was mishandled on Clinton's server.

Judge rejects DOJ's classified court filing on Clinton emails.  A federal judge ruled Wednesday [4/20/2016] that the Justice Department needs to make public at least a partial copy of a classified filing that seeks to keep details about Hillary Clinton's private server out of the public eye.  The ruling comes after the department submitted a classified filing to U.S. District Court Judge Randy Moss last month asking that he prevent certain information about the server from being released.  In a motion filed on Tuesday [4/19/2016], Vice News reporter Jason Leopold asked the court to deny that request.

Clinton IT staffer refuses to testify after immunity deal.  The former State Department staffer who set up a private server in Hillary Clinton's basement is refusing to testify before Congress in spite of his immunity deal.  An attorney for Bryan Pagliano said that he would "respectfully decline" a request to testify before two Senate committees, according to a letter provided to the Associated Press on Friday [4/22/2016].  Pagliano received an immunity deal from the Justice Department in early March in exchange for cooperating with the FBI's investigation into the issue.

Why Hillary Clinton Will Be Indicted for Mishandling Classified Information.  Hillary Clinton's email scandal is one of the most important, yet largely undiscussed issues of the 2016 election.  Even though this scandal has been going on for over a year, a vast majority of Americans are still unsure of what exactly she did wrong.  Many in the Democratic Party believe this whole controversy has simply been a partisan, Republican attack to damage her Presidential campaign.  That view has been reinforced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) who has refused to raise the issue in the primary elections thus far — something both potential Republican nominees have promised to do in the general election.

Attorneys Take on DOJ For Filing Secret Document About Clinton Email Investigation.  Attorneys for Vice News reporter Jason Leopold are taking the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to task after the feds filed a classified declaration supposedly providing more information to the court about the FBI's investigation into Clinton's private email server.  The filing was part of a FOIA lawsuit filed in federal court by Leopold seeking Clinton's emails from her private server as well as correspondence between the FBI and Clinton referencing the Clinton email server.  In March, the government filed a motion for summary judgement in the case, and incorporated as one of the supporting documents this classified declaration.  That's significant because as former federal prosecutor Bill Thomas told LawNewz.com not only is the "information being submitted to the court classified, but its really more than that, it is information that if revealed there exists 'reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.'"

State Department Consents to Depositions Over Clinton Email Server.  The U.S. State Department reached an agreement with the watchdog group Judicial Watch on Friday [4/15/2016] that would allow the organization's attorneys to depose Hillary Clinton's top aides about the "creation and operation" of her private email server.  The agreement is the latest legal victory for Judicial Watch, which has been suing the State Department for public records related to Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan approved Judicial Watch's request for discovery last month, a rare move in a Freedom of Information Act case.  Judicial Watch is seeking information on whether Clinton's email server allowed her and top aides to evade public records laws and whether State Department officials intentionally obstructed efforts to obtain public information.

Feds Agree To Allow Probe Of 'Creation And Operation' Of Hillary's Email System.  The State Department and Judicial Watch reached a tentative agreement late Friday [4/15/2016] that will allow the conservative watchdog group to conduct discovery regarding the "creation and operation" of Hillary Clinton's private email system.  The proposed joint order must now be approved by Emmet Sullivan, the U.S. District Court judge handling the Judicial Watch lawsuit, which seeks records related to the "special government employee" status of Huma Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department.  Abedin and Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff, will likely provide sworn depositions in the case.

Time for Hillary to Pay.  [Scroll down]  It would appear, however, that Obama and Hillary are protecting each other.  If Hillary is indicted, Obama surely would be ensnared in the scandal, and would face the wrath of the Clintons for destroying her chance to become president.  As we move toward the two presidential nominating conventions this summer, the FBI's dual probes into the transmission of classified material on Mrs. Clinton's private server, and allegations of corruption, may have reached a vital stage.

ABSCAM agents to FBI chief:  Bureau's 'reputation' on the line in Clinton probe.  Former FBI agents who worked the notorious 1970s sting operation known as ABSCAM have written FBI Director James Comey to warn that nothing less than the bureau's "reputation" is on the line as the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices enters a critical phase.  The agents, in a March 16 letter obtained by Fox News, offered their support for Comey and the agents working the email case.  But the letter cautioned the outcome would have long-lasting implications.  "Decisions must be made on facts alone.  Much is at stake here — people's trust in the Bureau for years to come, as well as the Bureau's reputation among our allies, partners, and friends as the greatest law enforcement agency in the world," wrote John F. Good, president of the Long Island Chapter of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.

How Hillary Clinton's Misuse Of Classified Documents Alters U.S. Law.  In the short run, President Obama's suggestion that mishandling classified documents is not necessarily a criminal offense merely signals his intention to keep a prominent Democrat out of jail.  But him pointing to the complexity of U.S. law regarding secrets, after his administration has brought more prosecutions for disclosures of classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all presidencies combined, points to how well that complexity lends itself to political game-playing.

Top 10 Misreported or Underreported Stories of 2015.  [#8] Vetting Hillary Clinton:  No matter how shameful her falsehoods or accompanying excuses, the mainstream media continue to give Hillary Clinton a free pass on virtually anything she alleges. [...] Hillary Clinton's email scandal has also turned into a campaign season debacle of drip, drip, drip.  She deleted half of her emails as Secretary of State — which were stored on a private email server — and then sent the remaining half to the State Department, claiming that those messages she deleted were personal.  It turns out that she deleted portions of the emails she sent on to the State Department, and also failed to provide a number of emails that were sent between her and confidante Sydney Blumenthal.  And, Mrs. Clinton falsely maintained that she never emailed classified information using her email server.  The intelligence community Inspector General has since declared at least two of her emails Top Secret.

The Real Clinton Email Scandal?  It Might Be What She Did Legally.  I have a saying:  "The scandal isn't what's illegal, the scandal is what's legal," liberal editor and commentator Michael Kinsley once said.  He was referring to the legal forms of corruption that go on day after day in Washington.  By that standard, the real scandal involving Hillary Clinton's e-mails might not be that she compromised national security out of convenience by using a private e-mail server while secretary of state.  The real scandal could lie elsewhere — namely, in what some of her e-mails reveal about her willingness use her position of power to help her corporate friends and campaign contributors.

Clinton Email Scandal: Hillary's Documents Flowed Openly Across Web.  While secretary of state, Clinton conducted State Department business through a personal email account handled by a private server that did not meet the government's security standards.  The homebrew system was probably the most susceptible to hackers during its first two months of existence when emails passed through it without encryption.

State Department: Don't Ask Hillary Aides About Classified Info in Lawsuit.  Lawyers for the State Department want to limit the types of questions that a watchdog group can ask former aides to Hillary Clinton, and potentially the former secretary of state herself, about her creation and use of a private email system while she was in office.  The department asked a federal judge Tuesday night to grant "limited discovery" to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that wants to depose some of Clinton's closest associates and staffers.

Why is the FBI so slow on Clinton e-mail probe?  IF FBI Director James Comey feels no deadline pressure to wrap up the investigation into Hillary Clinton's e-mail server, he should.  "The urgency is to do it well and promptly.  And 'well' comes first," Comey told local law enforcement agents in Buffalo on Monday [4/4/2016], according to the Niagara Gazette.

Hillary just boxed in AG Loretta Lynch.  Hillary Clinton yesterday [4/6/2016] made it very difficult for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to decline to prosecute a possible criminal referral from the FBI.  Using her trademark sandpaper tone of voice when she is being emphatic, speaking to a rally in Pennsylvania, Hillary flat-out declared:  "Everyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable."

No 'Coincidence': Romanian hacker extradited amid Clinton email probe.  The extradition of Romanian hacker "Guccifer" to the U.S. at a critical point in the FBI's criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's email use is "not a coincidence," according to an intelligence source close to the case.  One of the notches on Guccifer's cyber-crime belt was allegedly accessing the email account of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, one of Clinton's most prolific advice-givers when she was secretary of state.  It was through that hack that Clinton's use of a personal account — clintonemail.com — first came to light.

Hillary laughs off email scandal as GOP 'fantasy'.  Hillary Clinton on Friday laughed off as a "fantasy" the Republicans' hopes that the federal probe into her use of a private email server will lead to her being led off in handcuffs.  "Oh my goodness!" the Democratic front-runner told Matt Lauer in an interview that aired Friday morning on NBC's "Today" show.  "I know that they live in that world of fantasy and hope because they've got a mess on their hands on the Republican side.  That is not gonna happen.  There is not even the remotest chance that it's going to happen," she told Lauer on Thursday [4/7/2016] in a Bronx diner.

Will Guccifer Upend Hillary?  After several years of incarceration in his native Romania, Marcel Lazar Lehel, aka Guccifer, has finally arrived this week in Alexandria, Virginia, to face nine charges of computer hacking.  Guccifer, it will be recalled, is the one who revealed the presence of Hillary Clinton's private server through his hacking of Sidney Blumenthal's email account.

Indicting Mrs. Boss Hogg.  The FBI is on a winning streak.  They haven't looked this good since the heyday of Efrem Zimabalist, Jr. [...] The agents doing the investigation are not talking, and, one suspects, just given the size of the investigation — 147 agents — they have found something good.  And don't forget, James Comey is the hard case who insisted on not just prosecuting Martha Stewart, but sending her to prison.  If some of the people around the Clintons really are talking, no telling where it might lead.

This is how the FBI destroys Hillary: The 10 questions that could end her White House dreams.  The FBI's upcoming interview of Hillary Clinton will be a turning point in the race for Democratic nominee, especially since Clinton won't be able to speak to James Comey and his FBI agents in the same manner her campaign has communicated with the public. [...] They mean business, and lying to an FBI agent is a felony, so Hillary Clinton and her aides will be forced to tell the truth.  The doublespeak involving convenience and retroactive classification won't matter to seasoned FBI agents whose reputations are on the line; the entire country feels there's a double-standard regarding this email controversy.  Imagine if you had 22 Top Secret emails on your computer?  Would you be able to claim negligence?

Any One Of These Four Laws Could Put Hillary, Aides In Jail.  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and key aides are vulnerable to three felony charges and one misdemeanor count under the Espionage Act because of the unauthorized transfer of classified documents to her private email server, former national security and law enforcement officials tell The Daily Caller News Foundation.  As many as 150 FBI agents are deployed on the case and FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are reportedly meeting twice weekly to discuss the progress of the investigation.

Feds May Have Known Hillary's Unsecure Blackberry Was Been Hacked in 2009.  [A] Washington Post article from last week is a very good and very exhaustive piece of reporting on Hillary's email scandal.  Let me quote the article as regards The Battle of the Blackberry.  Hillary was absolutely determined to keep using her Blackberry, and her Palace Guard was determined to see the Queen's will made manifest, but apparently the government doesn't use Blackberries as secure phones.  (The article doesn't say what type of phone they use.)

Clinton Email Scandal: DOJ Veteran Says Hillary Should Be Indicted.  Should Hillary Clinton be charged with a crime because of her use of an unsecured, private email server to conduct all of her State Department business?  The question is usually asked in the context of the multitude of emails Clinton had on her server that have been classified or even top-secret.  Clinton has maintained all along that, even if there were classified emails on her server, she didn't know it because none of them was marked as such at the time.  But Ronald Sievert, who was with the Justice Department for 25 years and now teaches national security and international law, says the focus on classified material is a smokescreen.

Former DHS Official: 'Very Real Probability' Asian Intelligence Services Read Unsecured Clinton E-Mails.  Stewart Baker, writing for The Volokh Conspiracy Blog at the Washington Post on Monday [4/4/2016], raises some largely overlooked, yet potentially very troubling issues related to Hillary Clinton's use of private server while serving as Secretary of State.  Baker would know about this issue too, he previously served as the first assistant secretary of policy for the U.S.  Department of Homeland Security.  When analyzing newly available information about when Clinton started using the clintonemail.com home-brew server, Baker, a former Department of Homeland Security official, learned that for most of the first three months of Clinton's term as Secretary of State, her private e-mail server apparently was not encrypted or authenticated with a digital certificate needed to encrypt communications.

Clinton server may have been breached in 2009.  Information pieced together from Hillary Clinton's trove of released email suggests that her request for a secure Blackberry may have followed an intrusion into her system during a trip to Asia, according to an analysis by a former Homeland Security official.  "There now seems to be a very real probability that Hillary Clinton rushed to install an encryption certificate in March 2009 because the U.S.  intelligence community caught another country reading Clinton's unencrypted messages during her February 16-21, 2009, trip to China, Indonesia, Japan, and S. Korea," wrote Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, in a column for the Washington Post.

On the Left, Deep Unease About the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua.  Pass the popcorn: while conservatives are engrossed in the battle between Trump and non-Trump, over on the Left, they're having an ideological conniption fit over the fixed-fight they call the Democrat primaries.  Nobody, it seems, much likes Hillary: [...] In fact, no one less than the FBI director himself, James Comey, will interview the new chief of the Clinton Crime Family.  With nearly 150 agents on the case, it's clear that where there's (obvious) smoke there's also a four-alarm fire; the only question is whether the corrupt Obama "Justice" Department will dare or deign to indict the career criminal, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Four Hillary Aides Hire Joint Defense Counsel.  Politico yesterday revealed that four of Hillary Clinton's aides — not including Huma Abedin and Bryan Pagliano — are using the same high-powered, well-connected D.C.  lawyer for their counsel as they face likely FBI questioning over their role in the private server/classified email and possible criminal referral.  The group includes chief of staff Cheryl Mills; her deputy chief Jake Sullivan; Heather Samuelson, also on Mills's staff; and Philippe Reines, who served as Clinton's spokesman at State.

Clinton aides unite on FBI legal strategy.  Four of Hillary Clinton's closest aides appear to have adopted an unusual legal strategy, hiring the same ex-Justice Department attorney to represent them in the FBI's investigation of Clinton's private email server.  Beth Wilkinson, a well-connected former assistant U.S.  attorney best known for prosecuting Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, is listed as representing three of Clinton's top State Department staffers, according to a congressional letter obtained by POLITICO and dated Feb. 10.  A fourth Clinton aide, Philippe Reines, is also represented by Wilkinson, according to sources familiar with their representation.

Former Dem senator: Clinton email claim 'false on its face'.  A former Democratic senator on Friday dismissed Hillary Clinton's claim that she used a private server for convenience as "false on its face."  "She's a government official.  The law says the public has a right to know what's going on," former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.  Kerrey, who has endorsed Clinton's presidential candidacy, nonetheless accused her of trying to circumvent the law.

Klein: Comey And 'A Lot Of Other FBI Agents' Will Resign If Hillary Is Not Indicted.  Clinton author Ed Klein says that if Hillary Clinton is not indicted, FBI Director James Comey and "a lot of other FBI agents" would resign as well in protest.  In an interview with Fox Business Network's "Varney & Co" on Friday, Klein said, "I think Comey realizes that he's got to wrap this [investigation] up well before the conventions otherwise he's going to disenfranchise millions and millions of people.  So I think this is going to be wrapped up in around six more weeks."

State Dept suspends review into 'top secret' Clinton emails.  The State Department has suspended its internal review into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or her top aides mishandled emails containing information now deemed "top secret."  Spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said Friday [4/1/2016] the department had paused the review to avoid interfering with an ongoing FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private server while she was America's top diplomat.  She said the decision was made after the department sought the FBI's advice on how to proceed with the review and received word that it should follow its standard practice.  Trudeau said the department's standard practice is to place internal reviews "on hold while there is an ongoing law enforcement investigation underway."

10 Questions That Hillary And The State Dept.  Still Need To Answer About The Email Scandal.  There are the big, general questions such as why, exactly, Clinton chose to use a private email system to conduct her State Department business.  And why the State Department didn't do more to prevent the former secretary of state from using the system once officials found out about it.  But there are also questions about specific pieces of the email scandal puzzle that have largely gone unasked, such as whether and when Clinton deleted any of her work-related emails or who was involved in hiring the IT technician who managed her email system.

FBI orders State Dept.  to halt review of Clinton emails.  The State Department said Friday that the FBI has asked the department to halt its internal investigation into emails sent or received by Hillary Clinton while she led the department, emails that are now deemed to contain "top secret" information.  State had been reviewing whether the information was deemed top secret at the time it was sent, or whether the information only became top secret later.  But State Department spokesman Elizabeth Trudeau said the FBI asked the department to stop so as not to interfere with the FBI's own investigation.

Speculation mounts that Hillary's FBI interview on her secret email server is imminent as investigation reaches 'critical stage'.  Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton could be questioned by the FBI in days with the email investigation being wrapped up in weeks, according to new reporting from Al Jazeera America.  The network's David Shuster reported that the investigation has now reached a 'critical stage,' in that the bureau has finished examining her emails and homebrew server and will now be interviewing top aides, along with Clinton herself.  Among those to be interviewed: Clinton's State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills and senior advisor Philippe Reines, Al Jazeera America said.

The Clinton investigation enters a dangerous phase.  Federal law enforcement sources have let it be known that federal prosecutors and the FBI have completed their examination of raw data in the case.  After the FBI acquires raw data — for example, the nature and number of the state secrets in the emails Clinton failed to protect or the regular, consistent, systematic nature of that failure — prosecutors and agents proceed to draw rational inferences from that data.  Then they proceed to corroborate those inferences, looking for other sources to support or even to contradict them.  With one exception, all of this work has been done with neutral sources of evidence — documents, email metadata, government records and technical experts.

Second Judge Grants Discovery in Hillary's Ever-Expanding Email Scandal.  There have been some interesting developments in the Hillary Clinton e-mail saga over the past two weeks.  In response to an FOIA request, conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch obtained documents which seem to show that Clinton was well aware her BlackBerry wasn't secure from the very beginning of her tenure as the nation's top diplomat.  Correspondence between Senior Coordinator for Security Infrastructure Donald Reid, long-time Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and the NSA suggests the former First Lady had become "addicted" to her BlackBerry and essentially refused to use the secure desktop computer provided to her by security officials.

Hillary Clinton's top 10 most ethically challenged emails.  Hillary Clinton's closest aides are finding themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place as the investigation of her emails enters a new phase, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday [3/28/2016].  As the FBI begins scheduling interviews about her use of the private email and server throughout her tenure as secretary of state, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and others are now "in a position of choosing between being honest about those emails, or lying to the FBI, which is a crime," said Matthew G.  Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) in Washington, D.C.  and former U.S.  Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa.

Second judge grants discovery in Clinton email lawsuit.  Citing indications of wrongdoing and bad faith, a federal judge has overruled government objections by declaring that a conservative group is entitled to more details about how Hillary Clinton's private email account was integrated into the State Department recordkeeping system and why it was not searched in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.  U.S.  District Court Judge Royce Lamberth entered an order Tuesday [3/29/2016] agreeing that Judicial Watch can pursue legal discovery — which often includes depositions of relevant individuals — as the group pursues legal claims that State did not respond completely to a FOIA request filed in May 2014 seeking records about talking points then-U.S.  Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice used for TV appearances discussing the deadly attack on U.S.  facilities in Benghazi in September 2012.

State Department Loses Another Round in the Clinton Email Fiasco.  In a second loss in less than two weeks, a federal court has once again ruled against the Obama administration, this time in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) tussle with Judicial Watch over the Clinton email fiasco.  Previously, on March 22, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Justice Department and the IRS to stop their "continuous resistance" and "meritless" objections to producing information and documentation sought in a lawsuit filed by a Tea Party organization in the IRS targeting scandal.

Hillary Clinton's not-so-smartphone a troubling cyber sign.  With cyberterrorism one of America's greatest national security threats, voters need to think long and hard if they want to elect a president who chose personal convenience over national security concerns while secretary of state.  Is this who we want protecting us from Iranian hackers, the North Koreans, ISIS and a growing list of highly sophisticated cyber-thugs?  In addition to operating an off-the-grid private server, we've now learned from a Washington Post story that the Democratic front-runner insisted on using her BlackBerry while secretary of state despite being warned by top security officials about the risks it posed.

Federal judge allows further digging in Clinton email lawsuit.  A second federal judge has ruled that a conservative group should be allowed to dig deeper in its quest for emails sent by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a decision Tuesday [3/29/2016] that could allow the group to seek more documents and depositions from current and former State Department officials.  U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth's order grants limited discovery to Judicial Watch, which sued in 2014 in order to gain access to records relating to the drafting of the talking points given to then-Ambassador Susan Rice in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

FBI readies crucial interviews of Hillary and her aides.  Sources have told the Los Angeles Times that the FBI has alerted attorneys for Hillary Clinton's aides, telling them that the Bureau will be interviewing them about Clinton's private email server and the potential misshandling of classified information.  The sources say the interviews will be conducted in the next few weeks. [...] Reading between the lines of this particular story, it looks as though federal prosecutors are inclined to interpret the law about handling classified information far more generously toward Clinton than the FBI.  This doesn't mean that Clinton is off the hook.

Investor's Business Daily, HuffPo Columnist Agree: Hillary Should Withdraw.  The free-market, liberty-loving editorial board at Investor's Business Daily and a Bernie Sanders-supporting columnist at the Huffingon Post [sic] agree on one thing:  Hillary Clinton should withdraw from the presidential race.  Okay, IBD wants her to "suspend," while HuffPo's H.A. Goodman says she should "concede."  Both missives declare that Mrs. Clinton's withdrawal should be based on the FBI's criminal investigation into her "homebrew" server and her alleged reckless treatment of classified emails and the information contained therein.

The Loretta Lynch Stonewall: Will It Elect Hillary?  When it comes to Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal, the most important thing to bear in mind — even more than classified information — is this:  It was all about avoiding accountability.  It still is.  Mrs. Clinton did not set out to damage national security and compromise defense secrets, although she obviously had no compunction about doing so as necessary to serve her higher personal interests.  For a generation, she has been a public person whose most intimate companion has been scandal.  She knew her State Department stewardship would be no different.  Her motive in designing a communication system that circumvented government recordkeeping and disclosure laws was to avoid a day of reckoning as she campaigned in 2016 for the power of the presidency she craves.  And that is where Loretta Lynch comes in.

FBI to Interview Hillary Clinton's Top Aides in Email Investigation.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is kicking its Hillary Clinton email investigation into high gear.  The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday [3/27/2016] that the FBI and federal prosecutors are setting up interviews with Clinton's top aides, a group that presumably includes Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

A year after 'wiped clean' Hillary's email still a mess.  [Scroll down]  But just remember that in the year since we learned about "wiped clean," Democratic primary voters have been the main victims of Clinton's shifting stories.  The subtext of her claim to her party was that she had done nothing wrong... and that she had taken every step necessary to thwart investigators even if she had.  She was, she assured her party, a safe bet.  As it turns out she had neither done right in her electronic hygiene nor been thorough in preventing the discovery of her bad practices.  She proved neither forthright nor expert at the kind of tactical blocking for which she and her husband were famed.

Los Angeles Times previews Hillary's strategy to dispute a criminal referral on email scandal.  Hillary Clinton's allies are carefully implementing a strategy to deal with a possible criminal referral to the Justice Department by the FBI. [...] I see the Los Angeles Times as laying the groundwork for Hillary and her supporters to claim that a criminal referral from the FBI would be unjustified, and the result of "overzealous" agents seeking to justify their expensive inquiry.  When Bill Clinton's scandals were being investigated, the Democrats suddenly became obsessed with the cost of a government program, detailing the spending of Kenneth Starr.  You can expect the Hillary camp to do the same with a criminal referral should it occur.

How Clinton's email scandal took root.  Hillary Clinton's email problems began in her first days as secretary of state.  She insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but she wasn't allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices, a secure space known as Mahogany Row.  For Clinton, this was frustrating.  As a political heavyweight and chief of the nation's diplomatic corps, she needed to manage a torrent of email to stay connected to colleagues, friends and supporters.  She hated having to put her BlackBerry into a lockbox before going into her own office.  Her aides and senior officials pushed to find a way to enable her to use the device in the secure area.

Clinton email probe enters new phase as FBI interviews loom.  Federal prosecutors investigating the possible mishandling of classified materials on Hillary Clinton's private email server have begun the process of setting up formal interviews with some of her longtime and closest aides, according to two people familiar with the probe, an indication that the inquiry is moving into its final phases.  Those interviews and the final review of the case, however, could still take many weeks, all but guaranteeing that the investigation will continue to dog Clinton's presidential campaign through most, if not all, of the remaining presidential primaries.

New FBI Filings Reveal 'Pending Investigation' Into Clinton's E-Mails is Far From Over.  A pair of declarations submitted to a federal judge by the FBI late Friday [3/25/2016] in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Vice News reveal new details about the Bureau's "pending investigation" into Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server ("Clinton Server") that tend to indicate the matter is far from over.

Role of tech who set up Clinton's server unknown to bosses at State.  The technician, Bryan Pagliano, was running the off-grid email server that Clinton had him set up in her New York home for her work as secretary of state.  But even as years passed, Pagliano's supervisors never learned of his most sensitive task, according to the department and one of his former colleagues.

More lost Clinton emails unearthed.  Judicial Watch on Thursday [3/24/2016] announced that it had unearthed emails from Hillary Clinton's personal email account dated February 2009.  Until now, the former secretary of state had maintained she was not using the account at that time.  The findings include a Feb. 13, 2009, exchange between Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, in which Mills conveys to Clinton that the National Security Agency is not pleased with her request for a more secure, personalized BlackBerry.  Clinton sought the device to circumvent normal security protocols for accessing classified information.

Watchdog Discovers Another Email Hillary Failed To Turn Over To The State Department.  A conservative watchdog group has discovered yet another email from the early days of Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state that she failed to turn over to the State Department.  On Thursday [3/24/2016], Judicial Watch published a Feb. 13, 2009 email that Clinton sent her State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills in response to news about obtaining a special BlackBerry that Clinton wanted to use at the State Department's executive offices, which are designated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).  Mills was slated to meet that day with the National Security Agency's (NSA) State Department representative to discuss the issue, she said.  She also forwarded an email from another official suggesting that NSA was likely to approve the request.

Benghazi bombshell found in Clinton emails.  The final batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private server was released by the State Department yesterday — and they included a long-rumored email proving that Clinton was well aware of the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi, Libya.  And it appears that she did almost nothing to prevent the tragedy.

Ed Klein: Hillary Closer to Indictment.  Ed Klein, one of the best investigative journalist on Hillary's trail, says that his sources tell him that the "Justice Department is close to empaneling a grand jury and deciding whether to grant statutory immunity to Huma Abedin, Hillary's closest adviser."  Klein, who rarely gets it wrong, notes that such a development would force Abedin to testify under oath, facing perjury charges if she lies.  He also adds that he is "also told that Hillary herself will most likely be forced to testify."  Klein has previously reported that the FBI has notified Hillary's three closest aides, Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jake Sullivan, that they will be required to testify.

Here's Everything We Know So Far About Hillary's Shady BlackBerry Use.  Much of the focus on Hillary Clinton's email use as secretary of state has focused on the mystery that is the private email server that was set up in the basement of her New York home.  But Clinton's BlackBerry — which was not issued by the State Department — is also a crucial piece of the puzzle.  State Department emails published last week add to records that have been released over the past few months to paint a better picture of just how Clinton came to solely use that personal BlackBerry.

The Editor says...
Was the infamous email server set up in the basement of Hillary's residence, or in the bathroom, or in a closet?  I've heard all three.

Judicial Watch Lawsuit Uncovers New Hillary Clinton Email Withheld from State Department.  Judicial Watch announced today [3/24/2016] that it has obtained State Department documents from February 2009 containing emails that appear to contradict statements by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that, "as far as she knew," all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department and that she did not use her clintonemail.com email system until March 2009.  The emails also contain more evidence of the battle between security officials in the State Department, National Security Administration, Clinton and her staff over attempts to obtain secure Blackberrys.

Obama busted in Clinton email cover-up.  Did President Barack Obama's administration intentionally help hide some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's aides emails from public record?  Some critics are claiming that the Obama administration couldn't have just misplaced nearly 100,000 emails and documents from a Clinton aide they claimed they couldn't find — until a lawsuit seemed to jog their memory.  And it looks like hiding emails and documents that should be public record has become a pattern for the Obama administration.

State Dept. still lacks staffers to process Hillary Clinton's emails.  The State Department is still struggling to hire enough staffers to review all of the open-records requests being filed for emails and other documents from former Secretary Hillary Clinton and her top aides, the department acknowledged in a court filing Monday night [3/21/2016].  Department officials had promised Judge Rudolph Contreras that they would try to hire 50 screeners by February but had just 35 on board as of the end of last week.  It hired 39 in total, but four screeners have left the job, Benjamin C. Mizer, the principal deputy attorney general, said in court papers.  Of those 35, only 20 are reviewers with top-secret clearance eligible to screen the documents.

The perfect as the enemy of the good in the FBI's investigation of Hillary.  Here is my take on the state of play regarding Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State and the FBI's investigation of the matter:  [#1] There's a good chance that Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, has committed a felony.  And not just any felony, but a violation of the Espionage Act.  [#2] Given the consequences associated with a felon being nominated, or worse yet elected president, there is a strong national interest in a prompt determination by the government as to whether Clinton committed one or more felonies.  [#3] The inquiry under the Espionage Act is fairly straightforward.  For example, under 18 U.S.C. Section 793(f), the questions as I see them are (1) whether Clinton had possession or control of documents relating to the national defense; (2) whether she removed such information from its proper place of custody and/or delivered it to someone in violation of her trust; and (3) whether she acted with gross negligence.

Hillary Has an NSA Problem.  [Scroll down] Now, over two months later, I can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal's June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information.  The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal's highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.  Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified "Top Secret / Special Intelligence."  Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).

Clinton E-mail Scandal Update — Is Sidney Blumenthal in Trouble?  [Scroll down] If true, this report highlights the extent to which close Clinton friends and confidantes may soon find themselves in serious legal jeopardy.  Clinton's extraordinarily selfish act — her insistence on setting up a private server and a special, for-herself-only communications protocol — meant that her inner circle was inevitably ensnared.  If she insisted on communicating with her own devices — and simultaneously demanded timely intelligence information — then aides would constantly encounter a choice between following the law and obeying Hillary.

Will Hillary get charged, or what?  FBI chief James Comey and his investigators are increasingly certain that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton violated laws in handling classified government information through her private email server, career agents say.  Some expect him to push for charges, but he faces a formidable obstacle: the political types in the Obama White House who view a Clinton presidency as a third Obama term.  With that, agents have been spreading the word, largely through associates in the private sector, that their boss is getting stonewalled, despite uncovering compelling evidence that Clinton broke the law.

Bolton: FBI Will 'Explode' If Hillary Not Indicted Over Email Scandal Due to Politics.  Speaking in a radio interview on Sunday, John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, stated he believes the FBI will "explode" if Hillary Clinton ultimately is not indicted for her email infractions due to what he described as politics triumphing over the legal system.

Clinton Email Scandal: It's Time Hillary Suspended Her Campaign.  Though she tries to ignore it, Hillary Clinton can't escape her email problem. Almost every day brings more trouble for her.  It's time she did what a decent person would do — temporarily shelve her presidential campaign.

FBI chief James Comey 'increasingly convinced' Hillary's secret email server broke the law.  Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey is 'increasingly convinced' that Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton broke the law with her private email setup, says the New York Post, citing unnamed 'career agents.'  The paper charges that Comey is contemplating pushing for charges but doesn't have the backing of the Obama White House, who would like to see Clinton elected over Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.  Without such political will, agents have begun whispering to their friends in the private sector, telling them Comey is getting stonewalled, writes reporter Charles Gasparino.

State Department Documents Show that NSA Rebuffed Hillary Clinton's Attempts to Obtain a Secure Blackberry.  Judicial Watch announced today [3/16/2016] that it obtained State Department documents revealing that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly sought to obtain "Blackberry-like communications," but was rebuffed by the National Security Agency due to security and cost concerns.  The National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate response was "shut up and color."  The emails show that Clinton demanded Blackberry devices that could be used by her and her staff in her office's Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).

Clinton tried to change rules to use BlackBerry in secure facility for classified information.  Less than a month after becoming secretary of state, and registering the personal email domain that she would use exclusively for government business, Hillary Clinton's team aggressively pursued changes to existing State Department security protocols so she could use her BlackBerry in secure facilities for classified information, according to new documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.  "Anyone who has any appreciation at all of security, you don't ask a question like that," cybersecurity analyst Morgan Wright told Fox News.  "It is contempt for the system, contempt for the rules that are designed to protect the exact kind of information that was exposed through this email set up."

Clinton Email Scandal: She Knew The Security Risk But Took It Anyway.  Soon after Clinton took office as secretary of state in 2009, the National Security Agency rejected her request to use a smartphone to conduct government business.  She wanted a "BlackBerry-like" device, the Associated Press reported, similar to the one provided to President Obama.  According to emails obtained by Judicial Watch, which has filed a number of lawsuits to uncover what Clinton tried to cover up as secretary, she had become "hooked" on using a BlackBerry like the one she used during the 2008 presidential race to keep up with her emails.  She did not want to use a secure laptop or desktop computer to access email while secretary.

NSA: How did GAMMA compartment info end up in Hillary's unclassified e-mail?  Hillary and her team did not want to use computer terminals to access their e-mails and lose access to their Blackberries for outside e-mails, but such devices are not allowed in Secure Compartment Information Facilities (SCIFs).  This conflict at the start of Hillary's tenure set the table for much of what followed in the e-mail scandal.

Judicial Watch Names Clinton Aides To Be Deposed.  Eight present and past Department of State officials linked to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email scandal will be deposed by Judicial Watch in the non-profit government watchdog's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit if the federal judge hearing the case agrees.  Judicial Watch attorneys told U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Emmet G. Sullivan Tuesday [3/15/2016] it wants to depose the following individuals and could complete the depositions within two months of beginning: [...]

Watchdog Seeks To Interview 8 State Dept. Officials, May Need To Depose Hillary.  Judicial Watch filed a plan for a "narrowly tailored discovery" as part of its lawsuit against the State Department for failing to turn over records it requested in 2013.  The group is asking U.S. District Court judge Emmet Sullivan for permission to depose key State Department official who likely have detailed knowledge about Clinton's off-the-books email system, which involved the use of a home-brew server.  And "based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary," Judicial Watch wrote in its court filing.

Judicial Watch Submits Proposed Witness List, Discovery Plan to Federal Court in Clinton Email Matter.  Judicial Watch's discovery plan seeks the testimony of eight current and former State Department officials, including top State Department official Patrick Kennedy, former State IT employee Bryan Pagliano, and Clinton's two top aides at the State Department:  Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.  Judicial Watch's plan says that "based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary" but would only occur with permission by the Court.

'Filegate' Attorney Represents State Dept. Tech Official Who Is Silent On Hillary Server.  A high-priced Washington, D.C. attorney who represented a key figure in the "FileGate" controversy — one of the many scandals that marred the Bill Clinton White House — is back in the thick of another Clinton imbroglio, this time as the lawyer for John Bentel, a former State Department information technology official who is refusing to talk to Congress about Hillary Clinton's private email server.  Bentel's hiring of the Clinton-era lawyer — Randy Turk, of the firm Baker Botts — raises questions about whether the Clintons are working behind the scenes to ensure that people with potentially damaging information remain under their control, one longtime Clinton watcher says.

Will Hillary's IT Guru Be A Superstar Witness Against Her?  Bryan Pagliano is not a household name, but he could become an unlikely superstar in the federal investigation of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state.  Fox News reported Friday that only a week after the Department of Justice granted Pagliano immunity from prosecution, he was described as a "devastating witness."  "Bryan Pagliano is a devastating witness and, as the webmaster, knows exactly who had access to [Clinton's] computer and devices at specific times.  His importance to this case cannot be over-emphasized," the intelligence source told Fox News.

Could Hillary Clinton face the same fate as David Petraeus?  [David] Petraeus pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanour offence, mishandling classified information, after being accused of handing notebooks with classified information to his biographer-turned mistress, Paula Broadwell.  He was fined and placed on probation — a resolution that some have called a slap on the wrist.  In other cases people who have revealed classified information were sent to prison.  In 2009 Stephen Kim, a former government contractor, was sentenced to 13 months for giving classified material to a reporter.

Another Ex-State Dept. Official Refuses To Talk To Congress About Hillary's Server.  Politico reports that John Bentel, who retired from the State Department in Dec. 2012, has told the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees that he will not meet to discuss the server and what, if anything, he knows about it.  In response to a Dec. 5 letter from Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and Homeland Security chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, Bentel said he had "no memory of knowledge" about the server.  But the Senators believe Bentel may know something.  As director of information resources management at the office of executive secretariat, Bentel oversaw information technology for top level officials at the State Department, including Clinton.

Former State Dept. IT Official Threatened With Subpoena Over Clinton Emails.  Hillary Clinton's legal woes appear to be getting only worse as another former State Department IT official has refused to talk to Congressional investigators looking at Clinton's private email server.  However, Senate Republicans are now threatening to subpoena John Bentel, unless he voluntarily cooperates with the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Homeland Security Committee according to The Hill.  Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), chairmen of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees respectively, wrote to Bentel's lawyer in a letter that was made public Monday [3/14/2016].

Lynch indicates DOJ not required to charge Clinton.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch indicated Wednesday [3/9/2016] that the law doesn't require the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email system, even if the FBI recommends criminal charges.  Lynch was asked in a hearing by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, what her department would do if the FBI were to recommend that step.  "If the FBI were to make a referral to the Department of Justice to pursue a case by way of indictment and to convene a grand jury for that purpose, the Department of Justice is not required by law to do so, are they — are you?" Cornyn asked.

The Entire Criminal Enterprise Known as the Clinton Foundation Laid Bare.  It's a well-established fact that by setting up her private email server in the basement of her New York home, Secretary Clinton was able to avoid accountability through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel penned an important op-ed last night that takes a closer look at the other reason Clinton set up a non-governmental email:  the Clinton Foundation.  By using one private email account, Clinton was free to conduct both State Department and Clinton Foundation business — often overlapping — on the same email account.  The same is likely true for close aide Huma Abedin, who in fact worked simultaneously for the State Department and the Clinton Foundation (oh, and for Clinton in a private capacity and the Clinton-tied Teneo Consulting).

Clinton Email Server Technician Described As A 'Devastating Witness'.  Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department computer network technician who managed Hillary Clinton's email system, is being described as a "devastating witness" for the FBI in its investigation into whether classified information was mishandled on the Democratic presidential candidate's email server.  According to Fox News, Pagliano has provided information that will allow investigators to piece together who had access to Clinton's server and when.

Odds of a Hillary email grand jury underway just went much higher.  I have speculated that, given the immunity offered to Bryan Pagliano, it is possible that a grand jury has been convened.  But I am not a lawyer, much less a former U.S. attorney.  Joseph E. diGenova, on the other hand, is one of a small group of attorneys generally considered a super-lawyer, and not only a veteran U.S. attorney, but the former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., at the very top of federal prosecutors.  So when Joe diGenova offers an opinion on the likelihood of a grand jury being empaneled, we [all] should pay attention.

Another debate, another pack of lies from Hillary Clinton.  Looks like Hillary Clinton means to squirm out of tough questions all the way to Election Day.  Start with her use of a home-brewed server for all her work emails.  "It was not prohibited," she said at the last Democratic debate.  "My predecessors did the same thing."  "Not prohibited"?  Univision's Jorge Ramos had just finished noting that she'd personally sent a department-wide memo warning against any use of a non-secured, unofficial system — the kind she always used.  And, no, no other secretary of state has relied on a home system for all his or her work — especially not the classified stuff.

Source: Clinton IT specialist revealing server details to FBI, 'devastating witness'.  Former Hillary Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, a key witness in the email probe who struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department, has told the FBI a range of details about how her personal email system was set up, according to an intelligence source close to the case who called him a "devastating witness."  The source said Pagliano told the FBI who had access to the former secretary of state's system — as well as when — and what devices were used, amounting to a roadmap for investigators.  "Bryan Pagliano is a devastating witness and, as the webmaster, knows exactly who had access to [Clinton's] computer and devices at specific times.  His importance to this case cannot be over-emphasized," the intelligence source said.

Loretta Lynch Says White House Should 'Stay Silent' About Hillary Email Investigation.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Wednesday [3/9/2016] that neither she nor anyone else at the Justice Department has briefed President Obama about the Hillary Clinton email investigation and that the White House should "stay silent" about the probe.  The question of whether she had was brought up during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing by North Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who referred to comments that White House press secretary Josh Earnest made back in January downplaying the investigation into how classified information was handled on Clinton's private email server.

Hillary's 'No Classified Markings' Canard Actually Makes Things Worse.  Let's also keep in mind a fact that's easy to forget since what's before our eyes is so outrageous:  For now, we are only talking about the Clinton emails that she deigned to turn over to the government.  As Guy reminds us, there are another 32,000 emails that she attempted to delete.  There have been reports indicating that the FBI has been able to recover at least some of these from the server.  It is a shoe that has yet to drop.

Hillary to Lose the FBI Primary.  [Scroll down]  Hillary forgets that emails are marked because they are classified and not classified because they are marked.  It is the content that makes all the difference, not the markings.  She put the classified information in these emails and her claim that there were no classified markings is specious because at least one of her emails instructed her staff to remove markings and send classified data via unsecure means.

Email Scandal: Hillary Clinton's Last Defense Just Blew Up.  The Washington Post, of all places, found that not only did Hillary Clinton send and receive classified material on her unsecured email server as Secretary of State, she wrote dozens of classified emails herself.

Ratting Out Hillary.  Clinton's defenders have searched the dictionaries and encyclopedias to find a way to spin the FBI's investigation of her conduct as secretary of state.  They've said it was an investigation into her private email system, but not of her.  They've said it's not a criminal investigation and that it's nothing more than a "security review."  What nonsense.  The FBI doesn't investigate email systems, it investigates what people communicated while using them.  The FBI only investigates people's conduct to determine if they have violated federal criminal law.

What Bryan Pagliano will sing about.  [Scroll down]  My guess is that Huma, who has dedicated her life to ingratiating herself with Hillary and who comes from a family dedicated to the Long Jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood, will go to jail rather than testify.  Cheryl Mills has very long history with Clinton and may also clam up.

Hillary Clinton tries putting her email scandal to bed by clearing up 'misinformation going on around here' during Fox News forum.  Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton was again was forced to answer questions about her ongoing email scandal during a town hall tonight on Fox News hosted by Bret Baier.  Clinton said neither she nor her lawyers, nor any former or current aides, have been notified by the FBI that they're the focus of an ongoing investigation.  'No, but let me clarify this, because there's much misinformation going on around here and let me just start with the basic facts,' she said, subtly dinging the conservative cable network.

Hillary's Emails Can Wait Until After the Election.  The State Department announced it may put off its review of the sensitive classified information former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent on her illegal, insecure email server until after Election Day.  The server is at the heart of the 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.  But this possible delay is a transparent ploy intended to benefit Clinton's presidential campaign.

Judge Napolitano: Indictment Certain in Clinton Email Scandal Before November.  Expect the indictment of former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or one or more of her high-level aides from the State Department in the next few months.  Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano explained in a Fox Business panel discussion last week that the granting of immunity against self-incrimination to Bryan Pagliano, who helped set up the private email server for Clinton that is central to an ongoing investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), means the Department of Justice intends to secure indictment of a person or people up the "totem pole" from Pagliano in the Hillary Clinton email scandal.  Concludes Napolitano, "I think there will surely be indictments prior to November."

Clinton's Laughable Claim: Petraeus Offense Was Worse.  For months it has been obvious that a serious criminal investigation of the former secretary of State's reckless mishandling of classified information has been underway.  Yet Camp Clinton has maintained that the government is merely engaged in a "security inquiry" that is focused on the physical server itself — not a probe of criminal suspects.  This has never made sense.  The FBI, which has assigned many agents to the case, is in the criminal investigation business.  Plus, when the now-immunized former staffer, Bryan Pagliano, invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in refusing to testify before the House Benghazi committee, it signaled that he feared truthful answers would incriminate him.  Now with Pagliano apparently poised to cooperate with the FBI, the claim that Mrs. Clinton is not a criminal suspect is untenable.  So Clinton and her supporters are changing tack:  instead of implausibly insisting there is no crime to investigate, they argue that there is no crime worth prosecuting.

Here Are The 23 Classified Memos Sidney Blumenthal Sent To Hillary Clinton.  Of the dozens of intelligence memos that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton while she served as secretary of state, 23 contained information classified as "Confidential" or "Secret," a Daily Caller analysis shows.  Sending nearly two dozen sensitive emails makes Blumenthal, a former journalist and aide in the Bill Clinton White House, one of Clinton's most prolific sharers of classified information.  The Democratic presidential candidate herself sent 104 emails containing classified information, The Washington Post found.

13 Times Hillary And Surrogates Scoffed At The FBI's Investigation Of Her Server.  Now that Hillary Clinton's email server technician is cooperating with the FBI in its investigation into the mishandling of classified information, it's worth taking a look back at all the times that the candidate and her surrogates have downplayed the probe or outright laughed at it.  The FBI seized control of Clinton's server in August, just after the intelligence community's inspector general flagged "Top Secret" emails that traversed the device.  Clinton housed the server at her New York residence during her State Department tenure.  She hired Bryan Pagliano, a staffer on her 2008 presidential campaign, to manage the system.  She even got him at a job at the State Department as an information technology specialist.

Release of Clinton Documents Delayed After State Department Discovers 'Thousands' of Unsearched Records.  The State Department's recent discovery of thousands of unsearched records from Hillary Clinton's tenure has delayed several public records lawsuits and could keep many of the documents out of the public sphere until next fall.  The watchdog groups Citizens United and Judicial Watch, which are suing the State Department for Clinton-related records, are two plaintiffs that have been affected by the discovery.  The State Department said the new documents could take months to process, a time period that extends well beyond its court-ordered deadlines.

Email Scandal: A Desperate Clinton Lashes Out At Independent Investigators.  If Hillary Clinton's increasingly reckless attempts to spin conspiracy theories are any indication, she's far more worried about her email scandal than she lets on.  Witness her recent attempts to smear independent investigators.

The FBI's Hillary probe closes in on a political crisis.  The FBI probe of Hillary Clinton took a major step forward this week with news that the guy who ran her illicit home-brew email has been granted immunity.  Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights in refusing to testify or cooperate with investigators.  A tech with the 2008 Clinton campaign, he got hired for related duties when she took over at State — then won the nearly $140,000-a-year side job of setting up and maintaining her private email system.

Report: FBI Investigating Whether Clinton Aides Retyped Classified Info Into Emails.  In its investigation into whether classified information was sent using Hillary Clinton's private email server, the FBI is reportedly looking at whether aides to the former secretary of state retyped information from classified sources into emails then sent to Clinton's unsecured system.

Former Attorney General Lists All Laws Hillary Possibly Broke.  Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey listed four laws Hillary Clinton possibly broke with her email server:  "There are a couple of them.  There's one that says you can't put classified information in an unclassified setting.  That's the one that General Petraeus was convicted of on his own plea.  There's one that says that you can't expose national secrets through gross negligence.  Then there's one that says you can't destroy government information.  And then there's one that says you can't obstruct justice.  So there's four of them," Mukasey told MSNBC's Morning Joe.  [Video clip]

Hillary and the Espionage Act of 1917.  Attorneys fresh out of law school are familiar with the legal issue known as "spoliation of evidence."  When parties fail to produce relevant evidence within their span of control, evidence which they are otherwise naturally expected to possess, the U.S. legal system allows and even mandates that unfavorable presumptions be drawn against them.  So when some item of relevant evidence — whether documents, physical objects or data relevant to an ongoing legal matter — is destroyed, discarded or modified in some way, the U.S. legal system allows us to presume that the missing evidence was unfavorable to that party and allows us to draw conclusions accordingly.

Hillary aide Huma's email on North Korea revealed in last of Clinton's secret server messages.  The State Department has released the 14th and final batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private server, bringing the total to more than 52,000 including 2,100 that were censored or withheld completely for containing information now deemed classified.  Among the emails: a message from President Barack Obama that is being withheld until after he leaves office and one from aide Huma Abedin on North Korea that the intelligence community wanted to mark 'top secret' but State successfully walked back to 'secret.'

Huge New Developments in Clinton Email Scandal.  Two extremely significant stories broke today [3/2/2016] in The Washington Post and The New York Times regarding the FBI's investigation into the Hillary Clinton email scandal.  The deep-fat fryer is just heating up.

Cover-Up: Review Of 22 Top Secret Clinton Emails May Not Be Done Before General Election.  Today [3/1/2016], the State Department said that it will not commit to finishing its review of whether the 22 "Top Secret" emails on Clinton's server were classified at the time they were sent or received before the general election more than eight months away.

State Dept: Review of Clinton secret emails may wait until after November election.  The State Department may wait until after the November election to finish its review of classified information former Secretary Hillary Clinton sent on her secret email account, a spokesman said Tuesday [3/1/2016], vowing they will not be held to the political calendar.  "We're not going to rush judgment of any of these things," spokesman John Kirby told reporters.  Mrs. Clinton, who rejected use of an account tied to the official state.gov secure email system and instead relied on an account tied to a server she kept at her New York home, returned more than 30,000 messages to the department in December 2014, or nearly two years after she left office.

The Editor says...
Others have already said this in many ways, but if the defendant in this case were anyone but Hillary Clinton, that defendant would have been in prison months ago.  The State Department isn't going to rush to judgement, they say.  And after the election, what will they say?  Oh, that's ancient history.

FBI investigating if Clinton aides shared passwords to access classified info.  The FBI is investigating whether computer passwords were shared among Hillary Clinton's close aides to determine how sensitive intelligence "jumped the gap" between the classified systems and Clinton's unsecured personal server, according to an intelligence source familiar with the probe.  The source emphasized to Fox News that "if [Clinton] was allowing other people to use her passwords, that is a big problem."  The Foreign Service Officers Manual prohibits the sharing of passwords.

What Pagliano's Immunity Deal in the Clinton Email Scandal Reveals.  The revelation that former Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano was given immunity by the Justice Department in the former Secretary of State's email scandal has led to a kaleidoscopic array of interpretations, a true Rashomon moment.  Democrats see the granting of immunity of the last step in a process of clearing the Clinton of wrongdoing.  Some conservative commentators see the immunity grant as proof that a federal grand jury has been convened with dire consequences for the putative Democrat presidential nominee.  It is impossible to say for sure which interpretation is true, but an objective legal view suggests that this development is more likely to bode ill for Clinton than be the first step of her exoneration.

Ex-Clinton staffer who set up email server accepts immunity offer from FBI to provide interview, official says.  First he said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights but now the IT specialist, who set up Hillary Clinton's controversial private email server, is ready to cooperate with the FBI.  In doing so, Bryan Pagliano, 39, has been granted immunity by the Justice Department as it continues its criminal investigation into whether or not the current Democratic Presidential candidate mishandled classified information.  Pagliano, a former State Department employee and Clinton presidential campaign staffer, set up the server in 2009 at her New York home during her time as Secretary of State.

The secret life of Bryan Pagliano revisited.  Bryan Pagliano is the former State Department staffer who has now reportedly been granted immunity in the Clinton email investigation.  This past September Pagliano asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before a congressional committee seeking his testimony.

DOJ grants immunity to federal worker in Clinton email case: report.  The Justice Department has granted immunity to a State Department employee that worked on former secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server, according to the Washington Post.  A law enforcement official told the Post that Bryan Pagliano has agreed to work with the FBI in exchange for not facing any possible criminal charges.  The new development is not a good sign for the Democratic presidential front-runner, though there is still no indication that any criminal charges will be brought against Clinton.

In Clinton email investigation, Justice Department grants immunity to former State Department staffer.  The Justice Department has granted immunity to the former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private email server as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.  The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano who worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.  As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents will likely want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said.

Comey speaks, tersely.  On the rare occasions when she is asked about the FBI investigation arising from her use of an insecure email server to conduct official business as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton refers to it as "a security review."v It is, moreover, "a security review" that "was requested," as though the FBI is doing someone a favor.  The woman lies with the ease and abandon of a pathological liar.  Clinton makes it sound routine.  The FBI, however, does not perform "security reviews."  It conducts criminal investigations.  Its handling of the Clinton email matter clearly constitutes a criminal investigation.

As Presidential Campaign Unfolds, So Do Inquiries Into Clinton's Emails.  As Hillary Clinton moves toward the Democratic presidential nomination, she faces legal hurdles from her use of a private computer server as secretary of state that could jar her campaign's momentum in the months ahead.  Foremost among a half-dozen inquiries and legal proceedings into whether classified information was sent through Mrs. Clinton's server is an investigation by the F.B.I., whose agents, according to one law enforcement official, could seek to question Mrs. Clinton's closest aides and possibly the candidate herself within weeks.

Hume on Hillary Emails: 'Not a Huge Case,' 'You Don't Have Any Criminal Intent'.  Monday [2/29/2016] on Fox News Channel's "Outnumbered," while discussing the possibility of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton being indicted as a result of the current FBI investigation into her handling of classified material on an unsecured email server during her tenure as secretary of state, Fox News senior political contributor Brit Hume said there were enough questions about the circumstances of Clinton's case that an indictment isn't a slam dunk.

The Editor says...
Deceptive cover-up appears to have been the whole purpose of establishing a secret email server.  The circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act is the least of it, but even that shows criminal intent.  If the secret email system was set up to hide graft, bribery or espionage, the email server is just a subsidiary issue.

Hillary Emails Betrayed Whereabouts of Murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens.  An email containing the whereabouts and plans of murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens passed through Hillary Clinton's private server, dispatches released Monday [2/29/2016] in the final group of messages from Clinton's emails reveal.  The email was actually first released last May but was contained in Monday's batch as well, serving as a reminder that numerous emails sent to Clinton's private address betrayed Stevens' location while he was stationed in arguably one of the most dangerous zones in the world for an American diplomat.

Hillary Clinton 'secret' email count doubles as latest batch is released.  The State Department on Monday deemed 23 more of former Secretary Hillary Clinton's emails "secret," more than doubling the number of messages she sent or received on her special account that have now been given that high level of classification.  Those messages were part of the last batch of 1,700 or so Clinton emails released by the State Department on Monday [2/29/2016], closing out a 14-month process in which the department, under a judge's order, processed and released 30,322 messages from Mrs. Clinton's secret server.

State Dept. declares 261 new Clinton emails classified.  State Department officials declared 261 of Hillary Clinton's private emails classified Monday [2/29/2016] when the agency released the final batch of the former secretary of state's records.  The batch included 1,723 emails, totaling more than 3,800 pages.  Its release marked the end of a months-long process of reviewing and redacting Clinton's private emails for release at the end of each month, a process that began last summer with a judge's ruling in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold of Vice News.  The State Department has now classified more than 2,000 emails, including 22 that were deemed "top secret" in January.

Top 11 Emails From The Final Batch Of Clinton's Private Server Emails.  Today the last batch of Clinton emails from her illicit, private server were released by the State Department.  Of the 1,723 released today [2/29/2016], 261 were found to contain classified information.  Those 261 new classified emails brings the final tally to an astounding 2,079 emails held on Clinton's unsecure server that now are said to contain classified information.  In the 261 classified emails, 19 contained "secret" information.  That also means that this batch includes the largest number of secret emails in any tranche.

Senior Clinton aide maintained top secret clearance amid email probe, letters show.  A senior Hillary Clinton aide has maintained her top secret security clearance despite sending information now deemed classified to the Clinton Foundation and to then-Secretary of State Clinton's private unsecured email account, according to congressional letters obtained by Fox News.  Current and former intelligence officials say it is standard practice to suspend a clearance pending the outcome of an investigation.  Yet in the case of Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff at the State Department, two letters indicate this practice is not being followed — even as the Clinton email system remains the subject of an FBI investigation.

Final Clinton emails coming today.  The State Department will release the final batch of Hillary Clinton's emails on Monday, some 10 months after the process began.  The release comes just ahead of 11 Super Tuesday contests, which Clinton hopes will propel her to a commanding lead over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential race.  Clinton's campaign has tried to shake off the email controversy, but the monthly releases have fueled fresh headlines about her exclusive use of a private email account while serving as secretary of State.  With the releases now nearing an end, Republicans have seized on the fact that more than 1,800 emails from her machine were eventually classified.

Hillary's email account an open secret in Washington long before scandal broke.  Hundreds of people — from White House officials and titans of the mainstream media to senators, Supreme Court justices and many of her top colleagues at the State Department — could have known about Hillary Clinton's secret email account, if only they'd cared to look closely enough.  Listed on some of the more than 28,000 messages Mrs. Clinton released so far are several White House chiefs of staff and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, much of the rest of official Washington, and a number of people who had oversight of the State Department's key operations and open-records obligations.  President Obama was also on a series of messages, though the government is withholding those.

State Dept. to withhold two new Clinton emails.  State Department officials will withhold two emails from the batch of Hillary Clinton's private records set for release Monday but none because they contain "top secret" material, spokesman John Kirby said.  The agency will withhold one email between Clinton and President Obama, bringing the total number of undisclosed emails sent back and forth between the two to 19.  It will withhold another email at the request of an unspecified law enforcement agency, Kirby said, although he noted the email was not classified.

With the Clintons, the political scandals never stop.  After two presidents who've served beyond personal reproach, many Americans have forgotten the eight-year stream of Clinton scandals — right up to the pardons for fat-cat donors in Bill's final days in the White House.  If Hillary wins come November, it'll all start up again.  Indeed, Judge Sullivan just ensured that she'd take office with at least one investigation still open.  He ruled that top State Department officials and Clinton aides can be questioned under oath about whether her private email server was set up specifically to evade the freedom-of-information laws.  Oh, and the FBI's still doing its criminal probe into Clinton and her cohorts' mishandling of top-secret information.  Mind you, Judge Sullivan was named to the bench by Bill Clinton — and he made it clear he's fed up with this stalling.

Lynch confirms career Justice Department attorneys involved in Clinton email probe.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch confirmed to Congress Wednesday [2/24/2016] that career Justice Department attorneys are working with FBI agents on the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices and the handling of classified material.  Legal experts say the assignment of career Justice Department attorneys to the case shows the FBI probe has progressed beyond the initial referral, or "matured," giving agents access to the U.S. government's full investigative tool box, including subpoena power for individuals, business or phone records, as well as witnesses.  The Associated Press reported earlier this month that career lawyers were involved, but Lynch's comments are the most expansive to Congress.

FBI professionals 'will be angry' if no indictment recommendation is made.  In a story published Thursday [2/25/2016], Catherine Herridge of Fox News added incrementally to what we know about the ongoing investigation, but the buried lede may be word of the current mood at the FBI.  Herridge quotes an unnamed source with knowledge of the investigation who tells her career professionals at the FBI, "will be angry and walk off if no indictment recommendation is followed through."  That certainly makes it sound as if some portion of the FBI — presumably those with knowledge of the case — think there is enough evidence to recommend prosecution (of someone).  They wouldn't be ready to "walk off" unless they were pretty certain the evidence supported their conclusion.  And, reading a bit more between the lines, it seems there is some impatience in the ranks to go ahead and conclude the matter in the way these professionals have already concluded is warranted.

John Kerry Says He Had 'No Knowledge What Kind Of Email' Hillary Used At State Dept. When He Was Emailing Her.  The nation's top diplomat, who testified on the State Department's budget in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also asserted that the American people "are really getting bored with" questions about the Clinton email scandal.  "You're fixated on this," Kerry told California Rep. Darrell Issa after a tough line of questioning about Clinton's email arrangement and his knowledge of it.  Issa, a Republican, pressed Kerry over emails revealed last month that show he sent emails from his personal address to Clinton's personal address discussing government business.  Information in one of those emails has been retroactively classified as "Secret," the second-highest classification level.

At least 1,818 Clinton emails contain classified material.  At least 1,818 emails that Hillary Clinton sent or received contained classified material, according to the State Department's latest update from its ongoing review of more than 30,000 emails.  The State Department released a new batch of 1,589 pages of Clinton's emails Friday evening [2/26/2016] in response to a court order.  Of those, 88 contain classified information.  All are at the confidential level, which is the lowest level of classification.  None of Clinton's emails was marked as classified during her tenure, State Department officials say, but intelligence officials say some material was clearly classified at the time.  Her aides also sent and received classified information.

Is it Espionage?  [Scroll down] One official involved in the investigation said that the special access program information found on Hillary Clinton's email was so sensitive that Intelligence Community's Inspector General, Charles McCullough and some of his aides, had to receive clearance to be "read on" the SAP before they could view the sworn declaration about the Clinton emails.  The Special Access Program material does not appear to be the same two Top Secret emails identified earlier among the hundreds of classified emails found on Clinton's server.  FBI may refer Hillary Clinton and her staff — Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jake Sullivan — for indictment for the simple charge of mishandling classified information.  But don't bet the rent money.  Over the last 70 years, left-leaning Justice Departments have a history of watering down or drowning any indictment of top-level Democrats caught in the act or suspected of conducting classic espionage.

Clinton antagonist: We'll get all the emails.  All of the roughly 30,000 personal emails Hillary Clinton claimed to have deleted from her private email server will eventually be reviewed by the government — and many will be made public, according to a top legal adversary of Clinton.  "They're all going to get reviewed eventually, despite Mrs. Clinton's resistance," Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative legal watchdog organization Judicial Watch, said in an interview with The Hill.  Clinton has said she "chose not to keep" roughly half of her server's email cache because the 30,000 personal emails contained information about "yoga routines," "family vacations" and "condolence notes."

The Five Must-Read Emails of the Latest Clinton Email Dump.  Today [2/26/2016] the State Department released the penultimate batch of emails gleaned from Hillary Clinton's illicit, private email server.  The release featured another 88 emails that the government has determined contained classified information.  Those 88 emails bring the total number of Clinton's email that contain classified information to at least 1,818.  While the State Department's release of Clinton's emails is winding down, the amount of damaging information found in Clinton's emails certainly isn't.  The latest tranche of Clinton emails spotlight many of questionable aspects of her State Department tenure.  The biggest bombshell of the batch is an email from Neera Tanden that exposes Clinton's faulty approach to email security.  Others, such as one from Wendy Sherman, highlight the failed policies Clinton pursued at the State Department.  There is also a damaging exchange about trade that reminds people of the many flip-flops Clinton has made this campaign.

State Department Turns Over 1,600 Newly-Discovered Clinton Documents to Benghazi Committee.  The State Department turned over 1,600 pages of previously undisclosed documents related to Hillary Clinton and Libya to the House Benghazi committee on Friday [2/26/2016], a month after it revealed the existence of the documents in an unrelated court case.  The House Select Committee on Benghazi announced it received the records on Friday, adding that the State Department has yet to fully comply with document requests the committee made nearly a year ago.  "Today the State Department turned over more than 1,600 pages of new documents related to former Secretary Clinton and Libya," the committee said.  "The State [Department] claimed in a January 8th court filing that it only recently discovered these new documents from the Office of the Secretary."

House chairman: Military files, emails deleted amid probe.  The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday [2/25/2016] that personnel at U.S. Central Command have deleted files and emails amid allegations that intelligence assessments were altered to exaggerate progress against Islamic State militants.

Emails on Hillary Clinton's secret server matched top secret documents virtually word for word.  U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton's home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as 'top secret' because their wording matched sections of some of the government's most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.  The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

Hillary conspiracy to evade FOIA through server? Judicial Watch gets to find out.  In a ruling sure to keep the Hillary Clinton email scandal alive through the summer, if not longer, a federal just has granted Judicial Watch the right to take discovery as to whether Hillary's home server was part of an effort to evade the Freedom of Information (FOIA) law by shifting federal records off-site and into the sole control of Hillary, her attorney's and consultants.  We have been following Judicial Watch's federal lawsuit seeking State Department records regarding Huma Abedin's outside employment.  The FOIA request giving rise to the suit also has given rise to much obfuscation by State, which even resulted in the Court ordering Hillary Clinton to provide a declaration under oath as to records.

Clinton's right-hand woman Huma Abedin faces being questioned under oath over Hillary's secret server.  A federal judge opened the door to allowing a conservative legal group to question top aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about whether she deliberately sought to thwart open records laws by using a private email server.

Aides' email-server testimony could throw Clinton campaign a curveball.  A federal judge ruled Tuesday [2/23/2016] that top aides to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about her use of a private email server as secretary of state, raising new political and legal complications for Clinton as she tries to maintain momentum for her campaign.  The ruling granted a request from the conservative group Judicial Watch, which sought testimony from State Department officials and members of Clinton's inner circle to determine whether Clinton's email arrangement thwarted federal open-records laws.

Is Hillary Clinton Getting A Free Pass On Her Email Scandal?  CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was found guilty last year of leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter about Iran's nuclear program.  Today, he's at the front end of a 3½ year stint in prison.  So what does Sterling think about the treatment Hillary Clinton is getting after it came to light that her unsecured, private email server contained more than 1,700 classified emails, 22 of them at the highest "Top Secret" level?  Sterling thinks Clinton is getting special treatment.

Jailed CIA leaker Says Hillary's Been 'Given a Pass' for Emails.  Hillary Clinton has not only been given a pass for her multitude of email indiscretions, she's been given an "almost apologetic pass," according to Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer who is now serving jail time for leaking documents to the New York Times.  In an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, Sterling accused federal officials of "setting a double standard" by refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

He was fired from the CIA and jailed for a leak.  Locked away in federal prison, Jeffrey Sterling is struggling to keep his demons at bay.  The former CIA officer whose case came to signify the Obama administration's crackdown on leakers spends his days reading, tutoring fellow inmates and finishing a memoir, which he says he has to write by hand and mail home so his wife can type it.  "There is no sugarcoating it for me," Sterling said.  "I'm in prison."

Judge threatens subpoena against Clinton over emails.  A federal judge warned Tuesday that he may have to subpoena former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's entire secret email account, saying he has real questions about whether the Obama administration gave her special treatment.  In the interim, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said he was granting discovery to Judicial Watch, a public interest law firm who's sued to get a look at the emails, meaning the group will be able to demand the State Department explain who approved Mrs. Clinton's server, how many officials knew about it, and what accommodations they made to her after her emails become a public issue.

State releases hundreds of Clinton emails just before Nevada caucus.  State Department officials published 550 of Hillary Clinton's private emails Friday [2/19/2016] in accordance with a judge's order in a contentious Freedom of Information Act case.  The roughly 1,000 pages of emails came just hours before the start of the Nevada caucus Saturday.  Clinton has faced increased scrutiny of her private email use since the end of last month, when the State Department withheld at least 22 emails deemed "top secret," the highest level of classification in government.  Since then, Clinton has attempted to argue the controversial decision was the result of "over classification."

More than 500 new Clinton emails released by State Dept.  The 562 new documents posted online totaled 1,116 pages of emails.  The latest public release brought the total number of pages released to 46,946, or about 85 percent of the 55,000 pages originally surrendered by Clinton.  Friday's [2/19/2016] release brought the total number of public Clinton emails containing classified information to 1,731.

Clinton email chain discussed Afghan national's CIA ties, official says.  One of the classified email chains discovered on Hillary Clinton's personal unsecured server discussed an Afghan national's ties to the CIA and a report that he was on the agency's payroll, a U.S. government official with knowledge of the document told Fox News.  The discussion of a foreign national working with the U.S. government raises security implications — an executive order signed by President Obama said unauthorized disclosures are "presumed to cause damage to the national security."

Watchdog Wants Investigation Into Ex-State Dept. Employees' Using Clinton Campaign Email Accounts.  A government watchdog group is asking two lawmakers to investigate whether State Department employees violated federal law by using email accounts from Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign to conduct official government business.  The request, which the Cause of Action Institute sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, was prompted by the discovery that Bryan Pagliano, the State Department staffer who managed Clinton's private email server, communicated with Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, from his campaign email address [...]

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton And Cheryl Mills Did Not Sign Mandatory Agreement to Return Classified Materials.  Breitbart News has obtained confirmation on State Department letterhead that Hillary Clinton did NOT sign a mandatory OF-109 "Separation Statement" when she left the State Department.  That statement would have required her to affirm that she had returned all classified materials in her possession.  Clinton's top aide Cheryl Mills also avoided signing a separation statement.  Additionally, Clinton never certified that she went through a mandatory security debriefing to learn how to handle classified information.

Republicans stand down for FBI investigation of Clinton server.  Republicans are refusing to use the Benghazi playbook to go after Hillary Clinton's private email server.  Instead of launching formal investigations or propping up a new special committee to investigate the emails — as they did with the 2012 Libya terror attack — House Republicans have gone out of their way to avoid formal inquiries into allegations that classified information was mishandled on Clinton's personal machine.

If Putin Is Reading Her Email....  It is highly likely that Vladimir Putin's minions obtained Hillary Clinton's emails while they were hanging out there on her insecure private server.  Even former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said so.  (I'm sure the same applies to the intelligence services of other hostile states as well.)  Well, so what?  Paul Roderick Gregory addresses the question in an intensely interesting Forbes column.

What If Vladimir Putin Has Hillary Clinton's Emails?  [Scroll down]  A Kremlin penetration of Clinton's private e-mail account would give it the world's most complete record of her secretary of state correspondence including the almost 32,000 emails that the Clinton team deemed private and made unavailable.  Consider Vladimir Putin with a full inventory of Clinton e-mails.  Putin's KGB training was in running agents, most recruited by kompromat (compromising information) that he had gathered, meaning that he would immediately have understood the possibilities.  Putin's FSB and military security experts would be told to scour the load of e-mails for operational information, names, addresses and dates.  As kompromat specialists, they would look for personal Clinton material ranging from embarrassing to compromising.

More Clinton Emails Designated 'Classified' and 'Secret' in Latest Doc Dump.  The State Department performed one of their weekend document dumps, releasing another 550 Hillary Clinton emails — more than 1000 pages.  They also reclassified another 84 emails, bringing the total number of sensitive communications that had no business being on a private server to more than 1700.

Hillary's latest batch of emails dropped yesterday with more Top Secret goodness.  To describe yesterday [2/13/2016] as a "busy" day would be a bit of an understatement, but there was still news being made on the national front.  One big story which got shoved toward the back of the shelf was the fact that yet another set of Hillary Clinton's emails was released.  This batch numbered more than 500, with a full fifteen percent of them being classified at one level or another and three ringing the Top Secret bell.

Number of Classified Emails Found on Clinton's Bathroom Server Climbs to 1,700.  That steady drip, drip, drip sound you hear is not just the leaky faucet in Hillary's bathroom.  It's also the repeated revelations that she compromised national security by maintaining a email private server to evade public and governmental scrutiny.  Today's [2/13/2016] release of 1,000 pages of emails revealed 84 new classified documents, bringing the total number of felony violations to nearly 1,700.

More Hillary Clinton emails released by State Department.  Among the 551 emails released Saturday by the State Department from Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, parts of 84 of the documents were upgraded in classification level, but none of them to the "top secret" classification.  Most of the emails, according to the State Department, were upgraded to "confidential," the lowest classification level, and none were marked classified at the time they were sent.  The government upgraded three of Clinton's emails to the "secret" level of classification.  The latest batch of emails span a range of topics — including several amusing illustrations of Clinton's well-documented struggles with technology and her "berry phone."

15 percent of latest Clinton emails marked classified; 551 released Saturday.  More than 15 percent of the latest batch of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails released Saturday contain classified information, with three of the messages being labeled "secret" — continuing to add to the questions surrounding her email use.  One of the messages is an extensive missive from David Satterfield, a top U.S. diplomat to Egypt, who told top officials in both the White House and State Department about negotiations in the Sinai.  The entire contents of the messages are now deemed "secret," though there is no indication they were marked as such at the time.  The message was forwarded to Mrs. Clinton by top aide Jacob Sullivan.

Former intel chief: Clinton should drop out, save FBI the manpower.  A former top military intelligence official to President Obama said Hillary Clinton should step out of the 2016 presidential race due to the amount of resources and manpower required to conduct the private email investigation that could be put to better use.  "It's been stated that there are 100 FBI agents that are on this case.  And yet we have the FBI director that has told us that all 50 states, we have Islamic State cases ongoing," said retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Friday [2/12/2016] to CNN's Jake Tapper.

Former Obama intel official: Hillary Clinton should drop out.  President Barack Obama's former top military intelligence official said Hillary Clinton should pull out of the presidential race while the FBI investigate her use of a private email server for official government communication while secretary of state.  Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the retired chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, made the call in an interview with Jake Tapper on "The Lead."  "If it were me, I would have been out the door and probably in jail," said Flynn, who decried what he said was a "lack of accountability, frankly, in a person who should have been much more responsible in her actions as the secretary of state of the United States of America."

The Democrats' Likely Nominee Appears to Be a Felon — This Is Not Business as Usual.  For all the surreal projection of normalcy, the race is enveloped by an extremely serious criminal investigation.  If press reporting is to be believed — in particular, the yeoman's work of Fox News's Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne — Hillary Clinton, the likely nominee of one of the two major parties, appears to have committed serious felony violations of federal law.  That she has the audacity to run despite the circumstances is no surprise — Clinton scandals, the background music of our politics for a quarter-century, are interrupted only by new Clinton scandals.  What is shocking is that the Democrats are allowing her to run.

At least 1,666 Clinton emails contain classified material.  The State Department released a new batch of 1,012 pages of Clinton's emails Saturday afternoon [2/13/2016] in response to a court order.  Of those, 84 contain classified information.  Most are at the confidential level, which is the lowest level of classification, though three are at the secret level.  None of Clinton's emails was marked as classified during her tenure, State Department officials say, but intelligence officials say some material was clearly classified at the time.  Her aides also sent and received classified information.

Judge orders four more Hillary Clinton email releases.  U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras issued an order Thursday [2/11/2016] requiring State to release batches of the still-undisclosed portion of Clinton's emails on Feb. 13, 19 and 26 with "all remaining documents" released by "the close of business" on Feb. 29.  Contreras had publicly discussed the possibility of releasing some of the messages directly to the Freedom of Information Act litigant whose case the judge is overseeing, Jason Leopold of Vice News.  However, the judge's order Thursday [2/11/2016] directs State to release the records on its website, as the agency has done at least once each month since last May.

The Clintons' Mind-Boggling Damage to National Security.  [Scroll down]  If it is true that Hillary Clinton had SAP information on her unsecure server, whether it was marked or not, you can be sure that the FBI will strongly recommend that charges be brought against Hillary Clinton and continue in an exhaustive investigation to trace back to every single person that had even the tiniest role in this unbelievable security compromise.  If the Attorney General, through "prosecutorial discretion," elected not to prosecute this crime, I believe Congress would have no alternative but to impeach her, and the FBI would then have no choice but to conduct a criminal investigation of her for a deliberate cover up — so grave is this security violation.  If President Obama were to pardon Hillary Clinton for a compromise of this magnitude he would render himself in the historical record as an "enemy of the state," and could himself face criminal prosecution — so grave is such a security compromise.

Could It Get Worse For Hillary? Yes, And Here's Why.  Throughout her email problem, Clinton has said that she neither sent nor received classified material on her personal email that was handled by a private server in her home.  When it turned out that more than 1,300 of her emails held classified information, she changed her defense.  The material was designated as classified only after she sent or received it, her camp said.  But new information from Judicial Watch shows that Clinton's personal email wasn't the only one that had classified and top secret material.  There was a wide breach in the Clinton State Department.  According to the government watchdog organization, "Clinton and her top aides, deputy chiefs of staff Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, received and sent classified information on their non-state.gov email accounts."

Hillary Clinton Is Now Tied To At Least Four Investigations By Federal Agencies.  The State Department's inspector general last year subpoenaed the Clinton Foundation for documents related to work that required approval from the Hillary Clinton State Department, making it now at least four investigations involving the Democratic presidential candidate being conducted by federal agencies.  According to The Washington Post, the State Department inspector general's subpoena, which was filed in the fall, also sought records related to longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin's concurrent employment in 2012 with the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, and Teneo Holdings, a Clinton-connected consulting firm.

State Dept to release 550 Clinton emails over weekend, under court pressure.  The State Department will release 550 emails from Hillary Clinton's private server this weekend after pressure from a federal judge who earlier this week appeared visibly annoyed at its delayed efforts.  In a court filing late Wednesday night [2/10/2016], State Department official Eric Stein told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that department staffers have made "significant progress" on preparing the emails for release.  As a result, the department will now be able to release the roughly 550 emails — roughly 14 percent of the 3,700 remaining Clinton emails — on Saturday [2/13/2016], in the middle of the Presidents Day holiday weekend.  The department had previously said it could not release the emails until late next week.

Spillage: Up to 30 accounts on Hillary server interacted with top-secret data.  According to an exclusive report from Fox News reporters Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne, the 29 e-mails considered too damaging to release even in redacted form went through at least a dozen different e-mail accounts on Hillary's secret server and at the State Department.

State Department offers to release some Hillary Clinton emails on Saturday.  A federal judge has ordered the State Department to release Hillary Clinton's remaining work-related emails in four installments over the next three weeks.  The order by Judge Rudolph Contreras comes just hours after the State Department proposed releasing the emails in two batches — one on February 13th and another on February 29th.

So many coincidences help Hillary Clinton in her email scandal.  The FBI has acknowledged she [Hillary Clinton] and some aides are targets of an investigation surrounding their use of an unsecured private server as her primary email device for national security information when Secretary of State.  President Obama, however, has said he's sure there are no national security problems there.  How he knows what the FBI doesn't is unclear.  But in Obama's Washington, where the IRS, Justice Department and EPA have been profoundly politicized, it's raised dark suspicions of inappropriate political influence in a criminal probe.

Exclusive: Former Obama Defense Intel Chief Says Hillary Should 'Step Down'.  President Barack Obama's former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) believes Hillary Clinton should drop out of the presidential race to clear the way for the probe of her private email server by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.) said he thought the former Secretary of State should leave the Democratic presidential race:  "I think Hillary Clinton, for the good of the country, should step down and let this FBI investigation play out."

How Much Trouble Is Hillary Clinton In?  She survived a squeaker in Iowa, but suffered a shellacking in New Hampshire.  Every Democrat under 30 is feeling the Bern.  Her dishonesty over her email server has turned into a legal problem that keeps bubbling and bubbling and bubbling.  She's a Wall Street candidate running in an anti-establishment election cycle, delivering a muddled message to an electorate looking for clarity of vision.

The Democrats' dilemma: Clinton may not be salvageable.  Clinton's problems are threefold.  First and foremost, she has a serious legal problem, one that cannot be wished away by those indifferent to the facts.  The FBI does not investigate and devote considerable resources for nothing.  It does not lightly send a letter stating it is investigating a former high government official's use of an unsecured email [system].  And someone (whether in the FBI, the Justice Department or some other corner of the administration) does not without good reason leak a story as damaging as this latest Fox News report: [...]

Is Bill Clinton in the FBI crosshairs too?  [Scroll down]  First, did Mr. Clinton, in fact, own, pay for and house on his property the server used by Mrs. Clinton while she was secretary of state?  And second, did he touch, read, see and/or use any of the classified documents that appeared on that server, and if so, did he have the appropriate clearances and approval?  Let's take a step back.  In March 2015, when the story first broke that as secretary, Mrs. Clinton had kept a private server through which all of her official government business passed, the Associated Press reported that the server was traced back to an Internet service registered to the Clinton home in Chappaqua, N.Y.  At her initial press conference on the matter that month, Mrs. Clinton said the server that housed her emails while she was secretary was set up for Mr. Clinton.

Official: Top Clinton aides also handled 'top secret' intel on server.  At least a dozen email accounts handled the "top secret" intelligence that was found on Hillary Clinton's server and recently deemed too damaging for national security to release, a U.S. government official close to the review told Fox News.  The official said the accounts include not only Clinton's but those of top aides — including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines — as well as State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy and others.  A second source not authorized to speak on the record said the number of accounts involved could be as high as 30 and reflects how the intelligence was broadly shared, replied to, and copied to individuals using the unsecured server.

State Department Asked Hillary Clinton Lawyer to Delete Specific Classified Records, Return Paper Copies.  [Scroll down]  "This letter highlights how the State Department took a casual approach to Hillary Clinton's violations of law concerning classified information," stated Tom Fitton.  "The Obama State Department should have sent the FBI to retrieve and secure this classified information.  Does Hillary Clinton still have other classified material she is hiding from the State Department?"

New Emails Show Hillary Clinton and Aides Had Classified Information on Non-Government Email Accounts.  Judicial Watch today [2/9/2016] released nearly 70 pages of State Department records that show that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides, Deputy Chiefs of Staff Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, received and sent classified information on their non-state.gov email accounts. [...] The new documents show that Hillary Clinton used the clintonemail.com system to ask Huma Abedin (also on a non-state.gov email account) to print two March 2011 emails, which were sent from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (using the moniker "aclb") to Jake Sullivan on Sullivan's non-state.gov email account.  The Obama State Department redacted the Blair emails under Exemption (b)(1) which allows the withholding of classified material.  The material is marked as being classified as "Foreign government information" and "foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources."

Judge orders State Dept. to speed up Clinton emails: 'Unreasonably long'.  A federal judge told the State Department to speed up the final release of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails, saying the voting public has an interest in seeing them as the primaries are underway.  Judge Rudolph Contreras said the government is taking an "unreasonably long" time processing the messages and is already more than a week overdue on making them all public — and said he didn't like being told speeding up could hurt national security.  "Government has me between a rock and a hard place," he said.

Judicial Watch: Hillary e-mail requested printout "without any identifiers".  A new release from the State Department of e-mails involving Hillary Clinton aides and the secret, unauthorized private server once more calls into question denials by Hillary of sending or receiving classified data.  Judicial Watch received dozens of pages in response to a FIOA lawsuit filed last May that specifically sought e-mails from Huma Abedin in the scandal.

Obama may be Ensnared in the Clinton Email Scandal.  Perhaps President Obama's involvement is the reason that the FBI has not yet referred charges to the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case.  It may be metastasizing so quickly and so dangerously that not only are agents and lawyers within the agency having trouble keeping up with new evidence of wrongdoing, but that the scandal itself now threatens a constitutional crisis.  The Department of State's refusal to release 18 emails exchanged between President Obama and Clinton through her unsecured home server at best creates a conflict of interest for Obama while at worst it raises the likelihood that the President has run afoul of national security laws and ought to be impeached.

Pressure mounting on Lynch for special counsel on Hillary e-mails?  Will she or won't she?  That's the question Loretta Lynch faces on the investigation into Hillary Clinton's unauthorized homebrew e-mail server, on two levels.  If the FBI brings her a recommendation for indictments, will she pursue the case?  Or, will Lynch opt for a special counsel if that decision comes with too much political freight?

Pressure on Lynch to step aside in Clinton email probe.  Loretta Lynch is on the edge of the spotlight, about to be dragged to the center.  If the FBI finds sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton or one of her top aides for mishandling classified information, Lynch's Justice Department will have to decide whether to press ahead.  Even if no evidence of wrongdoing is found, Clinton's many critics are unlikely to take the word of an appointee of President Obama's and will doubt that justice has been served.  Already, top Republicans are calling for a special prosecutor to be brought in and evaluate the situation.

FBI formally confirms its investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server.  In a letter disclosed Monday [2/8/2016] in a federal court filing, the FBI confirms one of the world's worst-kept secrets:  It is looking into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  Why say this at all, since it was widely known to be true?  Because in August in response to a judge's direction, the State Department asked the FBI for information about what it was up to.  Sorry, the FBI said at the time, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.  Now, in a letter dated February 2 and filed in court Monday, the FBI's general counsel, James Baker, notes that in public statements and congressional testimony, the FBI "has acknowledged generally that it is working on matters related to former Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server."

Clinton Emails: Appoint A Special Counsel, Guarantee A Speedy Trial.  The investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email account is taking on the look of a political stonewall.  It's time for an independent counsel to ensure that justice isn't delayed past the next election.  The Hill reported Monday [2/8/2016] that pressure on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint an outside solicitor in the Clinton email scandal is starting to build as "top Republicans are calling for a special prosecutor to be brought in and evaluate the situation."  As one GOP congressman pointed out, the unique circumstances of this case require an exceptional response.

Issa: FBI Has No Choice But To Recommend Clinton Indictment.  Former Secretary of State and current Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been under criminal investigation by the FBI for nearly a year.  At this point, it's been reported Clinton hosted thousands of emails containing classified information on her private email server.  Worse, at least 22-emails contain the most sensitive of all top secret information about human sources, putting lives at risk in addition to compromising U.S. national security.  Yesterday [2/3/2016] on The Intelligence Report, former House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa explained why FBI Direct James Comey has no choice but to refer Clinton for indictment.

Judge Wants Explanation from State Department on 'Newly' Discovered Clinton Records.  Judicial Watch announced today [2/4/2016] that a federal judge ordered the State Department to explain how and when new records from the office of Hillary Clinton were located and why they were not identified previously.  The court order comes in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records about the State Department vetting of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's potential conflicts of interest.  The explanation was initially due on Monday, but Judge Rudolph Contreras granted the State Department an extension to Friday, February 5, 2015, due to the federal government shutdown because of the recent blizzard.

Clinton hit for invoking 'everybody did it' defense on email scandal.  Critics are blasting Hillary Clinton for claiming at Thursday night's [2/4/2016] Democratic debate nothing will come of the FBI probe into her email practices and seizing on reports that other former officials received classified information on personal accounts — saying she's glossing over glaring differences between her case and theirs.  "The attempt to paint her predecessors in the State Department as equal offenders in mishandling classified material is an insult to what we now know to be the truth," Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement Thursday, calling the argument an "everybody did it" defense.

The Democrats' New Game:
State Goes Back and Retroactively Classifies Emails Sent to Powell's and Rice's Personal Accounts, So They Can Say "Everybody Does It".  The interesting thing here is that State can classify, or declassify, information originating with State.  But they cannot classify, nor declassify, information originating with another service, like the CIA or NSA.  Hillary is claiming that State "disputes" the CIA's and NSA's determination that the information she was passing around was top-top-secret.  Shockingly secret.  State is disputing this on her behalf — but they have no such power to classify or declassify CIA or NSA information.

Email Scandal Spin: No, Hillary, Powell and Rice Didn't 'Do It Too'.  [Scroll down]  In summary, Hillary Clinton's server is the scandal.  It's possible that Rice's aides and Sec. Powell may have acted improperly (though the email rules were set forth after Powell left office).  They may have been sloppy with a small number of low-level classified information on an ad hoc basis.  The rules and laws pertaining to the US government's data security must be followed.  By everyone.  But Clinton mishandled hundreds upon hundreds of classified emails, which held state secrets at the highest classification levels.

The e-mail scandal stretches far beyond Hillary.  The State Department has confirmed that Clinton's successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, sent her a message, now deemed secret, from his personal email account.  At the time (May 2011), Kerry chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with access to top-level secrets.  But since Kerry sent the message, he presumably knew Hillary also wasn't using a government email address.  Same for President Obama:  He claims he first learned about Clinton's private email address from news accounts — but it turns out he and Hillary exchanged at least 18 emails, which State refuses to make public.

Speaking as an expert on the subject...
Clinton Calls Cybersecurity 'One of the Most Important Challenges' for the Next President.  At the end of a get out the vote campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday [2/3/2016], Hillary Clinton was asked about her plans for protecting cyber security.  "It is one of the most important challenges the next president is going to face," Clinton said.  Clinton said that the technology offenses conducted by hostile states have become more advanced.  She named Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as countries that are just going to accelerate their attacks on the cyber infrastructure of the United States.

Powell says his email use was 'a lot different' than Clinton's.  Former Secretary of State Colin Powell pushed back on attempts Thursday [2/4/2016] to liken his infrequent use of a personal email address more than a decade ago to Hillary Clinton's exclusive reliance on a private server when she held the State Department's top position.  "It's a lot different from what the rest of us were doing and what Mrs. Clinton is doing," Powell, a Republican appointee, told NBC.  Powell spoke after a top House Democrat revealed in a public letter the discovery that Powell had received two classified emails in his private inbox while serving as secretary of state.

Clinton's Security Clearance Is Under Scrutiny.  Now that several e-mails on Hillary Clinton's private server have been classified, there is a more immediate question than the outcome of the investigation:  Should the former secretary of state retain her security clearance during the inquiry?  Congressional Republicans and Democrats offer predictably different answers.  The State Department announced Friday [1/29/2016] that it would not release 22 e-mails from Clinton's private server after a review found they contained information designated as top secret.  U.S. officials who reviewed the e-mails tell us they contain the names of U.S. intelligence officers overseas, but not the identities of undercover spies; summaries of sensitive meetings with foreign officials; and information on classified programs like drone strikes and intelligence-collection efforts in North Korea.

What voters know about Hillary Clinton: She's a crook.  On the Friday before Monday's caucuses, the State Department, which Clinton headed in President Obama's first term, revealed that it discovered 22 top-secret emails on the private computer server to which Clinton diverted all her governmental email traffic.  This acknowledgement marks a radical departure from previous State Department pronouncements and is a direct repudiation of Clinton's repeated assertions.  She has repeatedly asserted that she neither sent nor received anything "marked classified" using her private email server.  The State Department, until last Friday, has backed that up by claiming that while the substance of at least 1,300 of her emails was confidential, secret or top secret, they were not "marked" as such when she dealt with them.

How the FBI Could Force DOJ to Prosecute Hillary Clinton.  Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, knows the laws regarding classified information firsthand.  In his private practice, Cuccinelli defended a Marine lieutenant colonel court martialed on charges of possessing such information outside a secure facility.  He says Clinton's actions in the e-mail scandal clearly satisfy all five requirements necessary to sustain charges of mishandling classified material, and constitute a breach perhaps even more glaring than the one for which General David Petraeus was convicted.

Seven additional Clinton emails to be marked 'top secret'.  A Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday [2/3/2016] that the State Department has classified seven more of Hillary Clinton's private emails as "top secret."  "There are more than 22, and it's not just one or two more," Rep. Chris Stewart told the Washington Examiner, referring to the 22 emails deemed top secret by the State Department last week.  "It's a more meaningful number than that."  Stewart said the State Department has classified seven additional emails as "top secret."  The agency will now withhold 29 emails from the public due to their sensitive content.

Lawmaker Says He's 'Never Read Anything That's More Sensitive' Than Information In Hillary's 'Top Secret' Emails.  A member of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that he has "never read anything that's more sensitive" than the contents of the "Top Secret" Hillary Clinton emails identified by the State Department last week.  Utah Rep. Chris Stewart also said during an interview with Fox New's "America's Newsroom" that there are "actually more" than 22 "Top Secret emails," which is the number reported by the State Department.  In a separate interview with the Washington Examiner, Stewart said that another seven emails are being withheld in full because of their sensitive nature.

Obama's Growing Conflict of Interest in the Clinton E-Mail Scandal.  [Scroll down]  So egregious have the scandal's latest developments been that a critical State Department admission from last week has received almost no coverage:  Eighteen e-mails between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have been identified, and the government is refusing to disclose them. [...] Think about what this means.  Not only is it obvious that President Obama knew Mrs. Clinton was conducting government business over her private e-mail account, the exchanges the president engaged in with his secretary of state over this unsecured system clearly involved sensitive issues of policy.  Clinton was being asked for "advice and counsel" — not about her recommendations for the best country clubs in Martha's Vineyard, but about matters that the White House judges too sensitive to reveal.

Hillary's ridiculousness is approaching critical mass.  Clinton's stories continue to evolve. In 2007 having a secret email account was "shredding the Constitution."  Back on March 10 of last year, there was no classified information on her server:  "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email; there is no classified material."  Until there was.  More than 1300 of them.

The 'Secret' Email John Kerry Sent To Hillary From His iPad Was Also From A Non-Official Account.  As a Senator in 2011, Sec. of State John Kerry sent an email containing information that the State Department now says is classified as "Secret" from a non-government account to Hillary Clinton, agency spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday [2/2/2016].  The tranche of Hillary Clinton records released on Friday contains the sensitive May 11, 2011 email, which is heavily redacted because it contains foreign government information.  In the email, which Kerry sent from his iPad and was first reported on Friday, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee discussed negotiations between India and Pakistan.

Former FBI Official Red-Flags Troubling Lack of Activity at DOJ Regarding Hillary's Emails.  A former assistant director of the FBI is voicing concern about the Justice Department's lack of movement on the ongoing FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's email arrangement which, according to sources, will be wrapping up soon.  If Bureau leaks are to be believed, the results will show that Mrs. Clinton and her underlings flagrantly violated some of our most important laws — laws that are designed to protect national security.  Anyone else would have been arrested by now.

Three Big Unanswered Questions About Hillary Clinton's Emails.  Question 1:  What sort of role is the White House playing in the investigation and is it exerting any pressure to exonerate Clinton?  White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last week that that Hillary Clinton would not be indicted "based on what we know."  Are the Justice Department and FBI briefing the White House on the ongoing investigation?  What does the White House know that we don't?  Given the political consequences of an indictment and the fact that the White House may have lots of reasons to influence the investigation that have nothing to do with seeing the law fairly applied, doesn't the White House's statement about Clinton not being indicted come off as unseemly?

Plans for Hidden IT Network to Help Clinton Skirt Rules Uncovered by Judicial Watch.  Judicial Watch announced today [2/1/2016] that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a "stand-alone PC" so that Clinton could check her emails in an office "across the hall" through a separate, non-State Department computer network system.  Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, "The stand-alone separate network PC is a great idea."  The emails are from January 23-24, 2009, a few days after Clinton was sworn in as Secretary of State.  The new emails were obtained by Judicial Watch in response a court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for State Department records about Hillary Clinton's separate email system.

Hillary Clinton Put Spies' Lives at Risk.  I've elaborated how Hillary Clinton, the apparent Democratic frontrunner for President this year, put large amounts of classified information at grave risk through slipshod security practices by herself and her staff.  Now that scandal has taken a significant turn for the more ominous.  Last Friday afternoon [1/29/2016] the State Department's latest court-mandated release of Hillary Clinton's emails from when she was Secretary of State caused a new political firestorm.  While many more emails were released by Foggy Bottom, some with redactions due to classified materials they contained, twenty-two emails totaling thirty-seven pages of text were withheld entirely at the request of the Intelligence Community.  Those twenty-two emails, deemed "unclassified" by Ms. Clinton and her staff, were judged to be Top Secret in reality.

Behind Closed Doors, Media and Government Buzzing about Hillary's Emails.  [Scroll down]  Wait — is he referring to Hillary Clinton's email scandal?  But we've been assured by Democratic flacks that Hillary has little to worry about.  That's when host Joe Scarborough let in the audience on the conversation among elites.  "A couple people held their breath when we talked about it the other day," he said.  "Everybody in the government, everybody in the media, everybody that runs anything is talking about how advanced this investigation is.  And nobody's telling the American people about it.  So I had an executive at another network ask 'is it safe to talk about it now?'"  Barnicle agreed, saying, "There's just too much buzz around it from all different levels of government, media, and everything to ignore it, and Bernie is no longer ignoring it."

That ever changing Clinton email defense may be running out of excuses.  Unless you're a complete idiot, you know what does or doesn't fall within the realm of classified ... especially if you're the Secretary of State.  And its not like this was all new to her.  She'd served as a US Senator and been privy to classified material before and was certainly briefed on how to handle it.  One can't imagine, given the stringent rules surrounding the handling of classified material, that she didn't receive additional briefings when she took State.  She chose to ignore them all.

Grassley probes Clinton aide's refusal to cooperate with investigators.  A top aide to Hillary Clinton "refused" to cooperate with investigators looking into whether the Clinton team suppressed a 2012 records request that could have exposed their private email use years before a separate congressional inquiry did so, Sen. Chuck Grassley said Monday [2/1/2016].  The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman raised concerns about the role Cheryl Mills, then-chief of staff to Clinton, played in blocking a Freedom of Information Act request for Clinton's email use in a pair of letters to the State Department and the agency's inspector general Monday [2/1/2016].

Judge Sets Hearing Date in Hillary Clinton E-mail Case.  The federal judge overseeing the main Hillary Clinton e-mail lawsuit has scheduled a status conference for next week to see where the headline-generating case goes from here.  Judge Rudolph Contreras will ask the lawyers at the hearing on February 9 where the lawsuit stands, now that the State Department has said it will finish disclosing the relevant documents by the end of the month.  February 9 also happens to be the day of the New Hampshire primary.

Hillary's emails included CIA officers' names, report says.  Hillary Clinton's e-mails included the names of CIA officers serving overseas and foreigners who are on the spy agency's payroll — potentially endangering their lives, it was reported Monday [2/1/2016].  "It's a death sentence," a senior intelligence-community official told the Observer.  "If we're lucky, only [foreign] agents, not our officers, will get killed because of this."  The paper said the intelligence community is in panic mode trying to determine which agents may have been compromised.

Clinton Scandal: Hillary Used A Team To Help Her Hide Emails.  Hillary Clinton's effort to conceal her State Department communications from the disinfecting glare of sunlight was planned from the beginning.  It's time to know what she wanted to hide.  Emails received Monday [2/1/2016] from the State Department by a government watchdog organization show that department officials were busy early in Clinton's tenure setting up a stand-alone personal computer in a "counselor office" so the secretary could "go across hall regularly to check her email."

How long can Hillary Clinton hide in a parallel universe?  Hillary Clinton's defense of her seemingly criminal mishandling of the nation's secrets now looks to be pretty much, I live in a parallel universe.  The latest:  She insists the e-mail story is still in the news only because some "people are selectively leaking and making comments that have no basis in anything I'm aware of."  That's what she told CNN's Alisyn Camerota on Monday [2/1/2016] — just three days after the State Department announced it can't release 22 of her e-mails because they're too dense with highly classified information.

Emails show aides wanted 'super encrypted' Blackberry for Clinton.  An internal email chain from Hillary Clinton's early days at the State Department suggests Clinton's staff initially sought a "super encrypted" Blackberry for the secretary of state before apparently abandoning those plans in favor of a personal device.  The records indicate Cheryl Mills, then Clinton's chief of staff, had pushed for a secure cellphone because Clinton did "not know how to use a computer to do email," according to an exchange obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch.

Republican warns of White House influence on Clinton investigation.  The second-ranking Republican in the Senate is amplifying his call for the Justice Department to name a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton's email server, suggesting the White House is trying to influence the FBI's probe.  "I believe that Secretary Clinton has likely violated multiple criminal statues," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Monday [2/1/2016].  Cornyn said Attorney General Loretta Lynch should name a special counsel to counter the "apparent inability of the White House to resist the temptation to try to influence or at worst obstruct the current investigation."

If you can't prosecute Hillary Clinton, then you can't prosecute Edward Snowden.  In the latest Friday night document dump 2,000 Hillary Clinton emails were made public.  Twenty two of them were not released, as they were considered "too damaging" to even release in redacted form.  The State Department has been dragging its feet in releasing the Clinton emails and won't meet a Court ordered deadline to release the remaining emails due to an "internal oversight."  Now the Clinton campaign wants the Top Secret emails made public.

Cheryl Mills Refused To Speak To State Dept. Investigators About Hillary's Email Account.  Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, refused to speak to investigators with the State Department's Office of the Inspector General about her handling of a 2012 public records request for information about Clinton's private email addresses that the agency falsely denied.  That's according Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who sent letters last week to Secretary of State John Kerry and the State Department's inspector general Steve Linick, in response to a report Linick's office released last month about the State Department's mishandling of Freedom of Information Act requests for records pertaining to Clinton's email account and private email system.

NYT Reporter: Clinton's Problem Is the FBI, Not RepublicansNew York Times reporter Peter Baker rebuked Hillary Clinton's rhetoric over the weekend about Republicans politicizing her private email scandal, suggesting on CNN Sunday [1/31/2016] that it was the FBI that should be really on Clinton's mind.  The Obama administration announced Friday [1/29/2016] it could not release 22 of Clinton's emails from her private server because they were top-secret, while Clinton maintained her line that those emails were not marked classified when they were sent or received, a statement columnist Ron Fournier remarked was "irrelevant."  The Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton signed a non-disclosure agreement laying out criminal penalties for any mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

Hillary's Email Scandal Envelops the Intelligence Agencies.  The latest revelations about Hillary Clinton's misuse of an unsecured private email system to communicate top secret information appear to lead possible criminal complicity in some intelligence agencies that had to know of her conduct.  This past week we found out that at least twenty-two of those emails are so highly classified that they cannot be released even in a heavily redacted form.  Clinton, predictably, is trying to score political points by saying they should all be released, thus putting the blame on the State Department for withholding them even though she knows perfectly well that the emails in question can't possibly be disclosed because of the intensely guarded secrets they contain.

Who Received Hillary's Secret Emails?  Congressman Darrell Issa has predicted that Hillary and Huma will never be indicted for leaking top-secret information through their illegal email scam. [...] If H&H are not indicted soon, FBI and DOJ career lawyers may retaliate by leaking additional evidence about Hillary's criminal, irresponsible, and dangerous malfeasance in high office.  Hillary is therefore deeply implicated in the worst hostile penetration of the U.S. government since Stalin.  Huma's lifelong collaboration with the Nazi-era Muslim Brotherhood has been thoroughly documented.

Plans For Hidden IT Network To Help Clinton Skirt Rules Uncovered by Judicial Watch.  Judicial Watch announced today [2/1/2016] that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a "stand-alone PC" so that Clinton could check her emails in an office "across the hall" through a separate, non-State Department computer network system.  Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, "The stand-alone separate network PC is a great idea."  The emails are from January 23-24, 2009, a few days after Clinton was sworn in as Secretary of State.

Official: Withheld Clinton emails contain 'operational' intel, put lives at risk.  Highly classified Hillary Clinton emails that the intelligence community and State Department recently deemed too damaging to national security to release contain "operational intelligence" — and their presence on the unsecure, personal email system jeopardized "sources, methods and lives," a U.S. government official who has reviewed the documents told Fox News.  The official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and was limited in discussing the contents because of their highly classified nature, was referring to the 22 "TOP SECRET" emails that the State Department announced Friday [1/29/2016] it could not release in any form, even with entire sections redacted.

Hillary Clinton: When I'm President, I Won't Let Staffers Do What I Did.  Hillary Clinton said in a Sunday [1/31/2016] interview with Iowa's WHO that if she is elected president, her staff will not be allowed to use a private email for official government use.

Hillary Clinton Put Spies' Lives at Risk.  Last Friday afternoon [1/29/2016] the State Department's latest court-mandated release of Hillary Clinton's emails from when she was Secretary of State caused a new political firestorm.  While many more emails were released by Foggy Bottom, some with redactions due to classified materials they contained, twenty-two emails totaling thirty-seven pages of text were withheld entirely at the request of the Intelligence Community.  Those twenty-two emails, deemed "unclassified" by Ms. Clinton and her staff, were judged to be Top Secret in reality.

State Dept. Records Show John Kerry Sent Hillary A 'SECRET' Email From His iPad.  Emails released by the State Department on Friday [1/29/2016] show that in 2011, then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry sent then-Sec. of State Hillary Clinton an email from his iPad that has been deemed to contain information classified as "Secret."  While previous releases of Clinton's emails have shown that she and her staff communicated directly with Kerry when he was a senator, the new email is the first from Kerry that the State Department has determined contains sensitive information.

Hillary Compares FBI Investigation of Email to Benghazi: 'Pretty Clear They're Grasping at Straws'.  Sunday [1/31/2016] on ABC's "This Week," Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton compared the FBI investigation into her handling of classified material on her private email server during her tenure as secretary of state to the investigations into the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks saying, "I think it's pretty clear they're grasping at straws and this will turn out the same."

Hillary Emails "Too Damaging" To National Security To Release.  Bad news for Hillary Clinton as new revelations further undercut the former Secretary of State's claims that she never received or sent classified emails stored on her home-brew email server.  Fox News's Catherine Herridge is reporting that intelligence officials will not be releasing some of Hillary Clinton's emails because doing so would be "too damaging" to national security.

State Department Won't Acknowledge That Clinton Emails Have Already Been Classified Top Secret.  State Department spokesman John Kirby would not acknowledge on Friday [1/29/2016] a letter from the intelligence community's inspector general stating that information on Hillary Clinton's private server was classified at the time it was sent and received.  Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge asked whether the State Department disagreed with the intelligence community's determination that Clinton's email contained information that was highly-classified when it hit the server.  The Clinton campaign has argued that the information was only classified retroactively.

Hillary Email Scandal Takes Yet Another Troubling Turn.  Fox News, which seems to be the only news outlet doing any reporting on the story these days, reports that some of the emails found on Hillary Clinton's private, unsecured email server are "too damaging" to ever be released.  That's according to a Fox News source "close to the ongoing review."  The State Department itself confirmed the gravity of the situation, however, when it announced Friday that even email chains are being withheld from the public "in full" because of the sensitivity of the information they contain.

Hillary Clinton Campaign Meltdown: Top-Secret Emails 'Innocuous,' Should Be Released.  This week's Friday afternoon news drop was a blockbuster for Hillary Clinton, with revelations that some of her emails contained information so sensitive they cannot be released to the public at all, others will be delayed beyond the first few primaries by the State Department, and the number of Top Secret documents in her homebrew private email server has risen to 22.

Last Night's State Department Email Dump: The Most Damning for Hillary Yet.  With a classification rate of nearly 27 percent, this was the most highly classified batch of emails yet, despite the fact the State Department only produced 10 percent of the emails it was required to under court order.  And given the State Department's claim that many of the emails they withheld were still being reviewed by other agencies as well as the steep increase in the number of emails classified as 'SECRET,' it appears Hillary Clinton's email woes are only going to get worse.  Indeed, many redactions in last night's production had to do with information from several intelligence agencies including the CIA.  No wonder Clinton's friends in the State Department are trying to delay further releases until she's cleared the early nominating contests.  Here are some of the most eye-popping emails from last night's release [...]

Another Friday night Hillary Email Dump — minus the 22 Top Secret ones.  It's Friday night.  So the State Department just released a new batch of Hillary emails.

About Those 22 E-Mails.  If you or I had one top secret e-mail, never mind 22 of them there would be an armed swat team descending on our homes faster than you could say wilful suspension of disbelief.

Hillary Clinton emails declared 'top secret'.  Twenty-two emails sent through Hillary Clinton's unsecured home server while she was secretary of state contained government secrets, US officials say.  The State Department said the messages were "top secret" and could not be released.  Spokesman John Kirby said the emails were not marked classified at the time they were sent.  Mrs Clinton's use of a personal email as secretary of state has dogged her bid for the US presidency.

Josh Earnest may have gotten himself in a whole heap of trouble with comments on Hillary email scandal.  There are two very big dangers here.  It would be entirely improper for the White House to be in communication with the Justice Department over an ongoing criminal investigation.  This would constitute political interference.  A congressional committee could well issue a subpoena for Earnest, which would raise the Watergate flag when executive privilege likely would be claimed.  Second, this claim is likely to infuriate the FBI and those DoJ prosecutors with integrity.

Four Sid Blumenthal Emails In Latest Clinton Release Are COMPLETELY Classified.  Previous State Department releases of Hillary Clinton emails have contained messages from her longtime friend and intelligence-provider, Sidney Blumenthal, that have been deemed to contain some classified information.  But none of the records were completely classified, as is the case with four emails Blumenthal emails released by the State Department on Friday [1/29/2016].  Blumenthal, a former Bill Clinton White House aide, was infamously blocked from taking a job at the State Department under Clinton because of his anti-Obama campaigning in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Hillary's lame excuses for her e-mail misconduct are crumbling.  The State Department just knocked a gaping hole in Hillary Clinton's happy e-mail fable.  State, the Associated Press reports, won't release 22 of Clinton's messages to the public because they contain too much most-secret information.  OK:  Clinton's only promised that none of her e-mails were labeled "classified" — so she's technically not a blatant liar.  But US intelligence agencies have determined these message contain enough sensitive information that even blacking out whole passages isn't enough to make them safe for public view.

Scarborough/Halperin on FBI Investigation of Hillary: Sources Say Something Happening.  What it is ain't exactly clear, but it doesn't seem to bode well for Hillary Clinton.  Today's [1/29/2016] Morning Joe featured an ominous exchange between Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin.  The notion was that a variety of sources — from a senior network exec, to top Obama admin officials, to FBI agents — are saying the same thing:  the FBI investigation of Hillary is much further along than most people realize.

Oh my: Some Hillary e-mails "too damaging" to release?  What happens when redactions become insufficient to cover the damage to national security from Hillary Clinton's unauthorized and unsecured home-brew e-mail system?  Get ready to find out.  Fox News' Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne exclusively report that the intelligence community will prevent the State Department from releasing at least 22 e-mails in the current tranche, because not even redactions can prevent damage to national security from their release.

Official: Some Clinton emails 'too damaging' to release.  The intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton's emails "too damaging" to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review.  A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.  The determination was first reported by Fox News, hours before the State Department formally announced Friday that seven email chains, found in 22 documents, will be withheld "in full" because they, in fact, contain "Top Secret" information.

Ex-FBI Official: Hillary Indictment Will Come During the Heat of the General Election.  Six months after the FBI began their investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, sources believe that an indictment might fall during the "the heat of the general election campaign."  Former FBI assistant director Ron Hosko told The Hill that he doesn't "know that there's any magical cutoff date," and that the protracted length of the probe is not unusual for such investigations.

Why Hillary's EmailGate Matters.  Every few days, another bombshell appears in the media illustrating just how poorly Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as our nation's foreign policy boss, handled communications security.  By now, we have a complex portrait of someone whose mishandling of our nation's secrets, by herself and her staff, beggars belief for anyone versed in such matters.  EmailGate isn't going away, no matter how much Ms. Clinton's supporters want it to.  The number of "unclassified" emails that turn out to be classified, some of which transited Ms. Clinton's unencrypted server of bathroom fame, now surpasses 1,300 and may go higher still.  A couple weeks ago I explained how Ms. Clinton's emails included highly classified information from the National Security Agency, based on signals intelligence about Sudan at the Top Secret Codeword level.  How they got there has yet to be explained.

State Dept. set to release some Clinton emails amid legal battle.  State Department officials are set to release a batch of Hillary Clinton's private emails Friday [1/29/2016] amid a contentious court battle over whether the remainder of her records will see the light of day before the Democratic primary begins.  Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Jason Leopold, a reporter for Vice News, the State Department was required to complete the publication of roughly 30,000 Clinton emails by the end of January.

That bad, eh?
State Department Delays Full Hillary Clinton Email Dump Until After Early Primaries.  The State Department will release 2,000 pages of Hillary Clinton emails Friday [1/29/2016], but that's a fraction of the remaining Clinton emails still in its possession.  The Department has 7,000 more pages of Clinton's emails that it chooses not to release yet.  The State Department's Friday dump represents less than 23 percent of the remaining emails.  Vice reporter Jason Leopold is suing the State Department in District Court in Washington, D.C. for the full release.

Did Obama just send Hillary Clinton the all-clear on the FBI investigation?  Each day brings new details about the classified information Hillary Clinton had on her homebrew server.  The disclosures are inevitably followed by demands that she be indicted.  Color me skeptical that she will face criminal charges, especially after President Obama's kind words for her.  His praise of Clinton's experience in an interview, twinned with his comparison of Bernie Sanders as a "bright, shiny object," were widely interpreted as a Clinton endorsement.

Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare: Hint — it's not Bernie Sanders.  It seems that every week, more information comes to light about Clinton's grave legal woes.  Her worries are in two broad categories:  One is her well-documented failure to safeguard state secrets and the other is her probable use of her position as secretary of state to advance financially her husband's charitable foundation.  The FBI is currently and aggressively investigating both.  What I will describe below is in the state secrets category.  It is apparently not new to the FBI, but it is new to the public.  Among the data that the FBI either found on the Clinton server or acquired from the State Department via its responses to Freedom of Information Act requests is a top-secret email that has been denominated Special Access Program.

Hillary Can't Pin E-mailgate on the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  As Hillary Clinton sinks ever deeper into E-mailgate, her excuses for grossly mishandling state secrets grow ever weaker.  In defense of her gross negligence, Clinton and her comrades have dusted off a vintage 1990s cliché:  "It's the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!"  Clinton has been hobbled by Inspector General of the Intelligence Community I. Charles McCullough III's discovery that her private, unsecure computer server contained "several dozen" e-mails classified TOP SECRET/SAP.  "Special Access Programs" is America's highest clandestine designation.  Such secrets must remain concealed because, under federal law, their "unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."  As former Africom strategist Dan Maguire told Fox News, "There are people's lives at stake."

FBI's Clinton investigation not letting up.  Six months after it began, the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server shows no signs of slowing down.  Former FBI officials said the length of the probe is not unusual and speculated that a decision on whether to file charges against Clinton or her top aides could come later this year, during the heat of the general election campaign.

We are witnessing the end of the House of Clinton.  There is the stench of political death around Hillary, Bill, Chelsea and the entire House of Clinton.  You could feel it when Republican front-runner Donald Trump hit back — hard — over the "penchant for sexism" charge by basically calling Hillary Clinton an enabler in the former president's sexual shenanigans.  When have we ever seen the Clintons back off?  But they did.  Then came further reports about an expanded FBI probe of her handling of secure information; the nexus of State Department favors for donors to the Clinton Foundation; and the story that Hillary Clinton or her staff might have lied to FBI agents in this probe.

Hillary's email scandal now potentially a matter of high treason.  Catherine Herridge of Fox News reports that the FBI is going directly to the intelligence agencies that generated the assessments to determine the original classification level.  The investigators "will go directly to depose specific individuals in agencies who generated the highly classified materials."  This is the prudent and smart thing to do in order to get specifics on the classification authority and to compare original documents with those that were stripped of classification markings.  But there is potentially something deeper and more sinister going on. [...] The FBI appears to have moved from a criminal investigation into an espionage investigation.

Hillary Decides What's Top Secret, What's Not.  Hillary Clinton and her campaign minions are trying mightily to dismiss the conclusions of the intelligence community inspector general that highly classified Special Access Protocol (SAP) documents were transferred to Clinton's unsecured private server.  The first line of Clinton's defense is (as usual) that the allegations are 1) nothing new and 2) politically motivated.  But beyond this usual rote Clintonian response is the additional claim that the documents were also 1) not so classified when Clinton received them and 2) even if they were classified documents the information they contained was public knowledge anyway, so no harm, no foul.  As to Clinton's first line of defense, what can one say?  You support Hillary and accept her mendacious paranoia as part of the package, or you don't.

How the FBI Could Force DOJ to Prosecute Hillary Clinton.  Could the Hillary Clinton e-mail saga end with FBI Director James Comey resigning in protest?  Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, knows the laws regarding classified information firsthand.  In his private practice, Cuccinelli defended a Marine lieutenant colonel court martialed on charges of possessing such information outside a secure facility.  He says Clinton's actions in the e-mail scandal clearly satisfy all five requirements necessary to sustain charges of mishandling classified material, and constitute a breach perhaps even more glaring than the one for which General David Petraeus was convicted.

Hillary Clinton: Private Email Was a Mistake, But Only 'Because of the Reaction'.  In a meeting with Iowa's Quad-City Times editorial board, Hillary Clinton explained that she does believe her use of a private email server while Secretary of State was a mistake... but only because of the way other people reacted to it.

Clinton Chief Of Staff Lost Her Personal Blackberry, Which Contained Classified Emails.  While working as Hillary Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills lost her personal Blackberry, on which she sent emails that the State Department has determined contain classified information.  Records obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show Mills revealed that she lost her Blackberry in a March 20, 2010 email she sent to Bryan Pagliano, the State Department IT staffer who managed Clinton's private email server.

FBI going 'right to the source' in Clinton email probe, interviewing intel agencies.  The FBI is going straight to the source in its investigation of classified emails that crossed Hillary Clinton's personal server, speaking with the intelligence agencies — and in some cases, the individuals — that generated the information, two intelligence sources familiar with the probe told Fox News.  Investigators are meeting with the agencies and individuals to determine the classification level in the emails.  The step speaks to the diligence with which the bureau is handling the investigation, despite the former secretary of state's claims that the matter boils down to a mere interagency dispute.

The Clinton E-Mail Scandal And How It Will End.  The media are doing their best to keep it very much under the wire, but the Clinton e-mail scandal has been heating up to the point it can't be ignored much longer.  Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III just made an absolutely damning report to the intelligence committees in the House and Senate to the effect that in addition to 1,340 emails designated "classified" stored on her private home brew server, Mrs. Clinton actually had emails on her server that contained intelligence from "special access programs," which is "a level of classification beyond even 'top secret'."

DeLay: FBI sources say they're 'ready to indict' Hillary.  Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Monday [1/25/2016] his FBI sources had informed him they are ready to bring charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information.  "I have friends in the FBI, and they tell me they're ready to indict," DeLay said during an appearance on Newsmax's "Steve Malzberg Show."  "They also say that if the attorney general does not indict, they're going public," the Texas Republican added.

How Hillary Got Classified Information Onto Her Private Email.  Hillary Clinton's acolytes are racing to dismiss the latest allegations that classified material was cut and pasted into her emails, but this isn't some mere oversight that can be hand-waved away with a shrug and a sad trombone honk.  One doesn't spill classified material into an unclassified system accidentally or through mere negligence.  What these new revelations show — if they are true — is conduct that was conscious, intentional, and felonious as all get-out.

Hillary and the Law of the Jungle.  Hillary Clinton claims the email scandal that hovers over her presidential campaign is all about politics.  She's right, but not in the sense that she would like people to believe, i.e., that a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is persecuting her — again.  In fact, she has undoubtedly violated the laws of the United States with her reckless and dangerous use of a private email account that exposed the most highly classified documents the country possesses to foreign intelligence services.  That she has not already been charged and locked up (as would have happened to almost anyone else who did the same) is because of politics.  Under the "law" of the political jungle her status and power have protected her.  But the law of the jungle only protects the strong.  And as Hillary grows weaker politically, her vulnerability to the laws of the United States grows considerably.

Motion filed to block State from delaying release of Clinton emails.  The journalist who forced the State Department to release thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails is opposing the government's efforts to delay the final release by one month, warning the extension would cause "irrevocable harm."  On Monday [1/25/2016], lawyers for Vice News reporter Jason Leopold filed a motion seeking to block the department from extending the amount of time that it has to release emails from the former secretary of State's personal server.

Reporter fights Hillary Clinton email delay.  Lawyers for a journalist seeking release of Hillary Clinton's email trove are objecting to the State Department's request for a month-long delay to complete disclosure of the final set of the former secretary of state's messages, warning that allowing the process to drag out until the end of February could deprive voters in early caucus and primary states of information on the Democratic presidential candidate.

State Department accused of political tampering in delay of Clinton emails.  The reporter whose case has forced the release of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails accused the Obama administration on Monday [1/25/2016] of political tampering by asking to delay making the final set of messages public until after the first four states have already voted in the Democratic presidential primary.  Another 11 states are slated to vote March 1, just hours after the State Department has said it wants to release the final 4,000 or so emails — which are likely to include some of the most controversial messages.  That means nearly 45 million voters won't have enough time to digest the emails before having to vote, Jason Leopold, a reporter at Vice, said in a court filing opposing the State Department's new schedule.

Hillary Clinton's Email Scandal Appears Gravely Criminal.  [Scroll down]  The Clintons have made careers of defying our assumptions about how low they can go.  I should have reminded myself that anything was possible.  Now, Paul Sperry reports that the FBI is probing indications that Mrs. Clinton did precisely what I assumed, because of the time and purposeful effort involved, she wouldn't have done. [...] As I noted in my National Review weekend column, we now know that highly classified information from the secure systems ended up on Clinton's private, unsecured (and relatively easy to hack) system.  That, however, is not the half of it.  Sperry reports that the actual documents themselves appear to have ended up in Clinton's unsecured system — but carefully shorn of their classified markings.

Hillary's team copied intel off top-secret server to email.  The FBI is investigating whether members of Hillary Clinton's inner circle "cut and pasted" material from the government's classified network so that it could be sent to her private email address, former State Department security officials say.  Clinton and her top aides had access to a Pentagon-run classified network that goes up to the Secret level, as well as a separate system used for Top Secret communications.

Hillary Clinton's E-Mail Scandal: Far Graver than First Thought.  If a bumbling Clinton had let a smattering of classified e-mails land on her unsecured server, one might overlook an occasional slip-up or two.  However, the State Department so far reports that Clinton's private server held at least 1,340 e-mails that contain classified data.  The final tranche of Clinton's e-mails should arrive January 29, most likely featuring even more e-mails brimming with state secrets.

Hillary's emails contained Top Secret HUMINT as State Dept. Stalls.  As the State Department asked for an extension to publish the last of Hillary Clinton's emails, it's been revealed that at least one of them found on her private server contained extremely sensitive information.  According to Fox News, an intelligence agency has identified the email as 'HCS-O', which is the code used to report on human intelligence sources in ongoing operations.  A January 14 letter sent to Congress by the intelligence community's inspector general advises the Oversight committees that Special Access Program (SAP), which is intelligence beyond top secret, was identified in Clinton's emails, Fox News reported.

Clinton's email excuses are falling apart.  Hillary Clinton went into damage-control mode when news broke that the inspector general of the intelligence agencies had identified additional classified emails on her private server, including ones containing intelligence on covert "Special Access Programs."  Her campaign even accused the inspector general — an Obama appointee confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate — of engaging in a "coordinated leak" with Republicans "for the purposes of hurting her campaign."  Lash out as she might, Clinton's constantly changing email story is rapidly falling apart.  First, Clinton claimed there was "no classified material" on her private server — which turned out to be untrue.  Then she claimed none of the intelligence on her server was "classified at the time" — which also turned out to be untrue.

The shoes are raining down in Hillary's e-mail mess.  Fox News, which last week disclosed that messages on Clinton's private server went beyond even Top Secret classification, now reports they even included material on clandestine human-intelligence sources.  That is, secret agents and local assets in the field — people whose very lives are in danger if they're exposed.  And this comes as President Obama's own former defense secretary, Robert Gates, admitted, "the odds are pretty high" that her home server was accessed by one or more hostile foreign governments.

Why the Justice Department Won't Work with the FBI on Clinton's E-mail Case.  Another day, another double-take reading the New York Times.  The latest shoe in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's scandalous mishandling of classified information dropped heavily this week.  It had already been reported that, contrary to her denials, hundreds of secret intelligence communications were transmitted over the private, unsecured e-mail system on which the former secretary of state recklessly conducted government business.  It is now clear that some of these contained "top secret/SAP" information.  (SAP is "special access programs.")  This indicates defense secrets of the highest order, the compromise of which can destroy vital intelligence programs, get covert agents killed, and imperil national security.

Page and McLaughlin: The FBI Will Recommend Prosecution For HillaryChicago Tribune Editorial Board member Clarence Page and "McLaughlin Group" host John McLaughlin predicted the FBI will recommend Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton face prosecution for mishandling classified information on Friday [1/22/2016].  [Video clip]

CNN's Baldwin Presses Karen Finney on Hillary Campaign's E-Mail Conspiracy Theory.  Brooke Baldwin pursued Hillary Clinton flack Karen Finney on Thursday's [1/21/2016] CNN Newsroom over her campaign's conspiracy theory that the intelligence community's inspector general purposely leaked the latest revelation about the highly-classified information on Mrs. Clinton's server.  When Finney cited unnamed officials who alleged that the I.G. "unfairly targeted Hillary Clinton," Baldwin interjected, "What would the motivation be for this inspector general to do this?"  When the Democratic operative asserted that "they want to take down Hillary Clinton," the anchor twice asked, "What is your proof for that?"  [Video clip]

The smoking gun?  Special Access Programs (SAP) is a game changer.  It is now undeniably clear that the results of the FBI investigation will be the end of one of two things:  Hillary's bid for the White House or the legitimacy of the FBI — at least when it comes to prosecuting cases on the mishandling of classified material.

Email scandal puts Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations in peril.  Hillary Clinton is vehemently disputing new charges that she sent top-secret information from a nonsecure email account while at the State Department, but analysts say the scandal has already damaged her so deeply that her presidential ambitions are at risk.  Mrs. Clinton's messages contained some information classified above "top secret," the intelligence community's inspector general said in a letter to Congress this week.  Fox News reported Thursday [1/21/2016] that the information is so sensitive that even senators, who already have clearance, must go through additional hoops if they want to see some of what she was sending.

Exclusive: Clinton email exposed intel from human spying.  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.

State Department Asks For More Time To Release Last Batch Of Hillary Emails.  The State Department is citing a snowstorm expected to hit Washington D.C. this weekend and a need for additional "interagency review" in its request to a federal judge on Friday [1/22/2016] to grant it an additional month to complete its final release of all of Hillary Clinton's work-related emails.

Former Attorney General: Hillary Clinton Knew Enough to Support Conviction for Mishandling Classified Information.  Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey says there is enough evidence to justify criminal charges against Hillary Clinton and to bring a conviction for mishandling classified information.  Writing in the Wall Street Journal Thursday [1/21/2016], Mukasey, who served as Attorney General under President George W. Bush from 2007-2009 and now serves as an adviser to Republican candidate Jeb Bush, suggests there are several different charges that could be brought against Clinton.

Fallon's fallacies.  [Scroll down]  The "Justice Department inquiry" is in part a euphemism for the FBI investigation.  It also refers to the outcome of the inquiry including prosecutorial decisions.  Whether or not anyone is prosecuted for the wrongs Hilary Clinton has committed is ultimately in part a political decision.  We are capable of making up our own minds based on relevant information.  The lameness of [Brian] Fallon's comment is itself indicative of the vacuity in Clinton's position at this point.  As the Clinton scandal management playbook dictates, Hillary Clinton is playing for time and counting on political considerations to save the day.

Clinton emails so secret some lawmakers can't read them.  Some of Hillary Clinton's emails on her private server contained information so secret that senior lawmakers who oversee the State Department cannot read them without fulfilling additional security requirements, Fox News has learned.  The emails in question, as Fox News first reported earlier this week, contained intelligence classified at a level beyond "top secret."  Because of this designation, not all the lawmakers on key committees reviewing the case have high enough clearances.  A source with knowledge of the intelligence review told Fox News that senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite having high-level clearances, are among those not authorized to read the intelligence from so-called "special access programs" without taking additional security steps — like signing new non-disclosure agreements.

Hillary Clinton's Email Scandal Turns Deadly.  At the moment, about 1,340 emails that went to or from Secretary Clinton contained material the State Department deems to be "classified."  Clinton says they were not classified when she got or sent them and that their classification is only retroactive.  Her critics say she should have recognized them as classified and labeled them so herself, which she is authorized to do.  But the fact that she also sent or received SAP material is an even more significant breech of intelligence protocol.

Why Team Hillary's Conspiracy-Mongering Doesn't Pass the Laugh Test.  PJ Media's Stephen Kruiser reported earlier today that the embattled Clinton campaign is now resorting to conspiracy-mongering to stave off damaging reports about Hillary's metastasizing email scandal.  On MSNBC's Morning Joe, the panel cringed at Team Hillary's absurd argument that the Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III is somehow a member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." [...] It turns out that McCullough is an Obama appointee who was confirmed by a Democrat-controlled Senate by unanimous consent.

Hillary campaign's response to latest email revelations reveals desperation.  It is hard to overstate the significance of the latest revelations about the national security catastrophe caused by Hillary Clinton's private email server.  The nation's highest-level secrets were kept on an unsecure server that is believed to be have been hacked by multiple overseas parties.  These revelations come from the nation's Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III, not some partisan.  He is a nonpolitical official who was confirmed by the Senate and entrusted with keeping our intelligence agencies honest.  For those readers who have not yet familiarized themselves with the revelations, Catherine Herridge's exclusive report at Fox News must be read.

Hillary Clinton Email Said to Include Material Exceeding 'Top Secret'.  Intelligence officials reviewing emails on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private computer server have found information they consider to be of a higher level of classification than "top secret," according to a letter sent to lawmakers last week by the intelligence agencies' inspector general.

State Department Releases Clinton IT Guru Emails.  The State Department has released for the first time a batch of emails specifically regarding Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department tech worker who helped manage Hillary Clinton's private email system.  The records, which were provided to The Daily Caller in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed on its behalf by the watchdog group Cause of Action, suggest that Pagliano is a central figure in a State Department inspector general investigation.  They also show Pagliano, who started working at State in May 2009, discussing personnel and IT-related matters with Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, Clinton's top two State Department aides.

Krauthammer's Take: Hillary E-mail Scandal Now 'Worse than What Snowden Did'.  A new report that Hillary Clinton's personal server contained information about "special access programs" makes her handling of sensitive material "worse than what Snowden did," Charles Krauthammer said tonight [1/19/2016].  "What people have to understand is that there is nothing higher, more secret than an SAP," Krauthammer said on Tuesday's Special Report.  "From some people I have talked to, this is worse than what Snowden did because he didn't have access to SAP."  "The reason it's [so sensitive] is if it's compromised, people die," he said.  "It also means that operations that have been embedded for years and years get destroyed and cannot be reconstituted.  This is very serious."

Is Hillary Clinton 'Too Big To Go To Jail'?  During the Democratic debate two nights ago, team Hillary tweeted out the message that there should be "no individual too big to jail."  Privately, Mrs. Clinton is almost certainly hoping — and perhaps even on her knees praying — she's wrong about that.  Her email headache got substantially worse today [1/19/2016] with the Fox News bombshell regarding the top-secret nature of some of the emails found on her unsecured, homebrew server.  According to I. Charles McCullough III, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, "several dozen" additional classified emails have been identified on Clinton's server.  These include specific intelligence known as "special access programs" (SAP), a classification level that goes "beyond top secret."

Hillary's Email Saga: Time to Move On?  [Scroll down]  If Hillary's email troubles grow into a criminal investigation it may be impossible for the administration's lawyers to firewall the scandal from other officials.  President Obama himself corresponded with Secretary of State Clinton over the controversial server. [...] The president is on record as saying "I don't think it posed a national security problem," on CBS's 60 Minutes.  "This is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered."  The New York Times reported that the president's remarks "rankle[d] some in the FBI".  The FBI may be irritated but it is ultimately a part of the executive branch.  With Hillary running, in David Brock's words, "to cement this president's legacy" it is hard to see how a criminal investigation would not similarly indict this same legacy.  It is clearly in the president's political interest to hope Clinton survives this latest blow-up.

What Happens if Hillary Isn't Indicted?  Just when we were thinking it couldn't get much worse with Hillary's email scandal, an inspector general's unclassified letter to lawmakers tells us the former secretary of state was keeping the most classified of all intelligence material — beyond "top secret" — on her homebrew server. [...] Note there were several dozen of these SAP emails, not just the two we previously heard about that didn't even reach this classification.  Those included satellite photos of North Korea.  What do you suppose this is?  Gross negligence is the important criminal standard here and it sounds as if it's been passed by the proverbial country mile.

Inspector General: Clinton emails had intel from most secretive, classified programs.  Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs, according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior lawmakers.  Fox News exclusively obtained the unclassified letter, sent Jan. 14 from Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III.  It laid out the findings of a recent comprehensive review by intelligence agencies that identified "several dozen" additional classified emails — including specific intelligence known as "special access programs" (SAP).

Hillary's Campaign Accuses Intel IG Of Coordinating With GOP On Damning Email Reports.  Hillary Clinton's top campaign spokesman believes a vast right-wing conspiracy of sorts is behind Tuesday's [1/19/2016] explosive report about the discovery of emails on the former secretary of state's server that are classified at levels higher than previously known.  According to NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Brian Fallon, Clinton's communications director, believes that the Intelligence Community's inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, is "selectively" leaking information in coordination with Republicans.

Clinton's 'no individual too big to jail' tweet backfires.  Hillary Clinton's campaign encountered heavy backlash Sunday night [1/17/2016] shortly after tweeting a statement made by Clinton during the fourth Democratic primary debate.  "There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail," Clinton told the moderators during the first hour of the debate Sunday [1/17/2016].  Within seconds, the remark was tweeted out to the former secretary of state's five-plus million Twitter followers.

Hillary's subconscious acts up in Dem debate, provides 6 words that will haunt her.  There may still be a reasonable debate on whether or not Hillary Clinton has a conscience, but Sunday night's Democratic presidential debate proves that she does have a subconscious.  That part of her mind put words into her mouth that her conscious mind would rather not admit.  The critical six words:  "No individual too big to jail."

The Comey Plan: What An Indictment of Hillary Clinton Would Mean For The Obama Legacy.  In June of 2013, President Barack Obama reached outside the spectrum of political logic to select a former Bush appointed Republican as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  At 6'8", FBI Director James Comey stands tall amongst his fellow members of the Obama administration not only due to his height, but also his consistent financial support of Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney in their bids for President.  Why would Obama select a Republican, with nearly four decades of successfully prosecuting high-profile individuals for obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, to a ten-year appointment as its Director?  To preserve his legacy through the pursuit of justice against Hillary Clinton.

Clinton Aides Resisted State Department Suggestion That Clinton Use State.gov Account.  Bombshell emails from the State Department show that a top official at the agency suggested to Hillary Clinton's aide, Huma Abedin, in August 2011 that the then-secretary of state begin using a government email account to protect against unexpected outages of her private email server.  But as the emails show, Abedin pushed back on the suggestion, telling the official, Stephen D. Mull, then the executive secretary of the State Department, that a State-issued Blackberry equipped with a state.gov email address "doesn't make a lot of sense."  Besides showing that Clinton's top aides were against the idea of her using a state.gov email account, the emails show for the first time that top State Department officials were aware of Clinton's private email server arrangement.

State Department Suddenly Discovers Thousands More Clinton Documents.  Watchdog group Judicial Watch has been trying to squeeze Hillary Clinton's documents out of the State Department with Freedom of Information Act requests for years.  FOIA requests have a way of turning into FOIA lawsuits before any wing of the Obama Administration responds to them.  Last Friday [1/8/2016], three years after one such suit was filed, the State Department suddenly discovered thousands of previously undisclosed Clinton documents.

Released emails reveal just how deeply Clinton and her advisers despise Israel.  If you hate Israel and wish to see nothing but misfortune for the Jewish State, stop reading because Hillary is your candidate.  If you care about Israel and its relationship with the United States, read on.  Hillary's email scandal has unleashed a treasure trove of information pertaining to the former secretary of state's views on Israel as well as those of her closest advisors, Sidney Blumenthal, Anne Marie Slaughter and Thomas Pickering.  The latest email exposé involves Thomas Pickering.  Pickering has never been known to be friendly toward Israel but what he suggested to Hillary in a 2011 email is frankly shocking, even by anti-Israel standards.  He hatched a scheme to foment unrest in Israel through mass Arab demonstrations to pressure the Israeli government and arm-twist it into making damaging concessions.

Citizens United sues over Chelsea Clinton emails.  Citizens United filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., on Thursday in hopes of having a federal court grant the conservative group access to emails exchanged between Chelsea Clinton and five top aides to her mother, White House contender Hillary Clinton, while the presidential hopeful served as secretary of state.  The Freedom of Information Act suit, first reported by Politico, was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington in an effort to uncover any correspondence that could further detail the former first daughter's role with respect to her mother's tenure in the State Department from 2009 to 2013.

State Department Discovers 'Thousands' of Previously Undisclosed Clinton Documents.  The Department of State recently discovered "thousands" of previously unreviewed documents that relate to Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi attack, according to a watchdog group that has been suing the department to release public records from Clinton's tenure.  The State Department disclosed the existence of the additional records in a court filing on Friday [1/8/2016] and asked the judge for further time to search and review the documents.  The watchdog group Judicial Watch has been suing the State Department for years to turn over public records related to Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation, the employment arrangements of Clinton's top aides, and her response to the Benghazi attack.

Clinton denies FBI investigation into family foundation.  Hillary Clinton disputed a report Monday that the FBI is investigating whether there were illegal connections between her family's foundation and her service as secretary of state.  Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, was asked about the Fox News story during a meeting Monday afternoon [1/11/2016] with the Des Moines Register's editorial board.  "It's an unsourced, irresponsible claim that has no basis," she responded.  "It is something that is really without merit and should not have any influence whatsoever in this nominating process."  Clinton said there is no such FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.  "There is nothing like that happening," she said.

'150 agents' working Clinton Foundation probe: Ex-U.S. atty.  Joseph DiGenova, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said the FBI's foundation probe "has reached such a proportion of inquiry that it's starting to sneak out," but that it was sparked months ago by information pulled from Hillary Clinton's private server and from the tax filings of corporations that have donated to the charity.  "There are now, I am told, 150 agents working on this case," DiGenova told the Washington Examiner Monday [1/11/2016], noting that was "a very unusually high number" of investigators to be working on one case.

FBI expands Hillary e-mail probe to investigate corruption.  The FBI's probe into Hillary Clinton's secret e-mail server has expanded, Fox News' Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne exclusively report, into a new and more personal direction.  While continuing to press on the question of whether Hillary violated the Espionage Act on more than 1300 occasions, they also now have reason to look into whether the former Secretary of State used her office to enrich the family through the Clinton Foundation.

Key to Hillary conspiracy to subvert classification system revealed?  One of the mysteries of the Hillary email scandal has been how over 1000 emails containing various levels of classified material were sent to Hillary without being "marked" as classified.  It is that lack of emails being "marked" classified "at the time" that is Hillary's central defense.  On September 25, 2015, Kemberlee wrote that there must have been some signal to State Department employees to send the classified material without markings; there's just no way it could be coincidence and Hillary must have known

Clinton Email Scandal Widens.  Judicial Watch is asking for discovery concerning Hillary Clinton's emails in three separate FOIA lawsuits against the State Department:  [#1] Lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry to force action on Clinton emails[,]  [#2] Lawsuit for records of talking points given to Ambassador Rice regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya[,]  [#3] Lawsuit for records on State Department's "Special Government Employment" status for Clinton aide Huma Abedin[.]  Notably, the OIG specifically cites our Benghazi and Abedin FOIA requests listed above as being thwarted by the Clinton State Department's FOIA fraud.  The OIG report also points the finger at Hillary Clinton's then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills for supervising an "incorrect" no-records response to the left-wing watchdog CREW's request asking about Hillary Clinton email accounts!

2016 Starts Bad For Hillary — Will It End Worse?  The latest batch of Clinton's State Department emails included one in which she told an aide to take a "secure fax," turn it "into nonpaper" and "send nonsecure."  Some are saying this is the smoking gun showing that Clinton broke the law by mishandling classified information.  But of course, it's not an isolated instance of poor decision-making on her part.  So far, we know she's sent at least 1,340 emails that held classified material via her personal, non-secure email.  And her use of her personal email while at State might be leading to even deeper trouble.  Fox News is reporting that the FBI probe into her email "has expanded to look at whether the possible 'intersection' of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws."  Emails aren't her only problem, though.

Hillary Tries to Put Out the Fire.  In recent days, attention has focused on an email exchange that Hillary Clinton had with one of her principal aides, Jake Sullivan, in June 2011.  As Paul noted here and here, some have characterized the exchange as a smoking gun, demonstrating that Hillary improperly instructed Sullivan to send classified information by unsecure email when an attempt to send by secure fax failed.  If true, this would refute Hillary's last line of defense with regard to her bizarre homebrew email setup, i.e., the claim that her home server was never used to send or receive classified information.

Clinton: I didn't request classified information via email.  A new batch of correspondence released Friday by the State Department includes a 2011 email in which Clinton, then secretary of state, asked an aide to send information by email after attempts to send the document through a secure fax line failed.

The Editor says...
Whenever Bill or Hillary make a statement, parse it carefully to see where the loopholes are.  If you have asked someone else to send classified information via email to a third party, you can still claim you didn't request classified information via email.

Report: FBI Email Probe Now Investigating Potential Clinton Foundation Corruption.  According to reporting from Fox News, the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton's email use has expanded and is now investigating whether the "intersection" of Clinton Foundation donations and State Department decisions during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State violated corruption laws.  Three sources from the intelligence community confirmed the probe's expansion to Fox's Catherine Herridge.  "The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed," one source told Fox.

Hillary: Look, My Latest Classified Email Problem is Just Another Fake Controversy.  [Scroll down]  One problem with this explanation is that in light of Hillary's, shall we say, less than assiduous approach to handling classified data, the notion that she'd be a stickler about sending sensitive, but unclassified, information through non-secure means strains credulity.  Plus, the talking points she was seeking at the time have since been redacted, as has the subject matter of those talking points — albeit under the 'internal deliberations' FOIA exemption.  Are we to believe that their contents were not secret?  Also, why else would she ask for identifying markings be stripped away before being 'sent nonsecure'?

FBI's Clinton probe expands to public corruption track.  The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible "intersection" of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News.  This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton's personal server.

Hillary's EmailGate Goes Nuclear.  The latest court-ordered dump of her email, just placed online by the State Department, brings more troubles for Team Hillary.  This release of over 3,000 pages includes 66 "Unclassified" messages that the State Department subsequently determined actually were classified; however, all but one of those 66 were deemed Confidential, the lowest classification level, while one was found to be Secret, bringing the total of Secret messages discovered so far to seven.  In all, 1,340 Hillary emails at State have been reassessed as classified.

Hillary's Email: It's a Felony!  Secretary Clinton continues to stand on her statement that none of the e-mail she sent or received had classified markings.  Other folks in the conversation comment that many of the e-mails Secretary Clinton wrote and received were "born classified," at the time she wrote or received them.  We need to cut to the chase.  Somebody committed a felony, likely several.  If, as some reports have indicated, there was certain overhead imagery, marked or unmarked on Secretary Clinton's e-mail server, someone committed a serious crime.  The way government information/automation systems are set up, someone had to take a deliberate series of felonious actions in order for that imagery to get there.

Do Hillary Clinton's Emails Expose A Scheme To Trade US Secrets For Political Influence?  Back in August, I wrote a post titled The real email question: Did Hillary Clinton sell US secrets?  As much as I loathe Hillary, this was a very serious question based on the facts that we know.  The IG representing the 17 US intelligence agencies identified two emails residing on Hillary Clinton's private, unsecure email server as being properly classified as TS\TK, that is, the were classified Top Secret and compartmentalized under the code words Talent Keyhole which indicates that it is imagery deriving from a KH-11 reconnaissance satellite.

The real email question: Did Hillary Clinton sell US secrets?  While the media is focusing your attention on the shiny object that is her email server, the real story is not being told.  The circumstantial evidence indicates that Hillary Clinton, or members of her inner circle with her connivance, purloined highly classified US intelligence and either sold it, traded it, or used it for personal gain.  This is not a conspiracy theory and it is not hyperbole.

Hillary's EmailGate Goes Nuclear.  The latest court-ordered dump of her email, just placed online by the State Department, brings more troubles for Team Hillary.  This release of over 3,000 pages includes 66 "Unclassified" messages that the State Department subsequently determined actually were classified; however, all but one of those 66 were deemed Confidential, the lowest classification level, while one was found to be Secret, bringing the total of Secret messages discovered so far to seven.  In all, 1,340 Hillary emails at State have been reassessed as classified.

GOP Benghazi committee member hopeful Hillary Clinton will be charged over classified emails.  A Republican member of the House Benghazi committee said he's "hopeful" the Justice Department will bring charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for having classified information on her private email server.  Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said there is increasing evidence "an enormous amount of information" on Clinton's private server is classified.  "It was classified when it was on her server and it was classified when it was sent," he said.

Hillary ordered one of her flunkies to break the law.  In its latest dump of 3,000-plus Hillary Clinton e-mails, the State Department found another 66 to be classified, pushing the total over 1,300.  But two of the non-classified messages were eye-openers.  One tacitly admits her own wrongdoing.  The other orders a flunky to break the law on handling classified info. [...] No word yet on whether [Jake] Sullivan obeyed the order, and so broke federal law — but it's still smoking-gun evidence of a secretary of state ordering up a crime.  Mind you, Hillary Clinton is a lawyer — her degree is from Yale, no less.

The 8 must-read Hillary Clinton emails.  The State Department's releases of Hillary Clinton's emails are winding down but are still offering up colorful glimpses into the former secretary of state's four years at Foggy Bottom.  The latest batch of roughly 3,000 pages of emails — which State posted in the wee hours of Friday morning after missing a court-ordered deadline to keep up its schedule — showed the lavish praise heaped on Clinton, her aides' gallows humor, and struggles with technology that had Clinton turning to unsecure forms of communication.  It also showed how Sidney Blumenthal flooded the secretary's inbox with intelligence and advice, some of which made its way to the White House.

At least 1,340 Clinton emails now known to contain classified material.  At least 1,340 emails that Hillary Clinton sent or received contained classified material, according to the State Department's latest update from its ongoing review of more than 30,000 emails.  The State Department released a new batch of 3,007 pages of Clinton's emails after 1:30 a.m. Friday [1/8/2016] in response to a court order.  Of those, 66 contain classified information.  None of Clinton's emails was marked as classified during her tenure, State Department officials say, but intelligence officials say some material was clearly classified at the time.  Her aides also sent and received classified information.

The Bells Toll for Hillary.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation will recommend that the Justice Department bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton and various of her aides, and soon.  The evidence consists of materials that the Bureau has gathered in the course of its months-long investigation of Mrs. Clinton's personal server.  The recommendations will come very soon.  The charges will consist of some of the following:
  1.  Improper disclosure or retention of classified information.
  2.  Destruction of government records.
  3.  Lying to federal agents.
  4.  Lying under oath.
  5.  Obstruction of justice.
All the counts are familiar to those of us who have followed the Clintons for a quarter of a century, but, as one source familiar with the FBI's investigation told me, the evidence has now reached a "critical mass."

Senator: Newly released Clinton email 'disturbing'.  The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a scathing statement Friday [1/8/2016], calling on Hillary Clinton to "come clean" after the State Department released an email in which she asked an aide to send information on a non-secure system after attempts to send the document securely failed.  Sen. Chuck Grassley said the email, released at about 1:30 am Friday morning along with about 3,000 other emails from Clinton's State Department tenure, is "disturbing," and "appears to show the former Secretary of State instructing a subordinate to remove the headings from a classified document and send it to her in an unsecure manner."

Bombshell: In Email, Hillary Ordered Aide to Strip Classified Marking and Send Sensitive Material.  The State Department waited until the middle of the night to execute its belated, court-ordered release of the latest tranche of Hillary Clinton's emails — the ones she and her attorneys didn't unilaterally delete with no oversight, that is.  Fox News notices a significant exchange that may point to criminal conduct: [...]

Watchdog: Clinton email responses 'inaccurate and incomplete'.  The State Department has been providing "inaccurate and incomplete" responses to requests for emails and other documents involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a watchdog says in a new report released Thursday [1/7/2016].  The 29-page IG report says the leadership of the State Department "has not played a meaningful role in overseeing or reviewing the quality" of the responses to requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Scathing IG Report On Hillary Email Account Puts David Brock In A Bind.  [A] report from the State Department's Office of the Inspector General about the agency's improper handling of public records requests for information on Hillary Clinton's email account has put David Brock, one of the former secretary of state's most dogged supporters, in an awkward position.  Brock, a former foe of Bill and Hillary Clinton, has been the public face of the campaign to downplay the Clinton email scandal.  He's made numerous media appearances defending the Democratic presidential candidate, spinning her numerous inconsistent statements and portraying the whole affair as a throwback to the anti-Clinton attacks of the 1990s.

State dumps thousands of Clinton emails at 1 a.m..  State Department officials released roughly 2,900 pages of Hillary Clinton's private emails early Friday morning [1/82016], several hours past their target of late Thursday evening.  State first set a broad target of somewhere between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Thursday.  But as the night wore on, that shifted to a 2 a.m. estimate.  They were finally released right around 1 a.m.  The late release was on top of State's failure to release all the emails by New Year's Eve.  Instead of releasing everything on Dec. 31, State said it needed another few days to finish the group of Clinton messages.

State Department gave 'inaccurate' answer on Clinton email use, review says.  Two years before the public learned of Hillary Clinton's private server, the State Department gave an "inaccurate and incomplete" response about her email use when it told an outside group that it had no documents about Clinton's email accounts beyond her government address, according to a report from the State Department's inspector general to be released Thursday [1/7/2016].  The State Department made its statement in response to a 2012 records request from the independent watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).  The response came even though Clinton's chief of staff, who knew about the secretary's private account, was aware of the inquiry, the report says.  In addition, the IG review found that agency staffers had not searched Clinton's office for emails.

A vast left-wing conspiracy:
State Department covered up Hillary's private email server for years even though 'dozens of senior officials' knew about it, says scathing inspector general report.  The U.S. State Department told a watchdog group in 2013 that it didn't have any information about former secretary Hillary Clinton's emails, even though 'dozens of senior officials' knew she was using a private server for all her electronic communications.  A report released Thursday [1/7/2016] by the agency's inspector general — a powerful and impartial internal investigator — described a cavalier culture about transparency inside Clinton's agency, saying that 177 requests for documents about Clinton are still 'pending' nearly three years after she left office.  The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to respond to requests for information within 20 business days.

Hillary Clinton's State Department bungled many public records requests, watchdog report says.  The State Department produced "inaccurate and incomplete" responses to public records requests while Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton led the department, including its inability to find documents showing she used a private email account for official business, the agency's watchdog reported Thursday [1/7/2016].

Clinton's private email account exploits FOIA loophole, report says.  Hillary Clinton's unorthodox use of a private email account and personal server for government business exploited a loophole in the State Department's FOIA, or Freedom of Information Act, process, according to the findings of the first Inspector General report to stem from her email scandal.  Congress asked the Office of Inspector General, the State Department's independent watchdog, to investigate the issue following the revelation that Mrs. Clinton did not use a government email account while secretary of state.

Former federal prosecutor says Hillary could be indicted in the next 60 days as the FBI compiles 'overwhelming' evidence against her.  Joe DiGenova, a one-time federal prosecutor originally appointed by President Reagan, told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham Tuesday [1/5/2016] that the FBI's still-pending investigation of Clinton's email server seems to have reached 'a critical mass.'  Congressional Republicans last spring discovered that Clinton used a private, home-based email server in her New York home while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.  The scandal has dogged her presidential campaign for almost the entire past year.

Could Obama be planning a huge surprise for the 2016 election?  The U.K. Daily Mail reports that Joe DiGenova, a one-time federal prosecutor, told radio host Laura Ingraham Tuesday [1/5/2016] "that the FBI's still-pending investigation of Clinton's email server seems to have reached 'a critical mass.'"  Further, "[a] recommendation for prosecution would not only roil the presidential race, but would put President Barack Obama in an unbelievably difficult position."  All well and good, but [...] there are two things we know about Barack:  one, he has an infinite capacity for self-delusion, and two, he hates both Clintons.  So here's a prediction:  if Clinton gets indicted, Michelle Obama gets the Obama team's nod for the nomination.  Can Barack and Michelle pull such a thing off?  No, but the point is that they will think they can.

Hillary Will Be Indicted Says Former U.S. Attorney.  A former U.S. Attorney predicts a Watergate-style showdown in the Department of Justice if Attorney General Loretta Lynch overrules a potential FBI recommendation to indict Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.  "The [FBI] has so much information about criminal conduct by her and her staff that there is no way that they walk away from this," Joseph diGenova, formerly the District of Columbia's U.S. Attorney, told Laura Ingraham in a Tuesday [1/5/2016] radio interview.  "They are going to make a recommendation that people be charged and then Loretta Lynch is going to have the decision of a lifetime.  "I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general.  It will be like Watergate.  It will be unbelievable."

Former U.S. Attorney: Hillary Could Face Indictment Within 60 Days.  A former U.S. attorney predicted this week that Hillary Clinton "will not make it to the finish line" in 2016 because she will soon be facing a criminal indictment from the FBI.  During an appearance on Laura Ingraham's radio show Tuesday [1/5/2016], famed attorney Joseph DiGenova said that the FBI has "reached a critical mass in their investigation of the secretary and all of her senior staff" and predicted that it would come to a head "in the next 60 days."  DiGenova, who rose to national prominence during the Clinton scandals of the '90s, told Ingraham that if Attorney General Loretta Lynch refuses to indict Clinton, there will be a "massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an Attorney General."

Will Hillary be indicted?  Joseph diGenova, a well-respected former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, predicted today that Hillary Clinton will be indicted for crimes connected with her use of a private email server for State Department business.  He made this prediction on Laura Ingraham's radio program.  For Hillary to be indicted, the FBI would have to call for an indictment and the Attorney General would have to approve the recommendation.  FBI director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are both Obama appointees.  Comey has a reputation as a straight shooter.  In part, that reputation derives from the independence he displayed as a high-ranking Justice Department official during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Rumor Mill: Hillary Facing Criminal Indictment, Obama 2016 Surprise in the Works.  Opinions on Hillary Clinton's chances in 2016 come in two forms with not much in between:  "It ain't happening" and "Hillary's got it locked in."  We may soon find out which one of those prognostications is right.  Washington insiders are saying that the evidence in the FBI's investigation into Clinton's "unique email arrangement" has reached "critical mass."  The American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. joins former prosecutor Joe DiGenova in predicting that a decision to indict is coming soon.

Clinton's Staff Vetted Public Records Requests, Emails Show.  Hillary Clinton's top aide was closely involved in vetting a politically sensitive document requested under public information laws, according to emails from the Department of State released on Thursday [12/31/2015].  Public records officials at the State Department sought clearance from Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, in 2012 before releasing a memo related to the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation program.  The email corroborates a Wall Street Journal article last May that reported that Mills had been involved in vetting documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act, a process that is typically expected to be independent of political influence.

Emails Show Hillary Met At State Department With Sidney Blumenthal.  During the fallout from her use of a personal email account, Hillary Clinton has attempted to downplay her working relationship with Sidney Blumenthal, but emails released last week show that the two met at her State Department office in 2012.  Blumenthal has proved a thorn in the Democratic presidential candidate's side.  The former journalist, who worked as an aide in the Bill Clinton White House, frequently emailed Clinton intelligence that he had gleaned from undisclosed sources. [...] In distancing herself from Blumenthal, Clinton has claimed that his emails were "unsolicited."

New 'secret' message among Clinton's emails as classification rate spikes again.  The State Department has decided that yet another of former Secretary Hillary Clinton's emails contains "secret" information, and has classified hundreds more at a lower level of secrecy — part of Thursday afternoon's release of more than 3,000 messages from her unique email arrangement.  The secret message was deemed "unclassified" at the time it was sent, but has been elevated as officials process and release more than 30,000 of Mrs. Clinton's emails, which she belatedly returned to the government nearly two years after she left office.

State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve.  The State Department on Thursday released over 3,000 of Hillary Clinton's personal emails from her time as Secretary of State, marking the last of the major document dumps of the year.  Still, the agency said Thursday [12/31/2015] that it will fall short of the mandate to release 82 percent of Clinton's total emails by the end of 2015, blaming the holiday schedule and the sheer number of documents involved.

State Dept. breaks judge's deadline on Clinton emails.  The State Department broke a judge's order on the number of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails it was supposed to release Thursday [12/31/2015], blaming the holiday season for throwing it off track.  The department promised another release of emails next week to make up for its breach, and said even the emails it was releasing Thursday will not be fully processed and won't be able to be sorted by senders or recipients in the department's computer system.

State Department to Fall Short on Today's Hillary Clinton Email Release.  The U.S. State Department just released 5,552 pages of former Secretary Hillary Clinton's private email, the second to last installment of the court-mandated roll-out.  But in a statement sent to the press this afternoon, the State Department said it had fallen short of the court's order to release 82 percent of the documents by today.  Only about 76 percent are available online.

NOW more than 1,000 of Hillary Clinton's emails have been deemed classified.  The State Department released another 5,500 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails just hours before the New Year's Eve ball is set to drop.  The dump was originally supposed to be much bigger, instead of the just 3,100 messages the public can now browse.  The total number of Clinton's emails now deemed classified has climbed to 1,274, according to Politico, with 275 messages in this most recent cache being retroactively given the classified distinction.  Two emails released in the latest batch have been designated as 'secret,' the second-highest level of classification.

State Department still doesn't have all of Clinton's emails.  Despite the high-profile release of Hillary Clinton's emails each month, voters are unlikely to get a chance to read all of her correspondence.  That's because Clinton failed to hand over all her work emails, despite being asked to do so repeatedly, and the State Department is not searching for them elsewhere.  The Democratic front-runner for president said she is unable to access emails she sent or received in her first two months as secretary of state in 2009 because her emails were not yet being captured on her private computer server.

State Department releases more Hillary Clinton emails marked "classified".  The State Department on Thursday released around 5,500 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails from her tenure as secretary of state, in its continued effort to comply with a court order and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  Since earlier this year, Clinton has been under fire for using a private email account and private server to conduct business, rather than an official State Department address.  Questions about her email account have died down since Clinton addressed the issue at length during an 11-hour hearing of the House Benghazi Committee.

Hillary's Server, Monica's Blue Dress, and History.  What the server's e-mails indicate is that on the night that four Americans were murdered in Benghazi, Hillary e-mailed the truth of how they died to her daughter.  She told Chelsea that the Americans were the victims of an organized terrorist attack.  She later admitted that to the Egyptian prime minister also.  Nonetheless she signed a public statement from the State Department proclaiming that the Americans were the victims of a riot provoked by a YouTube video.  After lying to the American people the evening of the attack, she repeated the lie to the victims' relatives when their bodies were flown in to Joint Base Andrews.  Moreover, she stood by her false account when she testified to the House Select Committee.  There are other untruths that have been passed on from Hillary's server.  She has lied about arranging lecture fees from her State Department office for the gifted Bill Clinton.  There are lies about arranging donations for her family foundation, her forthcoming political campaign, and her own speaking fees.  There are lies on the topic of influence pedaling and on whom she kept in contact with.

FBI Probe Focuses on Hillary's 'Materially False' Statements.  The FBI has expanded its probe into the private email arrangement of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to determine if there's any evidence she violated a federal false statements law, Fox News reports.  According to Fox News, unnamed intelligence sources say the agency is now focusing on U.S. Code 18, Section 1001 — a provision that pertains to "materially false" statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party — a felony punishable by five years in prison.

State Dept. plans New Year's Eve release of Clinton emails.  Thousands of Hillary Clinton's private emails will hit the Internet on New Year's Eve thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that permits the State Department to wait until the end of each month to release the documents.  The holiday email release will mark the eighth time the agency has published a batch of Clinton's records according to the monthly schedule.

Sources: Review affirms Clinton server emails were 'top secret,' despite department challenge.  An intelligence community review has re-affirmed that two classified emails were indeed "top secret" when they hit Hillary Clinton's unsecured personal server despite a challenge to that designation by the State Department, according to two sources familiar with the review.  The sources described the dispute over whether the two emails were classified at the highest level as a "settled matter."  The agencies that owned and originated that intelligence — the CIA and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency or NGA — reviewed the emails to determine how they should be properly stored, as the State Department took issue with their highly classified nature.  The subject matter of the messages is widely reported to be the movement of North Korean missiles and a drone strike.

Clinton aide key focus in FBI server investigation.  More than 100 days after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying before the House committee investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack, a key Hillary Clinton aide is at the center of the separate and ongoing investigation by the FBI into Clinton's use of a private unsecured server while she was secretary of state.  That former staffer, Bryan Pagliano, set up the controversial private email server in Clinton's home in Chappaqua, N.Y.  Pagliano is believed to be the only witness publicly identified during the politically charged hearings on Benghazi to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

State Department belatedly finds 1300 emails on Anwar Al-Awlaki.  The State Department has belatedly discovered about 1,300 emails relating to deceased Islamic cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki in official accounts belonging to top aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, more than four years after a conservative group requested all such records, a new court filing reports.  At a federal court hearing in Washington last month, Justice Department attorneys assigned to the case brought by Judicial Watch told a federal judge that State's "executive secretariat" — the repository of records for the secretary's office — was searched in response to the initial Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch.

State Dept. cannot find emails of Clinton IT staffer.  The State Department cannot find emails sent by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's IT staffer Bryan Pagliano who helped setup Clinton's private email server, a State Department official told Fox News on Friday [12/11/2015].  Alec Gerlach, a State Department spokesman, told Fox News investigators working on recovering Pagliano's emails from the server "have not yet located a .pst that covers the time period of Secretary's Clinton tenure."

State Department Can't Find Emails For Hillary's IT Guy.  The State Department says it cannot find copies or backups of emails from the account of Bryan Pagliano, the State Department IT staffer who was paid by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private email server while she served as secretary of state.  Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley revealed the finding in a letter sent Friday [12/11/2015] to Sec. of State John Kerry which was obtained by Politico.  Grassley has considered granting immunity to Pagliano, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi in September.

The Editor says...
This fellow really is an IT guru, if he can make himself disappear from the internet.

Here's Why the Media Stopped Reporting on Clinton's New Emails.  Hillary Clinton told the media not just once but several times that her secret e-mail server did not transmit or store sensitive or classified information.  The Clinton e-mail story broke in March when The New York Times provided the first public notice that the former Secretary of State had exclusively used a personal server for her electronic communications rather than an official and secured government e-mail system — a fact that only came to light through a congressional investigation into the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi.  For four years, the State Department had told Congress and federal courts reviewing FOIA petitions that Secretary Clinton had sent no e-mails responsive to their demands, thanks to the subterfuge of Clinton's system and the obstruction of legitimate oversight that it produced.

Senators probe possible leaks in Clinton email review.  Two top Republican senators have written directly to Secretary of State John Kerry and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about possible leaks from their departments on the review of Hillary Clinton's emails that left the wrong impression that two "Top Secret" messages were not that sensitive.  Fox News has confirmed the letter was sent by Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who heads the powerful Intelligence Committee, on November 13.  Copies were sent to the intelligence community and State Department watchdogs, known as the Inspectors General.  The IGs were asked to conduct an independent review of the process.

As Hillary Runs, Marine Will Be Ousted for Emailing Classified Documents.  A Marine and U.S. Naval Academy graduate who self-reported that he improperly stored classified documents will be separated from the Marine Corps Reserve following a decision by Assistant Navy Secretary Juan Garcia, the Washington Post reported Monday [11/30/2015].  Maj. Jason Brezler's emails warned officials about the corruption, including homosexual pedophilia, of an Afghan police chief named Anwar Jan, whose servant later killed three Marines and wounded a fourth.

Shock Email: Hillary Claimed She 'Lost A Bunch Of Emails' When She Switched Blackberries.  Hillary Clinton told an email correspondent in February 2012 that she lost his email along with a bunch of others when she switched Blackberry devices.  "Dear Hank," Clinton wrote to Massachusetts state representative Harold Naughton on Feb. 5, 2012.  "When I switched blackberries last week, I lost a bunch of emails, including yours."

Clinton records reveal discrepancies in her official calendar.  The documents, obtained by the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, indicated Clinton met with nearly 100 corporate executives who have also donated extensively to her campaign and to her family's foundation.  Meeting lists showed Clinton welcomed executives who had commercial interests on her desk, raising further questions about whether the then-former and future presidential candidate took any steps to shield herself from the appearance of conflicts of interest.

Emails show Clinton staff asked NFL for help spinning her concussion, the State Department blacked out its list of Hillary's 'achievements' and Madame Secretary couldn't find 'Homeland' on her TV.  Hillary Clinton needed help finding the Showtime network on her cable box so she could watch 'Homeland' — according to an email the State Department released Monday [11/30/2015].  Her chief communications guru asked National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell for help spinning the press on the dangers of her December 2012 concussion, according to another message.  The State Department completely censored a third, which appeared to consist of a bullet-pointed list of four Clinton 'accomplishments' as secretary of state, determining it wasn't fit for disclosure under the Freedom Of Information Act's guidelines.

Henry: Indication Of More Classified Information Contained In Hillary Clinton's Emails.  The State Department released another batch of the emails on Hillary Clinton's private server, and with that more indications Clinton possessed classified information on her unsecured private account according to Ed Henry.  "The bigger picture, the broader point here is Hillary Clinton back in March said no classified information on this server and as we continue to see the drip-drip there are indications, of course, that there are dozens of those emails already come out that did have classified information," Henry said.

Nearly 1,000 Clinton emails had classified info.  The State Department's latest release of Hillary Clinton documents brings the total number of Clinton emails known to contain classified material to nearly 1,000.  The department on Monday [11/30/2015] released its largest batch of emails yet, posting 7,800 pages of the former secretary of state's communications.  The latest batch contains 328 emails deemed to have classified information.  According to the State Department, that brings the total number with classified information to 999.

Do Hillary's Emails Confirm Clinton-Obama Enmity?  The State Department released several thousand emails today [11/30/2015].  Out of curiosity, I searched for "Sid" and was rewarded with nine pages of documents — including, as always, duplicates.  Sid Blumenthal ranked high on the list of those who emailed directly to Hillary at her off-the-books, unsecured address; most such communications were forwarded to her by Huma Abedin or Cheryl Mills.  Reading Blumenthal's emails, one is reminded of the fact that he is an "old friend" of Hillary's, as she told a Congressional committee, and has no such relationship with Barack Obama.

State Dept. set to release 7,800 new Clinton emails.  State Department officials are set to release roughly 7,800 pages of Hillary Clinton's private emails Monday amid new speculation about the former secretary of state's official meeting schedule.  The email production Monday afternoon will kick off a countdown to the final two Clinton email releases, which will take place at the end of December and January respectively.

Hillary and the mystery of the vanishing woman who decided which of her emails were to be erased:.  Heather Samuelson was the Clinton aide who was tasked to go through the former secretary of state's emails and then, later on, was to take a job with the 2016 campaign.  But, according to Politico, Samuelson made the move — from Washington, D.C. to New York, as Clinton's campaign is headquartered in Brooklyn — but never started her campaign job.

Hillary's Private Email Server Used by Aide to Converse with Known Islamic Activist.  As the investigation continues into Hillary Clinton's alleged illegal use of her own private server for official State Department business, investigators have also been looking into the emails of some of her top aides that also used her private server.  One of those aides is Huma Abedin who for most of Clinton's time as Secretary of State was her closet aide and confidant.

Beyond Emails: Embassy Classified Info Unprotected Under Hillary Clinton.  There is a largely unknown security scandal emerging, which centers not on the doomed U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, but on the American Embassy in Tripoli about 400 miles away.  This scandal, combined with classified information on Clinton's private server and sensitive material looted from the dangerously unprotected Benghazi compound, may spell trouble in Hillary Clinton-land, especially in regard to the presidential candidate's national security credentials.

Comey Can Nail Hillary — But Will He?  FBI Director James Comey probably holds the fate of the presumptive Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton, in his hands, as his agency investigates her use of a private server for official government emails.  Whether Comey will handle the matter as a principled and honest policeman or as a conniving politician is the great unknown.

Report: FBI Investigating Whether 'Materially False' Statements [were] Given In Hillary Email Probe.  Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News that agents are focusing on U.S. Code 18, Section 1001 which governs "materially false" statements made in writing, orally or through a third party.  The section could apply to Clinton, her aides or her attorneys if they made any misleading or false statements about her emails which caused federal agents to expend more resources and time on the investigation.  Violations of the code are punishable by up to five years in prison.

Why Hillary has a Martha Stewart problem — and why she's likely safe.  Looks like Hillary Clinton has a Martha Stewart problem.  Stewart went to prison for lying to federal investigators.  She wasn't under oath when she did — but it was still a crime.  Other violators include Bernie Madoff, Bush-era White House aide Scooter Libby and Illinois then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.  Politico and Fox News report the FBI has expanded its probe of Clinton's use of that "home-brewed" e-mail server.  As Fox puts it, "agents [are] exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false-statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case."  The statute targets "materially false" comments "either in writing, orally or through a third party."

What lies are the FBI going to unearth in the Hillary Clinton server scandal?  The ongoing dumpster fire for Democrats that was Hillary Clinton's insanely risky email security strategy — to put it in the simplest terms, she didn't have one — has sparked a lot of concern, speculation, and cynicism.  The concern is:  What did Hillary Clinton's incompetence reveal to our rivals and enemies?  The speculation is:  What will the FBI find?  And the cynicism is:  At what point will Barack Obama swoop in and derail the investigation?  Well, this latest report from Fox News suggests that the answer to the third question is The FBI is still being allowed to do its job.

The Scandal We Were Told Was Over Just Won't Go Away.  Clinton might still be the Democrats' candidate, but she's not outrunning her email scandal, no matter how happy her media supporters are.  First, multiple news sources have reported that the investigation into the personal email account managed by a private server that she used while secretary of state has been ramped up.  Fox News disclosed Thursday [11/12/2015] "the FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton's emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case."

Judge Rules Against Judicial Watch's Attempt To Speed Up Email Release.  A judge ruled against a conservative group trying to speed up the release of some of Hillary Clinton's emails related to the 2012 Benghazi attack, according to the Hill.  Federal Judge Amit Mehta said it would be potentially risky to release the 242 emails, which are already on track to be released by next February because of a separate lawsuit.  The group conservative group Judicial Watch asked for the 242 emails to be taken from the larger spread of emails set to be released by next February.  The emails were either sent or received by Clinton, and were requested under a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch.  The larger spread includes about 55,000 pages of emails Clinton flagged as related to her work.

Top Hillary Aide Signed, Failed To Comply With State Dept 'Separation Agreement'.  That aide, Huma Abedin, maintained control of emails she sent and received through a personal email account hosted on Clinton's private email server for nearly two-and-a-half years after she left the agency in Feb. 2013.  In signing the form — called the OF-109 — but failing to turn over State Department records, Abedin may have opened herself up to criminal charges.

Court blow for Clinton: Judge orders release of 700 new docs.  A federal judge ordered the State Department Tuesday [11/10/2015] to provide 700 new pages of records from Hillary Clinton's former office by Dec. 1, paving the way for a spate of document releases that could continue well into next year.  The order by Judge Rudolph Contreras pushed agency officials to finish searching documents from Clinton's time as secretary of State, including emails, memos and notes, by the end of the year, according to court documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

FBI expands probe of Clinton emails, launches independent classification review.  The FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton's emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case.  Fox News is told agents are looking at U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to "materially false" statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party.  Violations also include pressuring a third party to conspire in a cover-up.  Each felony violation is subject to five years in prison.

FBI steps up interviews in Clinton email probe.  Even as Hillary Clinton tries to put questions about her private email server behind her, the FBI has stepped up inquiries into the security of the former secretary of state's home-made email system and how aides communicated over email, POLITICO has learned.  The FBI's recent moves suggest that its inquiry could have evolved from the preliminary fact-finding stage that the agency launches when it receives a credible referral, according to former FBI and Justice Department officials interviewed by POLITICO.

Signs emerge FBI investigation of Hillary emails has moved to a new, more serious stage.  Momentum is a concept that applies to criminal investigations almost as much as it does to sports teams.  And from the signs available, it looks as if the probe into potential criminality in the Hillary email scandal has got the Big Mo.  Despite the FBI's efforts to remain tight-lipped over the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server, it looks as though substantial resources are being devoted, so that a political kill of the query would be difficult to justify if push comes to shove.  Politico has been interviewing as many people as it can, both on and off the record, to get a sense of where the investigation is leading, and the indications are that Hillary should be worried.

17 of Hillary Clinton's Worst Email Lies.  Word came late yesterday that the FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified files.  A former assistant director of the FBI, Tom Fuentes, notes that "it's [likely] more than a preliminary inquiry; it sounds like a full-blown investigation ...When you have this amount of resources going into it ... I think it's at the investigative level."

The FBI's Clinton Email Probe Just Took A New Turn.  The FBI has expanded its probe into Hillary Clinton's personal email system to what one analyst is calling a "full-blown investigation," Politico is reporting.  The FBI has interviewed a former State Department official about how Clinton aides communicated over email.  And last month, the agency requested records from a data broker Clinton hired to find companies to manage her private email system after she left office in early 2013.

Is the FBI Closing in on Hillary?  According to Dr. Monica Crowley, quoted below, [FBI Director James] Comey is closely overseeing his crack cyber-forensic team, which has masterfully managed to do what many claimed couldn't be done:  they accessed the files on Hillary Clinton's "wiped" email server.  If they find ample evidence to indict her, as Crowley intimates below, and the Justice Department decides not to pursue charges, many political pundits foresee Comey resigning, or looking the other way when whatever illegal activity they found starts to leak.

Whitewashing Hillary — step one in shutting down the FBI's probe.  Hmm.  [James] Clapper answers to the president — who issued clear marching orders months ago, announcing that Clinton's server scam was "not a situation in which America's national security was endangered."  Oddly, news of Clapper's finding got leaked to Politico soon after the Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton did indeed, right after taking over at State, acknowledge her responsibility to properly guard classified info — and that "negligent handling" of it could bring criminal penalties.  Until the Beacon broke that news, even the State Department was unclear on whether Clinton ever signed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement.  By so doing, she promised not to put classified info at risk — by, say, storing it on a home-brewed email server.

Three Pinocchios:
Hillary Clinton's claim that 90 percent of her emails were 'in the system'.  Clinton clearly erred in saying that the "90 to 95 percent" figure was from the State Department.  This is her own staff's calculation, and she should correct the record.  While not all of the e-mails she submitted to the State Department have been released, what has been made available so far suggests that a substantial majority are to and from at least one "state.gov" e-mail address.  It is not an unreasonable assumption that these e-mails are contained somewhere within the bowels of the State Department.  But Clinton cannot make a definitive statement and certainly cannot attribute that to the State Department.

Hillary Clinton's Secrets Contract Should [End] Her Candidacy.  Massive government is usually viewed as functioning top-down:  The elected politician tries to guide the bureaucracies, directives routinely get distorted, and the end result includes horrors such as little old ladies being manhandled as potential terrorists at airports.  In the case of Clinton becoming secretary of state in 2009, however, it worked bottom-up, and accomplished something quite sensible.  Thanks to an open records request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a key non-disclosure agreement the beleaguered front-runner for the Democrats' presidential nomination signed is now public.

Clinton Signed NDA Laying Out Criminal Penalties for Mishandling of Classified Info.  A day after assuming office as secretary of state, Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement that laid out criminal penalties for "any unauthorized disclosure" of classified information.  Experts have guessed that Clinton signed such an agreement, but a copy of her specific contract, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute through an open records request and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, reveals for the first time the exact language of the NDA.

Clinton Signed NDA Laying Out Criminal Penalties for Mishandling of Classified Info.  As the nation's chief diplomat, Hillary Clinton was responsible for ascertaining whether information in her possession was classified and acknowledged that "negligent handling" of that information could jeopardize national security, according to a copy of an agreement she signed upon taking the job.  A day after assuming office as secretary of state, Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement that laid out criminal penalties for "any unauthorized disclosure" of classified information.

Hillary signed State Department contract saying it was HER job to know if documents were classified top secret.  Hillary Clinton's claim that she was unaware top secret documents on her private email server were highly classified took a hit on Friday [11/6/2015], with the revelation of a State Department contract she signed in 2009.  The 'Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement,' which Clinton inked during her second day as Secretary of State, declared that she was personally responsible for determining if sensitive documents in her possession were classified at the government's highest level.

FBI found TOP SECRET info in Hillary emails, evidence enough to charge Clinton.  Fox News' Monica Crowley revealed that several anonymous sources indicated to her that the FBI has found confidential "top secret" information on Hillary's private email account, and that this is enough to press charges against her for obstruction.  [Video clip]

The Benghazi Hearings.  The presence of a server in her home, the attempts to hide it, to prevent anyone seeing any email at all, speak volumes.  In the absence of recorded or filmed conversations, emails are the most solid evidence we can have.  Why was she not conducting business on State Department security approved computers and devices?  Federal law requires official communications to be preserved.  The object is a clean and transparent government responsive to the citizens they serve.  At one point Barack Obama promised the most transparent administration in history — but that was then and this is now.

Hillary's emails show paranoia about GOP.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's paranoia about Republicans permeates her emails, where even a common error message on an undelivered email prompted her to speculated — presumably jokingly — that the "neocons" must be reading her mail.  The jabs at the Republicans were just part of the more than 4,000 new messages released Friday [10/30/2015] in the latest dump from Mrs. Clinton's four years at the State Department, when her unique email arrangement shielded some of her communications from public view.

The Truth About Hillary.  In office, Clinton's use of an unsecured private email server ought to have been an impeachable offense for the "high crime" of being too inept at her job to keep it.  Clintonemail.com was the high-tech equivalent of sending old-fashioned radio communications unencrypted over public airwaves all across the globe.  In the old days, a King would have summarily executed his foreign minister for such treachery.  These days, the King gives her his tacit blessing to become his successor.

Looking at the latest round of Hillary's emails.  In case you haven't been following the Hillary Clinton email scandal lately, the most recent round of emails from Hillary's private server were dropped yesterday, and the news just keeps getting worse for the presidential aspirant.  As you might expect, there's plenty of important information we can mine from this.  The exchange over the former Secretary's struggles with emojis seems to have gotten the most press, but we should not let that be the shiny object that distracts us from far more important things contained within the latest release.

'Unsolicited?': Emails Show Blumenthal Drafted Speech Hillary Gave In 2009.  Far from providing just "unsolicited" advice to Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal appears to have authored a draft of at least one of the Democratic presidential frontrunner's speeches during her time as secretary of state at her behest.  Blumenthal has drawn controversy for the stream of emails he sent to Clinton during her time as secretary of state, especially those providing supposed intelligence on Libya.  After serving as an adviser during Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, Blumenthal was barred by the Obama administration from working with Clinton when she was confirmed as secretary of state.

Did Hillary Emails Put State Department In Compromised Position?  Government officials routinely make Friday afternoon document dumps knowing that the news coverage and public interest will be weak.  It's their way of hiding what should be out in the open.  Friday's [10/30/2015] deposit of emails might turn up the evidence many are looking for.  But it will take time before the entire tranche can be scrutinized.  If there's gun in there that's still smoking, it's unlikely to be uncovered right away.

Sid Blumenthal Emailed Hillary About 'Setting Up Secret Channels Between Insurgents And Governments'.  Emails released by the State Department on Friday [10/30/2015] show that Hillary Clinton's longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal reached out to her on behalf of a former United Kingdom diplomat who was interested in "setting up secret channels between insurgents and governments."  Clinton was receptive to the idea which came via Blumenthal from Jonathan Powell, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief of staff.

Classification rate continues to rise in Clinton emails.  The rate of classified information in former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails continues to spike, with another 266 in the latest release Friday [10/30/2015].  That means one out of every 16 emails Mrs. Clinton sent or received in this latest batch now have information classified as "confidential," meaning it requires at least some degree of secrecy — posing still more questions about Mrs. Clinton's decision to reject use of an official, secure email account.

'ServerGate For Dummies': 10 Hillary Email Answers.  Some might ask: Why would anyone want or need such a setup in their home?  How would it be used?  And for that matter, what exactly is a server?  IBD got the answers to this, and more, from a quartet of cybersecurity professionals.  The answers weren't always clear, as even the experts often couldn't reach a consensus on some questions.  But all agreed on one critical issue:  If Clinton thought the setup would give her extra security, then she was delusional.  No computer network is impenetrable, the experts say, and there is evidence that she didn't use the most secure options available.

Clinton paying a price now for her 2012 Benghazi lies.  In 1973 and 1974, many in the media wanted to see Richard Nixon disgraced and removed from office.  In 2015, many in the media don't want to see the only plausible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination disgraced and rendered unelectable. [...] And in both cases, despite claims of partisan witch hunts, the committees unearthed legitimately revealing material which the target sought to keep secret.  The Watergate committee discovered the Nixon tapes.  The Benghazi Committee discovered Hillary Clinton's home-brew email system.

Hillary's Attorney Concedes Criminal Behavior — Months of Official Emails Are "Missing".  Federal law states that agencies that allow federal employees to use non-government email systems must ensure that federal records are preserved in the appropriate recordkeeping system.  "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."  [36 C.F.R. 1236.24(b)]

Effort to recover missing Clinton emails fails.  An attorney for Hillary Clinton says it's not possible to recover emails missing from the former secretary of State's personal server, according to The Wall Street Journal.  Emails from Clinton's first two months on the job were missing from the batch of 30,000 emails turned over last year.  David Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, said in a letter to the State Department this month that the lost emails proved irretrievable due to technical errors in the server when it was first created.

The Editor says...
Mr. Kendall might want to patent those "errors" and sell them to anyone else who wants to build an email server that doesn't leave any residual evidence when messages are deleted.

State Can't Verify Clinton Email Claim Made At Benghazi Hearing.  One of the sticking points in Mrs. Clinton's testimony in front of the Benghazi panel was her claim that 90% to 95% of her work emails were automatically preserved in the State Department's system. [...] But State Department spokesman Mark Toner on Friday [10/23/2015] said the figure is something her campaign is using and referred questions to them for "the rationale or the background behind it."  "I'm not aware that we have given that figure," he said at a press briefing.  "I'm not in a position right now to confirm that."

State Dept. Cannot Confirm Clinton's Email Claim At Benghazi Hearing.  The State Department said that it could not confirm a figure Hillary Clinton cited during testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Thursday, suggesting that it was fashioned by her presidential campaign.  The Wall Street Journal reported that a State Department spokesman said Friday that the agency could not "confirm" Clinton's claim that between 90 and 95 percent of her work emails were already preserved in the State Department's computer system because she emailed other government officials on their work accounts.

DOJ Officials Fear Foreign Telecoms Hacked Clinton Emails, Server.  Officials close to the matter at the Department of Justice are concerned the emails Hillary Clinton sent from her personal devices while overseas on business as U.S. Secretary of State were breached by foreign telecoms in the countries she visited — a list which includes China.  "Her emails could have easily been hacked into by telecoms in these countries.  They got the emails first, and then routed them back to her home server.  They could have hacked into both," one Justice Department official close to the matter says.

DOJ believes China telecoms hacked Hillary's insecure bathroom email server.  Over at Fox Business News, Elizabeth MacDonald reveals that the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to destroy Hillary Clinton's campaign.  In this case, insiders at the Department of Justice have leaked stunning new information regarding Hillary Clinton's illegal bathroom email server.

Hillary as first prisoner-in-chief.  There's very little stigma now for celebrities serving time.  Even a Clinton is not guilty until a judge and jury says she isn't, and there may be a judge and jury lurking in Hillary's future.  Cities and states routinely send aldermen, judges, mayors and governors to prison.  Illinois, from whence Hillary sprang, needs an entire gubernatorial wing at state prison.  Prison could strengthen the character of any president as he (or she) reflects on life from the inside of a cell block.

Why did Hillary copy classified historical State Dept. files to her private server?  Why was Hillary Clinton transferring/extracting data from secure, and monitored, classified State Department data bases, into her non-secure private email server?  What else was data-mined and extracted from government accounts, that could/would be discovered with a thorough forensics investigation into the private server?  She wasn't just reading them, she was extracting them.  Why would she be doing this, if not to build a shadow file for use at a later date?

'Smoking gun' emails just released by UK Daily Mail prove Hillary a bigger liar than Tony Blair.  [Scroll down]  But much more important to me than this UK-centric story is what we learn about Hillary Clinton's emails.  Take a look at the memo itself, the top line in the left had column.  [Illustration]  This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as my friend Mike Nadler says, "she lied in her numerous statements that there were no classified documents on her server, even with her later qualification that none were marked classified at the time."  At the time she was doing this research, the memo was still classified, only to be unclassified in 2014.  Pantsuit on fire!

Hillary's Least Favorite Game Show — To Tell the Truth.  An FBI agent who spoke with The Daily Mail and has had a 20-year career in federal law enforcement and serves in a supervisory capacity in a domestic FBI field office.  He said that Hillary not telling Obama about her personal server would be enough to put her in jail for ten years based on The Federal Espionage Act under which she is being investigated.  Barack Obama was clear on 60 Minutes Sunday [10/11/2015].  When asked if he knew about the server, he said, "no".  A New York Times article suggests that Barack Obama's comments claiming her handling of emails did not violate national security has infuriated FBI agents.  Obama is steering the FBI.

Report Suggests Hillary Clinton Violated The Espionage Act.  Evidence may be mounting that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton violated a provision in the federal Espionage Act.  The penalty for such a violation under the Espionage Act of 1913:  a fine, a prison term of up to ten years, or "both."

Clinton cracks up over question about FBI probe into email server.  A question about the FBI investigation into her private email server caused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to laugh out loud during a Friday [10/16/2015] interview with CNN's Jake Tapper[.]  "Bernie Sanders said that 'the American people are tired of hearing about your d--- emails,' but there are a lot of people who are not, including FBI officials looking into whether national security was compromised because of this server," Tapper said in the interview, prompting Clinton to produce several hearty guffaws.  Clinton reiterated that she never transmitted classified information over the private server that she held during her tenure at State.

Hillary's Bizarre Reaction When Asked About FBI Investigation into Emails.  Hillary Clinton burst into uncontrollable laughter Friday [10/16/2015] when asked by CNN host Jake Tapper about the ongoing controversy surrounding her use of a private email server as secretary of state. [Video clip]

The FBI, not Bernie Sanders, has the last word on Hillary's emails.  Hillary Clinton was surely ecstatic when President Obama told a national TV audience that her private e-mail server was "not a situation in which America's national security was endangered."  Oops:  The flip side of Clinton's glee is the anger reportedly felt inside the FBI — where agents fear the president was trying to compromise their ongoing investigation.

Why You Actually Should Care About Hillary Clinton's Emails.  [Scroll down]  The emails are insightful because she really didn't know what to do.  She looked to all these outside advisors.  She wanted to know how [then-Senator] Carl Levin voted on the Iraq surge.  What the email shows is that this is a person who was very concerned at the time about how her decision — her important, important policy decision — would reflect upon her personally, and how it would impact her standing with the public.  That's important.

Obama's Comments on Clinton Emails Collide With F.B.I. Inquiry.  "I don't think it posed a national security problem," Mr. Obama said Sunday [10/11/2015] on CBS's "60 Minutes."  He said it was a mistake for Mrs. Clinton to use a private email account when she was secretary of state, but his conclusion was unmistakable:  "This is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered."  Those statements angered F.B.I. agents who have been working for months to determine whether Ms. Clinton's email setup had in fact put any of the nation's secrets at risk, according to current and former law enforcement officials.

Clinton Server's Technical Problems Boosted Use of Personal Accounts.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server appears to have routinely suffered technical problems while she was at the State Department, at times prompting correspondents to forward messages to top aides' personal email accounts, newly released emails show.

Hillary Should Be Going to JAIL Based on a Big Story Out Thursday.  There was a big story Thursday [10/15/2015].  Several whistleblowers came out to talk about the way they were aggressively prosecuted while they were working with journalists to expose government misconduct and they compared their treatment to politically connected and powerful people accused of the same or worst who received a slap on the wrist.  Based on the whistleblowers' stories, Hillary has to go to jail!

Email Scandal: Hillary Could Face Real Jail Time As FBI Probe Intensifies.  Fox News reported this week that the FBI is looking into whether there's been any violation of the Espionage Act as a result of her use of a private, unsecured email system while secretary of state.  When classified material started showing up in Clinton's emails, she argued that she'd done nothing wrong because none of the emails she sent or received was marked "classified" at the time.  But violating the Espionage Act doesn't require that the information come emblazoned with such markings.  "Gross negligence" in handling "information relating to national defense" is all that's needed to be found guilty.  And the maximum penalty is 10 years in prison.

Investigation into Hillary's email server focuses on Espionage Act and could get her 10 years in jail.  Hillary Clinton could be prosecuted in federal court for failing to tell President Barack Obama about her private email server at the time she was running it, according to a veteran FBI agent. [...] The FBI agent who spoke with DailyMail.com has had a 20-year career in federal law enforcement and serves in a supervisory capacity in a domestic FBI field office.  He said on Friday [10/16/2015] that failing to put Obama in the loop could be enough to send her to prison for ten years.

Source: FBI probe of Clinton email focused on 'gross negligence' provision.  Three months after Hillary Clinton's use of a private email address and server while secretary of state was referred to the FBI, an intelligence source familiar with the investigation tells Fox News that the team is now focused on whether there were violations of an Espionage Act subsection pertaining to "gross negligence" in the safekeeping of national defense information.  Under 18 USC 793 subsection F, the information does not have to be classified to count as a violation.

Report: FBI probe of Hillary is focused on Section 793(f) of Espionage Act.  [Scroll down]  Now, Fox News reports that "an intelligence source familiar with the [FBI] investigation of Clinton" says the Bureau is focused on whether there were violations of this very provision of the Espionage Act.  The intelligence source points out that Section 793(f) says nothing about classified information, but instead is triggered by lawful possession of national defense information when a security clearance holder "through gross negligence," such as the use of an unsecure computer network, permits the material to be removed or abstracted from its proper, secure location.  That sounds a lot like what Hillary Clinton did.

Email Scandal: 3 Questions That Demand Answers Before Hillary Can 'Put It Behind Her'.  'The American people," Sanders said after Hillary tried to explain away her email problems, "are sick and tired of hearing about your d*** emails."  Not only did the partisan audience erupt in cheers; so did reporters covering it.  "The entire press room just exploded when Bernie said that about Hillary's emails," one tweeted.  And, like other outlets, U.S. News concluded that "Hillary Clinton put the summer of emails behind her, with help from Bernie Sanders."

The Clinton vocabulary.  The definition of "is" episode has been the gold standard of semantic distortion in American politics for nearly two decades, but no more.  The language surrounding Hillary Clinton's email controversy is far more complicated than your basic verbs.  When it comes to examining the Clintons and their scandals, one is advised to have a dictionary at hand.  When it was revealed in March that Mrs. Clinton relied exclusively on a non-government email system set up in her basement while secretary of state, words like "home-brew" and "server" entered the popular lexicon.  Now we're talking about "nodes" and a "SIRIUS box" — other pieces of hardware that the FBI has requested from Platte River Networks or Datto, which provided back-end support to Mrs. Clinton's email concoction.

Is Obama working the refs on the FBI's investigation into Hillary's server?  Did you happen to catch the President on Sixty Minutes on Sunday night?  You get a free pass if you didn't because I know I was watching football.  His appearance dealt quite a bit with Vladimir Putin and Russia's involvement in the deteriorating situation in Syria... certainly an important and worthy topic.  But when the host got around to mentioning Hillary Clinton's email woes, the President took a decidedly more cavalier tone, discussing the ongoing investigation as if it were not that big of a deal.

Hillary Clinton: The Mae West of the internet.  In 2012, the State Department banned the use of remote-access software even on unclassified servers, without a waiver.  That same year, the Homeland Security Department's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned that "an attacker with a low skill level would be able to exploit this vulnerability."  And someone did.  AP reports that a hacker using a computer in Serbia "scanned Clinton's basement server in Chappaqua at least twice, in August and December 2012" (after the ban and the warning on her technology cited above)[.]  The server identified itself as providing email services for clintonemail.com.

Hillary's Email: Low-Skilled Hackers Could Get In.  Hillary Clinton wants to be president, but the White House would be a risky place to put her.  She should be nowhere near government secrets, given her unserious attitude about keeping them under cover.  When Clinton was secretary of state, she had the option of using a secure government email account.  Instead, she opted for a personal account handled by a private server — one, the AP says, that was vulnerable to "low-skilled intruders."  This much-discussed email setup, the AP reported Tuesday [10/13/2015], "appeared to allow users to connect openly over the Internet to control it remotely."

Security farce at 'data fortress' run by company that held Hillary Clinton's emails.  The facility owned by Datto Inc was part of the network that stored classified messages from the private email server the Democratic presidential candidate used as Secretary of State.  But unlike most government buildings, it is possible to walk to the front door without being challenged.  Daily Mail Online also saw employees from inside the building emptying trash into a dumpster that was kept open and unattended.

Hillary server had remote-control gateways wide open.  The only item missing from the secret e-mail server run by Hillary Clinton appears to be the welcome mat for hackers.  According to the Associated Press, the Clintons set up remote-control operations of its server without ever bothering to build in the normal security that would accompany those functions in a professional setting — if one could even find a professional setting that would allow those functions to operate at all.

White House says Obama not trying to influence FBI probe of Hillary Clinton's email server.  The White House said Tuesday that President Obama wasn't trying to influence an FBI investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton's private email server when he declared that Mrs. Clinton hadn't harmed national security.  "Of course not," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said when asked if the president was intruding into a federal investigation.  He said Mr. Obama "certainly respects the integrity of" an independent probe.

Michael Isikoff: Blumenthal E-mail to Hillary Is 'Evidence of a Commission of a Federal Crime'.  Investigative journalist Michael Isikoff reports that an e-mail Sidney Blumenthal sent Hillary Clinton while secretary of State revealed the name of a CIA operator, putting the spy's life at risk.  Appearing Monday [10/12/2015] on Morning Joe, Isikoff said the e-mail, which Clinton forwarded to one of her State Department colleagues, is "evidence of a commission of a federal crime by somebody," though not necessarily Clinton.  "This is maybe the single most problematic e-mail exchange we've seen with Hillary Clinton yet of all the e-mails that have been raised," Isikoff said.

AP Exclusive: Clinton server's software had hacking risk.  The private email server running in Hillary Rodham Clinton's home basement when she was secretary of state was connected to the Internet in ways that made it more vulnerable to hackers, according to data and documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton Scandal Just Got Even Worse.  While everyone has been focusing on House Republicans and their inability to elect a speaker, the Hillary Clinton email scandal has been growing more troubling by the day.  A letter released by the House Benghazi Committee last week revealed that Clinton acted to promote the business interests of her "old friend" Sidney Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton loyalist who sent her numerous "unsolicited" memos while running a rogue intelligence operation and earning a hefty paycheck from the Clinton Foundation.

Former CIA Lawyer: Hillary Emails Could Have Been 'Literally Lethal'.  In an interview with MSNBC's Morning Joe [10/12/2015], a former top CIA lawyer said Hillary Clinton's decision to move forward and store emails with the names of CIA operatives on them was extremely dangerous.  "As a former CIA counsel, what's most troubling about this email to you — specifically this email — and then if you're troubled by it, the Secretary's use of private email," host Willie Geist asked John Rizzo.  "The most troubling thing Willie is, if the [Trey Gowdy] version is accurate, the true name of a human CIA source being bandied about, really," Rizzo said.

Incompetent or indifferent: Clinton burns CIA Libya contact.  Clinton has come under fire this year for choosing to withhold her work emails from the State Department, and the public, for as many as five years after she began her employment as secretary of state.  Clinton's decision to conduct all work on a private server, and to keep the contents of that server to herself for more than a year after leaving office, was undertaken out of a false sense of entitlement to privacy.  It not only kept the public in the dark as to her communications in office but it also placed sensitive and classified information within reach of hackers, because the server was not properly secured.

President Obama's lukewarm defense of Hillary Clinton on the e-mail controversy.  If Hillary Clinton happened to be watching President Obama's interview with Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes" Sunday night [10/11/2015], her former boss's answers on her decision to use a private e-mail server as secretary of state had to bring a grimace to her face.  Kroft first asked Obama if he knew that Clinton was exclusively using a private e-mail server for her communication.  "No," the president replied.  Kroft then followed up by asking Obama whether Clinton's server posed a "national security problem."  Here's what the president said in response: [...]

Clinton Email Could Prompt New Intelligence Investigation.  An email forwarded by Hillary Clinton to a colleague that identified a top CIA informant in Libya could trigger an intelligence investigation and add to concerns that she mishandled classified information, according to intelligence sources.  Clinton received an email in March 2011 from her longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal that identified a covert Libyan source who was reportedly working with the CIA.  Blumenthal said his business partner, the late former CIA agent Tyler Drumheller, had given the information to him.  Clinton forwarded the email over her personal server to a colleague, according to emails published on Thursday [10/8/2015] by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), chairman of the House select committee on Benghazi.

5 Obama Scandals The Mainstream Press Is Ignoring.  Obama administration officials claimed not to know about Hillary's reckless use of a private email server as secretary of state.  Hillary says everybody knew about it.  Who's lying?  Was there any discussion about it among top White House officials?  Did anyone in Obama's circle express concern about this dangerous practice?  There's not even a hint that any of these questions are being pursued.

Clinton Emailed Identity Of Top CIA Asset Over Unsecure Server.  Last night, Yahoo News broke another big development in Hillary Clinton's growing email scandal.  According the below report, Hillary Clinton used her secret email server to "pass along the identity of one of the CIA's top Libyan intelligence sources," material the government considers "some of the most protected information in our intelligence community."  This latest shoe to drop underscores the recklessness of Hillary Clinton's decision to skirt transparency laws with her secret email server.

The Odds That Hillary's Emails Were Hacked Just Got A Lot Higher.  What sort of attacks happened before SECNAP started its cybersecurity efforts is, at this point, anyone's guess.  But given what we now know, it's a virtual certainty that Clinton's sensitive, classified, even top-secret information has fallen into the hands of foreign governments.  Over the four-plus years Clinton's server was in use — when she sent and received hundreds of emails containing classified information — it was either unencrypted, unsecured or insufficiently protected against determined, sophisticated hackers.

Clinton woes far from over.  [Scroll down]  But now we have learned that two technology companies are worried Clinton may have ensnared them in a cover-up, and the FBI has seized four more servers from the State Department in order to determine how top-secret information flowed from Clinton aides at the agency to her private server during her tenure as secretary there.  Maybe a backlash against the Benghazi investigation won't be enough to change the subject after all.

Benghazi committee, under fire, releases more Clinton emails.  Hillary Clinton used her private email account to pass along the identity of one of the CIA's top Libyan intelligence sources, raising new questions about her handling of classified information, according to excerpts from previously undisclosed emails released Thursday [10/8/2015] by Rep. Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Who cops a plea deal first, Huma or Cheryl Mills?  It now appears certain that someone in Hillary Clinton's inner circle copied Top Secret information from a SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility) to an unclassified email system, thereby committing multiple felonies.  Each such instance is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.  The FBI is so certain that this occurred that it has seized four (count 'em: four) State Department servers in order to forensically determine who perpetrated these crimes.

FBI Seizes Four State Department Servers in Clinton Email Probe.  The FBI has seized four State Department computer servers as part of its probe into how classified information was compromised on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email system, according to people familiar with the investigation.  The four servers, which were located at the State Department's headquarters building, were seized by the FBI several weeks ago.  They are being checked by technical forensic analysts charged with determining how Top Secret material was sent to Clinton's private email by State Department aides during her tenure as secretary from 2009 to 2013, said two people familiar with the probe.  The people spoke on condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing investigation.

Amazing: Cheryl Mills Emailed Classified Info to The Clinton Foundation.  The Clinton Foundation is, legally, a private organization with absolutely no status allowing it to legally receive classified US information.  It is not, as a legal matter, what as Hillary Clinton imagines it to be, which is Hillary's Shadow Government In Waiting.  But she treats it like it was just that.

Clinton e-mails were vulnerable to hackers, tech firm warned.  A technology subcontractor that has worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mail setup expressed concerns over the summer that the system was inadequately protected and vulnerable to hackers, a company official said Wednesday [10/7/2015].  But the concerns were rebuffed by the company managing the Clinton account, Platte River Networks, which said it had been instructed by the FBI not to make changes.  The FBI has been reviewing the security of the e-mail system.

Judge says Hillary Clinton's server is private.  A federal judge ordered the State Department Wednesday to request former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton not delete any government business emails she may still have, but said he doubts he can force her to do anything.  Judge Reggie B. Walton said since Mrs. Clinton used her own BlackBerry and computer devices, and kept her email server at her home, he doesn't have authority over the records she created on those.

Clinton email server reportedly target of cyberattacks from China, South Korea, Germany.  Hillary Clinton's private email server, which stored some 55,000 pages of emails from her time as secretary of state, was the subject of attempted cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013, according to a congressional document obtained by The Associated Press.

Clinton tech company: Cloud backup was 'enormous surprise'.  A Denver-based technology firm that has managed Hillary Clinton's private email network since 2013 said the discovery that Clinton's emails were backed up on an off-site "cloud" network came as "an enormous surprise."  Platte River Networks was "explicitly asked by our client to keep all data onsite," Andy Boian, a spokesman for the company, told the Washington Examiner.

Second company turns over Hillary email data to FBI.  The FBI's investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton's server has extended to a second computer data company to recover her deleted emails.  Datto Inc., of Norwalk, Conn., was hired in 2013 to provide a private "cloud" backup of Clinton's personal server and now is cooperating with the FBI to turn over any remaining data.

Benghazi Committee: New Emails Show Clinton Promoted Blumenthal Interests in Libya.  The House Select Committee on Benghazi will be making public next week new documents that demonstrate Sidney Blumenthal was seeking business in Libya as he was advising then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on U.S. policy in the country.  According to a letter from Chairman Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, at least once Clinton sought to aid Blumenthal's business interests in Libya.

Can Clinton's Email Scandal Get Worse? It Already Is.  The news cycle turned Tuesday night on reports that a second server handling Clinton's State Department emails has been found, raising questions about just how many people had access to the classified material on her emails.  How much did her negligence increase the country's vulnerability to espionage?  How widely did she expose herself to blackmail?  For months we've known that Clinton used Platte River Networks in Colorado to manage her email server — which had been in her house while she was secretary of state — after she left the State Department.  Now we know that Datto Inc. in Connecticut has been used as a second data storage site for her emails.

Hillary Email's Company Worried About a "Cover Up", Had Extra Backups Made.  Big developments today in Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  According to emails uncovered by congressional investigators, the IT firm contracted to maintain Hillary Clinton's secret email server became concerned about being roped into a "cover up" when they were asked to reduce email data after the State Department requested Clinton's correspondence.  Additionally, her deleted emails may still be recoverable as a SECOND company was involved in backing up the server.

Hillary's emails were backed up, Homeland Security committee reveals.  Some of Hillary Clinton's emails may still exist on the 'cloud' thanks to a technical hiccup.  A letter by Ron Johnson, head of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee, sent to the head of a company tasked with the storage, Datto Inc. of Norwalk, Connecticut, revealed that information from Clinton's private server was accidentally transferred to an off-site server and it may still be there.

FBI probe of Clinton e-mail expands to second data company.  The FBI's probe into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mail has expanded to include a second private technology company, which said Tuesday it plans to provide the law enforcement agency with data it preserved from Clinton's account.  The additional data, provided by Connecticut-based Datto Inc., could open a new avenue for investigators interested in recovering e-mails deleted by the former secretary of state — now the Democratic presidential front-runner — that have caught the interest of GOP lawmakers.

Second IT firm agrees to give Clinton's server data to FBI.  Hillary Clinton hired a Connecticut company to back up her emails on a "cloud" storage system, and her lawyers have agreed to turn whatever it contains over to the FBI, a personal familiar with the situation said Tuesday [10/6/2015].  The disclosure came as a Republican Senate committee chairman, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, also asked the firm to turn over to the committee copies of any Clinton emails still in its possession.

Who approved Clinton's homebrew server?  A new focus emerged Tuesday in the sprawling litigation over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server:  the State Department official who may have authorized the private setup Clinton used for most of her four years as secretary of state.  A conservative watchdog group pressed a federal judge to order Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy to appear in court to explain who greenlighted Clinton's private server and who kept it running.

Hillary server employee: The whole thing is 'covering up some shady [stuff]'.  An employee of the computer company that maintained Hillary Rodham Clinton's email server questioned if he was part of a coverup, according to documents released Tuesday [10/6/2015]. [...] The concerns by the Colorado-based Platte River Networks employee were aired after the Clinton camp ordered a reduction in the data stored during each server backup.

Hillary Email Scandal: Has Another Private Account Been Found?  In March, Hillary Clinton said she had turned over "all my emails that could possibly be work-related."  Two months ago, she signed a statement "under penalty of perjury" swearing that she had provided all emails that were, or potentially were, federal records.  Did she perjure herself?  It appears she did.  If she had turned them all in, why are officials asking for more?  Last week, Patrick F. Kennedy, the State Department's under secretary of state for management, told Clinton's lawyer in a letter that she had better get busy providing more emails.

Can Clinton delete her past?  Few doubted until this summer that Clinton, with vast institutional and popular support and little competition, would cruise to her coronation as the Democratic nominee for the presidency.  But many of her statements from those first defensive days have been proven false by a steady stream revelations from three congressional committees and four federal agencies investigating her use of a private email server.  Just as damaging have been dozens of lawsuits pursued under the Freedom of Information Act, which have shown gaps in the batches of emails Clinton gave the State Department last year.

No, not Obama — the other one.
Why Are Democrats Still Supporting a Compulsive Liar?  From the start, Hillary claimed that she set up the clintonemail.com server so she could use just one device for everything.  If that's the case, then why did she continue to carry several devices?  When asked to turn over all of her emails, she delayed and then said that most of them had been lost or deleted.  Yet it didn't take investigators long to find them.  When Hillary finally did hand over her emails, she claimed that it was everything.  Judicial Watch found gaps in the 'everything,' some of which covered several months.  When asked if she had ever used her personal email server to send or receive classified emails, she emphatically said no over and over again.  Yet the more investigators looked into her personal server and email accounts, they found classified information.

FBI Director Acknowledges Agency Looking into Clinton Emails.  FBI director James Comey told reporters on Thursday [10/1/2015] that he is "personally following closely" an investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server.  In his first public comments on the email scandal which has roiled the campaign of Clinton, a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Comey declined to say how long the investigation would take or whether the FBI would comment when the investigation concludes.  The FBI had previously declined to give the State Department any kind of progress report on its efforts to recover documents from Clinton's private email server — including the public information that the agency was investigating the matter.

FBI director confirming inquiry into Clinton email setup.  FBI Director James Comey confirmed Thursday the FBI is looking into the security of the setup of Hillary Rodham Clinton's email and that the agency has the appropriate "resources and personnel assigned to the matter."

Emails: Russia-Linked Hackers Tried to Access Clinton Server.  The phishing attempts highlight the risk of Clinton's unsecure email being pried open by foreign intelligence agencies, even if others also received the virus concealed as a speeding ticket from Chatham, New York.

Hey, Hillary — it's Cyber Security Awareness Month!  When he declared October National Cyber Security Awareness month, did President Obama know Hillary Clinton's birthday is on the 26th?  Hey:  The month even began with news that at least 400 emails to or from her address included classified information.  In declaring the awareness month, Obama noted "our need to remain aware, alert, and attentive on this new frontier" and urged Americans to work "together to prevent and disrupt threats to our digital infrastructure."  At State, Clinton did exactly the opposite.

A Clinton Email Scandal Checklist.  Hillary Clinton hopes you are busy. Hillary Clinton hopes you are confused.  Hillary Clinton hopes the endless stories about her private email server — and her endless, fabulist explanations — will make your head hurt, make your eyes cross, make you give up trying to figure it out.  All you really need to know at this point is this:  Pretty much every claim Mrs. Clinton made at her initial March news conference, and since then, is false.  In the spirit of keeping it simple, here's the Complete Busy Person's Guide to the Clinton Email Scandal.  Stick it on the fridge.

New batch of Hillary Clinton emails includes 215 classified messages — more than 1 in every 18.  The State Department released a new batch of emails originally held on former secretary Hillary Clinton's now-infamous private server on Wednesday [9/30/2015], putting 215 more retroactively classified messages into the public domain.  More than 1 in every 18 of the more than 3,800 emails published in the latest court-ordered installment required intervention — and sanitizing — by intelligence officials, bringing the total of headaches for the Democratic presidential front-runner to more than 400.  Three of the messages were marked 'SECRET' — one of the higher categories of classification that the government uses.

Hillary Aides Knew of Private Email Risks.  The threat of being hacked was never far from the minds of Clinton's top aides — they even talked about the wisdom of using private email accounts in emails released Wednesday [9/30/2015].

Attack Scenario: How Hillary Clinton's Lust for Money and Power Led to America's "Digital Pearl Harbor".  It's hard to overstate the impact on national security of what is commonly known as "The OPM Hack". [...] What was the 'OPM Hack'?  Every person who applies for a security clearance fills out an electronic application called an EQIP or EPSQ, which are questionnaires of applicants.  Those applying for a Top Secret clearance must answer an extremely detailed questionnaire delving into every aspect of their personal life: marital affairs, drug use, criminal activity, and any other bit of information that foreign intelligence services might use to blackmail or compromise a cleared individual.  All of those files were stolen by Red China.

Despite FBI inquiry, Clinton retains security clearance.  Hillary Clinton retains a security clearance allowing her access to classified information despite an FBI inquiry into her handling of sensitive government information on the private email account she used during her tenure as secretary of state. [...] While Clinton has kept her clearance, it's common practice to suspend them while an investigation or internal inquiry is ongoing, according to some national security experts on Capitol Hill and in private practice.  Others say a clearance could be suspended at any time after allegations are made if officials are concerned about the government's secrets.

Clinton emails increasingly classified; 1 in 20 messages contained secrets.  More than 5 percent of the latest batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, released Wednesday, contain classified information — or twice the rate of the previous releases, raising tricky questions about whether the department is finding more secrets or being more thorough in screening the messages.  All told, there are at least 400 messages that contain information the government now deems classified, out of nearly 12,000 emails released so far.

Hillary Clinton Says Two Different Things About Her Emails, Both of Which Can't Be True.  More than 60 percent of voters don't think Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy.  Even Donald Trump has a better reputation on that front, which is just embarrassing.  No wonder so many Democrats are biding for Biden.  Hillary and her campaign seem to think this is simply the result of biased media coverage, unfair partisan attacks and right-wing "conspiracy theories."  They insist it's "time to move on."  They should at least consider the possibility that voters have good reason not to trust Hillary.  Because is she really has nothing to hide with respect to her private email server, why do explanations keep changing so often?

Three Pinocchios:
Hillary Clinton's incomplete timeline on her personal e-mail account.  [Scroll down]  Clinton appears to be sticking to her timeline because it obscures the fact that she exclusively used a private e-mail for company business.  If she had used a State Department e-mail, just as many other cabinet officials in the Obama administration used ".gov" addresses, it's likely the State Department would not have had trouble responding to congressional requests.  That's why there are "gaps in the record keeping."

The Fact Checker Confirms It — She Is Lying.  Clinton is sticking to her story that the emails she has turned over to the State Department were part of a review that asked former secretaries to do the same.  Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gave her story three Pinocchios Sunday, meaning that it has a "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions."  The Clintons are likely to brush that off as more of the vast right-wing conspiracy that's been dogging them since the 1990s, even though the Post is not exactly a collection of right-wing activists.

Yes, Hillary Clinton broke the law.  Clinton originally denied that any of her emails contained classified information, but soon abandoned that claim.  So far, 150 emails containing classified information have been identified on her server, including two that included information determined to be Top Secret.  She then fell back on the claim that none of the emails in question was "marked classified" at the time she was dealing with them.  The marking is not what makes the material classified; it's the nature of the information itself.  As secretary of state, Clinton knew this, and in fact she would have been re-briefed annually on this point as a condition of maintaining her clearance to access classified information.  Then there's location.  Clinton knowingly set up her email system to route 100 percent of her emails to and through her unsecured server (including keeping copies stored on the server).

Hillary Clinton Explains Discrepancy in When She Began Using Private Email Server.  Hillary Clinton said today that newly released emails dated before she had said her private server was operational were from a "transition period."  There "was about a month" when all of her emails weren't on the server that was later turned over to the State Department because her account needed to be added, she said in an interview [9/27/2015] on NBC "Meet the Press."  "There was about a month where I didn't have everything already on the server, and we went back, tried to recover whatever we could recover," she said.  "I think it's also fair to say that there are some things about this that I just can't control.  I can't control the technical aspects of it.["}

Another day; another lie by Hillary Clinton.  [Scroll down]  Right now Clinton has committed federal offenses far exceeding anything undertaking by Sandy Berger or Scooter Libby or David Petraeus.  If she survives this it will only be due to the interference of the Obama administration.

Hillary Now Blames Her Lawyers.  With polls showing that a majority of Americans believe that she is lying, Hillary Clinton has been more aggressive in addressing questions about her private e-mail server.  But with each new appearance, more questions are raised than answered.

Why the Clinton Email Scandal Is So Sticky.  In an interview broadcast by CNN on Sunday [9/27/2015], [Bill] Clinton likened the email scandal dogging his wifes presidential campaign to the Whitewater land deal and others scandals that shadowed his political career.  It always happens.  Yes, sir.  Thats sort of the point.  Many voters are tired of Clinton controversies and their side effects:  deflection, deception, derision, and division.  He also blamed the email flap on Republicans who want to undercut Hillary Clintons campaign and on political reporters who aren[']t interested in substance.

Clinton Aide Shared Classified Information With Foundation, Email Shows.  A member of Hillary Clinton's staff at the Department of State emailed classified information about the government in Congo to a staffer at the Clinton Foundation in 2012, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.  Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department, sent the email to the Clinton Foundation's foreign policy director, Amitabh Desai, on July 12, 2012.  The message, which was originally obtained by the group Citizens United through a public records request, is partially redacted because it includes "foreign government information" that has been classified as "Confidential" by the State Department.

Latest Email Drop Reveals Hillary Committed Perjury.  The consistently excellent John Hayward relays word that new emails between SECSTATE Hillary Clinton and CENTCOM's David Petraeus have been discovered. This revelation completely contradicts her statement under oath that she had revealed all of her official correspondence and deleted only her yoga workouts and Chelsea's  plastic surgery  wedding plans.

Could Hillary please start getting her lies straight?  At some point, it becomes tiresome to ask the same question over and over again.  But Clinton leaves us no choice.  How many times must she be caught lying before the current presidential campaign has come to an end?  Clinton had maintained, and in fact swore, that she had turned over all work-related emails from the private server she chose to use, in contravention of government secrecy and transparency laws.  As it turns out, even this claim was untrue.

With the latest FOIA revelations, I am now officially calling on Hillary Clinton to suspend her campaign.  Writing at The Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel observes that if Hillary Clinton fails to achieve the presidency, it will not be because of her opponents.  It will be due to a 1966 law called the Freedom of Information Act, which has already revealed her illegal and reckless mishandling of State Department emails in which classified documents were co-mingled with side deals concerning her family's so-called charity.  And the worst disclosures are, in all likelihood, yet to come.  FOIA requires a complete inventory of all documents withheld by the targeted agency along with descriptions of each; this file is called a Vaughn Index and on Monday [9/21/2015] the State Department reluctantly handed over its version to a federal court.  The email descriptions are stunning: [...]

Hillary Clinton vs. FOIA.  The Clintons are street fighters, and over their scandal-plagued years they have mastered outwitting the press, Congress, the Justice Department, even special prosecutors.  But the reason Mrs. Clinton isn't winning her latest scandal is because she faces a new opponent — one she can't beat:  the Freedom of Information Act.

New Emails Show Clinton Used Private Server Earlier Than She Said.  Newly disclosed emails from Hillary Clinton to then CENTCOM chief David Petraeus show that the former secretary of state was using a private server earlier than she had previously said.

String of Emails Raises Question About When Hillary Clinton Began Using Personal Account.  Mrs. Clinton has said that she retained no emails from her first two months in office because she used an account that she no longer has access to.  She has said that on March 19, 2009, she began using the personal account [...] that she relied on for the rest of her time in office.  But on Friday [9/25/2015], State Department officials said they had been given copies of an email chain between Mrs. Clinton and David H. Petraeus, the commander of United States Central Command at the time, that shows that Mrs. Clinton was using the [private email] account by Jan. 28, 2009.

Hillary failed to turn over emails with Petraeus, officials say.  The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus when he headed the military's U.S. Central Command, responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They began before Clinton entered office and continued into her first days at the State Department.  They largely pertained to personnel matters and don't appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said, but their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.

State Dept. receives Clinton email chain apparently not included in pages turned over.  The State Department has received an email chain between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus that apparently was not included in the collection she said was a full record of her work-related correspondence.  In addition, the State Department said it provided more than 900 Libya-related emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi Friday.  The Department has had those emails since December.  The Clinton-Petraeus messages, according to the Department, were exchanged in January and February of 2009 and included a discussion about personnel.

State discovers hundreds more Clinton e-mails for release to Benghazi panel.  The State Department will provide Congress with 925 additional e-mails from former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to assist the investigation of the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, a senior agency official said Friday [9/25/2015].  The new submission comes after the State Department had previously said it turned over all records that the House Select Committee on Benghazi had requested and as the agency reviews Clinton's e-mails for public release.

Hillary Clinton: Come Clean or Get Out.  If the Democratic Party cares to salvage a sliver of moral authority, its leaders and early state voters need to send Hillary Rodham Clinton an urgent message:  Come clean or get out.  Stop lying and deflecting about how and why you stashed State Department email on a secret server — or stop running.

Nothing 'confusing,' Hill; just downright criminal.  Hillary Clinton deigned to go on moonbat TV Friday before a long holiday weekend to offer up an insincere non-apology apology for her latest scandal, involving multiple federal criminal and congressional probes of her email server.  "At the end of the day," she told Mrs. Alan Greenspan, the wife of one of her husband's hacks, "I am sorry that this has been confusing to people...."  Confusing?  No one's confused, Hillary.  It's very simple.  You set up your own email system to ensure that the sordid records of the Clinton Crime Family's billion-dollar pay-to-play shakedowns would never survive to be used as exhibits against you and Bill in a criminal trial.  Hillary wanted her own system for the same reason that old-time bookies used flash paper for betting slips — it was easier to destroy the evidence that way.  There's no confusion whatsoever.

Hillary Is Now Blaming Bush For Her Email Scandal.  Ever since it came to light that Hillary Clinton used a home-brew server and a private email account for all her State Department emails, she has tried various excuses to explain it away.  It was, she said in March, done only for convenience's sake, because she didn't want to carry "multiple devices."  She also claimed:
  •   Other government officials have done the same thing.
  •   She didn't handle classified material on her account.
  •   She turned over all her work-related emails.
  •   It was all allowed and perfectly legal.
  •   This is just a partisan witch hunt.
  •   She's sorry, sort of. As subsequent revelations undermined each of those excuses, Clinton simply dropped or modified them.  After classified emails showed up, for example, Clinton starting saying that she never "knowingly" handled such sensitive information on her unsecured server.  After the FBI started investigating, she pretty much dropped the whole "witch hunt" claim.  But her latest excuse for why she chose this highly unorthodox and risky way to handle her written communications is by far her most desperate — and ridiculous.

Hillary Clinton's e-mail cauldron on the boil.  Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, who's overseeing one of the Freedom of Information suits on the Clinton emails, ordered the State Department to ask the FBI what relevant info might be gleaned from the private server she used to store her correspondence, which the bureau recently took into possession.  Sorry:  "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," FBI General Counsel James Baker wrote back.  That peeved Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, whose panel oversees the FBI.  "The FBI is behaving like it's above the law.  Simply refusing to cooperate with a court-ordered request is not an appropriate course of action," he said.

Emails Between Hillary Clinton and Petraeus Discovered, Contradicting Her Sworn Statement.  Hillary Clinton didn't just "claim" she turned over all of her work-related emails.  She signed a sworn statement to that effect in August, under penalty of perjury, and submitted it to a federal court.  It's the same statement her top aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills refused to sign.  Many observers thought the proverbial Other Shoe would drop on Clinton when the FBI started recovering deleted emails from the server she thought was wiped clean, but it doesn't sound like we've even gotten to that closet full of Other Shoes yet.

State Department Hands Over 'New' Hillary Clinton E-Mails To Benghazi Panel.  The State Department has said over and over again that it turned over all of Hillary Clinton's Benghazi-related emails to the committee investigating the 2012 attack.  Turns out, that wasn't quite the case.  Foggy Bottom mistakenly failed to produce a "small number" of those emails, a senior State Department official told The Daily Beast.

Clinton Email Presents Spying Opportunity For Foreign Country.  Hillary Clinton continues to say that she did nothing wrong in using a personal email account from a private server to conduct State Department business.  That might be true if she believes that it's OK to leave the front door open for spies.  During a hearing Thursday, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that a foreign official who used a private email server to conduct government business would give the U.S. a grand opening for espionage.  "From a foreign intelligence perspective, that represents opportunity," he said.  But from a Clinton perspective, it's another point to ignore.

Hillary Clinton Server Not Wiped — Report: FBI Has Recovered Deleted Emails.  The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation's success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate's correspondence eventually could become public.  The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton's use of a private e-mail system for official business.

Clinton Email Scandal: 5 New Stories Tell Us It's Getting Serious.  Hillary Clinton keeps plowing ahead toward the party and presidential coronations to which she feels entitled.  But the going gets tougher with every email story that breaks.  On Wednesday [9/23/2015], there were at least five.  The trouble started Tuesday night when the Washington Post reported that Clinton's story about the manner in which she turned over her emails was being contradicted by the State Department.  She has claimed that she handed them over — all of them — as part of a routine request that included emails from previous secretaries of state.  The State Department said it didn't happen that way.

Clinton started editing emails 8 months earlier than thought.  Hillary Clinton and her aides began collecting Clinton's private emails in February of last year, eight months before the State Department formally requested copies of her work-related records.  The process of separating Clinton's official communications from her personal ones therefore lasted nearly ten months, as her aides did not provide 55,000 printed pages of emails to the State Department until Dec. 2014.  On Feb. 15, 2014, Clinton paid Platte River Networks, the technology company hired in June 2013 to move her emails onto a new server, to set up a "separate archive email box" for her records.

Exclusive: Hillary Aides Talked Benghazi with Clinton Foundation Staff, Witheld Emails.  Hillary Clinton's top State Department aides turned to Clinton Foundation employees for political help in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi terrorist attack, and Clinton withheld those emails from the House Benghazi Committee investigating her conduct.  Clinton currently faces federal investigation for allegedly allowing people without a security clearance to access classified information, in violation of the Espionage Act. Newly-discovered emails, considered classified by the State Department, were going to Clinton Foundation staffers who did not have a security clearance to view classified information.

State Department's account of e-mail request differs from Clinton's.  "When we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I'm the one who said, 'Okay, great, I will go through them again,'" Clinton said Sunday [9/20/2015] on CBS's "Face the Nation."  "And we provided all of them."  But State Department officials provided new information Tuesday [9/22/2015] that undercuts Clinton's characterization.  They said the request was not simply about general record-keeping but was prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system.  They also said they first contacted her in the summer of 2014, at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails.

Report: FBI Finds Hillary Clinton's Deleted Emails on Her Server.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has successfully recovered personal and work emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server, according to a new report.  Sources told Bloomberg News that some of Clinton's emails have been extracted from the server, thus disproving the claim that Clinton managed to wipe her server clean after she deleted all of her emails earlier this year.

FBI Has Supposedly Recovered Lost Clinton Emails.  The FBI has managed to recover deleted emails from Hillary Clinton's supposedly wiped email server, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday night [9/22/2015].  The discovery, if true, raises the possibility that Hillary's private correspondence, which number about 30,000 emails and were supposedly deleted, will become public.  Just how many emails the FBI has managed to recover from the server isn't clear, Bloomberg says.  In any case, they're unlikely to be seen until the FBI's investigation is concluded, which likely won't be for several months.

On Hillary's Emails It May Be Time To Investigate The FBI.  The conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of emails between the former secretary of state and her top aides.  The FBI's counsel responded to State's attempts to follow through on D.C. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan's order with a statement asserting that "we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation."  But it is known from Clinton's lawyers that investigators were given thumb drives with the emails and a private Clinton server.  One thing Judicial Watch wants to get to the bottom of is how top Hillary aide Huma Abedin juggled jobs at State, the Clinton Foundation and the Teneo Strategies consulting firm simultaneously.

FBI Said to Recover Personal E-Mails From Hillary Clinton Server.  The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation's success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate's correspondence eventually could become public.  The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton's use of a private e-mail system for official business.

FBI refuses to cooperate in Hillary Clinton email server probe.  The FBI refused to cooperate Monday with a court-ordered inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's email server, telling the State Department that they won't even confirm they are investigating the matter themselves, much less willing to tell the rest of the government what's going on.  Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had ordered the State Department to talk with the FBI and see what sort of information could be recovered from Mrs. Clinton's email server, which her lawyer has said she turned over to the Justice Department over the summer.

America's descent into lawlessness.  Almost everything former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has stated about her improper use of a private email account and server has been proven false.  A State Department staffer who worked on Mrs. Clinton's private server plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a congressional committee about his role in privatizing her email.  But like [Lois] Lerner, Mrs. Clinton has escaped an indictment or jailing.

Judge tells State Dept. to find more staffers to process Clinton emails.  A federal judge urged the State Department to get more people on the case reviewing and releasing the emails of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and her top aides, saying Tuesday that all sides should be eager to get the matter behind them.  Judge Emmet G. Sullivan also rejected the State Department's timeline for searching the aides' emails and insisted the government have them all put in an electronic system by the end of this week, and do an initial search to see which ones are related to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks next week.

Group unloads over delays releasing Clinton aides' email.  A conservative group is blasting the State Department for delays in the release of email messages sent or received by top aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  In a court filing Friday [9/18/2015], Citizens United accused the agency of defying a court order to produce emails belonging to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and former Deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin earlier this week.  At the time U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan entered the order in May, he warned Justice Department lawyers representing state that he would not grant any extension of the Sept. 13 deadline he set to produce emails responsive to the group's request about contacts with the Clinton Foundation and the consulting firm Teneo.

Hillary Clinton's lawyer refused to destroy emails.  In our chronicles of the many and mutating faces of Hillary Clinton's email story, we noted that her 'wartime consigliere', David Kendall, seemed to have placed himself in legal jeopardy.  Kendall clearly held onto Top Secret material retrieved from Hillary Clinton's server.  He stored it improperly.  And he and at least two of his associates viewed it even though they had no 'need to know.'  The emerging story seems much more murky and Kendall may have actually played the role of the honest man.

Hillary Clinton's aides relinquish more than 100,000 pages of emails.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's top aides have belatedly turned over more than 100,000 pages of emails they had kept on personal email accounts, or accounts tied to Mrs. Clinton's server, the government told a federal judge late Friday [9/18/2015].  Huma Abedin turned over an estimated 23,000 pages of emails, Philippe Reines gave back 70,000 pages of messages and Cheryl Mills returned somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,870 pages, the Obama administration told Judge Rudolph Contreras in a court filing.

Hillary Laughs Off Suggestion That She Be Prosecuted Over Email Handling.  Nobody thinks Hillary Clinton's email controversy is funny, which is why her past attempts to make jokes about the issue have fallen flat.  But the Democrat presidential hopeful doesn't seem to have learned from her past stumbles.  She laughed derisively when asked on CNN to respond to recent comments made by Governor Chris Christie regarding her problematic email arrangement.

Sen. Cornyn wants special counsel to investigate Clinton email.  The Senate's No. 2 Republican wants Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Clinton email controversy, as GOP lawmakers become increasingly skeptical that Obama administration appointees running the Justice Department will pursue the matter fairly.  Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general and Texas supreme court justice, asked Lynch in a Tuesday morning [9/15/2015] letter to appoint a special counsel.  It could be a conflict of interest, Cornyn's reasoning goes, for Clinton's former administration colleagues to escalate any investigation into her private email server.

Clinton's Nixonian Email Gap Grows: What's She Hiding?  Last month, Hillary Clinton's email gap was a mere two-month void.  Now there are several more months missing.  She protests her innocence and claims to be fully cooperating with the release of her emails, but both of those are looking like lies of convenience.

Hillary Knew Emails Hacked, Yet Continued Using Unsecured Server.  A new poll finds that despite her email breaches, voters still think Hillary Clinton is the best candidate to protect the country from cyberattacks.  They clearly miss the gravity of the scandal.  Of course, it's not their fault.  The Washington media have reported the story in fits and starts, while failing to provide context and relevance.

State Dept. concedes 'gaps' in Clinton emails; contradiction could result in perjury charge.  The emails former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton turned back over to the government last year contained "gaps," according to internal department messages evaluating her production.  Mrs. Clinton took office on Jan. 21, 2009, but the first message she turned back over to the department was dated March 18, and the earliest-dated message she herself sent was on April 13, or nearly three months into her time in office, according to a message obtained through an open records request by Judicial Watch, which released it Monday [9/14/2015].

Now-classified Clinton emails sitting on Google servers.  Classified emails passed through commercial email services like Google and AOL on their path to or from a private server maintained by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, but so far, the government appears to have done little to retrieve or secure the messages.  A Politico review of Clinton emails made public by the State Department shows that at least 55 messages now deemed to include classified information appear to have been sent to or from private accounts other than Clinton's.  That number is certain to grow substantially as State processes all Clinton emails and sorts through emails turned over to the department by several of her top aides.

Clinton's Emails from Private Server 'Might Not Be Erased After All'.  Hillary Clinton's 31,000 emails from her infamous personal server "might not be erased after all," a CNN anchor said Sunday [9/13/2015] after a Washington Post report that the company that managed it says it has no knowledge if it was truly wiped clean.  "The story is never going to go away for the Clinton campaign if there are more inconsistencies, and this would be another inconsistency if this server company says the server was not wiped at all, that means those emails would be able to be reviewed," CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny said.  "So some of them certainly are personal in nature, but we don't know if all of them are."

Justice Department on emails: No reason not to believe Hillary.  Hillary Clinton's defense in the email scandal received a boost this week when the Justice Department — the same Justice Department that is investigating the email affair — told a court it has no reason to suspect Clinton either deleted or failed to produce any emails under request by congressional or public-interest investigators.  "The evidence, if anything, demonstrates that the former secretary's production was over-inclusive, not under-inclusive," top Justice Department lawyers Benjamin Mizer and Elizabeth Shapiro wrote in papers filed in federal court last Wednesday [9/9/2015].  Taken as a whole, Mizer and Shapiro's brief was so pro-Clinton, so without even a hint of suspicion that she has been anything less than totally forthcoming, that it might as well have come from the Clinton campaign media team.

Hillary Clinton Emails Have A Five-Month Gap.  Five months worth of messages are missing from the emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned to the government, according to documents newly obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.  "A five month email gap," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said at the non-profit group's inaugural Leadership Summit Monday [9/14/2015].  "I want an explanation about that."  Some of the gaps were as long as a month or more, Fitton said.  Clinton submitted a statement to a federal court Aug. 10 under the penalty of perjury that she submitted all of the required emails.

New State Department Documents Reveal Hillary Clinton Email Gap.  Judicial Watch today [9/14/2015] released newly obtained Department of State documents showing a nearly five-month total gap in the emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided to return to the State Department late last year.  The documents also show that one key State Department official did not want a written record of issues about the Clinton emails.  The documents also raise new questions about the accuracy of representations made to Judicial Watch, the courts, Congress, and the public by the Obama administration and Clinton.

Huma Abedin, top Clinton aide, delivers 6,714 emails, 2,533 pages of documents.  Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's close personal aide, has turned over 6,714 emails, and 2,533 pages of documents in printed and electronic form, the Obama administration said in a court filing late Friday [9/11/2015].  Most of those materials were finally turned over Sept. 1, and though the majority came in electronic form already, they will still need to be converted to a searchable format, the State Department said.  The department said it will take 60 days to convert the messages, process them and begin releasing responsive documents.

Tech company: No indication that Clinton's e-mail server was 'wiped'.  [Hillary] Clinton and her advisers have said for months that she deleted her personal correspondence from her time as secretary of state, creating the impression that 31,000 e-mails were gone forever.  There is a distinction between e-mails' being deleted and a server being wiped.  If e-mails are deleted or moved from a server, they appear to no longer exist on the device.  But experts say, depending on the condition of the server, underlying data can remain on the device, and the e-mails can often be restored.

Server company: Deleted Clinton emails may be recoverable.  Platte River Networks, the company that managed Hillary Clinton's private email server, says it has no evidence of the server being wiped, meaning tens of thousands of deleted emails could be recovered, according to the Washington Post.  "Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped," company spokesman Andy Boian said.  "All the information we have is that the server wasn't wiped."

Exclusive: State Department 'Email Czar' Received Classified Hillary Clinton Emails.  The "email czar" hired by the State Department to handle the agency's response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal has a second hidden conflict of interest: she received some of the same classified emails that were also sent to Hillary Clinton via her private email system, Breitbart News has learned.  Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Janice L. Jacobs this week to serve as a non-partisan, non-political "transparency coordinator."  The recently retired bureaucrat will lead the State Department's political response to the various Clinton email investigations in Congress and the various civil lawsuits filed by transparency groups.

Justice Department lawyers argue Hillary Clinton had the right to delete any emails she chose.  Using laugh-out-loud justification, Justice Department lawyers have asserted to a federal judge that Hillary Clinton should be trusted to decide what records she chooses to delete, with no outside review.  Ruby Kramer of Buzzfeed is correct:  a brief filed by Justice Department attorneys on Wednesday [9/9/2015], was "little-noticed."  Yet it contains a shocking position for federal lawyers to assert to a court.

Will he or won't he? The Bryan Pagliano Story.  Sec. of State Hillary Clinton had an IT specialist, for whom she arranged special and highly unusual payment arrangements, and who is now on the hot seat legally since Clintons aren't ever on the hot seat themselves.  Bryan Pagliano has pled the 5th for the moment, but Republican senators would like to grant him immunity in exchange for spilling the beans on his old boss.  As Ed Morrissey noted this morning, Pagliano and his lawyers, represented by the Clinton-close firm of Akin Gump, could do a proffer session with senators, which would gauge what Pagliano knows without forcing him to incriminate himself.  Pagliano has now refused that.

Hillary Clinton Emailed Aide on Hotmail Account.  As pressure continues to mount on Hillary Clinton to answer more questions about her personal email, the former secretary of state, while acknowledging some mistakes, is doubling down on some of the claims she has made since the story broke in March.  One of these claims is that it was the secretary's "practice to email government officials on their official .gov accounts so that her messages were preserved within email archives."  This claim was made as recently as Tuesday on a new page on her website which was linked by an email sent to supporters Tuesday evening [9/8/2015].  However, a review of Mrs. Clinton's emails demonstrates that this was certainly not always the case.

Hillary Clinton Email — Deleted or Not?  First, and this is important, emails (by definition) cannot be deleted. Either you receive an email or you send one.  Which means complete copies are sitting in the sender's sent folder and in your inbox, or complete copies are sitting in your sent folder and in the recipient's inbox.  In other words, there is a copy of every email you've ever sent or received somewhere that is not in your control, so deleting your copies will (again by definition) only solve half of your problem.  No matter which type of email system you use (POP3 or IMAP), there is also a copy sitting on the server.  So, in practice, emails don't really come in pairs; they always live in at least three places.

What conflict? State Dept. defends Clinton donor as Clinton email watchdog.  Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped create the mess that is the Iran deal, is charged with addressing the email mess left by his predecessor, Hillary Clinton.  This week Kerry appointed Janice Jacobs, a retired career foreign service officer, as "transparency coordinator" to oversee that clean-up, among other things, including regular, court-ordered releases of the select emails that Clinton chose to turn in from her unapproved private email server.  This is a sensitive process.  Each email must be read and many redacted because they contain classified information that Clinton says is not there.  Additionally, Clinton deleted thousands of other emails she states were not work-related.  The FBI is overseeing that mess.  Clinton is seeking to become chief executive of the federal government.

Conservative group calls for removal of 'transparency czar'.  A conservative group has called on Ambassador Janice Jacobs, the State Department's newly-appointed "transparency czar," to resign amid revelations that she donated the maximum amount permitted by law to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.  America Rising, a Republican political action committee, highlighted the "conflict of interest" created by allowing a Clinton supporter to decide which of Clinton's emails will be disclosed to the public and Congress — a reported part of Jacobs' new position.

Judge denies Obama admin. request to halt Clinton email cases.  The Obama administration told a federal court Wednesday that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was within her legal rights to use her own email account, to take the messages with her when she left office and to be the one deciding which of those messages are government records that should be returned.  In the most complete legal defense of Mrs. Clinton, Justice Department lawyers insisted they not only have no obligation, but no power, to go back and demand the former top diplomat turn over any documents she hasn't already given — and neither, they said, can the court order that.

Hillary's IT Staffer Pleads The Fifth For Fear Of 'Anti-Clinton Frenzy'.  Hillary Clinton's personal IT worker invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a closed-door interview with the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Thursday because he's concerned about getting ensnared in an "anti-Clinton frenzy."  Bryan Pagliano's decision to plead the fifth came as no surprise.  His attorney informed the Benghazi Committee last week that his client would not testify about his work on Clinton's private email server.

State Dept. withholds dozens of Clinton-related records.  State Department officials withheld dozens of documents related to the unusual employment status of Huma Abedin, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who held two separate jobs in addition to her government position during Clinton's tenure.  Despite a court order requiring the agency to hand over 68 pages of records to the Associated Press by Tuesday [9/8/2015], the State Department delivered just seven pages to the news outlet in its response to its pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.  The batch contained just five emails, two of which had been partially redacted, the Associated Press said.

Justice Department rules Hillary Clinton followed law in deleting emails.  The Obama administration told a federal court Wednesday that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was within her legal rights to use of her own email account, to take messages with her when she left office and to be the one deciding which of those messages are government records that should be returned.  In the most complete legal defense of Mrs. Clinton, Justice Department lawyers insisted they not only have no obligation, but no power, to go back and demand the former top diplomat turn over any documents she hasn't already given — and neither, they said, can the court order that.

Clinton Only Apologized for Emails After Bad Focus Group Reactions.  Hillary Clinton's sudden reversal on whether or not she would apologize for using a private email server while Secretary of State seemed inexplicable; on Friday [9/4/2015] she refused to apologize in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, but by Tuesday was apologizing to ABC's David Muir.  But The New York Times reported Wednesday [9/9/2015] on the impetus for the change; Clinton watched a video of a focus group that reacted negatively to her email rhetoric.

Hillary Clinton Staffer Pushed to Accept Immunity to Testify on Private Server.  Two Senate committee chairmen authored a letter to a former Hillary Clinton aide pushing him to accept limited immunity in order to testify before Congress on the set-up of the former secretary of state's private server. [...] In response to a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, [Brian] Pagliano's attorney Mark MacDougall told the committee early last week that Pagliano plans to assert his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying on Clinton's email system.  Pagliano, who also worked on Clinton's failed 2008 presidential campaign, set up Clinton's personal server in 2009.  MacDougall likewise told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Pagliano would plead the Fifth.

Servergate Really Could Be Hillary's Downfall.  When you think about Watergate, you think about President Richard Nixon's downfall, underscored by a series of events that few could fathom to be accurate at the time.  The same holds true for the situation, currently, unfolding around Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  I've termed this debacle "Server-gate" due to the similarity between these two black marks in U.S. history.  No doubt, the players, timing, and technology may have changed but the reckless use of power, the secrecy, and the fact that both infractions took place immediately preceding presidential elections (by the candidates or potential candidates, themselves) remain, very much, the same.

Senators propose immunity for Hillary Clinton staffer to testify on email server.  Two top Senate investigators floated the idea of immunity Tuesday to Bryan Pagliano, the staffer who set up the email server in former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's home, in exchange for testimony about her activities.  Mr. Pagliano last week said he would assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to answer questions about the matter, but Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, the chairmen of two key committees investigating the situation, said they have authority to extend immunity if Mr. Pagliano is willing to talk.

Hillary will do anything to change the conversation — except be honest.  Before apologizing for the e-mail scandal yesterday, she had gone from iron defiance to painful jokes and then a claim that she was too busy as secretary of state.  "We had so many problems around the world," Clinton said in a TV interview.  "I didn't really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be."  Whopper alert!  Of course she thought about it, and plenty.  How else did the server get in her home?  Did it walk in, plug itself into the wall and start humming with classified information?  And she certainly thought about the server when she used private money to pay a State Department employee to maintain it.  She made the decision to operate outside the secure government system every time she received and sent an e-mail at her private address.  By her count, that happened about 33,000 times over four years.

Second Review Says Classified Information Was in Hillary Clinton's Email.  A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea's nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.  Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the inspector general's finding last month and questioned whether the emails had been overclassified by an arbitrary process.  But the special review — by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were "Top Secret," the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011.

CIA Confirms Clinton's 'Top Secret' E-mails Were Classified from Day One.  In the latest blow to the Hillary Clinton campaign's claim that sensitive government information stored on her private e-mail server was only classified after the fact, a special review by two top spy agencies confirmed that two e-mails with "Top Secret" material were classified from the moment they were received.

Lawsuit asks how Clinton lawyer got OK to store classified emails.  A new lawsuit is demanding that the State Department explain how Hillary Clinton's private attorney, David Kendall, got permission from the State Department to retain copies of Clinton's emails after the agency determined some of them were classified.  The suit was filed Monday [9/7/2015] in U.S. District Court in Washington by freelance journalist David Brown, who sent State a Freedom of Information Act request last month asking for all records about the decision to allow Kendall to retain a thumb drive containing copies of about 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to State in December.

What Hillary Clinton Would Say About Her Email Scandal If She Were Being Brutally Honest.  Hillary Clinton is struggling to manage the scandal that has erupted over her unprecedented use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.  She "regrets" not following the rules, and is "sorry that this has been confusing to people."  As Clinton has previously said, her biggest weakness is that the American people are too stupid to realize why she deserves to be president.  If Hillary's response to the scandal has come across as incoherent and dishonest, it's because those are the two words that most accurately characterize her response to the scandal.

Wordclouding Hillary.  Americans have short attention spans — how else could Barack Obama been elected and reelected despite a history of lies and broken promises (some broken almost immediately upon making them)?  Americans do not have time or inclination to pour over position papers or linger over the history of candidates.  Politics has been taken over by social media, Facebook postings, political cartoons, You Tube videos and Tweets. [...] The email controversy is the latest outbreak of self-created problems.  But there are no reasons to rely on this cloud hovering over her going into November next year; clouds move and Americans do suffer from attention-deficit disorder.  The Clintons have always relied on getting over the next news cycle and people forgetting and moving on.  The Clintons routinely dismiss criticism as "partisan attacks" and "old news."  Republicans should not allow this past practice to work again.

Another week of embarrassing shoes dropping for Hillary.  First came news that Hillary Clinton's private e-mails included highly classified information on North Korea's nuclear-weapons stockpile.  That comes from multiple intelligence sources speaking on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Times.  The nuke info apparently came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a highly classified satellite and mapping system.  Such info is automatically classified at the very highest level, even when not so labeled — and knowing that rule is part of the secretary of state's job.  So much for Clinton's repeated claims that she didn't know she was putting secrets at risk via her own personal e-mail server.

Hillary Clinton's new explanation makes matters worse.  Right now we know that, at a minimum 188 emails existed on Hillary Clinton's private (remember this term, it is important) email server.  We know at least two of those emails contained information that originated with a Keyhole satellite operated by the National Reconnaissance Office and was classified at the Top Secret level.  Things became more interesting on Thursday [9/3/2015] when it was revealed that a Hillary Clinton acolyte and a member of the criminal clique she brought into State with her, a guy named Bryan Pagliano, had pleaded the Fifth to a request to testify before Rep. Trey Gowdy's Benghazi committee.  Now taking the Fifth doesn't mean he is guilty of anything, it just means he doesn't want to incriminate himself.  The interesting thing about Pagliano is that he was brought into State as a high grade, GS-15, political appointee and embedded in the State Department's IT operation.

Pagliano didn't disclose off-the-books pay for secret work on Hillary's server.  Well, well, well, we now know at least one reason why Bryan Pagliano took the Fifth.  Buried in the 13th paragraph of the Washington Post story on him two days ago is this tidbit, spotted by Scott Johnson of Powerline: ["]Pagliano did not list the outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year.["]  This could lead to criminal charges: [...]

The secret life of Bryan Pagliano.  Bryan Pagliano is the former State Department staffer who just advised congressional committees seeking his testimony of his intention to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.  The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Carol D. Leonnig enlist the assistance of three of their colleagues to report on Madam Hillary's private arrangement with Pagliano.  The Post reports that Madam Hillary personally paid Pagliano for his services maintaining the private e-mail server she used for her official correspondence as Secretary of State.  The Post reporters confirmed the story directly with an unnamed Clinton campaign official.  The Post adds this intriguing detail:  "Pagliano did not list the outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year."  Pagliano's attorney declined to comment to the Post.

Clinton Emails: What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?  The FBI is probing Hillary Clinton's server to see if spies accessed her emails.  It's the right move.  There could be probative value there.  But the FBI should also be looking for emails to or from the president.

Former Obama Intel Chief Says Suspend Hillary's Security Clearance.  Former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Michael T. Flynn says President Obama should "immediately suspend" Hillary Clinton's security clearance because she ran a private, unprotected email server from her New York home.  Flynn also told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an exclusive interview Saturday that Clinton's use of a private server for official national security business was "unprecedented," and he believed Clinton caused "untold damage" to national security.  Clinton should also be denied "any access to any classified or sensitive information," said Flynn, who was appointed by Obama to the DIA job in 2012.

Clinton Admits She Destroyed Government Property.  Bryan Pagliano was Clinton's director of information technology during her failed 2008 presidential run.  After she became secretary of state in 2009, he followed her there.  He's now known as the tech specialist who set up and maintained the Clinton server.  Naturally, he has vital information Congress needs as it continues its probe.  And just as naturally, he said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right when called on to testify.  While that's his constitutional right, we'd bet his testimony would be likelier to incriminate his former boss than him.

Investigators wanted to ask Clinton IT specialist about destruction of evidence.  Investigators on the Benghazi Select Committee had hoped to question former Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano over the possible destruction of evidence, known in legal circles as "spoliation," a congressional source told Fox News.  However, in an August 31 letter to Congress, Pagliano's attorney said the former 2008 campaign staffer who installed and managed Clinton's personal server and left his IT job at the State Department in February 2013, the same month Clinton stepped down as secretary, would "respectfully assert his Fifth Amendment right" before the Benghazi Select Committee.  "The matters for which Mr. Pagliano's testimony and documents are being sought by the Select Committee are also the subject of investigative activity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice," the letter said.

Hillary Clinton is Sorry You're Too Stupid to Understand Her Lies.  Did Hillary do anything wrong?  No.  "It wasn't the best choice".  Why?  Because it's "confusing to people."  Is Hillary sorry?  Yes, she's "'sorry that this has been confusing to people."  Hillary Clinton is sorry that you're too stupid to believe her excuses.  And she would have made a different choice if she knew how stupid you were.  She disagrees with the choice she made, only because she had not previously imagined just how stupid everyone was.  Now she's sorry... that you're too stupid to understand why a top government official would want to run her own email server with classified information and poor security that she then wiped.  She's sorry that you can't understand why her associate is refusing to cooperate with the FBI.

Benghazi investigators hoped to question Clinton IT specialist about possible destruction of evidence.  Investigators on the Benghazi Select Committee had hoped to question former Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano over the possible destruction of evidence, known in legal circles as "spoliation," a congressional source told Fox News.  However, in an August 31 letter to Congress, Pagliano's attorney said the former 2008 campaign staffer who installed and managed Clinton's personal server and left his IT job at the State Department in February 2013, the same month Clinton stepped down as secretary, would "respectfully assert his Fifth Amendment right" before the Benghazi Select Committee.  "The matters for which Mr. Pagliano's testimony and documents are being sought by the Select Committee are also the subject of investigative activity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice," the letter said.

Clinton: Email use was 'fully above board'.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declined a chance to apologize for her email practices Friday [9/4/20-15], saying it was not a good choice but was "fully above-board" and other government officials knew she was using it. [...] She again insisted she did not send or receive any material marked secret, saying the nearly 200 messages already released and marked classified were only designated after the fact and don't indicate she mishandled information.

Citizens United Hires D.C. Lawyer to Help Gain Access to Clinton Emails.  The conservative group Citizens United has retained a top-flight Washington attorney to help in its fight to gain quicker access to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's records.  Citizens United has brought on Theodore Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general and his firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act case against the State Department.  "The American people have the right to see former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's records that Citizens United requested under the Freedom of Information Act.  The government's efforts to delay the disclosure of these records must be confronted," said Citizens United president David Bossie.

There's a Whole Arsenal of Smoking Guns in the Clinton E-mail Scandal.  The problem is that the standards for what counts as a smoking gun keep changing.  Nearly everything Clinton has said in her defense regarding her secret server has been a lie.  Among the minor lies:  her claim that she set up the server so she could use a single device.  (She had two.)  Her claim that the State Department was saving her e-mails to staff.  (It wasn't until 2010.)  Her claim that she erased tens of thousands of e-mails because they included, among other things, her e-mail correspondence with her husband.  (Bill Clinton doesn't use e-mail.)

Clintons personally paid State Department staffer to maintain server.  Hillary Rodham Clinton and her family personally paid a State Department staffer to maintain the private e-mail server she used while heading the agency, according to an official from Clinton's presidential campaign.  The unusual arrangement helped Clinton retain personal control over the system that she used for her public and private duties and that has emerged as an issue for her campaign.  But, according to the campaign official, it also ensured that taxpayer dollars were not spent on a private server that was shared by Clinton, her husband and their daughter as well as aides to the former president.  That State Department staffer, Bryan Pagliano, told a congressional committee this week that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination instead of testifying about the setup.

Clinton family reportedly personally paid State Dept. staffer to maintain private server.  Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her family reportedly paid a State Department staffer to maintain the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state.  The Washington Post, citing an unnamed campaign official, reports the arrangement helped Clinton maintain her personal control over the server that she used to conduct public and private business.  The official also said it also ensured that taxpayers weren't paying for the upkeep of the server that was shared by Clinton, her husband, the former president, and their daughter as well as former aides, the Post reports.

Tech specialist who helped Hillary Clinton set up her private email server was paid with Taxpayer dollars.  The IT specialist who set up Hillary Clinton's controversial private email was paid with taxpayer dollars after he helped the former Secretary of State skirt the law.  And Bryan Pagliano is finding his own words could be coming back to bite him.  'Some things that look like good ideas...may actually have bad consequences,' he told an IT webinar last year.  Pagliano, 39, was taken on by the State Department when Clinton was appointed the nation's top diplomat in 2009.  He had previously worked for her presidential campaign.

Is This Why Clinton Aide Bryan Pagliano is Taking the 5th?  Hillary Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano's attorney said last week that his client would not cooperate with the FBI and would exercise his Fifth Amendment rights.  What does he have to hide?  In fact, he may have already hidden information that will get him into a pile of legal trouble if he admits it.  It was revealed today [9/5/2015] by the Washington Post that Pagliano was paid to run Hillary's private server — out of Hillary Clinton's own pocket.  She paid Pagliano an initial sum of $5,000 to set up the server.  Pagliano dutifully reported the sum on his financial disclosure form in 2008.  But campaign officials now tell the WaPo that Clinton continued to pay Pagliano to maintain the server until Hillary left the State Department in 2013.  The paper could find no record of Pagliano reporting any income from Clinton on his disclosure forms during the intervening years, and the State Department says they had "found no evidence" of Pagliano earning outside income.

IT Experts: Anti-Spam Companies May Have Copies Or Logs Of Clinton's Emails.  Copies or logs of Hillary Clinton's emails could be stored on the servers of companies that the former secretary of state used to manage and block spam for her email domain, IT experts tell The Daily Caller.  The existence of such residual information could have two major implications, the experts say.  First, the additional email footprints would have provided more information useful to potential hackers.  On a different front, the records would allow federal agencies investigating Clinton's email server to compare the companies' records with what the Democratic presidential candidate turned over to the State Department in December.  Clinton has said that she handed all work-related emails over to the agency, though many of her critics say they doubt the claim.

It's fun and games 'til someone takes the Fifth.  Perhaps [Bryan] Pagliano is not truly in criminal jeopardy.  Maybe he just thinks he is.  People are entitled to anticipate the worst.  For example, he could reasonably imagine that blame for failing to secure the email system, thus compromising so much classified information, might be laid at his feet.  The Clintons' wake is littered with adherents who were sent to the slammer.  Or what if someone tries to blame him for erasing information that should have been preserved?  As crazy and as unlikely as it might sound, Clinton might someday try to play dumb about technology-related matters, in which case fingers might point in Pagliano's direction.  If you do not believe this possible, bear in mind that both Clinton and her campaign spokesperson have now publicly pretended that they do not know what it means to "wipe" a computer server.

What Will the Public Make of Hillary's Former IT Staffer's Decision to Take the Fifth?  [Scroll down]  Federal law also makes it a crime for any person to aid or abet another person's commission of a crime.  Pagliano can't be principally liable for concealing or destroying records under Section 2071(b) because he wasn't their custodian.  But if he set up Mrs. Clinton's server and assisted her in maintaining it knowing that the purpose was to avoid federal disclosure laws, he too might be implicated in criminal activity.  That seems unlikely.  More likely is that Pagliano is simply a techie who did what he was asked to do — set up a server.

Hillary Rodham Bismarck Hit With Another Salvo: Her Emails Altered to Hide Classification Markings.  [Scroll down]  In other words, 10 percent of Hillary's emails appear to be edited in order to hide either:  (a) SECRET and TOP SECRET data so egregious that there would be a massive public outcry if they were revealed; or (b) surreptitious dealings with foreign governments in exchange for donations to the Clinton Global Graft Initiative.  Either situation simply reinforces the fact that Hillary Clinton should be wearing an orange jumpsuit in a maximum security facility.  Perhaps Gitmo.  Maybe President Cruz could make that happen.

Hillary Clinton, inner circle responsible for most classified emails.  Nearly a third of the classified messages released so far from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails came from one man: Jake Sullivan, who served as her deputy chief of staff in the department, and is now the top foreign policy adviser to her presidential campaign.  Cheryl D. Mills, a longtime top Clinton aide who was chief of staff at the department, ranked second, and Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton's close personal assistant who was also a deputy chief of staff, ranked third, with 27 emails sent by her that contain information marked "confidential" by the government, according to a Washington Times analysis.

Another 57 Clinton email threads contain foreign governments' information.  "Here's my personal email," Hillary Clinton wrote to U.S. special envoy George Mitchell on a summer Sunday in 2010 as he telephoned one European official after another in an effort to keep peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians on track.  "Pls use this for reply," Clinton wrote in her email, sent from the clintonemail.com account she set up on an unsecured, private server in her New York home for her work as secretary of state.

Has Hillary Clinton created a national security disaster?  Most coverage of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server (including mine) has focused on whether she lied about her usage and whether she violated the law.  This focus is natural because Clinton is running for president.  Presumably, only partisan Democrats are likely to support a liar and even some of them might balk at backing a criminal.  But Stanley Kurtz looks at a different and vital question, namely the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary's mishandling of classified information.

Hillary's Emails: How Big a National Security Disaster?  Has Hillary Clinton been lying about her e-mail system and did she violate the laws against mishandling classified material?  Coverage of Clinton's e-mail scandal has been focused on those questions, but shouldn't we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary's carelessness with classified information?  We're not focused on the details of the security damage because it's difficult to know whether and to what extent Hillary's communications were intercepted, and more difficult still to make public whatever our intelligence agencies may have figured out on that score.  But maybe we already know enough to conclude that Hillary's e-mail scandal constitutes one of the most serious American national security disasters on record.

Staffer who worked on Clinton's private e-mail server faces subpoena.  The move by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, came in a Monday [8/31/2015] letter from his lawyer to the House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  The letter cited the ongoing FBI inquiry into the security of Clinton's e-mail system, and it quoted a Supreme Court ruling in which justices described the Fifth Amendment as protecting "innocent men ... 'who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.'"

Former Clinton Aide to Invoke Fifth Amendment in Response to Congressional Questions Over Private Email Server.  The former aide, Bryan Pagliano, was subpoenaed to testify before a House committee, but a lawyer for Mr. Pagliano has told the panel that his client will assert his right to remain silent and decline to answer their questions.  The subpoena was issued by the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.  As part of its inquiry, the panel is examining Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email account while she was secretary of state, which shielded her correspondences from congressional inquiries.

Former Clinton aide expected to plead the 5th in response to email inquiries.  A former State Department employee who worked on Hillary Clinton's private email server has informed Congress that he will invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi and in response to other Congressional inquiries related to the server.  On Monday [8/31/2015], Mark MacDougall, the attorney for former State Department employee Bryan Pagliano, sent a letter to House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy indicating that Pagliano would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to appear before the Select Committee for a deposition on September 10, 2015.

Should Government Employees be Allowed the Fifth Amendment Plea?  When a person is in the public service, when that person is compensated by the taxpayer, is it not demanded of the arrangement that there be transparency?  We all know Lois Lerner's Fifth Amendment plea, and now we are going to learn of Hillary's State Department's computer expert doing same.  He doesn't want to tell us, his employer, what he was up to. [...] Does the taxpayer, the citizen, not have the inherent right to know what that servant was doing with the powers and appointments of his or her position?  Let's take this to the absurd.  Imagine the President, upon being asked a question regarding his use of power, replied, "I don't want to tell you.  I don't have to tell you."  If a situation exists where testimony is required by the "public servant" to explain how the powers endowed to him or her, by the people, were indeed executed, should not the person be required to reply or be terminated?  The employee must be accountable to the employer.

What's Going on With the Republicans?  As I wrote earlier this year, it was hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, calling himself Guccifer, who in May 2013 revealed that Clinton had been using a personal email address for official business.  We learned of other information only through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed against the State Department by organizations such as Vice News, Citizens United, and Judicial Watch.  Some of these FOIA emails, it seems, were already in the possession of Trey Gowdy's select committee, for it leaked hundreds of them to the New York Times only hours before the State Department published its first batch.  Why had the select committee done nothing but sit on these?  And why leak to the New York Times?  Which leads one to wonder about Trey Gowdy.  Why is he allowing Hillary to run the clock on these emails?  More importantly, why is Boehner instructing him to do so?

Staffer who worked on Clinton's private e-mail server faces subpoena.  A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself.  The move by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, came in a Monday [8/31/2015] letter from his lawyer to the House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Exclusive: Hillary's Email Server Had A Webmail Portal That Allowed Unrestricted Access To Hackers.  Clintonemail.com had a subdomain called webmail.clintonemail.com, according to the account's GoDaddy.com encryption certificate.  That subdomain is a web-based email portal that considerably weakened the server's defenses and invited attack.  A webmail portal allows web traffic to bypass hardware and software firewalls to easily access the server's mail "interface."  If a user accesses emails through a web portal on an unsecure network like Clinton's, then the emails can be read without any encryption whatsoever for safety.

State Dept. seeks to oust 16 judges from Clinton email cases in favor of one judge.  The State Department asked to halt most of the judges prying into former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails, filing papers Thursday [9/3/2015] proposing that the cases all be combined into one so that a single judge can oversee the government's searches and releases.  Admitting it's "struggling" under the weight of the problem left by Mrs. Clinton's decision to use her own email account, the State Department warned it might miss the January deadline for turning over all of her emails — and might not be able to process her former aides' emails either — unless a single judge takes over and decides what they have to do.

Clinton Spokesman: 'I Don't Know What Wiped Means'.  A spokesman for Hillary Clinton told CNN he did not know what it means for a computer server to be "wiped."  Brian Fallon, Clinton's press secretary, spoke with CNN's Brianna Keilar about the news that a former IT staffer who worked on Clinton's private email server is pleading the Fifth Amendment in front of a congresional committee investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack.  Keilar pressed Fallon about why the former secretary of state deleted personal emails from her server, and the two had an exchange about the propriety of deleting those emails.

Lanny's Letter to Hillary Is D.C.'s Most Cringe-Inducing Document Ever.  The latest stash of emails from Hillary Clinton's private server released by the State Department has (once again!) revealed Washington to be a particularly unbearable place, employing particularly insufferable people.  From Clinton's email correspondence with her senior staff we can observe how those with proximity to power engage in rare forms of backstabbing, obsequiousness, pettiness, bad humor, and self-obsession.

Could This Be the Scandal That Finally Sinks Hillary Clinton?  This scandal is about national security.  It's about Hillary Clinton casually, recklessly mishandling something that was central to her job as Secretary of State:  protecting the secrets of the United States.  That's why the latest revelation is so important:  that her unsecure homebrew e-mail server was not merely the passive recipient of classified information sent to her by others, but that she used it to originate messages containing classified material.

Exclusive: Hillary Paid to Hide Identity of the People Running Her Email Server.  Hillary Clinton paid to hide the identity of the people running her private email server, Breitbart News has learned.  Her attempt to hide details about her server has allowed another faceless company access to her classified email information, while doing little to nothing to secure that information from hackers.  Clinton's private email domain clintonemail.com was initially purchased by Clinton aide Eric Hoteham, who listed the Clintons' Chappaqua, New York home as the contact address for his purchase.  But the domain is actually registered to an Internet company designed to hide the true identity of the people running it.

Will Hillary Clinton's Emails Burn the White House?  The Federal Bureau of Investigation can be expected to be tight-lipped, especially because this highly sensitive case is being handled by counterintelligence experts from Bureau headquarters a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, not by the FBI's Washington Field Office.  That will ensure this investigation gets the needed "big picture" view, since even senior FBI agents at any given field office may only have a partial look at complex counterintelligence cases.  And this most certainly is a counterintelligence matter.  There's a widely held belief among American counterspies that foreign intelligence agencies had to be reading the emails on Hillary's private server, particularly since it was wholly unencrypted for months.

Staffer who worked on Clinton's private e-mail server faces subpoena.  A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself.  The move by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, came in a Monday letter from his lawyer to the House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Hillary Email Scandal: Two Smoking Guns Found In Latest Batch.  In November 2009, Clinton sent an email to her pal Sidney Blumenthal.  In response to his email asking "how did it go in Berlin?"  Clinton writes back:  "Berlin was terrific.  Lots of good exchanges w leaders."  The entire rest of the email is blacked out.  The Washington Post reported Wednesday [9/2/2015] that it found six emails, so far, that Clinton wrote and sent that contained such classified information.  And, as the Post noted, the classification marks make clear that the information in these messages was classified "at birth," whether marked or not, because it contained "foreign government information" and "foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources."

IRS Lawyer Who Headed Lerner Email Release Present When Markings on Clinton Emails Changed.  Markings on no fewer than four emails contained on Hillary Clinton's private system were changed to a category that blocks Congress and the public from viewing their contents, according to State Department whistleblowers.

Hillary Knew Good and Well Those Emails Would Become Classified.  [Scroll down]  Okay, so why does this matter, and why does it matter that Hillary Clinton is doubtless intimately familiar with these concepts?  Well, see, it matters because, as it is revealed that more and more emails made their way through Hillary Clinton's insecure personal server that were later marked classified, Team Hillary has become determined to hang their hat on the fact that Hillary did not receive nor send any material that was marked classified at the time it was sent/received.  While this may or may not end up being true, technically speaking, it ignores the fact that Hillary knew good and well that a significant chunk of the emails she sent and received would inevitably be labeled classified later, simply because of the fact that they contained the private thoughts of the Secretary of State on matters of national security.

Hillary Intentionally Originated And Distributed Highly Classified Information.  A review of recently released e-mails shows that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly originated and distributed highly classified national security information.  Clinton's classified e-mail missives were not constrained to State Department staff, either.  She also sent classified information to Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton White House operative banned by the Obama White House.  An analysis by The Federalist of e-mails released by the State Department late Monday shows that scores of e-mails sent by Clinton contained highly confidential national security information from the beginning, even if they weren't marked by a classification authority until later.

Hillary Clinton's email trouble, explained.  Hillary Rodham Clinton's effort to quash the rising scandal over her misuse of email when she was secretary of state has so far backfired spectacularly.  Instead of cutting the story short, she has fanned the flames, and now even some of her backers in the Democratic Party are worried about the trajectory of this drama, which threatens to derail her presidential candidacy.  For readers who have mostly ignored emailgate — assuming it would disappear — and now feel the need to catch up, here's a primer on why it matters.

Hillary Intentionally Originated And Distributed Highly Classified Information.  A review of recently released e-mails shows that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly originated and distributed highly classified national security information.  Clinton's classified e-mail missives were not constrained to State Department staff, either.  She also sent classified information to Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton White House operative banned by the Obama White House.  An analysis by The Federalist of e-mails released by the State Department late Monday shows that scores of e-mails sent by Clinton contained highly confidential national security information from the beginning, even if they weren't marked by a classification authority until later.  The original date of classification of Hillary's e-mails can be discerned by noting the declassification dates noted next to redactions in the e-mails.

Sources: Clinton email markings changed to hide classified info.  At least four classified Hillary Clinton emails had their markings changed to a category that shields the content from Congress and the public, Fox News has learned, in what State Department whistleblowers believed to be an effort to hide the true extent of classified information on the former secretary of state's server.  The changes, which came to light after the first tranche of 296 Benghazi emails was released in May, was confirmed by two sources — one congressional, the other intelligence.  The four emails originally were marked classified after a review by career officials at the State Department.  But after a second review by the department's legal office, the designation was switched to "B5" — also known as "deliberative process," which refers to internal deliberations by the Executive Branch.  Such discussions are exempt from public release.  The B5 coding has the effect, according to a congressional source, of dropping the email content "down a deep black hole."

New Hillary Clinton Emails Show Violation of Freedom of Information Law.  The newly-released batch of Hillary Clinton emails provides further proof that Freedom of Information (FOI) law has been blatantly violated.  The documents include material directly responsive to a FOI request I made back in 2012 after the Benghazi terrorist attacks on the U.S. compounds.  However, the material was not produced at the time, as required by law.  Once again, there appears to be nobody who holds government officials and agencies accountable for their routine violation of this law.  So the infractions occur frequently and with impunity.  If nobody polices our government officials and agencies — if they are above the law — then how does a lawful society function?

Clinton Told Aide to Send Classified Info to Personal Email Address.  On the same day that the "hacktivist" group WikiLeaks posted tens of thousands of classified State Department communications online, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a top deputy to send now-classified information to her personal email address, newly released emails reveal.  "Here's my personal email," Clinton told former Sen. George Mitchell, then Clinton's special envoy for Middle East peace.  "Pls use this for reply."  Mitchell responded with details of discussions with Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini.  Most of the contents of the email, released by the State Department on Monday night [8/31/2015], are redacted pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act exemption designed to protect classified national security information.

Clinton wrote classified e-mails sent using private server.  While she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote and sent at least six e-mails using her private server that contained what government officials now say is classified information, according to thousands of e-mails released by the State Department.  Although government officials deemed the e-mails classified after Clinton left office, they could complicate her efforts to move beyond the political fallout from the controversy.  They suggest that her role in distributing sensitive material via her private e-mail system went beyond receiving notes written by others, and appears to contradict earlier public statements in which she denied sending or receiving e-mails containing classified information.

A prediction from Judicial Watch about 'Servergate'.  A conservative watchdog group predicts that Hillary Clinton could be forced to give up her presidential bid.  "I think Mrs. Clinton and her immediate circle, they are in trouble.  It's not going to go away," Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch says of the Democratic front-runner.  Clinton continues to be mired in controversy over her use of personal email while secretary of state, with the FBI investigating her under the Espionage Act for sensitive information that may have been unsecure on the email server, Fox News reported last week.

Tony Blair's Appearance in the Clinton E-mails Demolishes Hillary's Excuses.  Tony Blair knew about Hillary Clinton's private e-mail account before the American people did — and his off-the-grid e-mail exchanges with Clinton are another sledgehammer to the already crumbling edifice of excuses offered in defense of her homebrew server. [...] The conversations cover a wide range of world hot spots, including the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iran, Sudan, and Haiti.  Many of them — nearly 200 in total to date — have now been classified by the State Department as "foreign government information" and redacted or withheld from release.  The very nature of the communications in those e-mails established that they contained classified information from their inception.  Mrs. Clinton's defense that she did not know of the existence of such information on her server at the time is laughable.

State Department releases thousand of Clinton emails, 125 contain classified information.  The State Department released thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton's emails Monday night [8/31/2015] that a department spokesman said contained 125 messages with material now considered classified.  State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the emails in question were "subsequently upgraded" to classified.  He stressed that none of the emails was considered classified at the time.  However, the sheer number of emails that have been redacted stands as the latest example of how much sensitive material was contained in Clinton's email transactions.

Big batch of Clinton e-mails being released; some have redactions.  The State Department released on Monday evening [8/31/2015] its biggest trove yet of e-mails sent or received by former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, including a number of messages that were edited to remove material later deemed classified.  The e-mails are the latest in a rolling review of material that passed through an unorthodox private e-mail system that the Democratic presidential candidate has said she now regrets.

Classified data grows in Clinton emails.  The Obama administration is increasingly finding classified information in former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails, declaring secret material in nearly 3 percent of the batch released late Monday night [8/31/2015].  That is up from just 1.7 percent of the emails in the previous releases and raises questions about whether the new set of emails is more troublesome or whether the administration is being more strict after repeated warnings by watchdogs that Mrs. Clinton's messages contain matters that should not be made public.

Seven thousand pages released from Hillary Clinton's private server as 150 are 'upgraded' to classified status.  Hillary Clinton's private email account was a big enough secret at the State Department that the agency's computer help-desk experts didn't recognize her address when they saw it.  'They had no idea it was YOU,' her top aide Human Abedin remarked at the time.  Although she would claim years later that she carried only a single email device — her personal Blackberry — out of 'convenience,' Clinton emailed her press guru in 2010 to ask for help learning to use her new iPad.  And the once-and-future presidential candidate couldn't get skim milk for her tea — and was at a loss to figure out what time to catch 'Parks and Recreation' or 'The Good Wife' on TV.

The Editor says...
Does any normal person write emails about trivial stuff like that?  Did she ever do any work?  I suspect these email messages will be used as evidence in her favor someday soon:  See?  She's not a crook — she's just incompetent!

More sleepless nights for Team Clinton as additional classified documents are released.  The State Department has just released a batch of about 7,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's private server.  Approximately 150 of them are redacted because they contain classified information.  The classified emails deal with Haiti, China, and Sudan, among many other subjects.  A preliminary analysis by Fox News, presented on Megyn Kelly's program, found that some of the information on Clinton's server was inherently classified.  Fox's analysts cited a memo transmitting information provided by foreign diplomats about Sudan peace talks.

State Department IT staff among those in the dark about Clinton's private email address.  Members of the State Department's information technology staff were among those who were unaware that Hillary Clinton was using a private email address during her time as secretary of state, the latest release of messages from Clinton's private server revealed late Monday [8/31/2015].  In one email, dated February 27, 2010, an IT worker on the State Department's computer "help desk" sends a message to Clinton's email address inquiring about why one of Clinton's correspondents has been getting a "fatal error" when she tries to send messages to the secretary of state.

Hillary, with Sid's Aid, Has Long Plotted to Overturn Citizens United.  New e-mails released from Hillary Clinton's private e-mail account by the State Department late on Monday [8/31/2015] show that the then-secretary of state was furious over the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, blaming mysterious "forces" for orchestrating the January 2010 ruling and plotting with shadow adviser Sidney Blumenthal about ways to overturn it.

Who's who in Clinton's email saga.  The list of those drawn into the saga includes some of Clinton's top aides at the State Department, now playing roles in her Democratic campaign for the presidency.  They were among the ones who forwarded sensitive messages to Clinton that have raised national security questions.  A few bit players merely helped her set up or store material from the private email system, operated out of her New York home.  Fanning the flames are a growing list of officials questioning Clinton's conduct and demanding more information.

State Dept. to release 6,000 pages of Clinton emails.  The State Department is set to release a new batch of Hillary Clinton's private emails Monday [8/30/2015] amid a broadening FBI investigation into whether the former secretary of state mishandled classified information on her private server.  State officials have said they plan to release "6,106 or more pages" of emails Monday [8/31/2015], according to court documents filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Vice News that has forced the agency to publish Clinton's emails on a rolling basis.

Hillary Shared an Email Network with the Clinton Foundation.  Hillary Clinton's private email server was housed at the same physical location and on the same network as an email server used and operated by the Clinton Foundation, Breitbart News has exclusively learned.  Records reveal that Hillary Clinton's private clintonemail.com server shared an IP address with her husband Bill Clinton's email server, presidentclinton.com, and both servers were housed in New York City, not in the basement of the Clintons' Chappaqua, New York home.

Jindal: Hillary 'literally one email away from going to jail'.  Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state presents security implications that might land her in prison, charged Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Sunday [8/30/2015].  "With Hillary Clinton, it just seems to be one scandal after another," the GOP candidate said on ABC's "This Week."  "She's literally one email away from going to jail."

Latest Clinton Email Server Dump Reveals 150 More Documents Flagged For Classified Information.  Things are rapidly getting worse in the legal department for former Secretary of State and democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.  The State Department is set to release a batch of 6,000 personal emails belonging to Clinton tonight, but we're already getting a sneak peak of what they contain.

Mystery deepens into how classified emails got onto Clinton's unclassified server.  The daily revelations over classified information finding its way onto Hillary Clinton's personal email server are raising perplexing questions for former government officials who wonder how classified information made its way onto the former secretary of state's non-classified server — especially since the two systems are not connected.  "It is hard to move classified documents into the non-classified system.  You couldn't move a document by mistake," said Willes Lee, a former operations officer for the U.S. Army in Europe and former operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Top State Department Staff Used Personal Email to Send 'Sensitive' Data.  Senior State Department officials at the U.S. Embassy in Japan have been caught sending "sensitive" information over personal email accounts, subjecting the information to potential hacking attacks and other cyber threats, according to a new report by the department's inspector general.  Embassy staff, including the U.S. ambassador to Japan, were found to conducted "official business" via their personal email addresses, highlighting an issue of concern among national security experts and officials in the wake of disclosures about Hillary Clinton's email habits during her tenure as secretary of state.  The use of personal email among Obama administration officials has raised concerns about the protection of sensitive data, which could be stolen by hackers and foreign governments.

State Department says 150 more Hillary Clinton emails have been 'upgraded' to classified status.  The State Department said Monday afternoon [8/31/2015] that when it releases the latest tranche of Hillary Clinton's emails tonight, 'somewhere around 150' of them will have been 'upgraded to classified' status.  Agency spokesman Mark Toner briefed reporters in advance of the periodic release, which was rescheduled twice during the day and is now expected at 9:00 p.m. EDT.  Under intense questioning, Toner conceded that the review of about 7,000 pages of emails in the latest batch has uncovered the 150 communications 'that have been subsequently upgraded classified.'

Nobody Cares About the Clinton Email Scandal, Says Clinton Camp.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating Hillary Clinton's private email server to determine if its use violated the Espionage Act.  The unsecured server contained top-secret spy satellite information, raising the possibility that Clinton's decision to go outside official channels for her correspondence jeopardized national security.  That being said, the whole situation is a total snooze that is only interesting to the buzzards in the press, Clinton and her allies say.

Source: FBI 'A-team' leading 'serious' Clinton server probe, focusing on defense info.  An FBI "A-team" is leading the "extremely serious" investigation into Hillary Clinton's server and the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information," an intelligence source told Fox News.  The section of the Espionage Act is known as 18 US Code 793.  A separate source, who also was not authorized to speak on the record, said the FBI will further determine whether Clinton should have known, based on the quality and detail of the material, that emails passing through her server contained classified information regardless of the markings.  The campaign's standard defense and that of Clinton is that she "never sent nor received any email that was marked classified" at the time.

Hillary Stops Joking About Emails, But Doesn't Stop Lying.  Clinton's crashing poll numbers, along with questions by donors and supporters about her judgment in joking about the email scandal immediately after the FBI seized her private server, are obviously taking a toll.  She suddenly says she "takes responsibility" for the decision.  (Well, who else would be responsible?)  She's stopped joking, but she hasn't stopped lying.

If Clinton Loses Her Security Clearance, Could She Still Be President?  For the past six months, the issue of Hillary Clinton's secret e-mail server has mainly played out as a campaign news story, and for good reason. [...] After staying silent on it initially, Clinton held a press conference in which she asserted that the e-mail server never transmitted sensitive material, and that more than half of the e-mails on it had been deleted by her team before turning it over to the State Department.  Clinton pledged never to turn over the server itself, claiming that it was personal property.  Two of those emails from spy satellites and the NSA were classified as Top Secret when they were sent and are classified now.  None of these statements has held up to scrutiny.  A small sample of 40 e-mails from the data given to State was audited by Inspectors General from the intelligence community, which found four e-mails that contained classified e-mails.  Two of those included information from spy satellites and the NSA that was classified as Top Secret/Compartmented Information, the highest classification level for the US — data that was "classified when they were sent and are classified now."

Hillary's rookie errors with classified information.  When I write an op-ed — including this one — I am required to submit a draft to the CIA's Pre-publication Review Board and also the security officer at the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.  This is to make sure that I don't inadvertently disclose something that I learned when I had access to highly classified information.  Actually, I very much respect this process, because it protects me as well as the government.  Anyone who has ever held a Special Intelligence/Talent Keyhole (SI/TK) clearance — which is granted by the CIA — is required to do this for life, and the obligation comes from the agreement one signs in order to be granted access to that category of information.  I first signed such an agreement almost 35 years ago and a similar one when I was general counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Group: Emails show Clinton, aides mixed State Department, foundation business.  Ten days after the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks, the top foreign policy adviser at the Clinton Foundation had a potentially lucrative proposal on which to seek guidance from Hillary Clinton's aides at the State Department.

Hillary Clinton Takes 'Responsibility' for Email Use, Saying It 'Wasn't the Best Choice'.  Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that she understood why people had questions about her decision to use only private email while she was secretary of state and that she took responsibility for that decision, a shift from her past remarks about an issue that has dogged her since shortly before she began her presidential campaign.  Her remarks, made during a campaign stop in Iowa, came as Mrs. Clinton has faced growing criticism for making light of her email use, which Democrats fear has become an albatross on her hopes of winning the White House.  "What, like with a cloth or something?" she said to a Fox News reporter last week who had asked whether she had "wiped," or erased, her email server before turning it over to the F.B.I. recently.

Clinton Data Went Unsecured For Over a Month After 'Classified' Data Discovered.  A thumb drive containing Hillary Clinton's State Department emails was not secured in a specially designated safe until over a month after it was publicly confirmed that her server contained classified information, according to a timeline laid out in a letter by her attorney this week.  In the letter, first reported by Politico, an attorney working for Clinton, David Kendall, indicated that he had copies of the emails as early as December 2014, raising concerns from congressional investigators and intelligence officials that they may have been stored in an unsecured manner for months.  While officials said in May that Clinton's emails contained "now-classified" information, Kendall said the thumb drive was not moved to an officially secured safe in his office until July 8.

Clinton email had classified intel from 3 agencies.  One of the emails that triggered the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton's server contained classified intelligence from three different agencies, Fox News has learned — which could mean the State Department violated a President Obama-signed executive order by authorizing its release.  That 2009 order, EO 13526, lays out the rules for "classifying, safeguarding and declassifying national security information."  It states that the authority to declassify rests with the intelligence agency that originated the information.  "Information shall be declassified or downgraded by ... the official who authorized the original classification ... [or] the originator's current successor," the order says.

Clinton ally accused of running interference on email scandal.  A State Department official who was embroiled in a number of controversies under Hillary Clinton is reportedly attempting to influence the handling of his former boss' emails.  Patrick Kennedy, State's undersecretary for management, visited Capitol Hill in July to argue that an April 2011 email sent from longtime aide Huma Abedin to Clinton contained no classified information, according to a report by Fox News.  Abedin's message touched off the present FBI probe into Clinton's email practices, as three separate intelligence agencies — the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — each laid claim to information in the email.

How a 'mom and pop' firm which maintained Clinton's home-brew server ditched its contract as soon as scandal broke.  The IT company which maintained Hillary Clinton's private email server told employees they were cutting ties with the Democrat after allegations emerged that classified information was stored on it.  Telling staff 'we're done with this', Platte River Networks sought to distance itself from the Presidential hopeful, a former employee revealed to Daily Mail Online.

Hillary laughs off email scandal in Iowa.  Hillary Clinton on Wednesday [8/26/2015] literally laughed off the ongoing email scandal engulfing her campaign at an event accepting the endorsement of Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.  Vilsack hailed Clinton's toughness and ability to weather "trumped up charges," eliciting raucous laughter from the former secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton's lawyer is in the FBI crosshairs.  Hillary Clinton, by virtue of some deus ex machina, might skate on charges that she mishandled classified information.  It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that her inner circle — primarily but not exclusively Huma Abedin Wiener, Cheryl Mills, Philippe Reines, and Jake Sullivan — are in grave legal jeopardy.  While Clinton can claim with some plausibility that she didn't send or receive classified information (because her aides had stripped security classification from the material thereby giving her this out) her aides cannot make such a claim.

5 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Drop Out Of The Race.  [#1] Email scandal:  Clinton's choice to use her personal email account linked to a private server in her home while performing her duties as secretary of state shows an astonishing lack of judgment.  So does her decision to use her own personal device rather than a secure State Department-provided device.  By using her own email account and device, Clinton opened herself up to blackmail from hackers (does the Chinese government know more of what was on her private server that was wiped clean than federal and congressional investigators ever will?) and provided for herself and her top aides a way to skirt transparency laws.  The case against Clinton picked up Monday [8/24/2015] when former Attorney General Mike Mukasey said on MSNBC that Clinton has disqualified herself from holding office because she destroyed federal records when she had the server wiped clean.  That is, he noted, a felony.

GOP senator accuses Clinton of improperly passing state secrets to her lawyer.  In a "serious risk" to national security, Hillary Clinton gave her State Department emails containing Top Secret and other classified information to her lawyer, who lacked sufficient clearances to possess it and who kept it for as long as eight months, the Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee charged Tuesday [8/25/2015].  In a letter to her successor Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said when she turned over thumb drives containing her official emails to her lawyer, "it appears Secretary Clinton sent (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information) to an unauthorized person."

Most ridiculous defense of Hillary Clinton's email scandal, ever.  As sad as this defense is, it probably is the best that is available to Team Hillary.  When viewed in its most charitable light, Hillary was callously contemptuous of security classification and of the requirement to safeguard classified material.  In its worst case, that information was used as marketing material to entice foreign leaders to pay Bill Clinton for speeches and to subsidize the shadow intelligence operation run by Tyler Drumheller and Sid Blumenthal.  It is difficult to see how her campaign survives this.  In a best case scenario, Barack Obama does a Gerald Ford and pardons her so that the Democrats have a candidate.  The next best outcome is that she goes into the primary season with one or more of her closest associates under indictment for mishandling classified information and probably for lying to federal agents.

An ominous precedent for Hillary Clinton.  Hillary Clinton likes to point out that she is not the first senior national security official to conduct official business on a home computer system.  She's right about that, but the precedent should not give the Democratic presidential front-runner much comfort.  Former CIA director John Deutch was also found to have stored classified documents — including top-secret intelligence — on computers in his homes in Bethesda and Belmont, Mass., leading to an investigation by the CIA inspector general and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.  Deutch was stripped of his security clearance and ended up reaching a plea agreement admitting to his crimes — but was saved by a last-minute pardon from none other than ... President Bill Clinton.

State Dept.-released Clinton email had classified intel from 3 agencies, possibly violating Obama order.  One of the emails that triggered the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton's server contained classified intelligence from three different agencies, Fox News has learned — which could mean the State Department violated a President Obama-signed executive order by authorizing its release.  That 2009 order, EO 13526, lays out the rules for "classifying, safeguarding and declassifying national security information."  It states that the authority to declassify rests with the intelligence agency that originated the information.  "Information shall be declassified or downgraded by ... the official who authorized the original classification ... [or] the originator's current successor," the order says.

EmailGate Gets Worse for Hillary Clinton.  As evidence mounts that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff systematically violated Federal rules and laws governing the handling of classified materials, her supporters have dug in, denying anything wrong was done.  As the emerging facts get worse, so do their lies and obfuscations.  Clinton hangers-on are coming out of the woodwork not merely attacking those who have pointed out Hillary's serious problems with classified information and her "private" server — they now deny there is any scandal at all.  It's all yet another invention of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, say Team Hillary with one voice.

Something's Happening Here.  Clinton is now immersed in what could very well be the scandal of the century.  There's no way to wriggle free of the mishandling of classified data.  You can finesse financial laws and ethics rules.  You can't finesse this stuff.  News reports suggest there may be dozens of people who have violated the law and conspired to hide their involvement.  This is Watergate level stuff given her position.

Enablers:
Hillary Clinton's Sycophantic Inner Circle.  How could Hillary Clinton's staff let her get away with it?  It's one of the most perplexing questions surrounding the massive scandal over Clinton's use of an unsecured, private e-mail server when she served as secretary of state.  How could it be that no one in the State Department pointed out that Clinton was violating government policy and putting sensitive information at risk?  Why didn't her closest advisers warn that the move could torpedo her resurgent presidential ambitions?

The Tampa Tribune bravely states the obvious:
Clinton sidesteps the truth.  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton these days brings to mind her husband — but not the charismatic campaigner with a gift for making the most arcane public policy issue intriguing.  Rather, the former senator and secretary of state evokes the other side of President Bill Clinton, the dissembler who would parse the meaning of "is" and act as if rules were meant for others.  Mrs. Clinton has been both haughty and deceptive in explaining her use of a private email account while secretary of state.  The public has not been fooled.  Her poll numbers are plummeting.

Hillary Email Storage Firm Employs Top Clinton Operative.  The small Denver-based company that stored Hillary Clinton's private email server has close business and personal ties to Hillary Clinton and to the chairman of her presidential campaign, Breitbart News has exclusively learned.  The firm claims that it is an unsuspecting and apolitical small business that just happened to win a bid to store Clinton's server in 2013.

Another Lie: State Dept. Never Told DHS About Hillary's Server Despite The Rules.  Seems to make sense:  The DHS required regular updates about the security of email systems so they could audit them to discover if they were secure or if they were hackable.  Grandmonster Hillary never told them about this key system, upon which she conducted all of her  official State business  Pinterest-based Yoga Routine Research.

Obama's silent manipulation.  With the total of Hillary Clinton's "potentially classified" emails steadily climbing north of 300, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame recently provided a proper context for the scandal.  "It reminds me of the Nixon tapes," he told MSNBC, my old network but the one that now features more objective commentary by Al Sharpton and Chris Matthews.  How their faces must have dropped when Woodward suggested that investigators should "follow the trail" of their front-runner's emails.  Is Hillarygate unprecedented or really just Nixon 2.0?

Hillary Clinton's Ever Changing Story.  It seems every day there is a new development in the burgeoning scandal that is Servergate, so here's what's happened since our original piece.  The number of classified emails discovered that Hillary Clinton wrote using her personal email account has grown to 60, and another batch that was forwarded to intelligence agencies may likely result in 305 more.  There are still about 32,000 outstanding emails she claims she destroyed since they were "personal."  She has now turned over 55,000 printed emails, but they do not contain any metadata, making them difficult to trace.

Clinton's email server firm scrubs 'data-disposal' references from website.  The firm Hillary Clinton hired to manage her private email server quietly removed information from its website in recent days, including references to its partnership with a Colorado data-scrubbing company.  Platte River Networks, the Denver-based company that hosted Clinton's email server, deleted several pages from its website, including a section about how it outsources its data-disposal work to a local firm called Techno Rescue.  That page appears to have been removed earlier this month, but can still be viewed in a cached version on major search engines.

Hillary's security breach, and why it matters.  Perhaps you've heard of Sergey Lavrov — or perhaps you haven't.  He has been Russia's foreign minister since March 9, 2004.  Imagine what U.S. intelligence agencies might have gained if they'd had access in real time (or even with some delay) to every email and direct message Lavrov sent or received from Jan. 21, 2009 through Feb. 1, 2013.

Email timeline suggests second server may exist.  Conflicting accounts of when data was removed from Hillary Clinton's private server indicate copies of emails known to contain classified information may reside on a device other than the one presently in FBI custody.  She may have printed 55,000 pages of emails for submission to the State Department from a different device than the one presently in FBI custody.

More evidence, questions arise about existence of second, private Clinton email server.  The tens of thousands of emails on Hillary Clinton's private server from when she was secretary of state could also be on a second device or server, according to news reports.  The FBI now has the only confirmed private server, as part of a Justice Department probe to determine whether it sent of received classified information for Clinton when she was the country's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.  Platte River Networks, which managed Clinton's server and private email network after she left the State Department, has indicated it transfer — or "transferred" — emails from the original server in 2013, according to The Washington Examiner.

Hillary's email account returns to haunt her.  The controversy over Clinton's use of a private server and email address to carry out State Department business as Secretary of State has been plaguing her for months now.  But the issue resurfaced again after the server was transferred to the FBI, and it became clear it had been wiped clean.  While the evidence looks bad, Clinton's attempts at damage control have only exacerbated the problem.  She has attempted to employ several techniques that worked during her husband's presidency to move past the scandal, but all have fallen flat.

Hillary's e-mail defense is 'total BS': former State Dept. officials.  Former State Department security officials don't buy Hillary Clinton's latest alibi that she couldn't tell that government e-mails — which she improperly, if not illegally, kept for several years on an unsecured home server — contained top-secret information because they lacked official markings and weren't classified until later.  Such messages contain sensitive "keywords" distinguishing them from unclassified information, even if the material didn't bear a classified heading as she claims.  The secretary would have known better, the department officials say, because she was trained to understand the difference when she was "read in" on procedures to ID and handle classified information by diplomatic-security officials in 2009.

If there was no classified material, Clinton wasn't doing her job.  "There is no classified material."  That's how Hillary Clinton put it when asked in March.  To anyone who knows what the secretary of state actually does, this seemed strange, to put it mildly.  Then the Clinton line was:  "I did not send nor receive anything that was classified at the time."  Notice that she is reduced to pleading mere recklessness as a defense against possibly mishandling confidential material.  Well, to begin with, classified material does not need a label to make it so.

Hillary Email Scandal News Roundup, Panicked Liberal Media Edition.  When Hillary Clinton claimed that her use of a private email server was legal, it turns out (///shocked face///) that she was full of bullion. Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, says otherwise according to the mouthpiece of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy known as The New York Times: [...]

Devices from Clinton, aides wiped clean.  Investigations into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server that held classified information – as well as her inner circle's dealings – are being hampered by revelations that their computer devices have been wiped clean or destroyed, despite the Democratic presidential candidate claiming earlier this week she doesn't know "how it works digitally at all."  Clinton's lawyer David Kendall recently told a Senate committee that emails and all other data stored on her computer server were erased before the device was turned over to federal authorities.

A special prosecutor for Hillary's special emails.  When President Obama signed the Obamacare bill into law, Vice President Joe Biden said, sotto voce, "this is a big (expletive deleted) deal."  So it was.  Hillary Clinton's private email system, on which she trafficked in many of the nation's most closely guarded secrets, is just as big.  Start with the purpose for which Mrs. Clinton established the system.  It was to prevent the government — and any historians, journalists and the public — from knowing of and archiving her emails in order for her to evade accountability.  The emails to hdr22@clintonmail.com would only be revealed if she agreed, and whatever corruption — remember the Clinton "pay-to-play" Foundation — would never be revealed.

Email Scandal: 'Born Classified' Emails Destroy Hillary's Plea of Ignorance.  [Scroll down]  "I'm certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material," she said.  But after it became clear that Clinton had at least received classified information, she suddenly became unaware of classification requirements.  "I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified," she said, "which is the way you know whether something is."  Clinton has to say this, because she understands the potential legal ramifications if she knowingly kept classified information on an unsecured, private server.  But like every other claim that she's made since this scandal surfaced, this one is full of holes.

Hillary Clinton's Lawyer Defends Her Use of Personal Email.  Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email account for conducting State Department business followed both federal rules in place at the time and the practice of some of her predecessors, her lawyer says.  The explanation, from Washington, D.C. lawyer David Kendall, comes in a letter sent late Friday to the State Department's undersecretary for management, obtained by NBC News.  "Secretary Clinton's use of personal e-mail was consistent with the practice of other Secretaries of State and was permissible under State Department policy in place during her tenure," Kendall writes.

The deceptions of Hillary Clinton.  Clinton admits deleting 30,000 government emails from her time in office.  She claims they were personal, and that because they were also on a personal server, she was free to destroy them.  Yet, federal law defines emails used during the course of one's work for the federal government as the property of the federal government.  She could have designated which of the government's emails were personal and then asked the government to send them to her and delete them from government servers.  Instead she did the reverse.  She decided which of her emails were governmental and sent them on to the State Department.  Under federal law, that is not a determination she may lawfully make.

NBC News: Democrats Believe Clinton Staffers [are] In Denial About Server Scandal.  The scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton's server and emails (which some are calling wipe-water) continues to frighten fellow Democrats. On Thursday's [8/20/2015] Morning Joe, NBC News reporter (yes that NBC News) Kristen Welker said many Democrats think the Hillary Clinton campaign is "in denial" over the severity of her private email scandal when she continually brushes off the controversy as a media-engineered, partisan witch hunt.

Why did Hillary have to desperately wipe yoga routines and wedding plans?  The FBI is now in possession of Hillary Clinton's private email server.  Let us be clear — she did not "hand" it over as is widely reported.  The FBI took it.  It is suggested that the sever may cough up more than just the emails.  We shall see.  What did she claim was on that server?  What was it she deleted?

Hillary: Prisoner of Her Own Device.  [Scroll down]  The White House for its part is shocked — shocked and appalled! — to hear the former Secretary of State was using her personal account for government business.  For four years they were sending her top-secret information to hrc@clintonmail.com, never once imagining this was not an officially sanctioned government destination. [...] Obama did not trust her enough to keep her informed about cabinet meetings, much less vital intelligence.  Occasionally Michelle sent a recipe for a salad made from garden vegetables.  Then there were those annoying audio clips of Valerie Jarrett singing "I feel the earth move under my feet" and giggling uncontrollably.

The birds circling over Hillary Clinton.  Hillary Clinton may think those creatures making wide, gentle circles over her campaign are bluebirds of happiness, but they're looking more and more like buzzards.  They look hungry. [...] The lady has been saying for weeks that nothing on her email server was classified, and recently she revised and extended that to "nothing was classified at the time it was put it on the server."  Now she revises and extends still further, arguing that the security classifications are confusing and subject to interpretation.  "She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became classified," a spokesman "splains."  This may be the first time in her life that Hillary, who has been called many things, has been called "passive."

Hillary's Denver Server Company Claims To Have No Idea They Had Sensitive Material.  The Washington Post reported that Platte River Networks vice president David DeCamillis told them that his firm won a contract in 2013 to provide the Clintons with IT services.  He said that no one at the company was told about the material's secrecy when they accepted their contract, though they now regret being involved.  "It was an e-mail server, that simple," DeCamillis said.  "We would never have taken it on."

Judge presses State Department to learn more about Clinton's e-mail server.  A federal judge told lawyers for the State Department on Thursday [8/20/2015] that they should "establish a dialogue" with the FBI to learn whether federal records remain on Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mail server.  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan peppered the lawyers with questions about what they are doing to ensure that the department has sought to retrieve public documents from Clinton and her top aides.  At one point Sullivan, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, flatly stated that the questions would have been avoided if Hillary Clinton "had followed government policy" regarding e-mail.

U.S. Said to Probe How Classified Data Got on Hillary Clinton's Server.  U.S. law enforcement officials are investigating how classified material found its way into messages that members of Hillary Clinton's State Department staff sent to her private e-mail address, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the inquiry.  The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an investigation still in its early stages, said there is some indication that Clinton aides drew upon a variety of messages in classified information systems to produce summaries and updates of events in Libya and elsewhere and then sent them to Clinton or her aides using a private server.  The official didn't identify the aides.

Confirmed: Despite Clinton's Claims, Documents on Her Server Were Always Classified.  First, Clinton claimed during a press conference in March that there was "no classified information."  "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.  There is no classified material.  So I'm certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material," Clinton said during the press conference.  Then the story became Clinton never sent or received any information that was marked classified.  "I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified," Clinton said in New Hampshire recently.

Dozens of Clinton emails were classified from the start, U.S. rules suggest.  For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids.  While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as "Classified," it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking.  Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.

Reuters: Hillary Clinton Sent and Received Scores of Emails Containing Information 'Born Classified'.  A review of emails found on Hillary Clinton's private server has revealed dozens of instances in which she sent and received a type of information which is "born classified," according to the government's own rules.  Reuters looked at the classification markings which the State Department has added to emails already released from Clinton's server and found markings which indicate they contain "foreign government information."  That's a type of information relayed by a foreign government in confidence.  Instances of foreign government information identified by Reuters include "privately shared comments by a prime minister, several foreign ministers and a foreign spy chief."

Everything You Need to Know About the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal in Two-and-a-Half Minutes.  The Hillary Clinton private email scandal has been one marked by constant falsehoods uttered by the Democratic frontrunner and the simplest of rebuttals from media reporting.  From saying she neither sent nor received classified material while secretary of state, to promising her server would remain private, to claiming she never received a subpoena, Clinton has constantly misled when she is not joking about it.  The saga of her private server, now under criminal investigation and flagged for potentially having hundreds of classified documents on it, threatens to derail her presidential campaign. [Video clip]

Why Obama is torpedoing Hilary Clinton.  There is only one person who controls Hillary Clinton's fate, and it isn't Hillary Clinton.  Mrs. Clinton is careening toward possible criminal charges involving her alleged mishandling of classified material on her personal email server while she was secretary of State.  And President Obama is driving the bus.

CBS: Clinton's Excuse Doesn't Fly Since Classified Emails Don't Have to Be Stamped That Way.  CBS correspondent Jan Crawford threw cold water Thursday [8/20/2015] on Hillary Clinton's excuse that classified emails that passed through her server weren't marked that way at the time, reporting for CBS This Morning that intelligence officials say that explanation doesn't fly.

Déjà Vu: When Bill Clinton Pardoned His Former CIA Director over Classified Documents on His Home Computer.  Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton insists she did nothing wrong by running all of her government communications, including classified material, through her unsecured, home-brewed computer server.  Perhaps she's forgotten one of her husband's final acts in the Oval Office:  issuing a presidential pardon to former CIA director John Deutch.  Deutch's offense?  Keeping classified material on unsecured home computers.  The pardon came just as Deutch was reportedly going to cop a plea with the Justice Department.  Deutch headed the CIA from May 1995 to December 1996.

State Dept., intelligence community battle over Hillary's emails.  Tensions between the State Department and the intelligence community are mounting as agencies struggle over which of Hillary Clinton's private emails should be classified.  While Clinton's campaign has attempted to capitalize on the disagreements — blaming recent controversy on simple bureaucratic infighting — the dispute has highlighted the volume of sensitive material that circulated on Clinton's server.  The State Department publicly disagreed Wednesday [8/19/2015] with the intelligence community inspector general's assertion that at least two emails contained classified information when they were written.

Hillary Clinton Aide Palmieri on E-Mail: 'She Didn't Really Think It Through'.  When it comes to using a private server for her e-mails when she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton "didn't really think it through," according to her communications director.  "I've encountered this a lot in politics where people think that the answer is a lot more complicated than it really is," Jennifer Palmieri told With All Due Respect co-host John Heilemann in an interview on Wednesday [8/19/2015].

Watchdog: Two National Security Laws Appear Broken in Clinton Email Scandal.  Hillary Clinton and two aides appear to have violated two national security laws by sending classified information on a private email server, according to a former Army counterintelligence agent and investigator for a public interest law group.  Additionally, the two Clinton aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, disregarded a federal judge's order this month requiring both to make sworn statements to the court that all government documents in their possession will be returned to federal officials, said Chris Farrell, director of investigations for Judicial Watch, the law group.  "What we have is a secretary of state, the only cabinet official in our history, who established her own private email server ... in an effort to avoid the normal protocols for unclassified and classified communications.  It's an end run," he said.

Hillary Clinton spox on emails: 'She's actually never gotten one question about it' from voters.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has not gotten a single question on the campaign trail from voters about her private email setup, her campaign's communications director said Wednesday [8/19/2015].  "I think it's worth repeating what Hillary said when she was walking away from the press conference which is the press have a lot of questions about emails, but voters don't, and voters have in her time in New Hampshire and Iowa and doing a lot of town halls, she's actually never gotten one question about it," Jennifer Palmieri said on MSNBC.  "People are asking her [about] questions that affect their lives."

Is Playing Stupid a Good Tactic for a Candidate?  Hillary is just a little too good at playing stupid.  "Wipe?  You mean like with a cloth?" she says in answer to a question about her private email server.  She continued on to declare she doesn't know much about the digital technology involved.  These are curious statements, jests, and admissions for someone seeking the highest office in the land.  Hillary essentially says with these statements that she is technology ignorant.  We are to believe she missed the tech revolution.  Where was she?

Court says Clinton emails broke 'government policy'.  A federal judge said Thursday that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's unique email arrangement violated government policy and prodded the department to talk with the FBI to determine what documents can be recovered from the computer server and flash drives used to store her emails.  Judge Emmet G. Sullivan was surprised that the State Department hadn't made that request and poked at the administration's claim that the FBI needed to be left alone to conduct its investigation.  He gave the agencies 30 days to figure out whether emails can be recovered.

State Department did nothing to protect Clinton emails after hack.  Despite a hack two years ago that publicly exposed Hillary Clinton's emails, the State Department took no action to shore up the security of the former secretary of state's private computer server.  A State Department official said the department could not do anything in response to the March 2013 hack of longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal because it occurred on a non-governmental computer system.  The hacked emails, which included Blumenthal's frequent correspondence with Clinton while she was in office in 2012, were sent by the Romanian hacker to media organizations, which later posted them online.

Clinton Email Scandal: 19 Lame Excuses Can't Wipe It Away.  Hillary Clinton's email scandal has grown into a credible threat to her candidacy.  Worse for her, she continues to offer up a defense filled with contemptible excuses, weak explanations and outlandish dodges. [...] Here are examples of Clinton misdirection resurrected from its glory days of the 1990s.  Some are lame attempts at obfuscation, others are outright lies.

Classified emails from Clinton aides kick-started FBI probe, candidate downplays controversy.  An email from a top Clinton adviser containing classified military intelligence information, and one from a top aide containing classified information about the Benghazi terror attack, were the documents that kick-started the FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified information, Fox News has learned.  The emails, among thousands on Hillary Clinton's personal server, were released to the Benghazi select committee in May and have been widely discussed but Fox News for the first time has identified which Clinton aides sent them and the subject matter.

Is Hillary Clinton Finished?  It was on August 11 that the FBI took possession of Clinton's server hardware and three thumb drives in her lawyer's possession, which are said to contain copies of everything she turned over to the State Department.  In addition, experts say that tens of thousands of emails she deleted may be recoverable.  Which means Mrs. Clinton has now lost control over events, which is precisely what she was trying to ensure when she created her own homebrew computer system in the first place.

Special Operations Vets Call For Kerry To Strip Hillary Of Security Clearance.  A group of special operations veterans and intelligence community officials have formally asked Secretary of State John Kerry to strip former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of her security clearance along with three of her top aides, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.  The organization, called the Special Operations Educational Fund, wrote Kerry August 5 asking that he "immediately suspend the security clearances" because of Clinton's use of a private unsecured email server and domain name that contains classified information.  SOF is a 501(c)4 nonprofit group.

State Dept. Finds 17855 Missing Hillary Clinton Adviser Emails.  More than two years after the State Department claimed there were no emails responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a close Hillary Clinton adviser's contact with the media, the Department has informed a judge it has located 17,855 emails that appear to match the criteria.

Clinton Spox: Asking About Wiping Server Shows There Aren't Many 'Legitimate Questions'.  Clinton campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri stated, "when you get to the point where you're answering questions about wiping servers, that you're nearing the end of legitimate questions for her to answer" on Wednesday's [8/19/2015] "Andrea Mitchell Reports."

State Department Clamps Down on Speaking to Congress or Press.  The State Department has quietly issued a new policy that some insiders view as designed to keep employees from freely speaking to Congress or the press about Benghazi and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email controversy.  The State Department issued 19 pages of revised rules about official clearance for speaking, writing and teaching on July 27.

Judicial Watch: State Department Did Not Provide Secure BlackBerry to Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch announced that the State Department asserts in its most recent filing with the court the State Department did not issue personal computing devices to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and possibly destroyed the Blackberries of her aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills: [...] "The questions just keep popping up.  Every time the State Department tries to justify its stonewalling, one more bit of information arises," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  "If the State Department was not providing secure email devices to Mrs. Clinton, who was?  Best Buy?  Target?  Mrs. Clinton clearly did whatever she wanted, without regard to national security or federal records keeping laws."

State Department: Mills and Abedin official BlackBerrys likely gone.  BlackBerry devices the State Department issued to former Hillary Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin have likely been destroyed or sold off as surplus, a State official said in a court filing Wednesday [8/19/2015].  The secretary of state's information technology office "believes that Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin were each issued BlackBerry devices," State Executive Secretary Joseph Macmanus wrote in a declaration submitted to a federal court in Washington.  The office, referred to as S/ES-IRM in agency parlance, "has not located any such device at the department" and "standard procedure upon return of such devices is to perform a factory reset (which removes any user settings or configurations) and then to reissue the device to another employee, to destroy it, or to excess it," he added.

The Editor says...
That's the first time I've seen excess used as a verb.

State Department destroyed Clinton aides' BlackBerrys.  The State Department destroyed the BlackBerry devices issued to two top aides of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and never issued Mrs. Clinton a device at all, officials told a federal court Wednesday [8/19/2015] in a filing that raises still more security questions.  The filing came a day before officials will have to appear in court to detail the steps they took to try to track down Mrs. Clinton's emails, and whatever computers or other devices she may have used to send them.

Judicial Watch: State Department Did Not Provide Secure BlackBerry to Hillary Clinton.  Judicial Watch announced that the State Department asserts in its most recent filing with the court the State Department did not issue personal computing devices to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and possibly destroyed the Blackberries of her aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills: [...] "The questions just keep popping up.  Every time the State Department tries to justify its stonewalling, one more bit of information arises," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  "If the State Department was not providing secure email devices to Mrs. Clinton, who was?  Best Buy?  Target?  Mrs. Clinton clearly did whatever she wanted, without regard to national security or federal records keeping laws."

State of the Art Security: Hillary's Email Server Kept in the Bathroom Closet of an Apartment.  It turns out that the top diplomatic secrets of the Obama administration and the Hillary State Department were maintained on a home-brew server stashed in the bathroom of an apartment complex.  Which seems perfectly consistent with the quality of governance.

Latest Hillary server sighting: Bathroom in a Colorado loft apartment.  The story is a little involved and confusing, but what Clinton trail isn't?  Hillary's server has reportedly been in the basement of the Clinton home in Chappaqua.  Then, after Hillary was secretary of state, it was in a data center in New Jersey (where the FBI took possession of the wiped server).  However, at some point before that, it sounds like the contents of that server might have been sent to another server located in the bathroom of a Colorado loft apartment out of which a tech company operated at the time.  If the Hillary server story stinks to high heaven, the symbolism couldn't get more spot-on.

Hillary Clinton's email defense...is no defense under the law.  Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, yet she seems oblivious of the law.  Either that, or she well knows she has no viable legal defense, leaving herself little alternative but to conjure one.  Over the weekend, Clinton repeated her claim that she neither received nor sent any emails with information marked "classified."  But how they were marked is irrelevant and immaterial under the law.  Read the statutes (18 USC 1924 and 18 USC 793).  The content of the documents is what counts, not markings.

Federal Judge Moves Up Hearing for Hillary Email Case.  A Washington, D.C., federal judge, perhaps tired of getting the runaround from the Obama State Department, has moved up a hearing with the State Department, originally scheduled for September, to this Thursday, August 20th.  This is the latest development in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, the former deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Law firm representing Hillary has ties to State Dept..  An attorney who worked for the same firm representing Hillary Clinton in the legal battle over her private emails now oversees the State Department's handling of those same emails.  Catherine Duval, formerly of Williams & Connolly, departed the Internal Revenue Service last year for the State Department, where she assumed responsibility for the release of Clinton's emails and for the agency's production of documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of both the select committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he sees similarities between the IRS investigation and the Benghazi investigation.

New Clinton email count: 305 documents with potentially classified information.  More than 300 of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails — or 5.1 percent of those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret information, the State Department reported to a federal court Monday as the political furor continued to grow for the Democratic presidential candidate and her aides.  A top senator has demanded that Mrs. Clinton's attorney detail the steps he used to protect classified information in her emails, which he kept on a flash drive at his office.  ABC News reported this weekend that the Colorado company that helped run her server said there may be a full backup server, which might have many of the messages she said she deleted.

'Her Arrogance Is Breathtaking': Hillary Jokes About Email Scandal.  [Scroll down]  "I worked for the federal government for seven years as U.S. attorney.  It was made clear to all of us when we walked in the door:  official business is done on your official email account," said [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie, adding that when the Clintons get in trouble, they blame others.  He said there is definitely enough information for the FBI to investigate Clinton.

FBI Optimistic It Can Recover Some Data From Clinton Server.  The FBI may be able to recover at least some data from Hillary Clinton's private email server even though there was an attempt to wipe it, two sources with direct knowledge of the process told NBC News on Tuesday [8/18/2015].  The FBI is investigating the security of Clinton's personal server and the thumb drives that contain emails related to her work as secretary of state during President Barack Obama's first term.  The Clinton campaign has previously acknowledged that there was an attempt to wipe the server before it was turned over last week to the FBI.  The FBI "will try to figure what's there, how it got there and who put it there," one of the sources said.

Federal Judge Grants Early Hearing for Hillary Email Case.  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding the recent court order granting Judicial Watch's request for a hearing this week, on Thursday, August 20, 2015 at 12:00 p.m., which had previously been scheduled for September:  ["]The Obama administration's obstruction of the courts and our Freedom of Information Act litigation must end.  The court and the American people are weary of their legal gamesmanship.  We are fighting for the public's right to know what Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin and others were sending and receiving during their four years running the State Department.["]

Hillary Clinton Turns Over Server; Problems Just Beginning.  The investigation is being handled by the FBI and is considered a criminal investigation, according to sources in the Department of Justice.  In fact, though such cases are customarily handled by one of the many field offices around the country, the Clinton case is being handled out of the Hoover Building.  It is highly unusual for a case like this to handled at FBI headquarters, but then again, this is an unusual case.

Classified Clinton emails grow to 305.  Intelligence experts have raised the number of Hillary Clinton's emails they think contain classified information to 305, State Department officials admitted in court filings Monday [8/17/2015].  Those emails have been handed off to other agencies for further review as the intelligence community and the State Department together struggle to meet court-ordered deadlines for the production of Clinton's records.

Clinton Aides Conducted Official Government Business on Personal Email.  Hillary Clinton's top aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills have become key figures in the rapidly expanding Clinton email scandal.  They figure prominently in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.  U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan has issued a series of rulings instructing the State Department to certify that Clinton, Abedin, and Mills have turned over all subpoena-responsive documents, under penalty of perjury.

Is the Hillary email scandal Watergate all over again?  The reporter who broke the Watergate scandal wide open, Bob Woodward, says the Hillary email scandal reminds him of Nixon's drawn out battle over the White House tapes 40 years ago.  Just a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton seemed unstoppable:  a shoo-in to win the Democratic nomination, and favored to win the presidency.  Now there is open speculation that her candidacy is in trouble, and that she could be held criminally liable for mishandling highly classified documents — a crime that has sent lesser-known people to jail.

Hillary Says 'With a Cloth or Something?' When Asked If She Wiped Server.  Hillary was asked if she tried to wipe the entire server so there would be no personal or work emails on it.  She answered, "Well, my personal emails are my personal business, right? [..."] She was asked again if she tried to wipe the whole server, to which Clinton said, "I have no idea, that's why we turned it over — ."  Asked again, she answered, "What, like with a cloth or something?"  She further maintained that she doesn't know how the server "works digitally at all."

Clinton pulls plug on testy presser over server questions.  A visibly aggravated Clinton repeatedly insisted that she had done nothing wrong, and seemed frustrated at questions about the issue.  "What I did was legally permitted, number one, first and foremost," she said Tuesday [8/18/2015].  "We turned everything that was work related, every single thing."  She added that in "retrospect" it had not turned out to be convenient to have the private server during her years as secretary of State.

State Department Accused Of 'Incompetence' After It 'Finds' 81,000 Clinton Aide Emails.  The State Department says it has more than 81,000 state.gov emails from a top Clinton aide at the State Department despite the agency's past claims that it did not have such records.  The discrepancy, which has led to accusations that the State Department is either "lying" or "incompetent," is laid out in the agency's Aug. 13 response in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Gawker.

State Dept. Finds 17,855 Missing Hillary Clinton Adviser Emails.  More than two years after the State Department claimed there were no emails responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a close Hillary Clinton adviser's contact with the media, the Department has informed a judge it has located 17,855 emails that appear to match the criteria.

Ex-officials prosecuted for mishandling gov't info see 'double standard' in Clinton case.  Ex-officials who were prosecuted and had their lives upended for allegedly mishandling sensitive records are accusing the Obama administration of a "double-standard" in its approach to the Hillary Clinton email scandal.  This administration has charged more people under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law once used to go after major breaches, than any other in history.  While the FBI is looking into Clinton's server amid revelations of state secrets potentially passing through it, some critics — including those charged under that act — doubt the Democratic presidential candidate will get the same treatment.

Key lawmaker asks Clinton's attorney to say how he kept her emails secure.  The State Department and the intelligence community are now reviewing 305 emails sent or received by Hillary Clinton to determine whether they contain classified information, potentially deepening concerns over the former secretary of state's handing of sensitive information.  The examination identified the 305 emails from among 6,100 of her emails from a personal account and routed through the private server in her New York house, according to a document filed by the State Department in response to a lawsuit about the emails Monday [8/17/2015].

State Department Finds Thousands of Philippe Reines Emails It Claimed Did Not Exist.  Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive defender of Hillary Clinton.  Over two years ago, the department claimed that "no records responsive to your request were located" — a baffling assertion, given Reines' well-documented correspondence with journalists.  Late last week, however, the State Department came up with a very different answer:  It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to Gawker's request.

Hillarymail 'Chain of Custody' Request May Lead To Indictments.  Department of State officials refused to identify to a congressional committee the "chain of custody" — the complete list of people who had access to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation's investigation.  The request was made last spring by the House Select Committee on Benghazi probing the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered.  The chain of custody evidence is essential to determining if Clinton or people close to her violated federal laws on handling of classified materials.

Hillary as comedienne.  Hillary Clinton dismisses her email troubles as a joke — she was having a high old time with it in Iowa the other day — but there's no evidence that the FBI agents assigned to her case are laughing.  Joking about your transgressions while an FBI team is examining your life and times is not smart.  The investigators assigned to her case are said to be the same agents who handled the investigation of Gen. David Petraeus.  They got an indictment, forcing a plea bargain, and he broke far fewer laws, and less serious laws at that, than Hillary, both as the secretary of State and as a collector of family boodle since.

Probe of Clinton's server could find more than just emails.  Now that federal investigators have Hillary Rodham Clinton's homebrew email server, they could examine files on her machine that would be more revelatory than the emails themselves.

"You Think We're That Stupid?"  The almost unbelievable tale of Hillary Clinton's private email/server used for her official State Department business is fraught with loose ends.  While we struggle to keep up with developments, America Rising has put together the video [in this article] giving us a fair take on the story so far.  [Video clip]

The real email question: Did Hillary Clinton sell US secrets?  While the media is focusing your attention on the shiny object that is her email server, the real story is not being told.  The circumstantial evidence indicates that Hillary Clinton, or members of her inner circle with her connivance, purloined highly classified US intelligence and either sold it, traded it, or used it for personal gain.  This is not a conspiracy theory and it is not hyperbole.

Gowdy: Hillary's email server shows high 'level of concealment'.  Hillary Clinton finally surrendering her server "validates" the House Select Committee on Benghazi's March request that she do, and the fact that she scrubbed it clean first shows "a higher level of concealment," committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said Sunday [8/16/2015]. [...] "So your viewers have to ask themselves to what lengths would they go to delete a yoga email," said Gowdy on "Fox News Sunday."  "Would they call in forensic experts to triple wash a server so they could get rid of bridesmaids' emails or yoga practice emails?  Of course not."

Wanna See How Afraid Hillary Is Of The Email Scandal?  Remember, if not for the Benghazi investigation, we would likely never have known about that server and Mrs. Clinton's illegal use of top secret information.  Team Clinton destroyed evidence, wiped the server (the one she now boasts she handed over only after months of saying she would never do so) and if current rumors are true, appears to have been caught willfully destroying yet more evidence long after she was legally obligated to turn it over.

Hillary's Emails Were Backed Up On Another Server.  Tens of thousands of emails once housed on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's private computer server were moved to another device after a Colorado company took possession of the device in 2013, leaving open the possibility that copies of messages Clinton later chose to delete might still exist.  The FBI seized the server this week in a stunning move, signaling a new intensity in the investigation into whether Clinton knowingly send or received top-secret classified information through her private address while she was America's top diplomat.

Backup Server would be very bad news for Hillary.  [Scroll down]  If it turns out that not all potentially federal records were turned over, and if there is evidence that Hillary knew that representation to be false at the time of the Declaration, Hillary may face a perjury prosecution, or more likely because of the lower level of proof needed, obstruction of justice.  In fact, depending on how the evidence turns out once the "Second Server" is examined, the Feds could plausibly claim that the entire private server and deletion scenario was an attempt to obstruct justice.  So the Second Server, or backup database, could prove to be a major legal headache for Hillary.

Huma Abedin Facing Investigation for Her Role in Hillary's Email Scandal.  Earlier this week, it was announced that at least two "top secret" documents were present on Clinton's server.  Then, on Monday [8/10/2015], it was revealed in federal court that Abedin also used an account on Clinton's email server for matters related to her position at the State Department — a very unusual occurrence for any federal employee.

State Dept. confirms Clinton aides had other unreported email accounts.  Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's top aides, used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to a State Department email and an account on the controversial server Mrs. Clinton kept at her New York home, the State Department confirmed to a federal court Friday [8/14/2015].  The State Department admitted to the judge that it doesn't have control over those documents, and can't be sure it has all of the records from their time in the administration.

Vegas: Even Odds That Aides Huma Abedin or Chery Mills Removed TOP SECRET Classification Markings (a Felony) from Hillary's Emails.  In a public forum today, Hillary says that she never sent or received material that was marked classified.  Yet, my friends, Top Secret information was discovered among her various illegal email accounts, which makes clear that someone intentionally removed the TS/SI/TK/NOFORN classification markers.

Number of Hillary Clinton's emails flagged for classified data grows to 60 as review continues.  While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Hillary Rodham Clinton's personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.  That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said.  The process is expected to take months.

Hero Marine Nailed for Secret Email: What Did He Do That Hillary Didn't?  No matter how much classified material is found in her personal email server, Hillary Clinton will no doubt continue campaigning to become our next president.  Meanwhile, a decorated Marine officer who has deployed four times faces being discharged from the corps he loves because he used his personal email to send a single classified report as an urgent warning when lives were at stake.

Understanding just how serious Hillary's server problem really is.  Will Hillary Clinton survive this e-mail scandal criminally and politically?  It is tough for me to see how, given the revelation that she had retained on her private server e-mails containing classified information.  This is all dripping out slowly — the worst possible thing for Hillary.  Her trustworthiness rating in the polls is already Nixonian and it will only continue to drop as more information — or more stonewalling — comes to light.  And rightfully so.  Every single word Hillary has said about her email system has turned out to be likely false, demonstrably false, or ridiculous spin.

Hillary in the "let's laugh about it" stage of campaign grieving.  [I]n a completely contrived attempt to make light of the situation, Hillary's handlers had her joke about how she just opened a Snapchat account and loves it because the messages disappear on their own.  Get it?  Disappear on their own.  Laugh, laugh.  Oh, this is all just such a big joke.  Nothing to see here, move along.  You all will get over it because I'm Hillary.

Hillary Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda Followed the Law.  Ah, yes, the endless second-guessing to which poor Hillary is subjected!  And it's about ancient history, too, when she was Secretary of State.  Who can remember back that far?  Well, for starters, Hillary shoulda, coulda, woulda obeyed the law, specifically 18 USC § 1924, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to one year in prison, to "remove[] [documents or materials containing classified information] without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location."  Hillary also shoulda, coulda, woulda obeyed State Department policy, which required official email correspondence to be conducted using the Department's accounts on the Department's servers.

CNN National Security Analyst Unloads On Hillary Over Email Scandal.  Hillary Clinton's email scandal should disqualify her from the Oval Office.  At least so says former CIA operative and CNN national security analyst Bob Baer, who is not known for being a political partisan. [...] "Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet I'd get fired the same day, escorted to the door and gone for good — and probably charged with mishandling classified information," Baer said.

Hillary Clinton needs a miracle to save her.  Hardly a day goes by without more developments in her e-mail scandal and the damage is reaching red-alert levels.  The words "criminal probe" that she fought so hard against when The New York Times broke the investigation story are now routine, as are mentions of the FBI and the "home brew" server at the center of it all.  The drip-drip-drip of new details, combined with the chance that there will be a bombshell revelation, are taking a toll on supporters.  There is open talk about Democrats abandoning ship and the hunt for substitutes is picking up steam.

You Don't Have (Hillary's) Mail.  This week we learned the following:  [#1] There was some highly classified secret information in her emails — even in those very few she turned over that had not been scrubbed or tampered with by her and her staff. [...] [#2] Hillary Clinton tampered with even those emails she turned over to the Department of Justice. [...] [#3] Hillary's coterie may have stripped the "secret" classifications from the few emails she did turn over.

Prosecutor Who Took Down Petraeus on Classified Information Now Looking Into Clinton Server.  According to the Washington Post, the same prosecutor who took down General David Petraeus for improper possession of classified information is now looking into Hillary Clinton's email server.  Earlier this week, an intelligence Inspector General revealed Clinton did in fact have at least four pieces of top secret, classified information passed through and stored on her private email server.

Hillary Email Scandal Requires A Special Prosecutor.  [Scroll down]  The inspector general for the federal government's 17 spy agencies this week noted two of 40 random emails of the 30,000 that Clinton has handed over contained what it called "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information." [...] If the 2-in-40 ratio for top secret to nontop-secret emails holds up, investigators could find as many as 1,500 secrets made available to prying eyes on Hillary's private email server.  That's a massive potential breach of national security.

Hillary Clinton emails included very secret satellite images.  [Scroll down]  NBC News already reported all top national security and trade officials had their private emails targeted.  Which means the hackers could have figured out a way to penetrate her private email, or the private emails of one of her top subordinates.  Remember, the released Clinton emails showed the clintonemail.com addresses of both Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin.  But the documents redacted the personal emails of Cheryl Mills, which means it probably wasn't a clintonemail.com address.

The Editor says...
If Hillary's email system was hacked, as so many seem to suspect, perhaps there is an Edward Snowden somewhere with copies he'd like to publish.

How did Hillary's lawyers search a server no longer in her possession.  It's worth noting that at her March 10, 2015, UN press conference, when a reporter noted that some people suggested an independent review of the server, Hillary did not say that she no longer had the original server or that it had been wiped clean.  Instead, she said "the server will remain private."

State Dept. will not search Hillary's server.  State Department officials will not attempt to search the private server Hillary Clinton turned over to the Justice Department Wednesday [8/12/2015], court documents indicate.  "The Department is not currently working with the DOJ, the FBI, or other government agencies to search former Secretary Clinton's private email server" for records related to a high-profile Freedom of Information Act case, the agency said in filings Friday.

F.B.I. Tracking Path of Classified Email From State Dept. to Hillary Clinton.  To track how the information flowed, agents will try to gain access to the email accounts of many State Department officials who worked there while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the officials said.  State Department employees apparently circulated the emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and some were ultimately forwarded to Mrs. Clinton.  They were not marked as classified, the State Department has said, and it is unclear whether its employees knew the origin of the information.

State Dept. confirms Clinton aides had other unreported email accounts.  Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's top aides, used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to a State Department email and an account on the controversial server Mrs. Clinton kept at her New York home, the State Department confirmed to a federal court Friday [8/14/2015].  The State Department admitted to the judge that it doesn't have control over those documents, and can't be sure it has all of the records from their time in the administration.

Why Hillary's Wiping Her E-mail Server Clean Matters More than It Might Seem.  Hillary's homebrew server has been wiped blank.  Long live Hillary's hosted server.

FBI Said to Examine Whether Hillary Clinton E-Mail Was Backed Up.  The FBI is seeking to determine whether data from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server may still exist elsewhere, a U.S. official said.  After acquiring the server on Wednesday, agents are attempting to determine whether e-mails may have been backed up on another machine, said the official, who asked for anonymity.  The official said it's one of the next logical steps in the agency's investigation into whether the former secretary of state's private e-mail account handled classified information.

A Nugget Buried in the AP's Clinton E-mail Story.  [Scroll down]  Unless they were encrypted to U.S. government standards, "In my opinion there is a 100% chance that all emails sent and received by her, including all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA," said former CIA case officer Jason Matthews, an expert in Russian intelligence.

Hillary's IT Contractor Did Not Have Proper Security Clearance.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton entrusted her email server to an IT firm that was not cleared to handle classified materials, according to the chief spokesman for the Defense Security Service.  The DSS is an arm of the Defense Department and is the only federal agency authorized to approve private sector company access to sensitive or confidential material.

Hillary and Bill vs. the 'Little People'.  Hillary Clinton is under new scrutiny after the revelation that some of the e-mails on her now-infamous private server included information then classified as "top secret."  Her flat denial in March that classified information ever passed through the server was laughable at the time, and it's been proven false now.  But no one expects the Obama administration to punish Hillary the way it has so many "little people" who have mishandled classified data in the course of their government service.

Parsing Clinton: Deflection, Deception, and Untruths.  In addition to skirting federal regulations, Clinton set a precedent that threatens the public memory.  Archiving email on government servers preserves the actions and decision-making of public officials for release under the Freedom of Information Act, for congressional oversight, and for historical research.  Clinton's actions are an assault on the principles of transparency and accountability.  Why is there no explicit prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server?  Because, before Clinton, no public servant had the gall to use one.

Hillary has been playing a shell game with email server.  Like a Times Square hustler with three walnut shells and a pea, Hillary Clinton has been playing a game of misdirection with her email server.  No, it wasn't in Chappaqua; it was in New Jersey, although not dumped in a Meadowlands bog or buried under the goalposts of MetLife Stadium as Jimmy Hoffa was sometimes reckoned to have been.  Actually, it was in the hands of a company, Platte River Networks, that has been sued for "illegally accessing" a master database of phone numbers and "stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers".  And these dodgy tech wizards are said to have turned over to the FBI a server that now is "blank."

Influential people worldwide wrote Clinton on her personal email address.  Many people said they were surprised when it was revealed in the spring that Clinton relied on a private email account on a private server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home to conduct official business during her four years as Obama's secretary of state.  But the review of emails shows influential people in Washington and around the globe not only knew she used a personal account, but corresponded with her on that personal account.

The Editor says...
It's a vast left-wing conspiracy:  Plenty of "influential people" knew about the private email server, surely some must have known it was improper, yet nobody blew the whistle.

Federal Judge Orders State Department to Report on Status of Hillary Email Server by Friday.  The invaluable investigators at Judicial Watch continue to perform the Congressional oversight duties that Darrell Issa, Trey Gowdy, John Boehner, and the rest of the feckless GOP leadership hacks refuse to do.  That is, actually see some tangible results related to the serial perfidy of Hillary Clinton and the entire Obama administration.

Tech company which maintained Hillary's secret server was sued for 'illegally accessing' database and 'stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers'.  The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House.  Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers.  It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government.

The Annals of Corruption.  Hillary Clinton is a scandalous candidate for president of the United States.  Most people acknowledge this, at least judging by her plummeting poll numbers.  A raft of stories gives the distinct impression that she and her husband have been running an elaborate pay-to-play operation.  Donations to the Clinton Foundation may have produced favorable State Department policies dealing with Russia-owned U.S. uranium deposits, Haitian relief efforts, and foreign banking interests.  Her use of a personal email server while at the State Department, moreover, strongly suggests she has something to hide.

Top secret Clinton emails include drone talk.  The two emails on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that an auditor deemed "top secret" include a discussion of a news article detailing a U.S. drone operation and a separate conversation that could point back to highly classified material in an improper manner or merely reflect information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told The Associated Press.

Classified data found on emails in May; Clinton camp slow to protect secrets.  [Scroll down]  As federal investigators have been told previously, the server is no longer active and had been erased of all data, the officials said.  Clinton turned over all of her official emails to the State Department on Dec. 5, 2012.  She said at a news conference in March that she simultaneously deleted more than 31,000 of personal emails.  Clinton did not receive a federal directive to retain the emails until early March, the officials said.

Intelligence community wants Clinton's security clearance suspended.  Security experts say that if Hillary Rodham Clinton retained her government security clearance when she left the State Department, as is normal practice, it should be suspended now that it is known her unprotected private email server contained top secret material.  "Standard procedure is that when there is evidence of a security breach, the clearance of the individual is suspended in many, but not all, cases," said retired Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who was deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the George W. Bush administration.  "This rises to the level of requiring a suspension."

Dems near Clinton panic mode.  Democrats are worried that the furor surrounding Hillary Clinton's private email server will be prolonged and intensified after her sudden move to hand it over to the FBI.  The Clinton campaign's decision to give up the server and a thumb drive containing backup copies of emails left Democrats scratching their heads as to why the former secretary of State had resisted for months turning over the server.  Coupled with new polls that suggest Clinton is vulnerable, Democrats are nearing full-on panic mode.

Dems start to worry about the Clinton email scandal.  In interviews Thursday [8/13/2015], Democrats based in Washington insisted that their faith that Clinton would win the party's 2016 nomination and be elected president hasn't been shaken.  But when a campaign holds an emergency conference call with party insiders and media surrogates to quell nerves and offer messaging guidance, as Team Clinton did late Tuesday evening, people are bound to worry that a situation dismissed as Republican shenanigans might be worse than feared.

Hillary's emails contained secret CIA intelligence and satellite info — as panic hits Democrats.  At least two classified messages on Hillary Clinton's home-brew email server contained top-secret intelligence including signal intercepts and information from keyhole satellite conducted by the CIA and the Pentagon's satellite-spying National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Scandal Exposes Hillary's Disregard For Security.  Thanks to the State Department's release of Hillary Clinton emails, we now know she was more interested in how to permanently delete her emails than in protecting highly classified national security secrets.

The Countless Crimes of Hillary Clinton: Special Prosecutor Needed Now.  After years of holding herself above the law, telling lie after lie, and months of flat-out obstruction, HIllary Clinton has finally produced to the FBI her server and three thumb drives.  Apparently, the server has been professionally wiped clean of any useable information, and the thumb drives contain only what she selectively culled.  Myriad criminal offenses apply to this conduct.

Hillary Wanted a Book With Advice About How To Delete Emails That "Stay Deleted".  Now why in the world would Hillary Clinton want a book about how to permanently delete emails?  According to a new report from ABC's Jon Karl, the former Secretary of State requested a book about how to delete email before leaving her position in early 2013.

Hillary's Private Emails: The Vise Slowly Tightens.  The political class is seriously underestimating the impact of Hillary Clinton's email controversy.  They see it mainly as a problem of public opinion and electoral politics, where it has been increasingly costly but not yet fatal.  The political damage — the drip, drip, drip of revelations — has been bad, but there is worse to come.  Hillary Clinton's big problem now is legal, and it could well be insurmountable politically.  Here's why.  Once a "political" issue finally moves into the legal system, as the Clinton email server has, it moves forward with an independent logic.  That logic will slowly ensnare Secretary Clinton.

Official: Clinton 'inner circle' may have stripped email classification markings.  The latest revelations about top secret information traversing Hillary Clinton's private email server have triggered accusations that someone in her "inner circle" likely stripped the classification markings, illegally.  The claims come after the Clinton campaign stuck to the argument that the Democratic presidential candidate, while secretary of state, never dealt with emails that were "marked" classified at the time.  "Hillary only used her personal account for unclassified email.  No information in her emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them," campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri said in a statement to supporters Wednesday [8/12/2015].

"Morning Joe" Panel In State Of Crisis Over Clinton Email Server Spin.  "Morning Joe" runs down the latest details of the quickly developing Hillary Clinton private server scandal.  "Mika, please, we all knew this moment was coming six months ago," says a glum Chuck Todd.  "At some point the server was going to end up in the hands of somebody.  And why they made it have to be dragged out of them instead of giving it willingly.  This is going to do nothing to help her politically."  "If the FBI is looking into your handling of emails, it is bad news, you can't spin that.  The FBI wanted your server and now it is blank."

Hillary Clinton finally gives up her email server. But why now?  Despite several attempted and ultimately unsuccessful campaign launches to re-introduce herself to Americans who grew tired of her years ago, Clinton's favorability and trust numbers are seriously declining.  Tuesday [8/11/2015] came disheartening new poll results that New Hampshire's uppity voters have dramatically shifted their Democrat allegiances since March and now favor what's-his-name, the ancient socialist from next-door Vermont.  That's got to sting to fall behind a Mr. Magoo.

Hillary Clinton's Server Was In New Jersey This Whole Time. It's Blank Now.  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's mysterious email server has been in a private data center in New Jersey since 2013, that is, until the IT company the former secretary of state hired to maintain the hardware handed the "blank" device over to the FBI Wednesday [8/12/2015].  Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, informed the Department of State in a letter Wednesday that the company hired to manage and maintain the server, Denver-based Platte River Networks, was turning it over to the Department of Justice.  Kendall also told State he handed over three thumb drives that contained Clinton's emails.

Hillary Clinton Hands Over Private Email Server to Justice Department.  Hillary Clinton has turned over her private email server to the Department of Justice, the Clinton campaign confirmed to ABC News.  Barbara Wells, a lawyer for Platte River Networks, the technology company that has managed Clinton's email server since 2013, said the company turned the server over to the FBI Wednesday afternoon [8/12/2015] at a New Jersey facility.  She said the server was handed over voluntarily, under an agreement between Platte River and Clinton's presidential campaign, with no subpoena.

Judge orders Clinton to preserve all records; she misses deadline to certify compliance.  A federal judge ordered the State Department on Thursday [8/13/2015] to work with the FBI to try to get access to the 32,000 emails former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said were personal and that she didn't return to the government, as the courts get more deeply involved in her email practices.  One judge is trying to decide how the government is going about determining what classified information is included in Mrs. Clinton's messages, while another is exploring the email practices of Mrs. Clinton's top aides, as the State Department deals with a backlog of requests for her communications, which she only recently returned to the administration.

Tips on Deleting Emails From Email Book Hillary Clinton Wanted to Read.  [Scroll down]  The copy that ABC downloaded for $9.99 had some interesting revelations.  Take, for example, Chapter Six: "The Email That Can Land You In Jail."  The chapter includes a section entitled "How to Delete Something So It Stays Deleted."  "Some people are hoarders, some are checkers," the authors write.  "The main thing to consider is that once you do decide to delete, it's like taking the garbage from your kitchen and putting it in your hallway.  It's still there."

Boehner, Gowdy tout victory on Hillary's email server.  As Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign attempted to frame the decision to relinquish control of her private email server Tuesday as an act of cooperation, House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Trey Gowdy highlighted the five months of congressional requests for the server she previously ignored.  Boehner released a video Thursday [8/13/2015] in which he ticked through a few of the dozens of instances he and Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, called on Clinton to hand over the server.

FBI Gets Thumb Drives of Hillary Emails, Including "Top Secret" Ones.  After going through her pinky-promise under threat of perjury, Hillary Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall, has turned over two thumb drives containing her emails to the FBI, according to an anonymous official.

FBI Seizes Hillary Emails; Revelations of TOP SECRET emails.  First Hillary said there was no classified information contained within her emails; then the narrative changed to there was nothing classified "at the time" it was on her email server; which later evolved to there was nothing "labeled" as classified when her communications were exclusively on her personal email system.  Now it is revealed that TOP SECRET classified information was contained in her communication.

The Truth is Catching Up With Hillary.  The FBI investigation of the handling of classified information on Hillary's personal e-mail account, which she used for all her government business while serving as Secretary of State, is underway.  Her campaign announced on August 11th that she has directed her aides at long last to turn over to federal investigators her private server and a thumb drive containing copies of her e-mails.  Hillary's campaign is trying to portray her decision as evidence of her cooperative spirit.  This is utter nonsense, considering that she has refused to turn over her server for months to any independent third party.

Hillary is following the Clinton Scandal Playbook in email criminal investigation.  The skill set of the Clintons includes mastery of handling scandals, because, as the saying goes, "Practice makes perfect."  Bimbo eruptions, shady commodities trades, dodgy land deals — ever since the earliest days in Arkansas politics, the Clintons have developed expertise in delaying, distracting, denying, evading, expunging, lying, intimidating, impugning, and otherwise minimizing the impact of their unethical and illegal activities.

Clinton campaign says email server to go to Justice Dept.  Hillary Rodham Clinton relented Tuesday [8/11/2015] to months of demands she relinquish the personal email server she used while secretary of state, directing the device be given to the Justice Department.

Hillary Clinton and the Perks of Being Powerful.  From the Associated Press, a headline for the ages: "Clinton Relents, Gives up Possession of Private E-mail Server."  "Relents" isn't quite the right word, of course.  A better way of putting it would be, "runs out of options."  Since the news first broke, Hillary has run and she has run and she has run, and now the men with guns have caught up with her. [...] What was once casually derided as so much partisan hype has matured into a full-fledged criminal investigation.

Cover-Up: Major Newspapers Keep Hillary's E-Mails Off the Front Page.  Four of the country's largest newspapers on Wednesday [8/12/2015] kept the latest developments in Hillary Clinton's growing E-mail scandal off the front page (one kept it out of the paper completely).  The revelation that the Democratic candidate had top secret information on her server was relegated to the bottom of page A13 in the New York Times.  The Washington Post managed to place the news that Clinton will finally turn over her server on A2.  The Los Angeles Times hid the story on A9.  All of these newspapers, however, did better than USA Today, which completely skipped Clinton's scandal in the print edition.

Cloak and Dagger Again.  Hillary Clinton's website argues the material may not have been classified at the time she mailed; or if it was, the fact was unknown to her.  The former is unlikely, since information from these sources would have been classified at origination.  It was Kryptonite from the get-go.  The more plausible claim is "Hillary didn't know" what it was. [...] However, Charles Cooke writing in the National Review argues that Hillary's ignorance would be no excuse, quoting the relevant statues themselves.  "Under 18 USC 793(f)(1)-(2), it is a felony to transmit classified information on the subject of national defense through unapproved channels".  He adds, "legally speaking, however, her intentions are wholly and utterly irrelevant.  In this area of federal law, the standard isn't intent, it's negligence."

Is Hillary above the Law?  Hillary Clinton is in trouble.  Or more accurately put, she should be in trouble — very big trouble, in fact.  The latest from the Department of Justice is that, yes, they have seized Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and an accompanying thumb drive.  The FBI has reportedly confiscated copies of the same e-mails from Hillary's lawyer because it deemed the information contained in them too sensitive for him to keep.

Hillary Clinton emails contained signal intelligence from spy satellites.  The revelation that Hillary Rodham Clinton's private emails contained sensitive information derived from spy satellites and signal intelligence undercuts her defense that she had no reason to believe she was dealing with classified information, security experts say.  "If she is so ignorant that she doesn't recognize that this type of information in the email as being classified, it just calls into question her overall competence," Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst trained in the rules of handling government secrets, told The Washington Times.

All data gone from Hillary Clinton's email server.  All data from Hillary Clinton e-mail server and thumbdrive are gone due to a transfer error.  I'm no tech specialist or anything, but I've never lost data due to a 'transfer error.'  In fact, I've been able to get data back after a hard drive failure with free utilities available all around the Internet.

The Editor says...
Lois Lerner accidentally lost all her emails at the most convenient moment, and now Hillary Clinton accidentally loses hers.  What amazing coincidences!  If "transfer errors" could destroy data at both ends of the transfer, the internet wouldn't work at all.

Report: Hillary Aide REMOVED 'Top Secret' Markings Upping The Ante To A FELONY.  A Hillary Clinton insider must have tampered with 'Top Secret' documents by removing the markings that identified those documents as 'Top Secret', which would be a felony.  Judge Napolitano explains:  [Video clip]  Hillary's inner circle has someone who is covering up for Hillary or they are tampering with the email classification to send it to Hillary's private server.  The intelligence community stripping the markings is unlikely.  This leaves the felons to be Hillary or her circle.  As it seems, the noose is tightening on Hillary.  Or maybe its Huma Abedin, the Muslim Brotherhood agent?  The snow is melting and all the crap laying under is quickly being revealed.

Did Bill Clinton's Aides Access Hillary's Server?  It's not just Hillary's email practices that are under serious investigation.  The Inspector General for the State Department has confirmed that Hillary's top aides are also being scrutinized for how they used emails.  "Our review is not just focused on Secretary Clinton," the Inspector General's office said.  "We will follow the facts wherever they lead, to include former aides and associates, as appropriate."  Although no specific aides were disclosed, the review likely includes Hillary diehards Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan, and Philippe Reines.

Hillary's Private E-Mail Server Contains Exactly what we Thought it would.  The ongoing scandal involving the contents of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server appears to have gotten too big for even our government to ignore.  For months, conservatives have been saying she used her private e-mail server for official business during her time as Secretary of State, including the possible transmission of classified material.  The Clinton campaign, Democrats across the nation, and her allies in the media have denied it for months, but now that she has turned her server over to the FBI, it appears that we on the Right have been vindicated.

Emails May Show Hillary's Connection To The Muslim Brotherhood via Huma Abedin.  Fox News reported tonight that Hillary Clinton may have had several different private email addresses she used that were all on her private email server.  They got this information on the multiple email addresses from a professional hacker that used a tool to comb through public information found in major search engines.

Really Hillary? One Of Her Secret, Illegal E-Mail Addresses Was mau_suit.  This clears up something I've been wondering for the last 10-15 years:  Hillary isn't dressing like an extra on Star Trek, she's dressing like Mao!  She just doesn't know how to spell it.

Lady Justice will never catch up to a presidential-bound Madam Clinton.  Only the hopelessly gullible would believe that Hillary Clinton has volunteered to willingly surrender her private email server to "authorities".  Mainstream media reporting the latest on the Hillary email controversy would have been far more honest and accurate had they reported that Clinton handed over her private email server only after all it contained had been scrubbed, scoured, whitewashed and edited.  Hillary would NEVER have turned over to authorities anything that would implicate her signature cunning and dishonesty.

Hillary Clinton's Al Capone moment?  [Scroll down]  So is this for real — is Hillary Clinton in some legal peril?  There are a couple of reasons to believe this is the case.  First, the investigation is being handled by the FBI, headed by widely-respected director James Comey.  He has no reason to slow-walk an investigation or look the other way.  Nor does he have an incentive to refrain from forensic investigation and, if need be, reconstruction of the server's deleted e-mails.  The last thing he or the FBI wants is the allegation that they helped Clinton cover her tracks.  Second, high level officials including Gen. (Ret.) David Petraeus and another former CIA director John Deutch were investigated for improper handling of classified materials.

Hillary Clinton's top-secret sins.  The news that Hillary Clinton is finally turning over her private e-mail server to the FBI isn't even the most serious part of the scandal — because three bigger issues stand out.  [#1] The intelligence community inspector general says her private server held "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information" — one of the highest levels of classification.  Improper handling of such info violates federal law. [...] [#2] Clinton said she'd had her server wiped clean.  If so, it now seems she was destroying evidence of her own illicit activity.  The FBI will see if she truly erased everything.

State Dept. accused of stiff-arming intel watchdog over Hillary emails.  Top U.S. intelligence officials are running out of patience with the State Department's reluctance to turn over emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server, which have already been shown to have included top secret communications, Fox News has learned.  The Intelligence Community's Inspector General has requested some 30,000 emails from Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State in order to conduct its own review.  Those emails are in possession of the State Department, which has been gradually releasing them to the public.

FBI Is Moving Quickly and Hillary Is One Email Away From Prison.  Out of 40 emails reviewed by the Inspector General, 4 of them or 10% had classified information on them.  Generally, 10% is a statistically significant sample and it indicates there are probably a lot more.  This is supported by information from the State Department.  The top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committee were notified last week that the extent of classified information on Mrs. Clinton's private email server was likely far more extensive than the four emails publicly acknowledged last week as containing some sensitive spy agency secrets.

Gowdy: Clinton email bombshell a 'serious national security issue'.  "Secretary Clinton's decision to prioritize her own convenience — and desire for control — over the security of our country's intelligence should concern all people of good conscience," Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said late Tuesday [8/11/2015].  "This is a serious national security issue, and the seriousness of it should transcend normal, partisan politics."

Hillary Clinton protected herself and left America exposed.  It turns out that Hillary Clinton's email scandal could in fact get worse.  It was known already that Clinton had sent at least seven emails through her unsecured private system containing information that is classified or was at the time.  (There could be many more still undiscovered.)  But on Tuesday night [8/11/2015], Senate investigators revealed that two of these contained information that is "Top Secret."  The FBI is finally taking control of her server, and her candidacy is on the precipice.

Hillary Clinton email probe turns to Huma.  The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday [8/10/2015] told a federal judge that [Huma] Abedin — long considered her boss's keeper and even dubbed her "shadow" — had her own email account on Clinton's now infamous home-brewed server, "which was used at times for government business," Clinton acknowledged.  That's an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department.

The Spy Satellite Secrets in Hillary's Emails.  After months of denials and delaying actions, Hillary Clinton has decided to turn over her private email server to the Department of Justice.  As this controversy has grown since the spring, Clinton and her campaign operatives have repeatedly denied that she had placed classified information in her personal email while serving as Secretary of State during President Obama's first term.  ("I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received," she said last month.)  Her team also denied that she would ever hand over her server to investigators.  Now both those assertions have been overturned.

Turmoil mounts surrounding Clinton emails.  Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign on Wednesday sought to dismiss criticism that her decision to give the FBI her private email server suggested any admission of wrongdoing.  The vigorous pushback came as the server's handover dominated the news cycle and the State Department's inspector general vowed to "follow the facts wherever they lead."

Clinton Scandal: The Emails She Wanted To Hide.  That sound of panic screeching across the country Tuesday night [8/11/2015] emanated from the Hillary Clinton campaign headquarters after the media broke the story that two emails on Clinton's private account had "top secret" information.  It's material that's "more sensitive than previously known," McClatchy News reported.  This revelation takes the scandal to a whole new level, and it makes us ask again:  How long can Clinton stay in the race?

Exclusive: Sources Say Clinton Campaign Lying in Email Cover-Up.  The Hillary Clinton campaign is pushing outright falsehoods as it attempts to defend itself against its private-email scandal, according to a top-level source and an inspector general memo.  A high-level government source familiar with the investigation spoke to Breitbart News on condition of anonymity, telling us the inspector general for the intelligence community confirms that some of Clinton's emails were "classified when originated."

The Queen of Paradox and Her Crumbling Stone Wall.  [Scroll down]  Where do I start?  How about with the Clinton campaign's ridiculous suggestion that coughing up the server and email were voluntary acts.  We know that's bunk — because Clinton herself said she wouldn't surrender the people's records without a fight.  "The server will remain private," she said in March.  Her attorney told Congress at the time that there was "no basis" to support a third-party examination of the server.  Besides, he said, the server had been scrubbed. "There are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary of State Clinton's tenure on the server for any review, even if such a review were appropriate or legally authorized," attorney David Kendall wrote Congress.  It's safe to assume two things changed Clinton's mind:  political and legal pressure.  First, the public's trust and approval of the Democratic front-runner has plummeted amid revelations that she established an email system that violated federal policy, thwarted congressional oversight, and skirted the Freedom of Information Act.

Email scandal is just 'nonsense' to Hillary.  Congress is investigating her emails, the FBI is involved and top-secret data may have been compromised, but to Hillary Clinton it's all "nonsense."  That's the message Clinton's campaign sent to supporters today [8/12/2015] in response to the latest developments in the email mess ensnaring the Democratic presidential frontrunner.

Clinton Campaign Tries To Calm Supporters About Email Scandal.  The Hillary Clinton campaign is seeking to downplay the bombshell news that emails maintained on the private server she used as secretary of state contained Top Secret information and that she has turned over the server to the Justice Department to help with its investigation into the matter.  "You might hear some news over the next few days about Hillary Clinton's emails," writes Clinton's communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, in an email to supporters.  "There's a lot of misinformation, so bear with us; the truth matters on this."

Hillary, Huma and Cheryl Mills Blow Off Court-Appointed Deadline.  Amidst the hubbub about last week's Republican candidates' debate, the media seems to have ignored a development of potentially far more enduring impact on the coming presidential election.  On Friday [8/7/2015], Hillary Clinton and two top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedein, missed a court-ordered deadline arising from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch.  Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan required the three to produce all government records in their possession and describe their use of Hillary Clinton's email server to conduct government business.

White House: China's been hacking our emails since, oh, around the time Hillary began using her own insecure email server.  Completely unexpected news o' the day:  it would appear that Red China's cyber-warriors have been hacking sensitive White House, State Department, and related diplomatic emails since — you guessed it — Hillary Clinton began operating her own private email server to conduct official government business.

Hillary Clinton's empty excuses on e-mailing classified info.  It's important to put the questions about Clinton's personal storage of government emails into the same context in which they are viewed by national-security professionals.  Clinton's spokesperson vehemently and repeatedly claimed that press reports about her emails were "false."  However, the most troubling allegation — that the emails on Clinton's personal server were found to contain classified information — was not specifically refuted.  Probably because it's not "false."

FBI Seizes Hillary Clinton's 'Top Secret' Emails.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is now in possession of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails from her tenure as Secretary of State.  Seven emails are currently being reviewed by an inter-governmental agency, led by the FBI, to determine whether or not they are classified.  The two "Top Secret" emails were classified as top secret by the CIA, according to information circulated by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Why Did Taxpayers Foot The Bill For Maintaining Hillary's Private Server?  According to Hillary, her private emails server contained over 30,000 personal emails that she sent and received while Secretary of State.  Hillary described them as covering her daughter's wedding, mother's funeral, family vacations, and yoga tips.  She says they had absolutely nothing to do with State Department business.  So why did the State Department hire a former member of her political staff to maintain the server?  Why were taxpayers charged for her private business?  The server also held an additional 30,000 emails that were official public records that she deliberately kept out of the State Department email system.

Two "Top Secret" e-mails found on Hillary's private e-mail server; Update: FBI has Hillary's e-mail archives.  [Scroll down]  McClatchy's looser with its language there than I'd prefer given the stakes.  I think they mean that "top secret" messages were found on the server, which hosted not just Hillary's private e-mail account but accounts used by some of her top cronies, including Huma Abedin.  Finding a "top secret" e-mail in Hillary's own account would be more damning than finding it elsewhere on the server since it would mean she was knowingly trafficking in top-secret info.

Hillary Clinton to give her private email server to Justice.  Hillary Clinton agreed to turn over her private email server to authorities on Tuesday [8/11/2015], the same day an intelligence community inspector general told congressional committees that at least five emails from the server did contain classified information.  The decision to hand over the server, as well as a thumb drive of all her work-related emails to the Justice Department, represents an effort to blunt an expanding probe into her use of a private email account.

Clinton giving up server amid concerns about classified data.  Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign casts her decision to turn over her personal email server to the Justice Department as cooperating with investigators.

[The] FBI Should Not Be 'Investigating [the] Security' of Clinton['s] Server — It Should Be Seizing Clinton['s] ServerPolitico's Josh Gerstein reports that the FBI is "investigating the security of classified emails formerly stored on Hillary Clinton's private server," which now are apparently also "maintained on a thumb drive by Clinton's personal attorney, David Kendall."  The issue, however, is not whether Mrs. Clinton made good security arrangements for her private system, or whether the private thumb-drive Mr. Kendall is reportedly maintaining is secure.  The issue is whether the Clinton server system or Kendall's law firm are authorized government storage facilities for national defense information.  Obviously, they are not; if the government had authorized them as storage facilities, there would be no reason for the FBI to be investigating their security precautions.

Why Hillary Supports the Iran Deal.  Hillary Clinton doesn't stand for much of anything anymore other than the most conventional left pabulum.  She doesn't answer questions and she won't debate.  But she has doubled-down in favor of Obama's Iran deal: [... because] Hillary Clinton is in such deep legal trouble over her emails that she needs the backing of Obama to survive.

State Dept. to fall short of Clinton email production again in August.  State Department officials will not publish the required number of Hillary Clinton's emails at the end of August, marking the second month in a row that the agency has failed to meet a court-ordered benchmark for the production of the records.  Although a judge laid out a schedule for the agency with specific milestones for the State Department to meet each month, officials said they were unable to meet the July milestone due to the burden of screening the records for classified information.

Colorado Company Visited as Part of FBI Investigation into Hillary Clinton emails.  Tasked with digging into the security of Hillary's home brewed email server, the FBI investigation into presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is expanding it's [sic] reach.  A local CBS News affiliate reports the Denver based Platte River Networks received a visit from the FBI last week regarding former Secretary Clinton's email.  Platte River Networks handled the Clinton's email accounts though there's been no public explanation as to what that entailed.

FBI finally takes Hillary's thumb drives from her lawyer.  Hillary Clinton has finally agreed to turn over her personal email server to the government.  As RNC Chairman Reince Priebus says:  "All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options."  In related news, Clinton's attorney David Kendall turned over to the FBI three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.  He did so after the FBI determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails.

White House: China's been hacking our emails since, oh, around the time Hillary began using her own insecure email server.  Completely unexpected news o' the day:  it would appear that Red China's cyber-warriors have been hacking sensitive White House, State Department, and related diplomatic emails since — you guessed it — Hillary Clinton began operating her own private email server to conduct official government business. [...] In fact, a wide variety of cybersecurity experts had claimed that it was a virtual certainty that Clinton's private email server had been hacked by China, Russia, and Iran.

'Top Secret' emails found as Clinton probe expands to key aides.  As pressure builds on Hillary Clinton to explain her official use of personal email while serving as secretary of state, she faced new complications Tuesday [8/11/2015].  It was disclosed her top aides are being drawn into a burgeoning federal inquiry and that two emails on her private account have been classified as "Top Secret."  The inspector general for the Intelligence Community notified senior members of Congress that two of four classified emails discovered on the server Clinton maintained at her New York home contained material deemed to be in one of the highest security classifications — more sensitive than previously known.

The Editor says...
Yes, "more sensitive than previously known," but certainly not more sensitive than previously suspected, otherwise why would she conduct her business through her own email system?

Hillary Clinton Signs Court Statement That She's Turned Over All State Dept. Emails.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says in a sworn statement submitted to a federal judge on Monday [8//10/2015] that she has turned over all emails reflecting official government business.

Federal Judge Issues Emergency Order Blocking Cheryl Mills From Deleting Emails.  A federal judge has intervened to block Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department, from deleting any emails in her possession after her attorney informed the State Department last week that she had instructed her client to do so.  U.S. District Court judge Emmet Sullivan issued the order late Friday in response to an urgent request from the watchdog group Judicial Watch, which is suing the State Department over its failure to produce records related to a special work arrangement granted to Huma Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff at State.

Clinton Email Scandal: Cheryl Mills To Judge — Drop Dead.  Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills has brazenly threatened to violate a court order and delete State Department emails.  What role would she play in a Hillary Clinton administration?  Investigation obstructor in chief?

Hillary Clinton's e-mails: The 'old news' keeps getting worse.  The investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private account for official e-mails has just taken a significant turn:  The FBI is now actively looking into the security of her secret home server.  It also wants to know what her lawyer is doing to protect the thumb drive he's holding — a drive holding copies of tens of thousands of her e-mails.  Clinton's lawyer and campaign dismissed this revelation as old news, but a federal source with knowledge of the probe told The [New York] Post's Jamie Schram and Laura Italiano it could "lead to criminal violations."

Clinton certifies she has turned over work-related emails.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has told a federal judge that she has turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department after she was ordered to certify that she had done so, a state department spokesman confirmed to CNN on Sunday [8/9/2015].

Yes, the FBI's Investigation of Hillary's Emails is Definitely a 'Criminal Probe'.  "It's definitely a criminal probe," an unnamed source says in regards to the FBI investigation into whether Hillary Clinton knowingly sent classified information through personal email.  "I'm not sure why they're not calling it a criminal probe," the source adds.  The Clinton camp, in the meantime, downplays this.

State Dept. blames classified info for Clinton email delays.  The State Department says all of the potential secret information in former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails has knocked them off pace, and told a federal judge late Friday that's why they are currently in violation of his orders.  John F. Hackett, the top open-records officer for the department, said the government belatedly realized all of the potentially classified information in Mrs. Clinton's communications and, prodded by two watchdogs, realized they needed to be running her emails by intelligence officers to make sure they weren't giving out secrets.

More twists and turns in Hillary's email saga.  On Friday [8/7/2015], things began heating up again in the legal proceedings regarding Hillary Clinton's emails. Readers will recall the Judge Emmet Sullivan, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., had ordered the State Department to ask Clinton, her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and her former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to personally vouch that they'd turned over all records responsive to a Freedom of Information Act request that Judicial Watch filed seeking information on Abedin's employment arrangements.

Clinton Email Scandal: Turn Loose The Investigations.  A handful of Republican congressional chairman are reportedly "itching to investigate" Hillary Clinton.  It appears that they're just waiting on permission from their leadership.  There's no reason to wait longer.

Cheryl Mills to erase Hillary emails.  The attorney for a top aide to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state has informed a federal judge presiding over FOIA requests from Judicial Watch related to Huma Abedin's employment status that she will destroy electronic communications not already handed over.  "Ms. Mills does not believe that she has paper copies of potential records in her possession.  Following our production on August 10, 2015 [of the defense counsel's version of the electronic records], we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic records in her possession," said the attorney.

Cheryl Mills to Destroy EMails About Boss Hillary Clinton.  In a letter sent to the U.S. State Department and just filed today with U.S. federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the counsel for Cheryl Mills wrote:  "Ms. Mills does not believe that she has paper copies of potential records in her possession.  Following our production on August 10, 2015 [of the defense counsel's version of the electronic records], we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic records in her possession."  That is a far stretch from a statement by Ms. Mills under penalty of perjury, and she and her lawyers are planning to delete the emails Judge Sullivan wants produced?  Judicial Watch has made an emergency filing in Judge Sullivan's court to stop the further destruction of evidence of what may very well be assorted criminal conduct and violations of numerous federal laws.

The FBI and Justice Department Let the Clinton Camp Hold on to Classified E-mails.  When a bank gets robbed, is it now the Justice Department's practice to let the suspect hold on to the money while the FBI does its investigation?  According to the Washington Examiner, the Justice Department has still not seized the Clinton server and at least one thumb-drive copy of its contents even though government officials have conceded that national-defense secrets are stored on them.  Former secretary of state Clinton apparently still has the server, while the thumb drive is reportedly in the possession of her private lawyer, David Kendall.

Citizens United Renews Call for Special Counsel in Clinton Email Case.  This investigation is the first step in determining if Hillary Clinton compromised our national security by running her State Department emails through a private server in her New York home.

Judge asked to seize USB flash drive containing Hillary Clinton's email.  A federal judge is being asked to seize the USB flash drive that holds copies of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private emails.  Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman on Wednesday [8/5/2015] filed a motion to have a judge take control of the flash drive, which is being held by David Kendall, Clinton's lawyer, as part of his ongoing racketeering lawsuit against the Democratic presidential frontrunner.  "This court has a responsibility to preserve evidence and must do so to avoid its destruction," Klayman wrote in the new motion.  "Importantly, plaintiff has not requested to see the documents, hard and thumb drives at this time, but simply asked that this court take them into its custody for safekeeping."

Intelligence watchdog was denied access to Clinton emails.  Hillary Clinton's attorney has been allowed to keep emails now known to be classified, but the inspector general of the intelligence community was denied access to the same emails upon request, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday [8/5/2015].  "The counsel for former Secretary Clinton advised the department at the time that [the cache of emails] was subject to a separate document request" from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Mark Toner, State Department spokesman.  Toner said the intelligence community inspector general's request was denied on "jurisdictional" grounds.

FBI investigation of Hillary's emails is 'criminal probe'.  The FBI investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's unsecured email account is not just a fact-finding venture — it's a criminal probe, sources told The [New York] Post on Wednesday [8/5/2015].  The feds are investigating to what extent Clinton relied on her home server and other private devices to send and store classified documents, according to a federal source with knowledge of the inquiry.  "It's definitely a criminal probe," said the source.  "I'm not sure why they're not calling it a criminal probe.

Why a Criminal Prosecution of Hillary Clinton Might Not Happen.  Will the presumptive Democratic nominee face criminal prosecution? The answer is not a simple one, despite the apparent gravity of Clinton's actions.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch must first agree to open a full-scale investigation, and the DOJ must then find evidence of Clinton's criminal intent in order to prosecute.  National-security lawyers say the decision to charge Clinton would depend largely on whether the offending documents were actually marked "classified."  But given the Justice Department's history of foot-dragging in cases involving high-level government officials mishandling classified documents, Clinton may well avoid a criminal investigation altogether — much less a prosecution.

Report: FBI Investigation of Hillary Email is "Criminal Investigation".  The Clintonian parseltongue continues.  First she said "there was never anything classified on her private email server".  Then she said there was never anything "classified at the time" it was on her email server.  Now she claims there was never anything with "classified written on it", at the time it was on her private email server.  The Clinton's could debate the verbiage on a stop sign.

Former Intel Officials Call for Revocation of Clinton's Security Privileges.  A group of former special operations forces and intelligence community members are calling on the State Department to revoke "any and all security clearances" still held by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her confidants in the wake of revelations Clinton used a private email server to transfer classified information.  OPSEC, an advocacy group comprised of former intelligence and security officials, petitioned Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday to revoke classified privileges for Clinton, as well as her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, her former deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, and her top adviser Huma Abedin, according to a copy of the letter.

Clinton Email Scandal: People Need To Know If She's A Crook.  The Clintons became convinced many decades ago that they are above the law.  Nothing has persuaded them otherwise, not even that pesky impeachment of Bill.  Hillary's use of a personal email account powered by a private server while she was secretary of state, however, might be her undoing.  And we haven't even mentioned the Benghazi scandal, and the investigation into that terrorist attack, which led to the uncovering of the private server.  That alone should be enough to bring down Clinton's presidential ambitions.  The server is believed to have been installed at the Clintons' Chappaqua, N.Y., home for use in Hillary's 2008 presidential run.  She said she used it as secretary of state for the convenience of being able to do her State Department business on a single cellphone.  Here we'll add what she won't:  The private account also looked like a way for Clinton to conduct government business in secret — or so she thought.

FBI looking into the security of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail setup.  The FBI has begun looking into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton's private e-mail setup, contacting in the past week a Denver-based technology firm that helped manage the unusual system, according to two government officials.  Also last week, the FBI contacted Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall, with questions about the security of a thumb drive in his possession that contains copies of work e-mails Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state.  The FBI's interest in Clinton's e-mail system comes after the intelligence community's inspector general referred the issue to the Justice Department in July.

New documents suggest Clinton's email server may have crashed.  An email conversation between a top Hillary Clinton aide and a Clinton Foundation executive suggests the private server that Clinton and her staff used to communicate may have malfunctioned at least once during her tenure.  Huma Abedin, Clinton's then-deputy chief of staff, complained that her private email was "down" the evening of Oct. 9 and into Oct. 10, 2012, according to an email chain obtained by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act.

Has the Justice Department Seized Hillary's Server? If Not, Why Not?  We now know for certain what I argued was a virtual certainty back in March:  Hillary Clinton and her top aides illegally maintained and communicated classified information on Mrs. Clinton's private e-mail system.  One pressing question now is:  Has the government — preferably the Justice Department and the FBI — taken possession of the Clinton private server?  If not, why not?  Recall that rather than providing the government with her server(s) or, at the very least, with a readily searchable electronic download of all government-related information on her private system, Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers provided the government with "hard" (paper) copies of e-mails she unilaterally selected and decided to provide to the government.  What was inevitable has now been confirmed:  Those e-mails contained classified information, almost certainly lots of it.

Clinton email security breaches worry officials.  Hillary Rodham Clinton's email narrative had finally seemed to run its course as a top news story when Washington was entering the dog days of summer.  Then, from of all places, her former place of employment — the State Department — suddenly injected new life into the scandal on July 1 by announcing that a significant number of her private stash of emails contained classified information.

Hillary Clinton's Sandy Berger problem.  The Clinton e-mail scandal reached a new level of seriousness when the intelligence community inspector general found classified information from five intelligence agencies in e-mails housed on Clinton's private server.  It is against the law to remove classified information from government facilities and retain it after you have left office and have no official reason to possess it.  Just ask Sandy Berger.  In 2003, Bill Clinton's former national security adviser was caught removing five classified documents from a secure reading room at the National Archives, as he prepared to testify before the 9/11 commission.

Clinton's Email Scandal Gets Worse In One Hot Afternoon.  This is a candidate who cannot be trusted, cannot be believed — and should not be elected.

Calls mount for Hillary Clinton criminal investigation amid email data breach fears.  With U.S. intelligence officials scrambling to contain damage from potentially hundreds of spy agency secrets in Hillary Rodham Clinton's private emails, questions are mounting over why the Justice Department has not yet opened a criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential front-runner for mishandling a mountain of classified information.

Hillary Clinton's email woes will worsen.  The Hillary Clinton campaign has been engaged in a major spat with the New York Times.  On July 23, the paper published a story reporting that inspectors general at the State Department and the intelligence community had issued a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding her handling of classified information while serving as Secretary of State.

The Hillary Email Scandal Just Saw Its 'Most Significant Legal Development To Date.  A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides at the State Department, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they have turned over all official government records in their possession.  U.S. District Court judge Emmett Sullivan issued the bombshell ruling late Friday [7/31/2015], hours after the State Department released its second batch of Clinton emails.  The ruling was issued in the matter of a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department.

Newly-released Hillary Clinton emails show her concern about...email.  The State Department on Friday [7/31/2015] released 1,356 of Hillary Clinton's emails from her tenure as secretary of state, in its continued effort to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.  The emails date back to 2009, Clinton's first year in the Obama administration.  While most of the emails released Friday [7/31/2015] were of little significance, one casual email showed that Clinton may have had concerns about her electronic communications.

Clinton email release falls well short of judge's order.  The State Department admitted it was violating a judge's order Friday [7/31/2015] in releasing only 1,356 new emails from former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's time in the administration, with officials saying they're falling behind because they are having to run all of the documents by intelligence agencies to make sure classified documents aren't being released.  It's the latest stumble for a department put on the spot by Mrs. Clinton's unique email set-up, which saw her reject a State Department account and instead issue herself a private account, kept on a server she maintained at her New York home — raising questions about security and compliance with open-records laws.

Judge Sullivan is not amused.  It's hard to keep up with the news bearing on Madam Hillary's use of a private email account/server during her tenure as Secretary of State.

Federal Judge Slaps Hillary and Huma With Full Disclosure Demands.  Today [7/31/2015] U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the U.S. State Department to request that Hillary Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession, return any other government records immediately, and describe their use of Hillary Clinton's email server to conduct government business.  The court issued the ruling late today after holding a status hearing in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuit that sought records about Huma Abedin, the former Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).  The lawsuit reopened last month because of revelations about Hillary Clinton's email records.

Emails Show Top Hillary Aide Complaining That Clinton Email Account Wasn't Working.  A 2012 email exchange in which Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin complains that her Clinton email account was down raises new questions about the national security implications of Clinton's private email server arrangement.  Citizens United obtained the Oct. 10, 2012, emails between Abedin and Stephanie Streett, the executive director of the Clinton Foundation.  Citizens United has filed several lawsuits for emails from Clinton and several of her top aides.  The conservative watchdog group is trying to find out whether Clinton used her position as secretary of state to help the Clinton Foundation or any of its donors.  In one email sent from her official State Department account, Abedin complains to Streett that her Clinton email account was not working.

Email Scandal: Bad Day For Clinton A Good Day For U.S..  Friday [7/31/2015] had to be an extraordinarily trying day for the Democratic front-runner.  On the same day she releases a letter from her doctor saying she is fit to run for president, the latest tranche of emails showed that she is not fit to hold office.  Even before the 2,000 pages containing 1,300 emails were dumped, the McClatchy newspaper chain was reporting that classified emails stored on the former secretary of state's private server held "information from five U.S. intelligence agencies."  It also included "material related to the fatal 2012 Benghazi attacks."

Obama heavily redacts latest batch of Hillary Clinton's emails.  The Obama administration slapped a secret designation Friday [7/31/2015] on a number of Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state, raising more questions about whether her controversial email arrangement led to classified information being left unsecured.  A new tranche of Clinton emails, released by the State Department under a court order to impose transparency on the Obama administration, contains dozens of documents with information redacted and labeled either "confidential" or "sensitive."

Hillary Clinton Emails: 1,300 Messages From Private Account Released.  The State Department released a third batch of highly sought after emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's controversial private email account today [7/31/2015].  Posted on the State Department's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) website, the collection includes just over 1,300 emails all dated in 2009.

Hillary's "classified" excuse doesn't wash.  McClatchy reports that the classified emails known to have been stored on the former Secretary of State's private server contained information from five intelligence agencies, and included material related to the fatal 2012 Benghazi attacks.  And this, if I understand correctly, is just from a sample of 40 emails.

U.S. intel preparing for massive breach of classified data in Hillary Clinton emails.  The U.S. intelligence community is bracing for the possibility that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's private email account contains hundreds of revelations of classified information from spy agencies and is taking steps to contain any damage to national security, according to documents and interviews Thursday [7/30/2015].  The top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committee have been notified in recent days that the extent of classified information on Mrs. Clinton's private email server was likely far more extensive than the four emails publicly acknowledged last week as containing some sensitive spy agency secrets.

Judge Blasts State Dept for Clinton Email Delays: 'Even the Least Ambitious Bureaucrat Could Do This'.  A federal judge blasted the State Department during a court hearing Wednesday [7/29/2015] about the government agency's lack of response to Freedom of Information Act requests having to do with documents from Hillary Clinton and her staff.  Politico reported that U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon balked at State's inability to produce about 60 emails demanded in one particular FOIA request, saying, "Now, any person should be able to review that in one day — one day.  Even the least ambitious bureaucrat could do this."  The judge, like Clinton critics, suggested that the government agency is protecting its former secretary of state by failing to produce documents related to her staff.

Is Obama taking Hillary out?  The Clintons and the Obamas have a long history of bad blood, dating to the 2008 primary race.  After Mr. Obama creamed her, he offered her the plum gig of secretary of state.  Friends close, enemies closer.  She tried to get her dirty tricks consigliere, Sidney Blumenthal, a top position in the State Department, which Mr. Obama pointedly denied.  So she hired him anyway through the Clinton Foundation.  Through Mr. Blumenthal, she was fed all kinds of intelligence on global hotpots such as Libya, much of it inaccurate, as she circumvented traditional government communication chains via her private email server.  What was she hiding from Mr. Obama?  And why?  Perhaps because she trusted Mr. Obama about as much as she trusted Bill.

Classified info on Clinton server, thumb drive violation of law, national security lawyer says.  Classified emails on Hillary Clinton's personal server, and a back-up copy on a thumb drive held by her lawyer David Kendall, appear to be a violation of the U.S. code governing the unlawful removal and storage of classified information, according to a leading national security lawyer.  "In most situations like this you'd expect that a warrant would be issued and that the Marshals and the feds — FBI, somebody would go and get that thumb drive and take it somewhere where it would be considered safe by the government," said Edward MacMahon Jr., an attorney who has handled major national security cases including the leak investigation of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling.

Hillary Clinton's Emails: 69% Want Special Prosecutor To Investigate.  Fully 69% of those following the Hillary Clinton email scandal want the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to determine whether she mishandled classified information on the private email account she used while secretary of state, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll.  That finding comes just as the State Department released a new batch of Clinton's emails on Friday.  The poll was taken in the wake of recent revelations that some of Clinton's emails contained classified information, despite repeated claims to the contrary by the Democratic presidential candidate.  Two inspectors general asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the matter.

Hillary Clinton's former spokesman turns over 20 boxes of emails.  Long-time Hillary Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines handed the State Department 20 boxes of work-related emails taken in part from a personal email account, State officials said Wednesday [7/29/2015], calling into question the extent to which top aides to the former secretary of state also engaged in controversial email practices.  State Department top document official John Hackett, who heads Freedom of Information Act requests for the agency, told a federal judge in a court hearing Wednesday that Reines was among several officials asked to turn over any any work-related documents in his possession.

Facts in Clinton's 'secret' emails came from five intelligence agencies.  The classified emails stored on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private server contained information from five U.S. intelligence agencies and included material related to the fatal 2012 Benghazi attacks, McClatchy has learned.  Of the five classified emails, the one known to be connected to Benghazi was among 296 emails made public in May by the State Department.  Intelligence community officials have determined it was improperly released.

The Unique Challenges of Vetting Hillary Clinton's Email.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters earlier this year that she chose to use a personal email server for "convenience," opting to carry just one device while she served at the State Department.  But her use of a personal email server for official purposes has been anything but convenient for the agencies charged with reviewing her emails for public release.  The choice has created major headaches for the agencies as they grapple with the issues raised by the situation:  a cabinet-level official with access to wide sources of potentially classified information using her own email server to send and receive messages that by law are eligible for public release under the Freedom of Information Act.

Is a Criminal Probe of Clinton Near?  The U.S. Department of Justice has been asked to open a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information in emails she sent through her unauthorized, insecure private email server.  Whether such a probe, if it happens, will actually accomplish anything is a separate question.  That's because the DoJ is headed by Obama appointee Loretta Lynch who is essentially a carbon copy of her predecessor, the corrupt Eric Holder, a man who was held in contempt by the U.S. House of Representatives and who came close to getting impeached for misconduct in office.

Parsing Clinton: What Is She Hiding?  Let's return to the original sin: Hillary Rodham Clinton violated White House policy, federal rules, and every principle of political common sense by stashing her government email on a home-brewed server.  Her covert and unprecedented actions — she deleted more than half the email and scrubbed the server — thwarted the rights of Congress and the public to review many of those records.  Now for the repeated sin:  Clinton is not being honest with people about what she did and why she did it.  Her most recent comments were legalistic at best, deceptive at worst, and require an experienced Clintonologist to parse them.

The Screws Tighten Around Hillary Clinton.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the inspector general of the intelligence community has found that at least four emails from Hillary's personal account contained information that was classified at the second highest level of secrecy at the time that she sent them.  Uh... I mean "at the time that they were sent."  The IG referred the matter to the FBI's counterintelligence division.  The Justice Department first disclosed that the investigation was criminal in nature, but later it inexplicably reversed itself on that point.  This is interesting because of the timing of the Administration's leak to the New York Times, its favorite stenographer, as it came just days after Hillary went out on a limb and committed herself to supporting the Iran nuke deal.

Clinton's Conspiracy of Secrecy Worthy of Criminal Probe.  [Scroll down]  She's blaming The New York Times, which is as pathetic as it is laughable.  Post-production revisions of online and wire-service stories are standard practice after the parties involve respond.  Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Times reporter Michael Schmidt called the revision minor without detailing it.  Politico's Dylan Byers described the "small but significant changes."  Here's all you need to know:  The Clinton campaign doesn't — and can't — deny the nut of this story.  Two Obama administration inspectors general want an investigation into whether her personal email system contributed to the release of classified information.

Mitchell: No One Can Give Explanation For Clinton's Server Other Than Dodging Inquiries and FOIAs.  MSNBC host and NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell stated that when she spoke to intelligence officials at a security conference, "nobody can give an explanation for why a cabinet secretary would have a private email system other than to thwart inquiries, FOIAs" on Monday's [7/27/2015] broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe."  Mitchell said that it's possible that the impact of Clinton's emails on her campaign has been underestimated.

Obama Administration Officials: Hillary Clinton Lied; Used Personal Email Server to Transmit Classified Documents.  Try and contain your shock, but it turns out that Hillary Clinton blatantly lied to the American people about the use and nature of her illegal, personal email server.  Simply operating her own server to conduct official business was in all likelihood a direct violation of federal statutes; but sending and receiving classified information using personal servers is another set of crimes entirely.  Several Inspectors General in the Obama administration have reviewed a tiny fraction of the Clinton emails and determined that 10 percent were classified SECRET or higher at the time they were transmitted.

Hillary Clinton reiterates she didn't 'knowingly' send or receive classified information using her private email server.  Hillary Clinton said that she never knowingly sent or received classified information using her private email server on Saturday [7/25/2015] in Iowa.  The Democratic presidential candidate also stated that she did not know what messages were being cited by intelligence investigators as examples of emails containing classified information.

Fmr NY Times Sr. Reporter Reams Paper over Hillary Email Story.  On Friday [7/24/2015], the Times push-alerted its readers that the Inspector General was opening up a criminal inquiry into whether Clinton discussed classified information on her private, non-secure server while Secretary of State.  This would have constituted a major development in the email story, which until now Clinton had been weathering, and seriously imperiled the frontrunner's campaign.  But no quickly was it published than it began to crumble, as ranking member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said the documents the Times thought it had obtained were merely FOIA requests.  The Times reworded the post at the Clinton campaign's requests, walking back much of the criminal element of the story, and Clinton's direct involvement in the actions described therein.

Clinton denies sending classified information from private email server.  Hillary Clinton told reporters Saturday [7/25/2015] that she never sent or received classified information using her private e-mail server when she served as secretary of state, and that the facts on the issue "are pretty clear."  The Democratic presidential hopeful spoke briefly about the growing controversy surrounding her use of the server after a Democratic gathering at the Madison County Historical Complex in Iowa.  Reporters raised the issue during a news conference that followed the event.

Hillary's email troubles deepen.  Federal officials on Friday confirmed they have been asked to investigate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of State, deepening the political controversy surrounding the 2016 Democratic front-runner.  Clinton and her team fiercely pushed back at reports that two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to look into whether sensitive information was mishandled in connection with her private account.  "Maybe the heat is getting to everybody," Clinton quipped during an economic address in New York City in which she decried "inaccuracies" in the reports.

Hillary Clinton's Vast Non-Right Wing Problem.  Is Hillary Clinton a criminal, one who broke the law when she decided to homebrew her emails and compromise national security?  That's the question Attorney General Loretta Lynch faces, according to a report in The New York Times.  It seems that Clinton may have stored "hundreds of potentially classified emails" on her personal server in possible violation of the law.  That Clinton's move was stupid and bad politics is beyond doubt.  But even worse, it may have been criminal, according to the two Inspectors General who want a Justice Department investigation into the latest Clintonian escapade.

At this point, it might make a difference.  I take it that we cannot necessarily trust Madam Hillary to take care that confidential national security information is treated with care commensurate with its importance if such treatment conflicts with her personal interests.  In ordinary life, she would be deemed too careless or irresponsible to be entrusted with such information.  You probably already knew that, but this is news: [...]

IG: Clinton's Emails Included 'Classified Information;' 30,000 Emails 'Purported to Have Been Copied' to Thumb Drive in Possession of Her Lawyer.  Four out of a sample of just 40 emails that were on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's personal email server "included IC-derived classified information," according to a memorandum that L. Charles McCullough, III, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, sent yesterday to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and to DNI James Clapper.  Additionally, McCullough said, "we were informed by State FOIA officials that there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton" and that these 30,00 emails "are purported to have been copied to a thumb drive in the possession of former Secretary Clinton's personal counsel, Williams and Connelly attorney David Kendall."

Probe sought into possible 'classified' details in Clinton private e-mails.  The Justice Department said Friday [7/24/2015] that it has been notified of a potential compromise of classified information in connection with the private e-mail account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used while serving as secretary of state.  A Justice official said the department had received a "referral" on the matter, which the inspector general of the intelligence agencies later acknowledged came from him.  The inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, said in a separate statement that he had found information that should have been designated as classified in four e-mails out of a "limited sample" of 40 that his agency reviewed.  As a result, he said, he made the "security referral," acting under a federal law that requires alerting the FBI to any potential compromises of national security information.

Round One.  Something is setting the cat among the pigeons.  The New York Times reported that a "Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account" in connection with the mishandling of classified material.  A reproof from the Clinton campaign caused the New York Times to issue what it called a correction.

Hillary camp rips NY Times, but email story still dogs her.  Hillary Clinton's email mess has been like a low-grade fever that keeps returning in nastier form.  And the problem is she's never taken the cure — by answering all the outstanding questions — as part of her media-averse approach.  Now the Clinton campaign is on the offense against the New York Times, branding its latest story on the controversy "false" and "discredited."

Clinton's Conspiracy of Secrecy Worthy of Criminal Probe.  Post-production revisions of online and wire-service stories are standard practice after the parties involve respond.  Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe, [New York] Times reporter Michael Schmidt called the revision minor without detailing it.  Politico's Dylan Byers described the "small but significant changes."  Here's all you need to know:  The Clinton campaign doesn't — and can't — deny the nut of this story.  Two Obama administration inspectors general want an investigation into whether her personal email system contributed to the release of classified information.

Clinton facing new calls to turn over server after IGs request criminal probe.  Hillary Clinton faced new calls Friday [7/24/2015] to turn over her personal server after key inspectors general asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether classified material was improperly shared on the former secretary of state's account.  In correspondence obtained by Fox News, the inspectors general for the State Department and intelligence community raised deep concerns about the contents of the Democratic presidential candidate's emails.  An initial joint memo sent June 29 to State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy said a review of Clinton's email archive showed "hundreds of potentially classified emails."

Todd: Hillary lost any high ground when she refused to turn over the server.  "Now they've just got to hope nothing is found," NBC's Chuck Todd concludes in this short clip from MSNBC's Morning Joe earlier today [7/24/2015].  The panel discussed the New York Times' report on a request for a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private e-mail system, and the potential fallout from the new revelation that two Inspectors General believe classified material got transmitted through it.  Hillary had a chance to get in front of the story and blew it, Todd states: [...]

Admit it, Dems: Hillary Could Strangle a Puppy on Live TV, and You'd Still Back Her.  At first Clinton claimed that she needed a single non-governmental email account for "convenience," because she only had one phone.  That claim turned out to be provably false.  Next, she claimed that it didn't matter much, because "The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department."  The latter half of that claim turned out to be provably false, too.  She further insisted that none of the emails contained classified information, a claim that many people with intimate knowledge of such things — such as a former senior State Department official — described with phrases like "hard to imagine."  And her assertion in a CNN interview this month that she went "above and beyond" the email disclosure requirements was — wait for it — false.  In sum, the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again.

MSNBC Reporter: Clinton Email Probe Could 'Completely Change the 2016 Contest'.  MSNBC political reporter Alex Seitz-Wald reported that depending on the specifics of the probe into Hillary Clinton's emails sought by State Department investigators, it could have "enormous consequences" on the 2016 presidential race.  "The stakes are incredibly high, but there are still lots of questions to which we still do not have answers.  The Hillary Clinton campaign is saying that Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong, she complied with all requirements in using her private e-mail account... " he told MSNBC host Tamron Hall.

Report: Some Hillary Clinton Emails Were Classified As 'Secret' When She Was At State Department.  Though Hillary Clinton has steadfastly denied she ever handled classified emails as secretary of state, the inspector general for the intelligence community has found at least four of her emails that should have been marked as "secret" — the second-highest classification category — The Wall Street Journal reports.  Clinton's emails "were classified when they were sent and are classified now," Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the intelligence community's inspector general, told The Journal.

WSJ: Despite Denials, Hillary Sent Classified Material Through Private Server.  A few weeks back, we published a post detailing five lies Hillary Clinton and her team have told about her improper use of a totally under-secure, private email server. [...] We also refuted the notion that the White House was unaware that she was using her home-brew server to conduct official business.  It's time to add a sixth major whopper to the list.  Despite repeated and vehement denials to the contrary, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Mrs. Clinton did, in fact, transmit classified materials via her gerry-rigged, insecure email scheme: [...]

Hillary Clinton Comes One Step Closer to a Criminal Investigation.  Hillary Clinton may face a criminal investigation for her use of a private email server for official State Department business.

Bill and Hillary Clinton ordered to give depositions about emails in civil case.  Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have been ordered to give depositions in a civil case investigating the pair's growing email scandal.  Mrs. Clinton will give her deposition on the morning of July 28 in Washington, and Mr. Clinton will give his the following morning, according to copies of the notices of deposition reviewed by The Washington Times.

Hillary's Email Story Unravels.  Clinton scandals have a way of bumping and rolling along to a point where nobody can remember why there was any outrage to begin with.  So in the interest of clarity, let's take the latest news in the Hillary email escapade, and distill it into its basic pieces: [...]

Peter Schweizer: Deleted Hillary Emails Probably Relate to 'Clinton Cash' Transactions.  During a C-SPAN interview on Sunday, July 5th, Clinton Cash author and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer addressed the renewed interest in Hillary Clinton's private email server, saying the scandal "works hand in glove with the issues raised" by his bestselling book.

Hillary Spox: We Don't See The Need To Turnover Email Server.  On Monday's [7/6/2015] broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Hillary Clinton presidential campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri discussed the controversy regarding the Clinton campaign, including roping the media off in an event over the weekend, the state of the Clinton campaign and her Democratic presidential race opponent Bernie Sanders.  Palmieri also discussed the issues involving Clinton's email server and said she didn't see the need for Clinton to turn over the email server from she set up from her time at the State Department.

Hillary Clinton's E-mails Expose Washington's Culture of Duplicity.  "I was there.  I was a senior advisor.  I didn't know that," former White House political advisor David Axelrod said of Hillary Clinton's shadowy private email practices.  He offered that self-defense on June 17 in an unsolicited effort to defend former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who claimed that he was similarly unaware of Clinton's email methods.  "The question is, what are people focused on?  What do they care about?" Axelrod continued.  His implication was that no one will or even should care about Clinton's decision to jeopardize national security in service to her own cherished "convenience" and then lie repeatedly about the affair in a press conference.  Axelrod was no doubt speaking for much of official Washington when he tried to wish Clinton's email scandal away.  Not only is he now implicated in it, it seems as though much of the American political class was well aware of Hillary Clinton's careless and privileged communications practices.

Dozens of Hillary Emails Classified.  Michael Schmidt of the New York Times reported this morning that dozens of Hillary Clinton's emails are now be labeled classified.  Clinton, of course, said that none of her emails were classified.

New Revelations From Hillary Clinton's Latest Emails.  I'm working my way through the latest Clinton email dump and there are several observations that stick out.  Hillary and her crew thought Barack Obama was a clueless amateur; "Journalist" David Broder of the Washington Post apparently allows Clinton ghost writers to pen his columns; disgraced, unindicted criminal Sandy Berger (of the shredded Top Secret Bill Clinton/Bin Laden memos) was a key adviser to Clinton; and, based upon the dozens and dozens of pages of fully redacted material, Granny Catlady was definitely sending and receiving tons of classified information through her compromised email server (which gives the feds the right to seize that box).

Hillary: The More You Know....  E-mails revealed that Blumenthal, who was forbidden employment by the Obama White House, essentially functioned as a State Department employee, advising Clinton about Libya and messaging on crucial issues.  We also reported yesterday [7/1/2015] on the proof that White House aides weren't forthcoming about being aware of Clinton's private e-mail account.  Both Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod were in the know about the e-mail system as far back as 2009.

Emails Show Hillary's State Department Communicating With Google About Blocked Benghazi Video.  Emails among State Department officials show the administration was in contact with Google regarding a blocked YouTube video after President Obama conceded that the Benghazi attack was a preplanned act of terror.  On Sept. 27, 2012, Nora Toiv, a special assistant to the counselor of the Department, sent an email to other State Department officials with the subject line "RE: Google and YouTube."  The email referenced a phone conversation with a person named Sue who assured Toiv a block would remain on an unnamed video at least through Oct. 1, 2012.  "Sue just called back and the block will stay through Monday," Toiv said in the email.  "They will not/not be unblocking it before then."

Latest Batch Of Hillary Clinton Emails Reveals More Lies.  While the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails contains many embarrassments — like her troubles with a fax machine — it also exposes still more deceptions on her part and by those around her.  Clinton might have hoped she put that whole silly email kerfuffle behind her when she deigned to hold a press conference in March to answer questions about all the official email correspondence as secretary of state that took place on her personal account.

Five Lies About Hillary's Secret Emails.  CLAIM [#1]:  After the existence of the "home brew" email server was revealed, Hillary turned over all work-related emails to the State Department from her private server, deleting only personal emails — including missives about "yoga routines," "family vacations," and "planning Chelsea's wedding."  REALITY:  Records prove that among the 30,000-plus emails deleted by Hillary's team were notes regarding Benghazi and other Libya-related policies.  Congressional investigators have no idea what else may have been unilaterally erased without independent supervision.  What we know for certain is that some number of official emails were permanently deleted, not handed over to State, as claimed.

Admission of Hillary's classified emails opens door for feds to seize her servers.  A former senior intelligence official told The Washington Times the policy also requires the government to check other Internet paths her secret information could have taken.  The procedures are spelled out by the National Security Agency's special panel on controlling leaked secrets, called the Committee on National Security Systems.  It published a policy, "Securing Data and Handling Spillage Events," that fits Mrs. Clinton's unauthorized private server kept at her home while she was secretary of state, according to the retired officer's reading of the regulations.

Nothing to See: Stephanopoulos Dismisses New Batch of Hillary E-Mails.  George Stephanopoulos and the crew at Good Morning America on Wednesday did their best to dismiss the latest batch of Hillary Clinton's e-mails to be released, insisting that there are "no bombshells."

Blumenthal's Advice to Hillary 'Unsolicited'? E-mails Suggest Otherwise.  Despite an express ban on his employment by the Obama White House, newly released e-mails show how Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal operated as a shadow State Department employee during the first year of her term as secretary of state, sending her a steady stream of diplomatic memos and media advice even as her staff fretted over his possible discovery.

Hillary Emails Reveal Axelrod Knew About Private Account Despite Past Claims.  Emails released Tuesday [6/30/2015] by the State Department as part of the Hillary Clinton email dump reveal former White House advisor David Axelrod knew the former secretary of state had a private account despite recent claims. [...] According to the latest batch, two email chains show Axelrod did indeed correspond with the then-secretary of state — once in June, 2009 and again in July, 2009.

Axerlrod Said He Wasn't Aware of Hillary's Secret Email, Now Proof He Emailed Her.  Top Obama adviser and architect of his many campaigns, Chicago operative David Axelrod, has for months insisted that he had no idea that Hillary had a secret email account when she was Secretary of State.  Now, in the latest data dump, we find that Axelrod actually emailed Hillary at that very secret email address he claimed he never knew about.

Emails show top officials [were] aware of Clinton's private address.  Senior Obama administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, knew as early as 2009 that Hillary Rodham Clinton was using a private email address for her government correspondence, according to some 3,000 pages of correspondence released by the State Department late Tuesday night [6/30/2015].

A.B. Stoddard: 'Hillary Clinton's Entire Strategy Was to Circumvent the FOIA'.  On America's Newsroom today [6/30/2015], The Hill's A.B. Stoddard absolutely savaged Hillary Clinton for the corrupt manner in which she handled her emails while at State, and predicted that Hillary would have a difficult time persuading skeptical voters that she would make a trustworthy president.  "She not only cherry-picked and left everything she doesn't want anyone to see on the server — the entire strategy was to circumvent the FOIA," AB explained.  "It was very shrewd and very keen and they knew exactly what they were doing.  They didn't even give the State Department the emails that they cherry-picked electronically.  They printed pages so that the State Department wouldn't have to spend another five weeks trying to scan them to a system that could be shared and assessed and read.  This is the most intentional act of keeping government property and then destroying it... "

State Dept. set to produce nearly 4,000 pages of Clinton emails Tuesday.  State Department officials are set to release new emails Tuesday from the 55,000 pages Hillary Clinton provided to the agency in November of last year.  The State Department was forced to begin publishing portions of that batch, which contains roughly 30,000 individual communications, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Vice News.  Vice sued the agency after officials stonewalled its request for all of the records submitted by Clinton and many of those created by three of her top aides: Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines.

Blumenthal gave diplomatic advice to Hillary Clinton as early as 2009, emails show.  Controversial aide Sidney Blumenthal was sending then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advice on sensitive diplomatic matters much earlier than previously known, even as the White House was blocking him from becoming a part of her staff, according to emails released late Tuesday [6/30/2015] by the State Department.  The emails, which make up the first in a number of document dumps of Clinton's private email server, from which she controversially conducted official State Department business, also show that Clinton paid special interest to the attempt to hire Blumenthal.

Hillary Clinton, Get This, Edited the Emails She Turned Over to State.  Another story the media won't discuss.  I saw someone note that altering official federal records — which Hillary's emails are — is a felony. [...] The White House is putting out the word that they're "disgusted" by the email scandal, but this is par for the course for this White House, which tacitly approves of actions but puts out claims about how "angry" they are.  There's a way a president can show his anger about remorseless law-breaking:  Appointing a Special Prosecutor with the power to investigate and bring criminal charges, if warranted.

The latest mystery over Hillary's missing e-mails.  Now this was predictable: The State Department on Thursday said Hillary Clinton failed to turn over 15 work-related e-mails from her private server, despite claiming she'd handed over everything.  Which raises the troubling question:  How many more did she also, uh, "miss"?  Remember, the former secretary of state and her aides had insisted they'd sent the department all her work-related e-mails from her personal server after conducting a "careful" review.  Now it turns out she didn't include 15 of those she'd exchanged with longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal concerning Libya.

Hillary Clinton's missing e-mails may matter after all.  Former prosecutor and chairman of the Benghazi select committee Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has had enough of Hillary Clinton's antics.  That was plain from this exchange on CBS's "Face the Nation."  Host John Dickerson asked about the State Department's admission that she had not turned over all her work e-mails, which Sid Blumenthal provided in his deposition.

Hillary Clinton's missing emails likely to raise new questions.  The State Department cannot find in its records all or part of 15 work-related emails from Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that were released this week by a House panel investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, officials said Thursday [6/25/2015].  The emails all predate the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. diplomatic facility and include scant words written by Clinton herself, the officials said.  They consist of more in a series of would-be intelligence reports passed to her by longtime political confidant Sidney Blumenthal, the officials said.

State received Libya emails Clinton did not disclose.  The State Department has received 15 emails involving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton it did not previously possess, a new report says.  A State official admitted Thursday evening [6/25/2015] that the agency could not previously find the messages from Clinton's tenure as secretary there, according to The New York Times.  It said State discovered it lacked the communications following the House Select Committee on Benghazi's release of roughly 60 emails it had acquired Monday.

State Dept admits Hillary did not turn over all emails; Gowdy calls news 'troubling'.  [Scroll down]  The documents contained an admission that Libya-related emails between Clinton and longtime associate Sidney Blumenthal that Blumenthal turned directly over to the Benghazi committee had not been given by Clinton to the State Department.  The discovery of the emails proved that Clinton, contrary to her public claim, had not turned over all her emails "that could possibly be work related."

[The] State Department Says [it] Can't Locate 15 Hillary Clinton Emails.  Hillary Clinton did not give the U.S. State Department at least 15 emails from her personal server from her time as secretary of state, the department said on Thursday [6/25/2015], undercutting her claim that the 30,000 emails she provided were a complete record.

State Dept. Gets Libya Emails That Hillary Clinton Didn't Hand Over.  The State Department said on Thursday [6/25/2015] that 15 emails sent or received by Hillary Rodham Clinton were missing from records that she has turned over, raising new questions about whether she deleted work-related emails from the private account she used exclusively while in office.  The disclosure appeared to open the door for Republicans on Capitol Hill to get more deeply involved in the issue.  Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who is running for president, said he planned to send a series of questions to the State Department about the missing emails and about why it allowed her to use the personal account.

Missing Clinton emails likely to raise new questions.  The State Department cannot find in its records all or part of 15 work-related emails from Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that were released this week by a House panel investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, officials said.

Looks like Hillary did not give State Dept. all of her work-related emails.  Earlier this month, we learned that Sidney Blumenthal turned over to Trey Gowdy's committee 61 emails in which he corresponded with Hillary Clinton that the State Department hadn't produced in response to a subpoena by the committee for such documents.  The question was:  did State have the documents but fail to produce them to the committee or did State not have the documents because Hillary, who kept them on a private server, didn't give them to State?  The answer, it appears, is "both."

Benghazi panel says Hillary Clinton didn't turn over all Libya emails, despite her claims.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican and the Benghazi panel chairman, said the State Department informed his panel that it did not have in its possession some emails related to Benghazi and Libya that Mrs. Clinton had exchanged with longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal, and which he turned over to the committee.  If true, it suggests that Mrs. Clinton either did not perform a full search, intentionally shielded some messages, or had some other hiccup when she claimed to have belatedly complied with federal law and turned back to the department some 30,000 messages from her time as secretary.

Busted: Hillary Caught Not Turning Over All Work Emails.  The Select Committee on Benghazi is accusing Hillary Clinton of not turning over all her work-related emails.  The committee says it will release the proof later today [6/22/2015].

Hillary Clinton shoots [her]self in foot by talking cybersecurity.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened herself up to fresh attacks from Republicans yesterday over the home server and private email she used for official business, after she admitted top-secret government information was in danger of cyberattacks — saying the State Department was targeted "at least every day."  Clinton, who sat down with WMUR for a rare one-on-one interview that aired yesterday, was responding to a question about the recently revealed suspected Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management that compromised millions of federal employees.

Emails sought of nearly a dozen U.S. State Department workers under Clinton.  The revelations about Clinton's emails have raised questions about the State Department's email practices.  Earlier on Thursday [3/19/2015], U.S. officials said the State Department does not automatically archive the emails of its assistant secretaries of state, contradicting the department's prior public statement.  Gowdy said no decisions had been made in the House of Representatives about when Clinton would be called to testify, either about her email use or about the Benghazi events.

Fox News Alone Covers Hillary's High-Level Private-Server Libya Emails.  2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as seen in [a] March 10 Associated Press report, has claimed for several months that "No Classified Material (was) Sent via Her Personal Emails" from a home-based server she said "would remain private."  That claim, like so many other representations Mrs. Clinton has made, fell apart earlier this week, when, as Fox News reported, it was learned that Mrs. Clinton "used her personal email account to handle high level negotiations in 2011 for a no-fly zone to help topple Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi."  Only Fox considers this a story.

Shock: Hillary Clinton Did Not Turn Over Subpoenaed Benghazi Emails.  We only know this because the Benghazi Committee has subpoenaed Hillary consiglierte (and Clinton Foundation employee, natch) Sidney Bluementhal for his correspondence with Hillary about Benghazi — and, get this, Blumenthal turned over more Hillary emails than State did.  But these emails had been previously subpoenaed — not from Sidney Blumenthal, but from Hillary Clinton.  Or, rather, from State, which had been assumed until recently to have Hillary's emails in their possession.

Hillary Scrubbed Benghazi Emails.  Hillary Clinton scrubbed her Benghazi emails.  That is the logical conclusion drawn by investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson who, while at CBS, fought to break stories exposing the Obama administration's lies on "phony" scandals from Fast and Furious to Benghazi and for her efforts had her computer hacked and monitored, likely by administration operatives concerned by her revelations and curious about her sources.  Attkisson said on NewsmaxTV's "The Steve Malzberg Show" recently that she thought it was a common sense conclusion that Hillary Clinton erased the contents of her personal email server, created and used in violation of the National Records Act and State Department rules, because she would rather "take the heat" from destroying information under subpoena and sought by congressional investigators than suffer the political and possibly criminal consequences of the truth about her Benghazi activities.

Fmr Obama Chief Of Staff: I Had No Idea Hillary Had A Private Server.  President Obama's former chief of staff Bill Daley admitted he had no clue Hillary Clinton had a private e-mail server in her home while he served the president Sunday [6/14/2015] on "Meet The Press."  "Obviously, it was something that I did not know and others didn't, but she followed the rules of the State Department, and we're beyond that," Daley told the radio host Hugh Hewitt.

Bill Clinton contradicts Hillary on email claims.  Bill Clinton appeared Wednesday to contradict his wife's claims about their personal email use, saying he's only sent two emails in his life — despite Hillary Clinton saying some of the private messages on her personal server were from her and her husband.  The former president addressed his very sparing email use at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Denver.  He said the "only time" he got on the Internet was to do "two emails" and order Christmas presents.

Classic Trey Gowdy cross-examination: Does President Obama have a private email server?  The State Department is taking Hillary Clinton's word for it.  That was the message Wednesday [6/3/2015] when a State Department employee testified in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, telling lawmakers she relied on former Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton's assurances that all relevant emails had been turned over, just as they do with all other employees.

Federal officials voiced growing alarm over Clinton's compliance with records laws, documents show.  Over a five-year span, senior officials at the National Archives and Records Administrations (NARA) voiced growing alarm about Hillary Clinton's record-keeping practices as secretary of state, according to internal documents shared with Fox News.  During Clinton's final days in office, Paul Wester, the director of Modern Records Programs at NARA — essentially the agency's chief records custodian — privately emailed five NARA colleagues to confide his fear that Clinton would take her official records with her when she left office, in violation of federal statutes.

House Committee Knows Of Hillary Email Server Whistleblower.  The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently heard new information that could blow the lid off of the Hillary Clinton private email server scandal and shed new light on a consulting job Huma Abedin held while working as Clinton's aide at the State Department.  The Daily Caller learned of a three-hour May 1 meeting two State Department whistleblowers held with the general counsel and staffers for the Oversight Committee, which is led by Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz.

Hillary's top aide with terror ties saw all emails.  A full review of Hillary Clinton's personal emails released last Friday by the State Department finds Clinton's senior aide, Huma Abedin, was exposed to highly sensitive U.S. government information.  It was Abedin who forwarded to Clinton's personal email address details about the initial establishment of the U.S. special mission in Benghazi, updates about security threats to both the mission and Ambassador Chris Stevens, intelligence on the growing terrorist threat in Libya and insider information on the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi.  Abedin was privy to emails that contained the exact movements of Stevens while he was stationed in arguably one of the most dangerous zones in the world for any American diplomat.  WND previously reported on Abedin's personal and family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other to Islamic supremacists.

All of Hillary's Sensitive Emails Were Seen by Huma Abedin and Therefore the Muslim Brotherhood.  Aaron Klein reports on another fascinating chapter in the Clinton Cavalcade of Scandals.

Judicial Watch Files Lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry to Force Action on Clinton Emails.  Judicial Watch announced today [5/28/2015] that it has filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel Secretary Kerry's compliance with the Federal Records Act and challenge "the failure of Defendant Kerry to take any action to recover emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton" and other U.S. Department of State employees unlawfully removed from the agency (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. John F. Kerry (No. 1:15-cv-00785)).  Kerry's predecessor at the State Department, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, conducted official government business using a secret, unsecured email server and email accounts.  Her top aides and advisors also used non-"state.gov" email accounts to conduct official business.

Hillary's Libya Emails.  Hillary Clinton has sought to avoid public scrutiny of her emails since before she was sworn in as secretary of state.  When she did turn over some of her emails to the State Department, it was Clinton and her lawyers who decided which ones they would make available and which they would withhold.  While it might be useful for Clinton defenders to pretend otherwise, there was no expectation that Clinton would voluntarily share incriminating emails, especially now, in the first weeks of her presidential campaign.

If Hillary becomes president, who will make her obey the law?  Last year, before Hillary Clinton's secret email system became publicly known, Congress passed a law to keep presidents from trying the same trick.  If Clinton wins the White House, the law could well be put to the test.  The statute is the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014.  It recognizes that government officials sometimes (or in Clinton's case, all the time) want to use private email accounts — in the words of the law, "non-official electronic messaging accounts" — to conduct government business.  Such communications are still federal records, Congress declared, and must be preserved in accordance with existing laws requiring not just the president but all federal officials to preserve their documents.

Judge rejects State Dept. plan for Clinton emails, sets timetable for release.  A federal judge rejected the Obama administration's latest effort to delay release of some of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails, issuing an order Wednesday [5/27/2015] demanding that the State Department start rolling out the emails on a firm schedule every month.  Judge Rudolph Contreras gave the department until the end of January to complete the production of all 30,000 emails, which means the final messages will be released about the same time Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, prepares to face voters.

GOP Zeroes In On Clinton Aide Huma Abedin Over Email Controversy.  The Republican Party's well-oiled research team led by Indian-American Raj Shah which shoots out sometimes deadly volleys against potential Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is now honing in on one of the former Secretary of State's closest confidants.  Huma Abedin, who is married to former disgraced New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, has been Clinton's right-hand for many years seen by her side on most occasions.  Now Abedin is being accused, along with Clinton, of using unofficial email accounts for communicating with her boss of many years.

Another Reason Why Hillary Clinton Does Not Deserve to be President.  Anti-Hillary Clinton political ads are writing themselves on a weekly basis.  The latest source is this New York Times report that Hillary's private email account contained sensitive information.  The official name for the information is "sensitive but unclassified" (SBU). [...] Considering the fate of Christopher Stevens the following year, it's safe to say that this information was, indeed, sensitive.  And it's safe to say that it should not have been contained in an unsecure email system.

Sliver of Clinton emails hint at lingering political trouble.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email account about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that was later classified "secret" at the request of the FBI, underscoring lingering questions about how responsibly she handled sensitive information on a home server.

8 things we learned from the Clinton emails.  The highly selective trove of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department Friday [5/22/2015] revealed both the seemingly strong influence Sidney Blumenthal wielded over the secretary of state and the preoccupation with media coverage exhibited by her closest aides. [...] The emails show that Clinton's staffers often circulated and debated press clippings amongst themselves and occasionally discussed how to respond to certain media criticisms.  They also provide a narrow glimpse of how the State Department's top ranks operated in the weeks before and after the greatest crisis of Clinton's tenure.

Will anyone step up to challenge Hillary?  I cannot be the only pundit who believes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's reckless disregard for American national security is disqualifying.  This was made manifest in one particular episode of almost unimaginable fecklessness:  her selfish, and at best marginally legal, choice to maintain a non-secure server in her home from which she sent non-secure emails to and fro around the world.  Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell cannot be the only intelligence professional who believes all of that Internet traffic to and from Chez Clinton was compromised, monitored by foe and friend alike.

Hillary Deliberately Caused Delay Of Email Release By Submitting Only Paper Copies.  Hillary Clinton ended her 37-day boycott of the press today when she spent a few minutes claiming she wants her emails released by the State Department ASAP.  But here's the thing:  the only reason that there's been such a long delay is that Hillary deliberately delivered the 550,000 emails in hard copies, instead of in electronic files.  Why does that make a difference?  Because that meant every single one of the 550,000 pages has to be manually scanned.  And, to make it even harder, Hillary made sure that some of the documents were copies on both sides.  That took 5 weeks of 12 people working full time to complete.  And Hillary knew that would create just one more obstacle and cause an enormous delay.

Krauthammer: The release of Hillary's 296 emails is 'a farce'.  "What is being released now, as Gowdy indicates, is stuff that was scrubbed, cleansed and decided upon, chosen by her own people, acting in her own interest rather than as should happen, as the law requires to happen," said Krauthammer. [...] Krauthammer said the media will not find damaging information on Mrs Clinton and she will seem proactive in wanting the emails out in the open, "When people attack her later in the campaign she is going to says 'it's all been released, the press has looked at it, spent weeks and months examining it.  So I'm clean and it's old news."

New Hillary Emails Reveal She Received Sensitive and Now-Classified Info on Her AWOL Private Email.  If anyone else had done what Hillary did, they'd be serving five to 10 in Leavenworth.  Because it would appear that Granny Clinton received now-classified documents on her private email server.

Hillary Discussed Highly Sensitive Information, Now Classified "Secret," on Her Private Email — as We Predicted.  Today [5/22/2015], the State Department released Benghazi-related email from the private server and one of the (at least) two private email accounts on which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conducted official business — recklessly and in violation of laws and guidelines relating to the exchanging and preservation of electronic communications.  Within hours, the Obama administration was forced to concede that at least one of the emails contained classified information.  Mrs. Clinton has previously and dubiously claimed that she did not discuss classified information on her private email account(s).  Despite today's disclosure, she is standing by that claim as, apparently, is the State Department.

FBI reminds us why Hillary's emails matter.  Back in March, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to address revelations that she had conducted all official business as secretary using a private email address housed in a server within her own home.  Among other things, she maintained:  "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email."  At the time, we recognized that this statement seemed carefully parsed and should not be taken at face value. [...] Today [5/22/2015], the AP reports that we were right.  At least one email directly related to the Benghazi attack was indeed sensitive enough to require redaction by the FBI.

Krauthammer: Hillary E-mail Dump Is 'Farce,' We Saw What She Wanted Us to See.  Hundreds of Hillary Clinton's emails were released today [5/22/2015], something Clinton herself said she wants, but Charles Krauthammer doesn't really buy this is some great victory for transparency and disclosure.  "There isn't a shred of evidence," he said, "because she shredded the evidence.  This whole release is a farce."  He pointed out that it's not like every little email Clinton ever sent will be released to the public, only the ones 'scrubbed and cleansed and decided upon, chosen by her own people, acting in her own interest."

Newly Released Emails Cast Doubt on Hillary Clinton's Benghazi Claims.  Newly reported emails indicate Hillary Clinton was personally made aware of security dangers in the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya.  That's according to the House Benghazi Committee, which has obtained 300 long-sought emails from the State Department among tens of thousands under subpoena.

The State Department's In-Kind Contribution to the Clinton Campaign.  The State Department is taking a page directly from the IRS's playbook.  First, you destroy incriminating emails, but don't tell anyone.  Former Top IRS official Lois Lerner and the IRS perfected this as thousands of her emails mysteriously disappeared.  Clinton played that part well, destroying emails on her own private server instead of using the government server, while State Department staffers blocked attempts by the public to obtain public information.  Second, you wait years until the public discovers what you've done.  Third, you deny anything happened to the emails.  Fourth, you cover up.  When that is no longer feasible, you delay, stonewall, obfuscate, and otherwise drag out the process of turning over said emails.

Clinton handled "now-classified" Benghazi info on private server.  More than two months ago, Hillary Clinton told the media at a UN presser that she never accessed classified material through her private e-mail server, which produced considerable skepticism at the time. Secretaries of State access all kinds of classified material — diplomatic cables, intelligence, and military information — and since she didn't use the State Department e-mail system, it seemed unlikely that she was telling the truth.

How the State Department Is Tackling 55,000 Pages of Hillary Clinton Emails.  With voracious campaign reporters and now Hillary Clinton herself demanding to know when her emails will finally be made public, deep within the State Department lies a small factory of workers tasked with the laborious task of sorting, reading, redacting and reviewing paper copies of what now amounts to hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.  The unenviable task falls to the State Department's Office of Information Programs and Services and its lawyers, better known as the FOIA office — which stands for Freedom of Information Act.

Hillary Clinton's Benghazi emails released; Gowdy accuses State Dept. of holding back docs.  Under pressure from a federal judge and from the press, who'd already obtained many of the emails, the State Department on Friday afternoon finally released the first sliver of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails showing her communications concerning Benghazi.  The 296 messages released are a fraction of the 30,000 or so she kept on her private server but which she has now deemed to be public business, and — at the prodding of Congress and the department to live up to her obligations under the law — has now turned over to the administration.

Hillary Clinton on her emails: I want them out, too!  Hillary Clinton and the State Department on Tuesday insisted they are not slow-walking the public release of her emails during her time as secretary of state, while a federal judge ordered up a plan for a rolling release of the hotly anticipated documents.  "Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do," Clinton said to reporters in a rare instance of fielding press questions on the campaign trail.

The Editor says...
Technically, that's true, but let us now parse:  "Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do," Clinton said.  But what that means is nobody has more to lose if these emails ever become public.

I Don't Believe Hillary Clinton.  I don't believe Hillary Rodham Clinton when she says — as she did at a brief news conference on Tuesday — that she has no control over the release of her State Department email.  "They're not mine.  They belong to the State Department."  I don't believe her because a person's actions are more revealing than words:  She kept her government email on a secret server and, only under pressure from Congress, returned less than half of them to the State Department.  She deleted the rest.  She considered them hers.

NYT: Banned from State Dep't, Clinton Foundation crony advised Hillary on Libya anyway — while pursuing business there.  The crony in question is Sid Blumenthal, former White House advisor to Bill and longtime hatchet man for the pair.  We already knew Blumenthal was running his own off-the-books intelligence operation for the Secretary of State.  We also knew that he'd put a friend representing a pro-Putin pol in Georgia in touch with Hillary to lobby her on behalf of the Georgian opposition.  And the reason we knew those things isn't because Hillary Clinton voluntarily turned over Blumenthal's communications to State as part of routine recordkeeping protocols.  We know it because a hacker infiltrated Blumenthal's e-mail account a few years ago and lifted his copy of his chats with Hillary.  If not for that, the Clinton/Blumenthal communiques might be a secret to this day, sent into the ether after Hillary mass-deleted "personal" e-mails from her time in office that were stored on her private server.  Unless those deleted e-mails are retrieved, we may never know the extent of their exchanges.

Hillary Claim That She Used Only One Personal Email Account While at State... Also a Lie.  If America is willing to elect a sleazy, lying, unscrupulous, unethical, lying crook like Hillary in 2016, well, we deserve everything we get.  Yes, I said "lying" twice.  Because she warrants it.

What Sidney Blumenthal's Memos to Hillary Clinton Said, and How They Were Handled.  In 2011 and 2012, Hillary Rodham Clinton received at least 25 memos about Libya from Sidney Blumenthal, a friend and confidant who at the time was employed by the Clinton Foundation.  The memos, written in the style of intelligence cables, make up about a third of the almost 900 pages of emails related to Libya that Mrs. Clinton said she kept on the personal email account she used exclusively as secretary of state.  Some of Mr. Blumenthal's memos appeared to be based on reports supplied by American contractors he was advising as they sought to do business in Libya.

Federal Court Issues Historic Ruling in Hillary Email Scandal.  Last Friday, a federal court judge did something we had never seen before — U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton reopened a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.  The lawsuit had sought documents about an advertisement intended to air in Pakistan entitled "A Message from the President of the United States Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton."  Judge Walton issued the ruling on Friday, May 8, in response to a joint motion by Judicial Watch and the State Department.

Michael Morell: Foreign governments have Hillary's email.  Former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell said that he believes some foreign intelligence agencies possess the contents of Hillary Clinton's private email server.  "I think that foreign intelligence services, the good ones, have everything on any unclassified network that the government uses," Morell said Friday [5/15/2015] in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Hillary Caught in Another Email Lie: New Docs Reveal She Used Second Private Account While Sec. of State.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been caught in another lie regarding her private email accounts that she used during her tenure at the agency.  Though her lawyer David Kendall told the House Select Benghazi Committee that Clinton's "hrod17@clintonemail.com" email address "was not an address that existed during Secretary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State," new emails obtained by the New York Times show that Clinton did indeed use that email address for official business.

Hillary Clinton email case reopened by federal judge.  Judge Reggie B. Walton agreed Friday [5/8/2015] to a joint request by the State Department and Judicial Watch, which sued in 2012 to get a look at some of Mrs. Clinton's documents concerning a public relations push.  Both sides agreed that the revelation that Mrs. Clinton had kept her own email server separate from the government, and exclusively used her own email account created on that server, meant that she had shielded her messages from valid open-records requests.

Federal Records Agency's Top Lawyer Expressed "Concern," Surprise At Clinton's Private Email Use, Internal Emails Reveal.  Internal emails obtained by BuzzFeed News between officials at the National Archives show officials there were caught off-guard by Hillary Clinton's personal email usage.

Hillary email scandal moves court to reopen lawsuit against State Department.  A U.S. district judge has reopened a lawsuit abandoned late last year against the State Department, concluding that the Hillary Clinton email scandal provided the plaintiff in the case with "newly discovered evidence."  Government watchdog Judicial Watch (JW), the plaintiff, announced the reversal Monday [5/11/2015], essentially crediting the revelation that Clinton had secreted her official State Department emails on a private server with reviving the lawsuit.

State Dept: Clinton's personal email use 'not acceptable'.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email account run through a private server was "not acceptable" and happened without officials' knowledge, a top State Department record-keeper said on Wednesday [5/6/2015].  "I think the message is loud and clear that that is not acceptable," Joyce Barr, the State Department's assistant secretary for the Bureau of Administration, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Hillary Clinton's aide Huma Abedin's emails now face disclosure lawsuit.  The emails of Huma Abedin, the top personal aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, are now facing a disclosure lawsuit after the State Department failed to turn them over in response to an open-records request.  Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that uses open-records laws to pry information loose, had filed a request to get a look at Ms. Abedin's emails during her four years at the State Department.  News outlets have reported that Ms. Abedin also used the private email server Mrs. Clinton set up to handle government business, but the status of her messages is unclear.

New Lawsuit Attacks Hillary's Use of iPhones and iPads While Conducting Official Business at State.  Revelations this week lead one to wonder not so much whether Hillary Clinton can win the Democratic nomination for president, but whether she can stay out of jail.  Last week, we learned about apparent Clinton, Inc. tax fraud, bribery and money laundering to help Putin corner America's uranium market, and abuse of office to reward funders of the Clinton Cash Machine — not to mention Judicial Watch's bombshell of untoward Saudi influence and corruption in Hillary Clinton's State Department.  This week, we received more news about apparent money laundering out of India; lies by Clinton, Inc. about more Putin-connected contributions out of Canada; and more cover-up from another Hillary operation that focused on health care.

State Department allowing Clinton Foundation to approve emails for release.  State Department officials began allowing the Clinton Foundation to review emails the government planned to release to Congress and Freedom of Information Act requesters in January 2014, prompting a process that has delayed the publication of agency records for months, according to the group pursuing the records.  Many of the emails Clinton Foundation officials were permitted to review discussed the charity's work, as well as the hundreds of ethics reviews that former President Clinton faced as a result of his paid-speaking engagements around the world while his wife, Hillary Clinton, was secretary of state.

Judge sets deadline for deadline to release Hillary Clinton emails.  The State Department has about three weeks to propose a date by which it will release tens of thousands of work-related emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent or received on her personal account, a federal judge said in an order issued Tuesday [4/28/2015].  Clinton's former agency has pledged to use Freedom of Information Act procedures to process for release about 55,000 pages of emails the former secretary turned over in December after a State Department official asked four former secretaries to return copies of any official records they had.  Clinton has since declared her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination

Boeing and GE Refuse to Turn Over Hillary Emails.  The Washington Free Beacon's Lachlan Markay reports that industrial giant Boeing is refusing to release emails with Hillary Clinton's State Department that could implicate the candidate in (yet another) pay-for-play scandal.

Boehner Says Hillary Clinton Broke Law in Handling of Her E-Mail.  Speaker John Boehner made clear Thursday for the first time that the House of Representatives might subpoena Hillary Clinton's personal e-mail server if she doesn't voluntarily turn it over for examination by an independent party.  "I've not made any decisions yet but all options are on the table...  If we need to do that, we may have to," he said.  "It's important for the American people to know the truth about what happened in Benghazi and it's important to know what was going on at the State Department before, during, and after the events that occurred in Libya."

John Boehner may hold House vote to subpoena Hillary Clinton's email server.  House Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that the full House may have to vote to subpoena former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's email server, as the chairman of the Benghazi investigative committee officially called on her to testify twice to his panel.  The invitation by Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican and chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, sets up a test for Mrs. Clinton, the former first lady and newly announced Democratic presidential candidate, whose attorney has said she wants to appear before the committee only once, in public.

GE CEO: I Will Not Release Hillary Clinton State Department Emails.  General Electric (GE) CEO Jeffrey Immelt said Wednesday [4/22/2015] that he will not release the emails that GE exchanged with Hillary Clinton's State Department during the period in which GE was donating to the Clinton Foundation.

Study: How the Broadcast Networks Have Deleted Hillary's E-Mail Scandal.  Hillary Clinton's official presidential announcement was a golden opportunity for networks to demand the former Secretary of State respond to unanswered questions about her e-mail scandal.  Yet in the flurry of coverage since her official rollout (April 12 - April 20) the e-mail scandal garnered a total of just 7 minutes, 12 seconds on the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) evening and morning shows.  Even a new angle on the e-mail scandal — the New York Times reported April 14 that Clinton never responded to a congressional inquiry [in December of 2012] that "directly asked" if she had used a private e-mail account — failed to re-ignite the interest networks initially showed when the scandal first broke in March.

The most comprehensive depiction of Hillary lies yet?  Rep. Gowdy requested two interviews, a private, transcribed interview before the Select Committee on Benghazi as well as a public hearing.  While Mrs. Clinton has said she would testify in a public hearing before the committee, to date, neither she nor her counsel have responded to Gowdy's request.  On March 31, Gowdy subpoenaed Clinton's private server, but said this week he alone lacks authority to do so.  The server is not in the clear just yet as the full House may be able to make that request legally binding.

Hillary's email scandal will 'haunt her'.  House Speaker John A. Boehner says former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton "ignored the law" in setting up a private email system and server as the nation's top diplomat and that questions on the matter are "going to continue to haunt her until she comes clean."  "What's she going to do for America?  That's the real question," Mr. Boehner, Ohio Republican, told Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo when asked about Mrs. Clinton's 2016 presidential candidacy.  "It's not about personalities.

MSNBC Guest: Hillary Didn't Ignore Email Requests, She Just 'Hadn't Got Around To It'.  New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler may have set the record for lamest defense of Hillary Clinton's private email use during a guest appearance on MSNBC's "The Cycle."  Beutler was quizzed on The New York Times report Tuesday [4/14/2015] that Hillary Clinton was asked by Congress two years ago about whether or not she used a private e-mail account.  The official State Department response was delivered two months after Clinton left office and "ignored the question and provided no response."

Hillary Clinton Was Asked About Email 2 Years Ago.  Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.  But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter.  And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

Congress first asked Hillary Clinton about personal email use in 2012, letter shows.  Fox News has obtained a copy of a letter dated Dec. 13, 2012 that was sent from then-House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., to Cabinet secretaries, including Clinton, inquiring about their e-mail habits.  The committee was conducting an investigation into the Obama administration handled the use of personal e-mail by its officials.  The letter contained eight questions related to officials' use of personal e-mail accounts.  The very first question asked by Issa was "Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?  If so, please identify the account used."  Subsequent questions asked about whether "alias e-mail" accounts and text messages were used to conduct official business.

Down the Yellow Brick Road with Hillary.  Hillary's pretensions of innocence and her countless denials of wrongdoing began a long time ago.  Most recently, in her response to e-mail-gate, a wide-eyed Hillary again denied misconduct, insisting on her right to protect — and then destroy — thousands of her so-called personal e-mails, which she said had to do with things like her daughter's wedding, her mother's funeral, and (get this!) her yoga appointments.  Inasmuch as Hillary employs the well-compensated wife of Anthony Weiner as her personal scheduler, one might think it easy enough for Huma Abedin to set up exercise sessions for her boss. [...] In fact, it seems rather incredible that a highly placed government appointee would have so much free time in which to send such a plethora of personal e-mails.

A breakdown of every scandal swirling around Hillary.  [Scroll down]  In March, we learned that during her four-year stint as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton conducted all business — political, public and private — solely through her personal email account, on a server in her house.  When asked why she didn't use two emails, one for official business and one for personal use, Hillary said:  "I thought it would be easier to just carry one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two."  Then an email surfaced that was sent from her iPad, undermining that excuse.  In a press conference to address the controversy, Clinton answered questions with all-too-familiar arrogance, contempt and incredulity that her word should be questioned.

Three Reasons Hillary Won't Win the Democratic Ticket.  [Scroll down]  Then there's the issue of her private email server, which she apparently used to "conduct official business as US Secretary of State."  Representative Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) had "issued a subpoena for the private server" to acquire emails pertaining to the Benghazi scandal, but Americans then discovered that the server was "wiped" of about 30,000 to 60,000 emails.  We are to take at her word, in a case which is specifically meant to investigate the merits of her dubious integrity, that she only had emails that were "personal in nature" deleted?  Yes, that's a rat you smell.

Why is Trey Gowdy allowing Hillary to testify behind closed doors?  [Scroll down]  But I think most probably, the closed-door interview will explore detailed and potentially tedious questions and get Mrs. Clinton on the record, under oath, for use when public testimony is later heard.  Distractions in her defense offered by Elijah Cummings and other Democrats on the panel will have no effect on the public in these circumstances.  But what she admits to (or denies) can then be read back to her in the public hearing, cutting to the chase, as it were.  Especially if evidence is produced that contradicts her previous testimony under oath.

Top Spy: Hillary's Emails 'Likely' Hacked by China, Russia, Iran.  A top intelligence official under President Obama, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, says that the chances Hillary Clinton's private emails were hacked is "very high."  Flynn, who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency but is now retired, called it hackings "likely."

Hillary Clinton's Private Server [Was] A Foreign Spy Magnet.  As secretary of state, Clinton routed all her government-related email through the server, based in her house in Chappaqua, New York.  She reportedly hired a Cablevision subsidiary to run the server, with antivirus protection from Intel's McAfee.  And she registered her domain name, clintonmail.com, through Network Solutions.  Intelligence professionals fear that the use of the privately installed server, free of certified government defenses against foreign interception, has been a boon to foreign cyberspies.

Open Government Experts: Hillary's Use of Personal Email 'Brazen Decision' to Flout Law.  When Hillary Clinton began using a personal e-mail account to conduct official business as secretary of State, she made a "brazen decision" to flout the law and deny Americans access to records they deserve, according to a panel of open government experts and political watchdogs.  What's more, they say, dozens of officials in and out of the Obama administration must have known about her use of the private e-mail.

State Department found 4 emails about drones sent by Clinton.  The State Department says it can find only four emails sent between former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff concerning drone strikes and certain U.S. surveillance programs, and those notes have little to do with either subject.

Feds should have told national archivist of Clinton's private email abuse.  State Department officials who briefed Secretary Hillary Clinton on administrative policies and procedures soon after she took office were obligated to inform her of federal laws and regulations requiring her to use an official email account for government business and to inform the national archivist if they believed she was not doing so thereafter.

Former U.S. Attorney: 'Hillary Clinton Is Going to Have to Testify in a Federal Court'.  Hillary Clinton knowingly acted to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act by creating a private email server, according to legal experts.  Speaking at a panel hosted by government watchdog group Judicial Watch, experts in the field of government accountability agreed that Clinton's decision to create her own email server was a deliberate attempt to avoid transparency laws.  Daniel Metcalfe, who was the founding director of the Justice Department's office of information and privacy, said that the regime created by Clinton at the State Department was a "prescription for blatant circumvention of FOIA."

Benghazi panel summons Clinton.  A House panel Tuesday [3/31/2015] formally requested Hillary Clinton to testify about the private server and email account she used while serving as secretary of state.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, sent a request to Clinton's personal attorney, David E. Kendall, requesting that Clinton appear before the committee no later than May 1 for a transcribed interview about the server and email.

Hillary's accidental drone email about decorating reveals BIG new problems.  Being publicly proven a liar and a fool at the same time can't be easy, but that's what happened to Hillary Clinton on Tuesday [3/31/2015].  The Associated Press published a story proving the former secretary of wasn't telling the truth when she claimed she used a private email account and private server to conduct public business as a matter of "convenience" to avoid using two separate devices.

Hil on the grill: Gowdy demands Clinton face questions on emails by May 1.  The Benghazi investigative committee on Tuesday [3/31/2015] formally requested that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton give a transcribed interview detailing her decision-making in determining which emails she turned over to the government and why she wiped her email server clean.  Chairman Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican, made the request as the State Department began to divulge some of Mrs. Clinton's emails that she hid for years.  One of the early messages contradicts her claim that she wanted to use a single electronic device for email.

Hillary Clinton Makes It Hard to Follow the Money.  One way to evaluate presidential candidates is to follow the money.  To whom is a politician beholden?  To what extent are her personal financial interests at odds with the public interest?  Which moneyed groups is he unlikely to flout?  Republicans and Democrats have their respective (if sometimes overlapping) fundraising bases.  Very rich individuals sometimes support a given candidate.  And then there's Hillary Clinton, whose relationship to money is even more complicated.

AP: Hillary used more than one device for e-mail while SecState.  For a decade or more, anyone who used e-mail for work usually had more than one mobile device with which to retrieve it, especially for those whose jobs required them to have constant access to their communications.  Three weeks ago, though, Hillary Clinton claimed not to have done so, preferring "convenience" rather than carrying two devices to handle two different accounts as she would have had to do had she used an official State Department e-mail account. [...] It's been obvious that Hillary has been lying all along.  The AP's report this morning only confirms it.  Now we need to find out what Hillary wanted to hide by using a private e-mail system.

Rep. Duckworth, Top Dem Recruit, Demands Hillary Testify.  Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) says Hillary Clinton should testify before the special select committee examining the tragedy in Benghazi.  Duckworth added she would hold former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton "accountable" for erasing emails from her personal server.  Duckworth's strong stand may be a matter of political expediency.  She's running for U.S. Senate, for a seat Democrats would probably need to take if they hope to reclaim the majority in the elections in 2016.  She is challenging first-term Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), a former military intelligence officer.  Duckworth herself is a veteran of the Iraq War.

Swing-state poll shows 'red flag' for Hillary Clinton.  Hillary Clinton appears to have been damaged by revelations about her email use and is not seen as honest or trustworthy by about half of voters in three key states, according to a new poll.

The Latest Bombshell from Mrs. Clinton's Lawyer.  In the ongoing saga of Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a private server at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, the latest bomb was thrown by her lawyer, David Kendall (of Bill Clinton impeachment fame).  Late last week, Mr. Kendall wrote a lengthy letter to the Benghazi Select Committee to respond to Chairman Trey Gowdy's demand that she turn over her server for inspection and analysis by a "neutral detached and independent third-party."  Mr. Kendall flatly refused the demand, suggesting that the committee lacked the authority to request it.  But for good measure, Kendall explained that review of the server would be fruitless.

Obstruction of Justice - A Must For Hillary.  It does not matter when Hillary decided to do this.  All that matters is that she knew at the time that the records in question might be requested during an investigation and destroyed them so as to prevent their production.  The law under 18 USC 1519 is extremely broad and does not require that the person destroying (or ordering the destruction) of records know of an investigation at the time or even that said investigation exist.  It is only requires that the item destroyed might have reasonably become subject of a future investigation before any department or office of the United States.  18 USC 1519 was added by Sarbanes-Oxley which, incidentally, Hillary Clinton voted for as a Senator and thus knows [very] well applies to both this situation generally and to her specifically.

Hillary Clinton withheld information from Congress. Now what does Congress do?  On September 20, 2012, just nine days after the terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, the House Government Oversight Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton requesting that she turn over "all information ... related to the attack on the consulate."  About two weeks later, on October 2, 2012, Clinton responded, saying she would cooperate fully with the investigation into what went wrong in Benghazi.

Hillary Agonistes.  [Scroll down]  Consider her response to the e-mail scandal.  Compare it to that of her previous efforts to emulate the Borgias.  There has been no outrage on her part.  No Medusa on the rampage.  No counterattacks, no legal maneuvering, no horde of media sock puppets leaping into the breach.  No.  She and her entourage have been petulant and ineffectual — a truth underlined by her dog-ate-my-homework excuse to Gowdy's committee late last week.  Explanations have been offhand and feeble, allies scattered and virtually shame-faced.

Experts say portions of Hillary's emails are recoverable.  Computer forensic experts interviewed by Politico told the publication that portions of Hillary Clinton's 30,000 emails deleted by her aides are almost certainly recoverable, although getting at them would be time consuming and expensive. [...] If Clinton deleted the emails to hide something, it's safe to say she got the best IT expert available to do a good and thorough job of it.  Even as arrogant as she is, it's hard to see why she would chance anything that made her culpable remaining on the server.

The new Nixon.  At least Richard Nixon never burned the White House tapes.  Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, wiped clean the private e-mail server at the heart of her current scandal.  So says Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who heads the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  And she did it after Congress and the State Department issued subpoenas for her e-mails.  Seems she learned from her time as a lawyer for the Watergate committee:  The only safe way to keep potential evidence from investigators is to destroy it.

Clinton Also Used iPad for Email; Mixed Personal, Work Chats.  Hillary Rodham Clinton emailed her staff on an iPad as well as a BlackBerry while secretary of state, despite her explanation she exclusively used a personal email address on a homebrew server so that she could carry a single device, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Where have all Her emails Gone?  First, she used a private server for her e-mails.  She irresponsibly exposed her own schedule, even the president's and the nation's security.  Her obsession with secrecy overrode all other considerations!  Is this the kind of personality trait we want in the Oval Office?  Second, she decided what is personal and what is private — i.e., the ultimate in Clintonian arrogance!  I guess that we are supposed to believe that only personal stuff or "the grandma files" were deleted and all of the "State stuff" was turned over.  What happened to Clinton Foundation e-mails that were personal and public?

Hillary Clinton's unpardonable scandal trail.  It was bad enough that while secretary of state — under President Obama's watch — Clinton violated the rules, and possibly the Federal Records Act, by operating her own private email server system in her home rather than using the government email system.  Now we learn that not only has Clinton deleted more than 30,000 emails, but her non-governmental server has since been wiped clean.  This is despite the ongoing congressional investigation into the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, subpoenas and multiple Freedom of Information Act requests from a variety of parties.

Hillary's emails: Deleted but not gone.  As House Republican leaders weigh whether to try to force former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hand over her personal email server, experts say the messages she deleted from it — or at least portions of them — can almost certainly be recovered.  Half a dozen computer forensics experts interviewed by POLITICO said remnants of Clinton's emails likely still exist on the server, although retrieving them could be time intensive and expensive.

Senate GOP asking new questions about emails for Clinton and Abedin, who has special employment status.  Senate Republicans are renewing efforts to learn why Huma Abedin, a top assistant to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was allowed to keep working at the agency under a special, part-time status while also being employed at a politically-connected consulting firm.  The new requests are being made by Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, following revelations that both women used a private Internet server and email accounts for State Department correspondence.

Hillary Clinton wiped email server clean, refuses to turn it over.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has refused to turn her email server over to an independent third party and claims she has wiped the server clean, dealing a setback to the special investigative committee looking into the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, the probe said late Friday [3/27/2015].  Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said the whole House will have to decide what the next steps are in the push to pry information from Mrs. Clinton, but said she will likely have to appear and testify on her decision-making about her emails, setting up another dramatic showdown between the former first lady and her congressional critics.

Hillary deleted e-mails after request by State Department.  Hillary Clinton permanently deleted all e-mails from her personal server — and it appears she did so after Oct. 28, when the State Department asked her to turn them over, the chairman of a House committee investigating the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi said Friday [3/27/2015].  Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said the former secretary of state has failed to produce a single new document in recent weeks and has refused to relinquish her server to a third party for an independent review, as Gowdy has requested.

Head of House Benghazi probe says Hillary Clinton wiped email server 'clean'.  Hillary Clinton wiped her email server "clean," permanently deleting all emails from it, the leader of the House committee investigating the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi said Friday [3/27/2015].  Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said the former secretary of state has failed to produce a single new document in recent weeks and has refused to relinquish her server to a third party for an independent review, as Gowdy has requested.

Our government counts on public indifference to its spying and lying.  When Hillary Clinton learned that a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives had subpoenaed her emails as secretary of state and she promptly destroyed half of them — about 33,000 — how did she know she could get away with it?

Gowdy: Clinton Wiped Email Server Clean, Deleted All Emails.  Hillary Rodham Clinton wiped her email server "clean," permanently deleting all emails from it, the Republican chairman of a House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks said Friday [3/27/2015].

Hillary Clinton Defies Subpoena, 'Wiped Her Server Clean'.  Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton failed to provide any new documents to the congressional panel investigating the Benghazi terrorist attacks, instead notifying the committee that she has "wipe[d] her server clean," the lead investigator announced.

Trey Gowdy: Hillary's Server Was Recently 'Wiped Clean'.  Hillary Clinton's email server has been "wiped clean," and she has not turned over any new documents in response to a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, committee chairman Trey Gowdy said Friday [3/27/2015].  "After seeking and receiving a two week extension from the Committee, Secretary Clinton failed to provide a single new document to the subpoena issued by the Committee and refused to provide her private server to the Inspector General for the State Department or any other independent arbiter for analysis," Gowdy said in the statement.

The Hillary Spoliation.  The latest news about Hillary Clinton's email destruction may take her emails saga to another level.  As John and Scott have discussed, Clinton apparently had her server wiped clean of emails after a congressional committee had been established to investigate matters as to which she knew her emails were relevant Even more importantly, Trey Gowdy says that Clinton made this decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked her to return her public record.  The destruction of documents after they have been requested by a body authorized to do so is a quite a serious matter.

Reference material, in case you missed it earlier:
Spoliation of evidence.  The spoliation of evidence is the intentional or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. [...] The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party's destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding:  the finder of fact can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party.

Spoliation defined
Black's Law Dictionary, 1991, page 1401.

Grassley pushes for new investigations of Clinton email, Abedin's special status.  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley is pressing the Department of State Inspector General to open a new investigation of the use of a private email account and server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of her inner circle of advisers, particularly that of Huma Abedin.  Grassley is concerned that the private email allowed Clinton, Abedin and other high-ranking State Department officials to conduct official business without archiving them for government record-keeping purposes as required by federal laws and regulations.

Bloomberg: Don't forget that State had no independent IG under Hillary.  How did the State Department get away with so many failures during Hillary Clinton's leadership?  They ran a consulate in Benghazi with substandard security even for normal locations, let alone in the collapsed-state region of eastern Libya in 2011-12.  Hillary herself and her closest aides didn't use State Department e-mail systems despite both policy and legal requirements to do so.

One More Question on Hillary Clinton E-Mails: Where Was the Watchdog?  One of the many unanswered questions of the Hillary Clinton e-mail story has been:  Whose job was it to raise and address concerns about her exclusive use of a private account?  According to open government advocates, it would have been the agency's permanent, independent Inspector General — someone nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate — if such a person had existed.

DOJ Lawyers Argue Government Has No Duty to Search Hillary Emails.  Justice Department lawyers argued Thursday [3/19/2015] the federal government has no responsibility produce Hillary Clinton's private emails in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Politico reported:  "FOIA creates no obligation for an agency to search for and produce records that it does not possess and control," Justice lawyer Matthew Collette and Catherine Dorsey wrote in the government's first written court submission on the Hillary Clinton email issue.  The filing (posted here) came in response to a motion by conservative gadfly Larry Klayman asking for contempt proceedings against Clinton and one of her former top aides.

It Could Take 30 Years for Hillary Clinton's Emails to Reach the National Archives.  In recent weeks, the Federal Records Act has received widespread attention following news that Clinton used a private email account to conduct official government business as secretary of State.  The legislation, established in 1950 to provide guidance to federal agencies on record management, was amended last year by President Obama to include electronic records.  But the National Archives can't guarantee that federal agencies are keeping records properly, and acquiring them takes considerable time.

Van Susteren Slams NY Times Story on Clinton Emails.  Ever-blogging Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren called out the New York Times Monday morning [3/23/2015] for its exclusive use of anonymous sources in an article about Hillary Clinton's emails.  The article was by Michael Schmidt, who broke the story of Clinton's use of a personal email account several weeks ago.  This morning the Times published a follow-up on the 300 emails Clinton had submitted to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  This collection first alerted the committee to existence of the personal email account.  The committee now plans to subpoena more.

White House scrambles to limit damage from Hillary Clinton email scandal.  Hillary Rodham Clinton's email practices are now becoming a legal headache for the Obama administration, which for the first time has admitted to a court that the former secretary of state withheld her emails.  Administration attorneys are now scrambling to contain the damage by promising to redo what eventually could be hundreds of open records searches that were tainted by Mrs. Clinton's email practices and those of her top aides, who, according to a New York Times report Monday [3/23/2015], also occasionally used private emails to communicate.

Benghazi committee officially requests Clinton surrender her email server.  Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy sent a letter to the former secretary of state's personal lawyer making the request, which he said only comes after "exhaustive efforts" to get a look at her communications during the time of the 2012 terrorist attack on the diplomatic post in Libya's second-largest city.  "Though Secretary Clinton alone is responsible for causing this issue, she alone does not get to determine its outcome," the South Carolina Republican said.

Benghazi panel head Gowdy asks Clinton to 'relinquish' personal server.  The chairman of the congressional committee probing the Benghazi terror attacks has formally asked that Hillary Clinton turn over her personal server — warning that the House could take steps to pressure her if she refuses.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., sent a letter, released Friday [3/20/2015], to Clinton's attorney requesting that the former secretary of state "relinquish" the server to a "neutral, detached and independent third-party" for review.

Virtually impossible for top White House, State Department officials to miss Clinton's private email address: security expert.  A senior information security professional with intimate knowledge of federal systems has raised new security concerns about former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's use of a private email address and server to carry on official business, telling Fox News it would have been virtually impossible for White House officials to be unaware of the practice.  For one thing, the expert said, Clinton received many sensitive White House emails regarding top-level "Principals" meetings — sessions involving the most senior heads of government departments and agencies — she attended during her four-year tenure.

Where in the world is Hillary Clinton's server?  It was less than two weeks ago that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured the nation that her "homebrew" email server was safely secure in her home in Chappaqua, New York.  She insisted that the hardware was fortified behind a locked door and had a Secret Service detail mentoring it night and day, as though the greatest security threat that system faced was via a physical attack by a team of cartoonish cat burglars.  Nevertheless, Clinton insisted that the safeguards around the email system she constructed out of "convenience" were "effective and secure."

The Criminal Arrogance of Hillary Clinton.  Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to conduct, for four years, the office of Secretary of State using her own private email server.  Because these emails were not transacted and recorded through the official State Department servers, Mrs. Clinton "willfully concealed and removed" these critical documents from the records and archives of the United States Government.  You can further argue that by electing to not have these records placed onto government servers — which are secure, routinely backed up, and most importantly subject to Freedom Of Information Act requests, that she has, by any reasonable interpretation, "mutilated, obliterated and destroyed" these essential records, which belong not to Hillary Rodham Clinton but rather to the Secretary of State of the United States of America, and her employers, the people of that nation.  The penalty for this is a fine or up to three years imprisonment, or both.

Hillary committed obstruction of justice.  Hillary Clinton, and her attorneys who have helped delete her e-mails, have committed the serious federal crime of obstruction of justice.  In an op-ed today at the Wall Street Journal, legal professor Ronald D. Rotunda of Chapman University's Fowler School of Law and the co-author, with John Nowak, of Treatise on Constitutional Law, mentions any action to destroy information that is subject to subpoena, or may even become subject to investigation in the future.

Congress Subpoenas Emails of Nearly a Dozen Clinton State Dept. Employees.  Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) has subpoenaed the emails of "close to a dozen" people who worked for Hillary Clinton at the State Department, including "aides to aides," according to a Reuters report.  Gowdy, who chairs he House Benghazi Select Committee, told the outlet on Thursday that, "We sent a subpoena to the State Department for emails from a number of individuals within the State Department, other than Secretary Clinton."

Defense Intelligence Analyst: 'No Doubt' Hillary's Emails Hacked by Foreign Governments.  Let's examine a few significant updates on the Hillary email scandal, starting with perhaps the most important — but least covered — aspect of the imbroglio: Unconscionable national security risks.  In order to shield her communications from oversight and public information requests, Hillary Clinton chose to set up a private email server in her home, rather than use a secure official account.  Regardless of the ethical propriety and legality of that decision (stay tuned on those points), intelligence experts believe her actions led to extraordinary breaches at the hands of foreign governments and outside entities.

Virtually impossible for top White House, State Department officials to miss Clinton's private email address: security expert.  A senior information security professional with intimate knowledge of federal systems has raised new security concerns about former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's use of a private email address and server to carry on official business, telling Fox News it would have been virtually impossible for White House officials to be unaware of the practice.  For one thing, the expert said, Clinton received many sensitive White House emails regarding top-level "Principals" meetings — sessions involving the most senior heads of government departments and agencies — she attended during her four-year tenure.

Why doesn't Obama just pardon Hillary?  President Obama doesn't need his phone for this job — just a pen.  With but a stroke of it, he could pardon Hillary Clinton for any crimes she may have committed in Emailgate and spare the rest of us the long drama.  At first blush that might seem ridiculous.  Though the press is rattling on about how the former secretary of state has broken all sorts of federal laws in connection with her email, Clinton hasn't been formally accused of anything.  That doesn't mean that she couldn't get a presidential pardon.  Richard Nixon hadn't been indicted for any crime when President Gerald Ford gave him a pardon.  Nor had most of the Vietnam-era draft dodgers whom President Jimmy Carter pardoned (on his first day in office).

The Editor says...
The difference is that Mr. Nixon had already served as President and none of the draft dodgers could have been expected to run for the office.  To pardon Hillary while she is actively campaigning for the presidency is to acknowledge, abet and facilitate her apparent crimes.  A person who is not guilty does not need a pardon.

Was Hillary Clinton running her own rogue intel operation?  We all know that the only reason you would deliberately and premeditatedly set up a private email address and server is to have total control over your communications — to keep people away from those communications and to retain the ability to edit and delete your content.  In Hillary Clinton's case, given her long history of concealment and duplicity, total control was the system's purpose, not to keep track of Chelsea's bridal gift registry.  A story originally reported in 2013 (and little-noticed at the time) may offer a deeper dimension to the reasons she wanted this control — and it leaves us with many new, unanswered questions.

With Hillary, the Buck Stops Anywhere but Here.  Addressing the legal questions surrounding Hillary Clinton's email evasions, our friend Shannen Coffin noted last night:  ["]The Federal Records Act says that the obligation of the department is actually the obligation of the secretary.  The Federal Records Act says that the secretary is responsible for preserving all of the records of the agency.  It falls on the Secretary of State to be the responsible party.["]  That is important as a legal point, but, the law aside:  Isn't this exactly what we would expect regardless?  The Federal Records Act simply codifies in one particular area what we already regularly take for granted generally:  The head of a government body is responsible for that body.

Liz Warren: The next Obama.  [Scroll down]  Obama and the Clintons have a hate-hate relationship — which is why Hillary's e-mail scandal has hit the headlines at this time.  The media are still Obama's obedient servants.  They must have known about Hillary's personal e-mail server, since thousands of people in D.C. have been getting those emails, complete with her private "sent-from" address on top.  Hillary's personal aide Huma Abedin, the most visible Muslim Brotherhood loyalist in this administration, also used the private Hillary server.  It would be interesting to subpoena those electronic records.  Eric Holder had three private e-mail addresses; Lois Lerner had hers; and the White House refused to say whether the Obamas have theirs.  You can guess the answer.

State Dept: We Have No Record of Hillary Clinton's 'Separation Form'.  After he repeatedly pressed State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on the whereabouts of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's so-called "separation form," Associated Press reporter Matt Lee finally got his answer: the State Department has no record of Clinton singing the form.  As Mediaite reported yesterday, the OF-109 form could give clues as to whether Clinton violated any laws while she exclusively used a personal email address.  Employees leaving the State Department are required to sign the form, which says the employee turned over all official records before leaving.  If Clinton signed the OF-109 form, some are saying she might have committed a felony given that she admitted to deleting 31,000 emails she deemed "personal."

Hillary's Email Defense Is Laughable.  First, while it is accurate for Secretary Clinton to say that when she was in office there was not a flat, categorical prohibition on federal government officials ever using their personal email accounts for the conduct of official business, that's a far different thing from saying (as she apparently would like to) that a government official could use his or her personal email account exclusively, for all official email communications, as she actually did.  In fact, the Federal Records Act dictates otherwise.  That law, which applies to all federal agency employees who are not within the White House itself, requires the comprehensive documentation of the conduct of official business, and it has long done so by regulating the creation, maintenance, preservation and, ultimately, the disposition of agency records.  When it comes to "modern-day" email communications, as compared to the paper memoranda of not so long ago, these communications now are themselves the very means of conducting official business, by definition.

Hillary's Secret Email Was a Cyberspy's Dream Weapon.  The private email address for Hillary Clinton, which became the talk of Washington this week and created her first major speed bump on her road to the White House, has actually been freely available on the Internet for a year, thanks to a colorful Romanian hacker known as Guccifer.  On March 14, 2013, Guccifer — his real name is Marcel-Lehel Lazar — broke into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist, former White House aide to Bill Clinton, and personal confidante of Hillary Clinton.  Lazar crowed about his exploits to journalists, disclosing a set of memos Blumenthal had written to Clinton in 2012, as well as the personal email address and domain she's now known to have used exclusively for her personal and official correspondence.  Few journalists noticed that at the time, and it caused no ruckus in Washington.

Clinton campaign shifts story on destroyed emails.  "Hillary Clinton's camp late Sunday [3/15/2015] issued a significant clarification about the steps they say were taken to review thousands of personal emails before they were deleted, claiming her team individually read 'every email' before discarding those deemed private. Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News.  This comes after the former secretary of state's office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 'work-related' emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed 'private' and deleted.

Krauthammer: Hillary 'acted to destroy the files'.  Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer told 'Special Report with Bret Baier' Tuesday [3/17/2015] that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton willfully "acted to destroy" email files created during her tenure that were stored on her private server in New York State.  "This is really an elaborate scheme, very obvious, not done for convenience, but done to conceal," Krauthammer said Tuesday after State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki revealed that they "do not have any record of her signing" a "separation" form, or OF-109, declaring that Clinton surrendered all official records when she left office.

Whistleblower: State Department Employees Who Don't Sign Separation Agreement Face Dire Consequences.  By signing OF-109, agency employees affirm that they have turned over all records — classified or unclassified; emails or physical documents — pertaining to official government business.  Whether or not Clinton — who used a private email account hosted on a private server to conduct official business — signed the document when she left office in Feb. 2013 was finally answered on Tuesday [3/17/2015] by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.  Psaki said that it does not appear that Clinton signed the document when she left the agency.

Megyn Kelly Battles Juan Williams over Hillary: She 'Willfully Concealed Records'!  Megyn Kelly took her outrage at the State Department and Hillary Clinton to Fox's The Five today [3/17/2015] to go off on the absolute lack of transparency from anyone in the government on this issue, saying, "No one cares about the American public's right to know."  Kelly was one of the first people to publicly question whether Clinton signed a separation statement saying the signee has already handed over all relevant documents to the government.  Today State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said they have no record of Clinton signing such a statement, and that really set Kelly off.

State: No record of Clinton signing separation statement.  The State Department said Tuesday [3/17/2015] it had no record showing that Hillary Rodham Clinton signed any official statement attesting that she had turned over all unclassified documents related to official business when she left her post as secretary of state in 2013.

Treasury Secretary Lew: No Recollection of Clinton Email System.  U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew was pulled into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email controversy Tuesday as House Republicans grilled him on what he knew as her top operations officer.  Mr. Lew, who was Mrs. Clinton's deputy secretary of state for management and resources between 2009-2010, said he had no recollection of conversations about Mrs. Clinton's private email system.

White House counsel reportedly kept in dark on Clinton's personal email use.  The White House counsel's office reportedly was kept in the dark about Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of personal email while secretary of state, in the latest detail raising questions over how and why she stayed off the government system despite administration guidance to the contrary.  Clinton used non-official personal email, and also used a server traced to her New York home.  An unnamed source told The Associated Press the White House counsel's office only found out about her heavy personal email use as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack.

AP reporter to Psaki: Why is it so hard to find out whether Hillary signed the separation form when she left State?  Via the Right Scoop, if you're following the Hillary e-mail saga you already know which form he means.  It's OF-109, which, per former DOJ lawyer Shannen Coffin, requires the employee to declare under penalties of perjury that she's turned over all relevant records to the Department before leaving her position.  Work-related e-mails, which Hillary didn't turn over until two years after she stepped down as secretary, are relevant records.  Which means, if she signed the form, she's presumably guilty of perjury.  If she didn't sign the form, she's guilty (or guiltier) of following irregular procedures to avoid the sort of accountability that's routinely required of lesser mortals.  You would think someone in State's HR department could find the form and answer this question in 15 minutes but we've waited nearly a week for an answer.

Hillary's Super-Secret, Super-Secure Email Server Can Only Be Accessed with a... Web Browser.  Marc Perkel reveals that Hillary Clinton's personal email server has web access enabled, which means an intrepid password-guesser might be able to access all of the Pantsuit's yoga emails.

Spam Filtering Service had access to Clinton Classified Emails.  [Scroll down]  While the Russians are trying to hack her state department account, which doesn't exists, no one would ever think she's stupid enough to have her email on a private server in her home.  Security through obscurity.  And that is assuming that she's telling the truth about that.  Although we don't know what IP address Clinton's real email is on.  It's interesting to note IP addresses in the DNS for the clintonemail.com domain.  Most host names like www.clintonemail.com all map to some holding page of no importance.  However that host mail.clintonemail.com maps to a different IP address 64.94.172.146, which is in a data center in the New York area, Internap.com.  Interesting that her "home server" resolves to a data center.  Seems worth investigating to me.

Citizens United Sues State Department over Clinton-Related Records.  Citizens United has filed a new lawsuit against the U.S. State Department regarding "long-lingering freedom of information requests," in effect asking the judge to compel them "to respond to four separate requests seeking documents that were filed in May and July of last year.  Those included a request for correspondence between Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and officials at the Teneo Consulting firm.

Of Course Obama Wants to Take Hillary Down.  We can believe Ed Klein's sources claiming Valerie Jarrett is the White House point woman for the destruction of Hillary Clinton.  Evidence:  It was the New York Times which broke the story.  The Democratic press does not eat its own, ever.  Yet here was the Gray Lady, setting the headlines for Drudge.  People asked how Hillary could have been so stupid.  The answer is that in the normal course of mainstream reporting, there is no Democrat crime too large for the press to cover up.  She knew she was perfectly safe. [...] To make it even clearer that something was going on behind the scenes:  the fact that Secretary of State Clinton was using private email had come out in the news two years ago.  Raking up an old story detrimental to their team is not normally what the New York Times does.  The Times followed the emerging scandal with article after article.  They didn't just want to embarrass Hillary, they were out to destroy her.

Hillary Is Being Investigated for a Possible Felony.  Former Justice Department lawyer Shannen Coffin believes Hillary Clinton might have committed a felony if she signed the "separation" form OF109 when she left the State Department.  That form certifies that she turned over all "classified or administratively controlled" materials, as well as all "unclassified documents and papers" relating to official government business.  If she didn't sign it, she didn't follow department policy.  There are two investigations currently going on.

Hillary Clinton should face criminal charges.  Let's get down to brass tacks:  Hillary Rodham Clinton should be criminally charged for failing to turn over her government emails as mandated by law.  It's not a hard call.  While she nominated to be Secretary of State by President Obama, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she's just like any other government employee — there were documents she was required by law to sign over upon her departure.

Trey Gowdy: House may go to court to get Clinton email server.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., told "Fox News Sunday" [3/15/2015] he'll summon Clinton to talk to the committee about the emails as part of the probe into the department's response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.  Gowdy can't subpoena the server, but the House of Representatives does have the power to demand it and could be "forced to go to court" to get it.

'How Hard Can It Be?' State Dept Still Can't Find Hillary's Crucial 'Separation' Form.  AP reporter Matt Lee was stumped by the State Department's inability to find the "separation" form Hillary Clinton should've signed when she quit as Secretary of State, wondering why the department cannot go back and pull the document from the department's HR files.  The form, OF-109, is critical to understanding whether Clinton violated the law by maintaining her own private e-mail account and server to conduct official business as Secretary.  If she signed the form, as is required for all departing employees, she may have committed a felony.  The document asserts, under penalty of perjury, that the employee turned over all relevant records at the time of signing.  And if she didn't sign the form, the question remains:  Why not?

Laws are for the little people, not the Clintons!  Hillary Clinton insists she did everything by the book, that she broke no laws and heeded all regulations.  That book is obviously not the State Department records management handbook.  The government's book says that you don't get to keep materials, classified or unclassified, in your personal possession and then get to sift through them at your leisure to decide which ones the government that paid you gets to see.  All documents are the property of the government.  The State Department determines which ones are returned to you.

Clinton's Cover Up Team.  Hillary Clinton explains her use of a private e-mail account and a secret server to conduct State Department business as a matter of "convenience."  But congressional investigators are almost as interested in the fact that two of her closest advisers, personal aide Huma Abedin and chief of staff Cheryl Mills, also had e-mail addresses on the secret server.  Were they also interested in "convenience" or intent on shielding their work from public-record requests?

Obama adviser behind leak of Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail address during her time as secretary of state, sources tell me.  But she did so through people outside the administration, so the story couldn't be traced to her or the White House.  In addition, at Jarrett's behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary's conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation.

Top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett reported to have leaked Hillary Clinton email scandal to press.  The New York Post is reporting that Valerie Jarrett, one of President Barack Obama's top advisers, leaked details of the story to the press through outside sources hoping it would not trace back to the White House.  What's more, the entire thing was timed to become public just as Clinton was planning to announce her candidacy for president.

This is Why Hillary's Email Scandal Captured the Media's Attention.  Because President Jarrett wanted it that way.  Writing at The New York Post, Edward Klein reveals that "Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail address during her time as secretary of state." [...] And the media continues to pile on, almost as if they were taking orders from the White House.

White House dismisses Hillary-Jarrett story as untrue, nonsense.  White House officials emphatically denied Monday [3/16/2015] a report that senior White House aide Valerie Jarrett had ordered the State Department to launch a series of probes into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.  The inquiries were in response to a weekend column in the New York Post by author Edward Klein that said Ms. Jarrett ignited the issue both by ordering the State investigations and by leaking the information about Mrs. Clinton's email server to reporters.  "These uncorroborated, third-hand allegations are not only nonsense, they are simply not true," Deputy White House Press Secretary Jen Friedman told The Washington Times.

'Utter Baloney': White House Dismisses Report That Valerie Jarrett Leaked Clinton Email Story.  Did Valerie Jarrett secretly leak the details of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email account to the media?  That's "nonsense" and "utter baloney" according to the White House.  White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was questioned about the report during the White House Press briefing by Fox News reporter James Rosen.  "It's utter baloney," Earnest replied flatly.

The Ides of March Are Upon Us.  Barry promised Bill and Hill to back Hill's 2016 presidential run if they helped out during the historic 2008 contest.  In politics, though, 8 minutes is a long time to keep a promise, let alone 8 years.  So it seems BO and Val are now actively working to undermine her — which explains all the long daggers coming from the previously compliant media woodwork as of late.

White House says Valerie Jarrett didn't leak Hillary emails.  The White House has a rather unfavorable view of a report suggesting that Valerie Jarrett, President Obama's senior adviser, leaked news of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.  "It's utter baloney," White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday [3/16/2015].  The New York Post late Saturday published an article saying that Jarrett, Obama's closest confidant, was behind the leak of Clinton's personal emails.  The paper said the White House was intentionally trying to sabotage the presumptive Democratic frontrunner's campaign.

Defending the indefensible Hillary Clinton.  The toughest job in politics these days is defending Hillary Clinton, mocked brilliantly by The [New York] Post as the "Deleter of the Free World."  Her beleaguered defenders, as they retreat behind the bunker door, are settling on a crude legal defense.  Their mumbo jumbo chorus begins with the claim that she didn't break any laws by doing government business on her private e-mail and ends with the insistence that everybody does it.  That's their story, and they are sticking to it — until they are forced to find another one.

Hillary Clinton Spokesman: We Did Read Each Email.  Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of hits over her decision to exclusively use a personal email account for her work as secretary of state.  Among them: that in deciding which of the emails to turn over to the State Department, and which to withhold, nobody opened and read each email.  That was the conclusion that some reporters and experts drew from a nine-page fact sheet from Mrs. Clinton's office, which lays out the process she used in detail.  Nowhere in that description does it say that the emails were individually reviewed.

Hillary's performance doesn't inspire confidence in a potential president.  Hillary Clinton put on her dancing shoes and did all she could to convince reporters, and potential 2016 voters, that nothing untoward played into her decision to use a personal email account while serving as secretary of state.  It was just easier, that's all.  "I saw it as a matter of convenience," Clinton said Tuesday of using one mobile device and a private email account.  "I now, looking back, think it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning."

More body blows to Hillary's presidential prospects.  Friday saw the shocking disclosure that the State Department did not automatically archive official email correspondence during Clinton's term as SecState.  Not only does this seem to be a blatant evasion of requirements of the Public Records Act, it puts the lie to Hillary's UN press conference claim that her emails to State Department employees were automatically archived.

Media Matters pushes hard for Hillary 2016, putting its nonprofit status in question.  By retaining longtime Clinton loyalist James Carville as a regular columnist, the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America has increased its influence as a player in the 2016 presidential election.  But Media Matters may be edging toward violating the tax rules that govern nonprofit organizations.  Carville's new role at Media Matters was announced Thursday [3/12/2015], following two weeks of controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state.  Media Matters was founded by another Clinton friend, David Brock, one of the rare Clinton acolytes willing to defend her amid reports that she violated federal law by exclusively using a personal email address during her tenure as secretary of state.

30,000 e-mails, nothing classified? Judicial Watch cries foul!.  Earlier this week, the press savaged the former Secretary of State at a press conference where she attempted to explain the logistics governing her private e-mail server.  Then, a report released by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that one of Clinton's key claims — that all of her e-mails were somehow captured by the State Department — is completely baseless.  Now, advocacy organization Judicial Watch has laid into the feeble argument that Hillary never used her private e-mail account to deal with classified information.  They focus on a previous JW investigation showing that top State Department officials circulated sensitive and classified e-mails amongst themselves during and in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi.

An Open Letter to hdr22@clintonemail.com.  It has come to our attention while observing your machinations during your attempted restoration that you may not fully understand our constitutional system.  Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our democracy:  The importance of preserving historical records and the ill-advised gluttony of an American feminist icon wallowing in regressive Middle Eastern states' payola.

Judge Orders State Dept. to Release Records From Clinton Trips.  A federal judge on Friday [3/13/2015] ruled on behalf of Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, in its lawsuit against the State Department for documents related to Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure there.  Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the State Department to produce passenger manifests from 47 overseas trips that Mrs. Clinton made as secretary of state.  Citizens United requested the manifests last July through a Freedom of Information Act Request.  The State Department, the judge wrote, must release the first batch of records by April 3, with more being released every two weeks; all the documents must be given to the group no later than Aug. 1.

No one read Hillary emails before destruction.  How did Hillary Clinton know that the tens of thousands of emails from her time in office she ordered destroyed were personal?  Did she or even her staff scroll through her sent items scanning emails about "yoga routines" or "family vacations" before deleting them?  Nope.  No one looked at them.  The Clinton campaign said those emails that did not crop up in a keyword search performed by her team were automatically deleted.  No eyes.  No one to be subpoenaed.  Just highlight all and press delete.

State Department challenges Clinton claim that emails to officials 'immediately' saved.  A State Department spokeswoman said Friday that the department did not start automatically archiving emails from senior officials until February of this year — raising questions about Hillary Clinton's claim that her emails were "immediately" saved whenever she corresponded with colleagues.  The former secretary of state made that assertion during her press conference earlier this week — and in a lengthy statement put out by her office — as she defended her exclusive use of personal email.  Clinton downplayed concerns that official emails could have been lost by suggesting anytime she emailed anyone with a ".gov" address, that email would be stored for posterity.

This is enormous, and incandescently illegal.  Hillary's emails were never actually secured or encrypted, despite reports to the contrary (that they were encrypted "after three months.")  In fact, only "accessing the server" was encrypted; if I'm reading this right, the actual traffic was never encrypted.

5 Questions Hillary Clinton Ducked.  This is not about her personal email.  It's about why she seized control of documents that were supposed to be on a government server.

Hillary Clinton Is Still Violating the Law and the Justice Department Should Take Custody of the Server.  While it is true, as Mrs. Clinton has said, that the departing official must decide what information belongs to the government and what is private, that is just the start of the process.  What the official claims is private must be inventoried and reviewed by the department's records retention staff; if there is any doubt about whether a record is related to official business, the default position is that the government retains the record.  More importantly for present purposes, there is a form involved — this is the government after all.  The departing official must complete Form OF-109.

Former DOJ Deputy Attorney General: Hillary Clinton Broke The Law. Period.  She didn't comply with the Federal Records Act.  And she clearly did not comply with her own records management handbook for the Department of State which sets out a very specific process about how you remove records from the department control.

Freedom of Information Act expert: Clinton's email system 'laughable'.  A top freedom-of-information expert isn't buying Hillary Clinton's explanation of why she set up her own email system to conduct official State Department business, calling it "laughable."  Daniel Metcalfe, who advised White House administrations on interpreting the Freedom of Information Act from 1981 to 2007, told The Canadian Press that the former secretary of state acted "contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law."

'Major disconnect': Why no red flags in Clinton's use of personal email?  While Clinton says she followed the rules, questions are mounting over why administration and government information security officials apparently did little to nudge her back into using the government system — which various guidelines make clear is preferred, if not legally required.  Part of the problem may be that a key IT office has been plagued with problems and confusion for years.  Plus, the responsibility for email systems is so far-flung across the government that it's unclear whether any one person or agency could be accountable.

Hackers, probing Clinton server, cite security lapses.  Stirred by the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state, a determined band of hackers, IT bloggers, and systems analysts have trained their specialized talents and state-of-the-art software on clintonemail.com, the domain under which Clinton established multiple private email accounts, and uncovered serious lapses in security, according to data shared with Fox News.

White House frets return of 'Clinton way'.  With so much on the line, with so much time to prepare, she's back to classic Clinton? She's flubbing a campaign kickoff eight years in the making because she somehow thought that no one would ever care that she set up a secret email server?  That anyone would then accept her word that it was OK that she deleted 30,000 emails even though the State Department had been asking for some of them?  And then go silent again?  After all, 2008's "Change you can believe in" campaign slogan wasn't just a reference to George W. Bush.  It was also about her, and the uneasy feeling many people had that with Clinton, something else was always going on.

The Obama administration doesn't trust Hillary.  Of course Republicans don't trust Hillary Clinton when she claims she has turned over all government-related documents created on her secret email server.  Some Democrats appear to have doubts as well.  But surely Clinton's old colleagues in the Obama administration — the people who worked with her for four years and know her well — surely they trust the word of the former secretary of state?  Not at all.  Listen to the administration's official voices, particularly at the White House and the State Department, and you'll hear bureaucrats carefully keeping their distance from Clinton.  Nobody wants to fully vouch for her truthfulness.

Hillary's Crime: Section 1001.  Shannen Coffin, former counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, told Fox's Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night [3/11/2015] that there is "no doubt" that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed a felony when she didn't turn over her email records as she left the State Department — if she signed the usual exit form given to all exiting employees.  The State Department's "Separation Statement," Form OF-109, [...] requires the outgoing State Department employee to certify that all "classified or administratively controlled documents and material" have been "surrendered to responsible officials."

Hillary Clinton could face jail time as email scandal sparks legal challenges.  The Obama administration will soon find itself in court having to explain to federal judges why it never told anyone former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a secret email address, potentially spoiling dozens of open records requests, experts said Wednesday [3/11/2015].  And Mrs. Clinton could face up to three years in prison per message if she is found to have broken her word and handled classified information on the secret account, one open records expert told The Washington Times.

Clinton was required to sign document claiming she turned over emails in 2013.  "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, like all departing federal employees, was required to fill out and sign a separation statement affirming that she had turned over all classified and other government documents, including all emails dealing with official business.  Fox News Megyn Kelly reported Wednesday evening [3/11/2015] on the requirement and that a spokesman for Clinton had not responded to a request for comment, including an explanation of when the former chief U.S. diplomat signed the mandatory separation agreement or, if she didn't, why didn't she.

Hillary Clinton Says Her Email was Secure; She Can't Know.  The internet protocols we use to zap email about the globe were largely written during the early freewheeling days of the net, and they're still vulnerable to a wide range of attacks.  Emails can be spoofed; they can be read in transit; and servers can be hacked.  "Email is one of the least secure services you can run," says Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensic scientist.  "[Clinton's] people might be very good, but no one who really is at the top of their game is going to try to make the claim that they can catch 100 percent of the attacks."

Dear State Department: Where is Hillary Clinton's OF-109 Form?  According to people who would know, like National Review's Shannen Coffin, on or near her last day as Secretary of State, per government policy, Ms. Clinton was required to sign what is known as the OF-109 form.  Coffin, a former senior lawyer at the State Department, says that the OF-109 is an acknowledgement that the departing State Department employee has returned and/or turned over all official documents and records to the State Department.

Report on Hillary Email: Apparently It Was Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills Executing The Plan.  Earlier today Steve Hayes reported that Hillary aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills also used the "clintonmail" personal email scheme to communicate and avoid disclosure.  Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Huma and Cheryl were key players in the original plan to set up the communication network.  The "inner circle" around Hillary is comprised of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Philippe Reines, Jake Sullivan, Capricia Marshal and Maggie Williams — in that order.

Gowdy: Benghazi Panel Will Ask Clinton to Appear — Twice.  Saying Hillary Rodham Clinton's Tuesday afternoon news conference raised more questions than it answered, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi announced plans to call the former secretary of State to appear — at least twice — before his investigative panel.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in a statement issued after Clinton spoke for the first time publicly about her extensive use of a private email address and server during her four years at State, said the email server should be turned over to a neutral third party.

State Department IG: Employees Not Preserving Enough Email.  A report released Wednesday [3/11/2015] by the State Department's Inspector General concludes that the department's employees are not saving enough of their emails for "official records."  In a review of the State Department's systems that took place in Washington, D.C. during the first three months of 2014, the IG found that State Department employees "have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails.'"

Subpoena Hillary's server.  Trey Gowdy, chairman of the special House Committee that's investigating Benghazi, said today that his committee lacks the power to subpoena Hillary Clinton's email server because it is personal property.  At the same time, Gowdy called on Clinton to turn over the server voluntarily.  Clinton "doesn't get to determine what's a public record and what's a personal record," said Gowdy.  Actually, in the absence of a subpoena, Clinton gets to do exactly that — her determination that the emails she deleted were personal records will not be reviewed.

Clinton was required to sign document claiming she turned over emails in 2013.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, like all departing federal employees, was required to fill out and sign a separation statement affirming that she had turned over all classified and other government documents, including all emails dealing with official business.  Fox News Megyn Kelly reported Wednesday evening [3/11/2015] on the requirement and that a spokesman for Clinton had not responded to a request for comment, including an explanation of when the former chief U.S. diplomat signed the mandatory separation agreement or, if she didn't, why didn't she.

Democrats struggle to defend Hillary Clinton's email practices as GOP threatens subpoena to get more information.  Democrats struggled Wednesday [3/11/2015] to defend Hillary Clinton's email practices in the wake of her first public remarks on the matter, while Republicans threatened to use subpoena power to get the information they are demanding.  After Clinton on Tuesday acknowledged deleting 30,000 emails that she said were personal, backers were left with little to say beyond urging voters to take her word for it.

State Dept. Docs Call Into Question Clinton's Claim She Complied With Rules.  "The Kelly File" learned tonight [3/11/2015] that every employee leaving the State Department must sign an OF-109 form.  The document requires every employee to certify that s/he has "surrendered to responsible officials all unclassified documents and papers relating to the official business of the Government acquired by [the employee] while in the employ of the Department or USIA."

WSJ: Hillary's Private Email Was Planned in 2009.  The Wall Street Journal is out with a new report tonight [3/11/2015] claiming former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's personal email address was actually "planned" way back in 2009 before she became the United States' top diplomat, and was her idea in the first place.  Citing people familiar with the situation, the WSJ reported that Hillary's aides approached Bill Clinton's aides with the proposal — setting up her private email account through a server set up by the former president at the family's Chappaqua, N.Y., home.  The aides reportedly expressed trepidation about the potential for hackers, and were not aware at the time that Clinton would be exclusively using the private account instead of a government one via State.gov.

"Their words are always innocent — which makes it hard to figure out when they actually are."
The Clinton's tricky way with words.  Already, the press has changed its focus from the deleted — I mean, not saved — emails to the security of her private email server.  This question, which the press can probably keep aloft for weeks, can't be finessed away in a future Hillary Clinton press conference because it is largely speculative.  Given the Internet's capacity to remember everything, perhaps server logs detailing who corresponded with Clinton on her private account exist somewhere even if the emails themselves have been destroyed, as Clinton implies.

More than a billion emails at State Department, but few saved.  The State Department's government watchdog has released a review of its email record-keeping practices and concluded that the vast majority of emails sent by State personnel are not being preserved, possibly in violation of the Federal Records Act.  Out of the billion emails sent by personnel in 2011, the Office of the Inspector General found that only a minuscule fraction — 61,156 — were actually recorded within employees' official email accounts.  That number dropped to 41,749 in 2013.

Hillary's Presidential Hopes, Deleted.  In my opinion, the current email controversy represents a death knell for Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes.  Not because her crude deception is decisive in itself — although in some voters' minds, it may be — but because it reminds us of what a lousy, unlikable, not-very-competent candidate she is.

Don't Blame Gowdy.  Congress, of course, can issue subpoenas, but only for conducting oversight and the fact-finding necessary to craft legislation.  Congress is not a grand jury. Unlike the Justice Department (the main executive-branch law-enforcement arm), Congress has no standing to appear in court on behalf of the United States and to seek search warrants.  Nor does it have a police force for the execution of warrants — that's the job of the FBI and other executive-branch police agencies.

David Brock's Nonprofit Once Attacked NY Governor For Using Private Emails.  Media Matters for America founder David Brock has emerged as the preeminent defender of Hillary Clinton in the wake of her recent email scandal, even battling fellow liberals on MSNBC over the issue.  But Brock's own organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, once attacked another Democrat and a potential Clinton rival for exactly the same behavior.

'Obscure' Court Filing Explodes Hillary Clinton Email Scandal.  I have no doubt that it was Judicial Watch's focused Freedom of Information lawsuits, the disclosures from which led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which led to the uncovering of a scandal that could have criminal ramifications for Mrs. Clinton.  We knew something was up.  And we had gotten hints in our blockbuster litigation that uncovered the smoking-gun documents showing Hillary's top aides at State knew that the Benghazi terrorist attack had nothing to do with "demonstrations" or Internet videos.

AP sues State Department, seeking access to Clinton records.  The Associated Press on Wednesday [3/11/2015] sued the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

Fox Guest: Hillary Email Controversy an 'Inside Job' Ordered by Obama, Valerie Jarrett.  Author and purported Clinton insider Ed Klein has a theory about how the Hillary Clinton email controversy came about:  it was sparked by President Barack Obama and ordered by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.  Appearing on Fox and Friends Wednesday morning [3/11/2015], Klein said he's not the only one who buys into that explanation, and that Bill Clinton also believes it.  According to Klein's sources, the White House is leaking information to their "friends in the mainstream media" about Hillary's actions as Secretary of State.  Klein also said his sources from within the White House told him that Hillary is under six investigations that were sparked by the Obama Administration.

Did someone mention Valerie Jarrett?

No one in government knows knows how to use email — except Hillary Clinton.  It's claimed Clinton hosted her own email server at home, a practice endorsed by privacy enthusiasts as one of the best ways to avoid the government snooping on your private emails.  The irony being, of course, Clinton was one of the country's most powerful government officials and using this practice.  This set-up allowed Clinton to keep her emails far away from the prying eyes of the Federal Records Act, which requires government officials to keep digital records of their email correspondence.  Her staffers only recently disclosed her emails to the State Department for review, according to the Associated Press, and only upon request.

History lesson: President Hillary Clinton would be secretive, too.  News that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account to keep secret her communications as Secretary of State should surprise no one.  She came to Washington more than 20 years ago determined to keep secrets, and she's still at it.  In 1993, the newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton chose his wife to head his administration's most important domestic initiative, health care reform.  Hillary Clinton proceeded to create a task force that seemed more determined to keep secrets than to restructure health care.

Gowdy: 'Our Committee Doesn't Have the Power' to Seize Hillary's Email Server.  The House Select Committee on Benghazi will not subpoena Hillary Clinton's email server, because it can't, committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday [3/11/2015].  "Well our committee doesn't have the power — under our rules, we don't have the power to seize a personal property like that.  The House as a whole, that's franky an open constitutional question as to whether the House as a whole has that legal authority, but frankly, we shouldn't have to compel it," Gowdy said.

IT Expert Says He Traced Hillary's Email Server To Manhattan Government Building.  Cyber-security expert Vinny Troia told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday [3/10/2015] that he traced the IP address of the server Hillary Clinton used to host the private email account she used as secretary of state to a government building in the heart of New York City.  "I did read reports that [the server] was at her house, but when we traced the IP address it came back to the city office here in downtown Manhattan," Troia told Van Susteren.

Hillary in Free Fall: What Happens Next?  Last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hoped the email mess would die quietly, a one-day story.  Bad calculation.  The story has staying power, is metastasizing, and is engaging the legacy media.  Worst of all for the denizens of Hillaryland, all its responses have failed to quash it.

No Classified Emails by Clinton? Some Experts Are Skeptical.  Anyone who has tried to pry information from the federal government may have been surprised on Tuesday [3/10/2015] by Hillary Rodham Clinton's assertion that in all her emails in four years as secretary of state she never strayed into the classified realm.  After all, a consensus of both Republicans and Democrats for many years has been that the government routinely overclassifies information, reflexively stamping "secret" on mountains of documents with marginally sensitive content.  The government classified more than 80 million documents in 2013, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, which publishes an annual count.

The Mendacious, Charmless, Painfully Mediocre And Unelectable Hillary Clinton.  Little can be done for Hillary following today's shambles of a press conference.  She took a bad circumstance and turned it into a roaring inferno with one implausible statement after another, creating a series of conundra for her supporters along the way.  Do you believe her "creature of convenience" story and thus agree someone incapable of setting up two email accounts on a mobile phone has the intellect to be president?  Do you buy the idea that all emails she sent to other State Department employees would therefore have gone to the "state.gov" server and are already archived?  If so, what of the reports that her key advisors at State, for example Huma Abedin and Phillippe Raines, also had email addresses at clintonemails.com?  What of the idea that Hillary wasn't the only employee at State using personal emails to do government business?  Do you believe someone who forewent a state.gov account of her own would never contact another government official at their personal email?

Hillary's E-Mails May Cost Taxpayers Millions.  The State Department is beginning to sort through more than 55,000 pages of e-mails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary that she handed over late last year, sticking taxpayers with additional costs that could reach into the millions. [...] Clinton's office sent the e-mails to the State Department last December, a portion of the total in her possession, after printing them out and stacking them in boxes.  The department largely sat on them until last week, when news broke that she had used a "homebrew" server rather than her government account to conduct her official business.

The Hillary Email Scandal: Who Profits?  [Scroll down]  I think it's at least possible at this point that not too many weeks down the road Hillary will suddenly develop "health issues" and not run at all.  So who profits by this?

Gowdy: 'No Choice' But for Clinton to Turn Server Over to Third-Party Arbiter.  House Republicans who have been trying to see former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails in the Benghazi investigation weren't satisfied with her press conference today [3/10/2015].  "For instance, there remain serious questions about the security of the system she employed from a national security standpoint, who authorized this exclusive use of personal email despite guidance to the contrary from both her State Department and the White House, who had access to the server from the time Secretary Clinton left office until the time — almost two years later — the State Department asked for these public records back, and who culled through the records to determine which were personal and which were public," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the special committee investigating Benghazi, said in a statement.

The real Hillary Clinton.  If you want to know why Hillary Clinton thought she could get away with violating federal regulations in order to conceal her emails when she was secretary of state, take a look behind the facade.  Mrs. Clinton pretends to be a compassionate woman who cares about the little people and will champion the middle class if elected president.  The reality is that behind the scenes, she is abusive to those same people.

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys.  [Scroll down]  But it is impossible for any person with a functioning central nervous system to believe that Hillary Clinton is telling the truth about her emails, inasmuch as her statements on the matter are in conflict with established facts and in conflict with each other.  They simply are not compatible with reality.  Likewise, it is impossible for any sentient person to believe that Barack Obama is telling the truth about the matter, that he learned about the situation from press reports when he in fact corresponded with her via email.

AP Reporter: Hackers Have More Access to State Dept Records Than Public.  AP Reporter Matthew Lee argued that hackers "have more access to the State Department records and archives than the American public and Congress do" during Monday's [3/9/2015] State Department briefing.  "It seems to me a little bit unusual where we're in a position where hackers from Russia, or from wherever they are, have more access to the State Department records and archives than the American public and Congress do" he declared.

Hillary acts stupid when she plays dumb.  I'm talking about the Hillary Clinton who makes unforced errors every time she opens her mouth — the one who last year described herself as having been "dead broke" in 2001 when she had $20 million in book advances coming her way.  That moment of playing dumb was designed to make her seem more accessible to the hoi polloi she wanted to buy her new book.

Obama Once Called Hillary's Refusal To Release Communications With Bill A 'Problem'.  [Hillary] Clinton, who eventually served as Obama's secretary of state during his first term, is now under fire for conducting business with a private e-mail address that was attached to a personal server.  Obama told CBS he first learned about Clinton's use of a private email address "through news reports," implying that he never personally corresponded through email with the secretary of state.

Secrecy, sex, Hillary and Bill.  Secrecy is to Hillary Clinton what sex was to Bill.  She has to have it.  She doesn't care if it is wise. She doesn't care if it does more harm than good.  And enjoyment doesn't enter into it.  She has been secretive for much of her political life, which is one reason that many people still have no clear idea who she really is.

Hillary Clinton scandal spreads as tea party group seeks private IRS emails.  One of the tea party groups targeted by the IRS asked Congress Monday to demand the private emails of some agency employees, while a top committee chairman issued a request for instant-chat messages from the EPA, as the Clinton emails scandal begins to envelop other parts of the Obama administration.  The White House, meanwhile, tried to keep the burgeoning scandal at arm's length, with spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledging President Obama and Mrs. Clinton did email, but insisting the White House followed all record-keeping laws, and the president didn't know Mrs. Clinton was exclusively using a private email until reports surfaced last week.

Gov. Palin: I faced tough questions over email, so should Hillary Clinton.  The latest Obama administration scandal involving Hillary Clinton's emails has many Americans discussing private email accounts used by government officials, and clarification is in order.  It's appropriate and proper for a politician to use private email for personal and campaign business.  This is what I did as governor of Alaska in order to be in compliance with the law, which requires that personal or campaign business not be conducted using public resources such as a government email account.  There is a firm line separating the two.  However, that's not what we see with this Clinton email scandal.

Hillary's house of no cards to play.  Richard M. Nixon taped himself planning a cover-up; Gary Hart posed with a blonde in his lap; and Hillary Clinton decided to accept donations to her private foundation-cum-personal-piggy-bank while serving as the country's first diplomat, after having set up a private email account that is not only unaccountable to outside authorities but also easy to hack.  It is not the Clintons' first scandal, but it is by far their least timely, and their most dangerous.  For the first time, they lack the protections that managed to save them before.

Hillary Clinton's Possibly Fatal Email Mistake.  Hillary Clinton's email scandal showcases that she shouldn't be president.  This has nothing to do with her party or politics — it has to do with how she seems to approach a decision — through tunnel vision leadership.  This method isn't biased on the left or right, but it is more hardwired into men than women.  Unfortunately, Clinton seems to have this in spades.  It may even explain mistakes like Benghazi better than any of the hair-brained theories that her opponents so far have fielded.

Trey Gowdy: Shame on me if I trust State Department to be 'neutral arbiter' of Clinton records.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican, says he is not confident the State Department can be a neutral arbiter of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's records amid the controversy over Mrs. Clinton's use of a private e-mail during her time as the nation's top diplomat.  Mr. Gowdy, who chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Monday evening [3/9/2015] on Fox News' "The Kelly File" that the State Department "is not the neutral third party arbiter that I would recommend the secretary turn her server over to so you can analyze it for forensics to see whether or not there's been any hacking or tampering."

The public deserves answers, not stonewalling, from Hillary Clinton.  A week has passed since the disclosure that Ms. Clinton used a private account for all of her e-mail messages while serving as secretary of state, contrary to the administration's instruction that officials should use government e-mail accounts and contrary to what the State Department — on her watch — was telling its ambassadors and other officials to do.  Ms. Clinton did not turn in the e-mail records to the government when she left office.  Since then, she has given the department 55,000 pages of messages in response to a request, but those were selected by her and her staff, not by government archivists or officials.  All of this reveals a cavalier attitude to the public's legitimate claim on government records.

Hillary Exposed Her Emails To Spies... To Hide Them From You.  We already noted that there was no way she couldn't have known that she had to use government email systems for government work, as there was a big scandal from the previous administration using private emails and within the early Obama administration as well.  This morning we discovered that Clinton also gave clintonemail.com email addresses to staffers, which undermines the argument made by Hillary's spokesperson that it was okay for her to use her own email address because any emails with staffers would still be archived by the State Department thanks to their use of state.gov emails.  But that's clearly not the case when she's just emailing others with the private email addresses.

Mystery location of Clinton email server seen as 'matter of national security'.  In the depths of the hacker and IT-blogger community, a skirmish has broken out over the nature of Hillary Clinton's email server — a debate that could have profound implications for national security during Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, and for investigators hoping to mine her emails for evidentiary purposes.  The questions center on where, exactly, Hillary Clinton's email server is, or was, physically located; which private-sector firms may have been hosting it; and how secure Clinton's emails were at any given point.

Hillary made the case for disclosing her emails in 2011.  The former first lady's situation seems to worsen by the day.  First it was revealed that Hillary had a private email account for the duration of her tenure as Secretary of State.  Then it was discovered that her private email account was run through servers reportedly in her home.  And no one in Obama's administration seemed to have been aware that Mrs. Clinton was operating an extra-governmental account.  Or at least that's the current story.  When asked if they could prove with certitude that no classified information was exchanged via Hillary's private email, the State Department replied, "that's not a pertinent question."  Late last week, the State Department changed their story saying it was up to each Secretary to determine what was relevant and then submit that information back to the DOS for record keeping.

Hillary aboard C-17
Hillary's Missing Emails.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email scandal widened as the lead Republican investigator into the deadly Benghazi fiasco accused Clinton of failing to hand over months of emails from her tenure.  "There are gaps of months and months and months," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Sunday on "Face the Nation" on CBS.


Clinton, Inc. is what's wrong with America.  Here's the bottom line of the latest HillaryWorld scandals:  Clinton Inc. embodies what's wrong with America.  It's about getting stinking rich from the inside connections forged in a life of public service.  It's about using your "charity" and your high government office as adjuncts of your political machine.  It's about refusing to play by the rules even as you want to set the rules for everyone else.  Start with the latest shocker, the email lunacy.  You don't get to keep your government work a secret from the government.

Republicans warn that Hillary could be charged with a crime if she doesn't hand over ALL her State Department emails.  Top House Republicans are warning Hillary Clinton they won't hesitate to have her charged with criminal wrongdoing if it turns out she didn't provide the State Department with copies of every email she sent in relation to the Benghazi assault.  A spokesperson for Clinton has said that the former secretary of state completely complied with the requirement but Republicans have continued to question the veracity of that statement.

Hillary Clinton's Trained Seals and Their Tiresome Act.  Over the last few days we've seen one former Clinton aide and acolyte after another come out of the woodwork to defend yet another Clinton from yet another series of scandals.  It's like a tired, awful syndicated series that's been cancelled but just won't go away.  In one corner, it was Lanny Davis being methodically taken apart by Fox News's Chris Wallace.  In another corner was the Ragin' Cajun, James Carville, whining about "cockamamie right wing talking points" being responsible for this story. [...] Watching these men react like trained seals is pathetic, causing a wave of Clinton Fatigue to once again wash over America.

White House: Hillary And Obama Did Email Each Other.  White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest admits that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama did exchange emails while she was in the Obama administration.  "The president, I think as many people expected, did, over the course of his first several years in office, trade emails with his secretary of state," Earnest confirmed, but added that the number of emails they exchanged was "not large."  Earnest said that Obama did know Clinton's email address, but was not probably not aware of the details of the address or the existence of the secretary's private server.

Hillary's Watergate.  It is hard to imagine the 2016 presidential race without Hillary Clinton.  But Mrs. Clinton seems to have missed the most important lesson that everyone else learned from the Watergate scandal:  The cover up is worse than the crime.  It is especially ironic since Mrs. Clinton started her legal career in Washington advising the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation.

Hillary being hung out to dry by her own.  Hillary Clinton has a lot fewer friends than she must have supposed.  In a stunning turn of events, people she should have been able to count on are turning on her in the wake of her mushrooming e-mail scandal.  The way things are going, we may hear her warn of a "vast left wing conspiracy" against her.  Let's start with the man who should be her stoutest defender:  Bill Clinton.

Defenseless Secretary.  It's been nearly four days since the world learned that, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton did all of her government emailing on a private account — a decision that skirted the law and thwarted public records requests in the process.  Since the story broke, Clinton remarkably has made no effort to explain herself.  Instead, she's relied on an army of spokesmen, surrogates, and other allies to deflect the criticism or simply distract from it with a variety of political explanations that don't add up to a convincing real-world defense.

Sebelius Offers No Excuse for Hillary's Email Troubles.  Even Kathleen Sebelius isn't going out of her way to defend Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services denied using private email while she served in the Obama administration.  "No," Sebelius said in response to a question about whether she used a private email system, according to an article in the Topeka Capital-Journal.  "We were told specifically, in our department at least, that we needed to use government emails and even if you receive something on your private email that was professional, you needed to transfer it over to your government email and respond that way."

While Clinton Hid Emails, $6 Billion Went Missing in Her State Dept..  [Scroll down]  But the emails — if they are ever disclosed to the public — are not the half of it.  They are the proverbial tip of the iceberg of secrecy.  Recall that not even a year ago, it was quietly disclosed that the Hillary Clinton State Dept. "misplaced" more than $6 billion dollars that remain unaccounted for.

The Benghazi Committee's Belated Interest in Hillary's Hidden E-mails.  The Benghazi massacre was the lowlight of Mrs. Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.  Suddenly this week, the public was informed, for the first time, that during those four tumultuous years, she conducted State Department business through a private e-mail system designed to evade government record-keeping requirements.  The scheme is redolent of Clintonian hypocrisy:  Even while Mrs. Clinton was exclusively using personal e-mail, she admonished State Department personnel that doing so was prohibited as a major security breach, and she forced the resignation of the U.S. ambassador to Kenya for, among other things, using private e-mail for public business.

'Huge gaps' in Clinton emails: Chairman of House Benghazi Committee.  The chairman of the House committee investigating the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012, said there are "huge gaps" in the Hillary Clinton emails turned over to his panel.  "We don't have all of them," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation."  Included in the gaps are emails from Oct. 18, 2011, the date of the well-known photo of then-Secretary of State Clinton wearing sunglasses and gripping her BlackBerry while on a plane to Libya.  In fact, there were no emails released to the committee from that entire trip, Gowdy said.

Next!.  The Democrats' response to Herself's trouble has taken three main forms:  1) What she did wasn't technically illegal, says David Brock and other slavish Clinton retainers, even hauling out that old Al Gore classic, "no controlling legal authority"; [...]

Obama weighs in on Hillary Clinton's private emails.  President Obama only learned of Hillary Clinton's private email address use for official State Department business after a New York Times report, he told CBS News in an interview.  CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante asked Mr. Obama when he learned about her private email system after his Saturday [3/7/2015] appearance in Selma, Alabama.  "The same time everybody else learned it through news reports," the president told Plante.

Also posted under Liberals think you're stupid.

White House: Obama Was Aware Of Clinton's Email Address.  The White House says the president did email with Clinton during her time in office, but he was unaware of that she used the personal account exclusively and housed it on a private server.

The Editor says...
The president is either lying or he is monumentally stupid, or his staff is incompetent and corrupt.  Take your pick.

Guess who else was on Clinton's private at-home server.  [Hillary Clinton] deliberately sought to hide her email correspondence from the public — shielding her skulduggery, failures and treason perhaps.  No one installs a server in their home for their emails just because.  The motive is malevolent and the American people should be outraged.  Further, the server should have been seized before Clinton could destroy what is obviously damning and indictable.  Further, it is striking that Huma Abedin was the only non-family member to have her own account on Clinton's server.

State Department: Hillary decides what emails we can see.  The State Department has faced a lot of questions about former Secretary Hillary Clinton's secret email account, but the most fundamental one is:  Do you have them all? Officials at State have said repeatedly that Clinton has turned over 55,000 pages of emails from her time at the department.  But each time spokeswoman Marie Harf has been asked whether that material — 55,000 pages, not 55,000 emails — represents all of Clinton's State Department emails, she ends up citing Clinton's staff, who have told department officials that Clinton has turned over everything that is "responsive" to the department's request for documents.  Clinton, of course, decided what is "responsive" and what is not.

'Huge gaps' in Clinton emails: Chairman of House Benghazi Committee.  The chairman of the House Benghazi Committee said "there are huge gaps" in the Hillary Clinton emails turned over to his committee investigating the deadly attack that killed four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012.  For instance, there were no emails on Oct. 8, 2011, the day the iconic picture of the Secretary of State clad in sunglasses and bracing her Blackberry on a plane to Libya.  In fact there were no emails from that entire trip.

Hillary's Twitter Disconnect.  An imperial message came from the Internet's one-dimensional darkness Wednesday:  "I want the public to see my email.  I asked State to release them.  They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."  Those brief keystrokes were Hillary Clinton's Twitter response to the firestorm over her apparent bypassing of the State Department's email system and instead using a personal account on "dark" computer file-servers at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, 260 miles from Washington.

White House alerted to potential Clinton email problem in August.  The White House, State Department and Hillary Clinton's personal office knew in August that House Republicans had received information showing that the former secretary of state conducted official government business through her private email account — and Clinton's staff made the decision to keep quiet.  Sources familiar with the discussions say key people in the Obama administration and on Clinton's staff were aware that the revelation could be explosive for the all-but-announced candidate for president.  But those involved deferred to Clinton's aides, and they decided not to respond.

Obama: All my emails 'are available and archived'.  President Obama was asked about Hillary Clinton's secret emails during his trip to Selma, Ala., Saturday [3/7/2015] and said he did not know his former secretary of state was using a secret account until he read it in the news.  The president also noted he does not follow Clinton's practice of secrecy.  "Mr. President, when did you first learn that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. Government for official business while she was secretary of state?" asked CBS's Bill Plante.  "The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports," Obama said.

Trey Gowdy sees months-long gaps in Clinton emails.  The top House Republican Benghazi investigator says the emails Hillary Clinton has handed over for review have "huge gaps" that challenge her credibility over what happened in the 2012 attacks in Libya.  "There are gaps of months and months and months," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said on Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Emails May Be a Key to Addressing 'Pay to Play' Whispers at Clinton Foundation.  Hillary Clinton's secret communications cache is a bombshell deserving of full disclosure because of her assault on government transparency and electronic security.  But its greatest relevancy is what the emails might reveal about any nexus between Clinton's work at State and donations to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Foundation from U.S. corporations and foreign nations.  Under fire, Bill Clinton said his namesake charity has "done a lot more good than harm" — hardly a ringing endorsement.  One of his longest serving advisers, a person who had worked directly for the foundation, told me the "longtime whispers of pay-to-play are going to become shouts."

Did the White House expose Hillary's e-mails this week to protect their deal with Iran?.  [Scroll down]  Allegedly, State Department lawyers working on producing documents for the House's Benghazi investigation first raised the alarm about private e-mails last summer.  Hillary's advisors met with State officials in August to discuss producing her private e-mail correspondence.  It took Team Hillary until December to actually hand over the files. [...] Not until three weeks ago did State finally hand over the files to Trey Gowdy's Benghazi committee.

Huma Abedin's private emails, Muslim Brotherhood.  Hillary Clinton's Emailgate scandal is becoming more problematic by the day.  Turns out she exclusively used a private email account while personally prohibiting other State Department employees from doing the same.  One other State Department official evidently violated this policy:  Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin.  Her emails are of particular interest insofar as Ms. Abedin has extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.  That's the Islamist organization whose self-declared mission is "destroying Western civilization from within."

The curious case of Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, the Muslim Brotherhood and all of their missing emails.  Watchdog group Judicial Watch, which doesn't like being lied to or jerked around any more than the House Benghazi Select Committee does, has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of State seeking all communications, including emails, between Secretary of State Clinton and Huma Abedin with Nagla Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi between Jan. 21, 2009, and Jan. 21, 2013.  The lawsuit — which also seeks a thorough search of Clinton's newly discovered private email accounts connected to a home-based server to exclusively conduct government business — comes alongside the issue of subpoenas by the Benghazi Select Committee.  Both have long been curious about the scarcity of produced emails with Clinton's name on them.

FOIA Request for Hillary Clinton's Email Address Went Missing.  The State Department may have ignored or rejected a request made in 2012 under the Freedom of Information Act by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) seeking Hillary Clinton's email addresses, according to a Daily Caller report on Thursday [3/5/2015].  The New York Times reported on Monday that Clinton exclusively used a private email account and server for her email during her four years as secretary of state, skirting federal records laws, as well as State Department and Obama administration transparency guidelines, and raising suspicions that numerous public records requests for her emails were improperly blocked.

Hillary's Email Escapade.  Hillary Clinton has made some disingenuous statements over her political career, but none remotely compare to the tweet she issued Wednesday night:  "I want the public to see my email," she said.  This requires — how to say it — a willing suspension of disbelief.

Hillary's email practice raises larger questions.  The excuses coming from the Hillary Clinton camp about her private email account are hard to swallow.  Claims that she lived up to the "letter and spirit of the rules" governing email accounts while serving as secretary of state border on insulting.  And the fact she released 55,000 pages of emails when asked for them is hardly evidence that she embraces transparency.  Far from it.  The email episode reveals a deliberate flouting of the rules, and it could limit our understanding of key events that occurred during her tenure at the State Department.  Her use of an email server traced to her New York home raises security questions.

AP Doesn't Ask WH Officials if They Successfully Emailed Hillary on Private Account.  On Thursday [3/5/2015], the Associated Press reported, citing "a person familiar with the matter," that the "White House counsel's office was not aware at the time Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state that she relied solely on personal email and only found out as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack."  The outlet did not note whether anyone outside of the White House counsel's office knew about Clinton's private email account.

Review of Hillary Clinton emails to take months: official.  A growing controversy over Democrat Hillary Clinton's use of personal email for work while she was U.S. secretary of state could drag on for months, threatening to cloud the expected launch of her 2016 presidential campaign.

Top Dem Congressman Praises Hillary For Email Transparency.  Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is the ranking member on the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  So when it was discovered that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had every email she ever sent during her tenure on a previously unknown private server in her home — and that it was not accessible or searchable by anyone in government — you'd think he'd be upset that his committee had not received all the information they need to conduct their investigation.  You would be wrong.

La la land
Why Hillary Will Abandon Her Run for the Presidency.  It's not like Hillary did not know she was supposed to use the State Department's email system for reasons of national security; her private emails could have been hacked by forces unfriendly to the U.S. All government employees are routinely briefed on the laws that require this.


Huma Abedin: Clinton's Unindicted Email Co-Conspirator.  Watchdog group Judicial Watch, which doesn't like being lied to or jerked around any more than the House Benghazi Select Committee does, has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of State seeking all communications, including emails, between Secretary of State Clinton and Huma Abedin with Nagla Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi between Jan. 21, 2009, and Jan. 21, 2013.  The lawsuit — which also seeks a thorough search of Clinton's newly discovered private email accounts connected to a home-based server to exclusively conduct government business — comes alongside the issue of subpoenas by the Benghazi Select Committee.  Both have long been curious about the scarcity of produced emails with Clinton's name on them.

Exclusive: Internal cable from Clinton State Department office barred use of personal email.  An internal 2011 State Department cable, obtained by Fox News, shows that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office told employees not to use personal email for security reasons — while at the same time, Clinton conducted all government business on a private account.  Sent to diplomatic and consular staff in June 2011, the unclassified cable, bearing Clinton's electronic signature, made clear to employees they were expected to "avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts."  The message also said employees should not "auto-forward Department email to personal email accounts which is prohibited by Department policy."

Hillary fired US Ambassador to Kenya for using personal email account.  Jake Tapper points out a very important detail in all of this.  Hillary Clinton and her staff have only turned over a limited number of emails from her time as Secretary of State, but the Federal Records Act requires all communication conducted by cabinet officials to be permanently archived.

Server, Serve Her: Clinton Crumbling.  EmailGate is reminding Americans of the scandalous Clintonian habit of deception and corruption.

State Dept. Silence on How It Handled FOIA Requests For Hillary Email.  The State Department is refusing to provide insight into how the federal agency handled Freedom of Information Act requests for Hillary Clinton's emails, as fallout from Clinton's use of a private email account as secretary of state is poised to stretch into a third day.  As The Daily Caller, The New York Times and others noted on Tuesday, Clinton's use of a personal email account [...] thwarted the FOIA request process.  Since 2009, federal regulations have required agencies to preserve emails generated on outside systems.  By failing to make those documents available to the Department, Clinton avoided having her emails made subject to numerous FOIA requests.

Was the State Department 'IT guy' Asleep at the Switch?  At the very least, Hillary Clinton showed very bad judgement.  At worst, she did not care that her fear of transparency could end up hurting the nation.  Don't be surprised if a lot of Democrats start looking for an alternative to Hillary Clinton!

More bad news for the sorcerer's apprentice.  Hillary Clinton's trouble with her email account is only a symptom of what ails the lady.  Like Bubba, she suffers from terminal arrogance.  Hillary and Bubba — or should that be Bubba and Hillary? — think rules don't apply to them.  When he gets caught in a jam, which is often, he winks, smiles, crooks his crooked pointing finger, and asks one and all:  "Whatcha gonna do with a good ol' boy like me?"  That always worked.  Hillary knows better than to try that anywhere but at home.  When the heat is turned up under her, as when the telephone rang at 3 o'clock in the morning with news of catastrophe at Benghazi, she disappears.

Are we watching a cheap spy movie or a presidential campaign?  According the New York Daily News "Mrs. Clinton "had her own computer server and private email that she used for official business while working as secretary of state.  The server was registered at the Clinton's Chappaqua home under an apparent pseudonym, 'Eric Hoteman.'"  That name is curiously similar to long-time financial adviser Eric Hothem who has been involved with the Clintons for decade.  Like so many Clinton loyalists, Hothem is linked to various controversies, including suspected pay-to-play pardons issued by Bill Clinton during his presidency and the controversy over the removal of family of furniture from the White House.  Classy folks, those Clintons.

The Hillary Camp's Rationale for Staying Quiet.  Hillary Clinton won't be presiding over a soul-searching press conference or sitting down for a come-clean interview about her use of a private email address any time soon — at least if everything goes according to her team's plan.  The former secretary of state and her advisers have decided to adopt a time-tested Clintonian approach:  take a concrete step to ease the pressure, then wait out the storm, according to three sources with knowledge of her team's approach.

Newly Relevant Benghazi Panel Spooks Dems.  When the House created its Benghazi Select Committee last year, it seemed like a joke — derided by mocking Democrats and eye-rolling Republicans, who'd already run through multiple investigations and hearings on the U.S. consulate attack.  Then the committee revealed Hillary Clinton had used multiple personal email accounts for official business at the State Department.  And suddenly, Democrats are terrified — terrified that the Benghazi panel is about to become the House Select Committee to take down Clinton, their presumptive presidential nominee.

Clinton created multiple email addresses on private server, data show.  Hillary Clinton appears to have established multiple email addresses for her private use, and possibly the use of her aides, under the domain of "clintonemail.com," according to a prominent member of the hacking community who supplied independent research data, conducted with high-tech tools, to Fox News.  The hacker used an open-source tool, publicly available, called "The Harvester" to search a variety of data sources — including well-known platforms such as Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter and others — for any stored references to email addresses seen using a particular domain, in this case clintonemail.com.

Clinton's personal email use — despite clear rules — raises double-standard questions.  Hillary Clinton's State Department for years was telling underlings not to use personal email — even ousting an ambassador, the ex-diplomat says, in part over his Gmail habits — despite the secretary of state herself ignoring that advice.  The disconnect is now raising questions of a double standard during her tenure.  An internal 2011 State Department cable, obtained by Fox News, shows Clinton's office told employees not to use personal email for security reasons.

Larry Klayman pushes for contempt proceedings against Clinton, aide.  The fight over Hillary Clinton's private email system is moving to the courts as a conservative legal activist presses for contempt proceedings against the former secretary of state and one of her top aides.  Longtime Clinton nemesis Larry Klayman filed motions late Thursday asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to send two cases pending there back to lower courts so they can explore whether Clinton's use of a private email account during her tenure as secretary led to incomplete and inaccurate responses from the State Department to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

White House knew about Clinton's e-mails in August.  The White House learned in August that House Republicans knew Hillary Clinton had been using her personal email to conduct official business as Secretary of State, Politico reported Friday [3/6/2015].  It was then that officials at the State Department first noticed the personal email appeared in a document being provided to Republicans has part of their investigation of the Benghazi attacks, according to the report.  Administration officials reportedly deferred to Clinton's personal staff, who decided not to tackle the issue publicly until it was made public this week by The New York Times.

White House Suggests Obama Found Out About Hillary Email Scandal From 'Reading The Newspaper'.  Aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest indicated that President Obama probably found out about the Hillary Clinton email scandal from "the newspaper."  Earnest admitted he had "no idea" when Obama learned that Clinton was exclusively using a private email account based on a home server but that he "wouldn't be surprised, however, if he had learned about that by reading the newspaper."

Valerie Jarrett: 'I Don't Know' if Obama Officials Ever Received Emails from Hillary.  During a Friday morning [3/6/2015] interview on Bloomberg TV, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett was asked whether she or any other administration officials received emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her personal clintonemail.com server.  Her answer:  "I don't know."  The grilling came at the tail end of an interview about the White House "Let Girls Learn" initiative, when anchors Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle pivoted to the ongoing Clinton email controversy, asking:  "I'd have to imagine that while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State you received emails from her..."  "I actually did not," Jarrett insisted.  "No, I have not received an email from Secretary Clinton."

A Hillary Clinton Email the State Department Couldn't Find.  Hillary Clinton supporters have defended her use of a private email account to conduct official State Department business by arguing that she emailed colleagues at their government addresses, ensuring that a copy of the correspondence would be retained on government servers and available to archivists.  As it turns out, some aides to Hillary Clinton also used private email addresses.  But even if Team Hillary's initial claim had held together, it wouldn't matter.  Public records laws encompass not just correspondence with other government employees but also emails with third parties about government business.  That's why a particular email flagged by J.K. Trotter is important.

State Dept. changes story on Clinton emails.  In a reversal, the State Department acknowledged Friday [3/6/2015] that a Congressional investigation into the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi played a role in the agency's decision to ask Hillary Clinton and three other secretaries of state to turn over copies of all work-related emails they sent or received on private accounts during their tenure.  State spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that a special House committee's ongoing probe into the Benghazi incident was one of many factors that led the department to send a request last October that resulted in Clinton sending her former agency 55,000 pages of emails she exchanged on an unofficial account.

Dems denounce subpoena for Hillary Clinton emails.  Democrats on the House Committee on Benghazi are calling on the panel's Republican chairman to withdraw subpoenas sent to the State Department for Hillary Clinton's personal emails.  In a letter sent to Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Friday, the five Democrats on the panel criticized Gowdy for issuing the formal request for documents from Clinton's term as secretary of state without consulting with Democrats and accused the committee of operating as a campaign arm of the Republican National Committee.

Is the Mysterious 'Eric Hoteham' Actually Longtime Clinton Aide Eric Hothem?  The name of the mysterious individual who registered the servers for Hillary Clinton's private email address used at the State Department bears a striking resemblance to a longtime Clinton aide. [...] The customer listed in records registering the Internet address to the Chappaqua home was "Eric Hoteham."  The AP, however, was unable to identify an "Eric Hoteham," stating that the "name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records, or Internet background searches."  But the name is similar to that of Eric Hothem, who worked as a staff assistant for Clinton during her time as First Lady.

Geriatric oligarch hacks hardest hit.
Reports: Hillary's Use of Covert Email System to Skirt Subpoenas May Constitute a Felony.  As Flyovercountry observes, "Her crime, my fellow gentle snow flakes, had little to do with email, although that was the vehicle which she used to commit her transgression.  Her crime was establishing a subpoena-proof system to hide her dealings on behalf of a public which has a legal right to know what their servant is up to, even before she held the job for which said email was to be used.  She committed a covert act, three days before her confirmation hearing to cover up a crime she hadn't even committed yet, but clearly was planning on committing in the very near future. [...]"

Hillary lets Dems twist on her email scandal.  If anything frightens lawmakers more than 4 inches of snow, it is the prospect of getting crossways with Clinton's communications cutthroats.  But they're not giving Democrats much to work with here.  Lashing out at the NYT and trying to shift the blame to the Obama administration is not exactly putting Hill Democrats in their sweet spot.  And when the subject — lack of transparency and ethical concerns — goes to the heart of the party's misgivings about its presumptive nominee, it's that much tougher.

Former Clinton Spokesman Denies Using Private Email Account.  A former State Department spokesman for Hillary Clinton denied using a private email address to conduct official government business in a lengthy email barrage that began Tuesday night [3/3/2015] and continued Wednesday.  Gawker reported on Tuesday [3/3/2015] that Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines, two longtime Clinton confidants, used private email addresses to conduct State Department business during Clinton's time as secretary of state.  Clinton has been embroiled in a public records controversy since Monday, when the New York Times reported that she exclusively used a private email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department, a possible violation of federal records law and clearly at odds President Obama's much-touted transparency directives.

Hacker Reveals Contents from Hillary's Private E-Mails and Shows Who She Was Talking To.  It appears Hillary Clinton was conducting serious and sensitive international affairs on her private email account.  She also kept up confidential correspondence with a political operative who hasn't worked for the government in over a decade.  The revelation that Secretary of State Clinton used a private e-mail account rather than an official State Department e-mail struck many as troubling and potentially criminal.

Bigger Question: Did Hillary use unsecured email for Classified Info?  [Scroll down]  As Secretary of State, Hillary presumably received classified and other protected information via email at least on occasion, since it was her only email account.  That distinguishes her from predecessors, who at least had government email accounts.  We need more facts on her usage, but if Hillary maintained classified documents (including emails) on an unclassified computer device and email account, that could raise much more serious issues than the records violation.

White House scrambles to answer when they learned of Clinton email habits.  White House spokesman Josh Earnest, when asked about what the White House knew, said senior officials were emailing Clinton while she was secretary of state and a few noticed she wasn't using a .gov email address.  However, he did not say when they noticed it and whether red flags were raised.  He also said he had no idea when President Obama first found out and claimed he wouldn't be surprised if Obama only learned about it from "newspapers."

Krauthammer: Hillary E-mails a Version of Depends on the Meaning of 'Is'.  Krauthammer argued Clinton was "clearly constructing a system in which you control access.  If anybody ever demands access you will have your lawyers out there for a year blocking, questioning, and protecting it.  And, as we just heard, if you want to make something disappear by swapping out a server, you can do it, and nobody knows.  Why would you do that if you're Secretary of State and you're not intending at some point to be secretive about it? [...]"

Hillary Clinton's use of private e-mail reflects poor judgment.  Hillary Rodham Clinton has served as first lady, a senator from New York and secretary of state.  She is no newcomer to the corridors of power.  Her decision to exclusively use a private e-mail account while secretary suggests she made a deliberate decision to shield her messages from scrutiny.  It was a mistake that reflects poor judgment about a public trust.  Under the rules as they existed during Ms. Clinton's time as secretary, from 2009 to 2013, government officials were not strictly required to use official e-mail accounts.  However, in 2011 the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said, "We are definitely instructed that we need to conduct all of our work on our government accounts...."  He said it was "administration policy" to use government accounts.  Did this not apply to Ms. Clinton at the State Department?

As House panel issues subpoenas, questions mount over Clinton e-mails.  A congressional committee issued subpoenas Wednesday [3/4/2015] seeking information about Hillary Rodham Clinton's use of a private e-mail account for official business while she was secretary of state, setting up a potential legal clash with the presumptive Democratic front-runner for president.  The move followed the revelation that Clinton had installed a private server at her New York home that allowed her, and not the State Department, to store her e-mail correspondence and later decide which ones to turn over as public records.

Judicial Watch Sues for Hillary and Huma's Egypt Emails.  Judicial Watch announced today [3/4/2015] that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department seeking any and all communications — including emails — from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Chief of Staff Huma Abedin with Nagla Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi, from January 21, 2009 to January 31, 2013.  This latest lawsuit will require the State Department to answer questions about and conduct thorough searches of Hillary Clinton's newly discovered hidden email accounts.  Judicial Watch also has nearly a dozen other active FOIA lawsuits that may require the State Department to search these email accounts.  Huma Abedin is also alleged to have a secret account as well.

A flustered Marie Harf is grilled on Clinton's private email.  At this point, I feel sorry for Department of State spokeswoman Marie Harf.  She's always in way over her head.  Harf's latest mess comes to us from a press conference held earlier today.  Reporters asked if the Department of State could say with certitude that Clinton's private email was never used to share classified information.  DOS's response?  "It's not really a pertinent question."

Don't ask Dems about Hillary Clinton's emails.  Everyone in Washington is talking about Hillary Clinton's email controversy — except Democrats in Congress.  The mere mention of Clinton's travails sent Democrats scrambling to avoid commenting, if they answered questions at all.

White House lawyers were not aware of Hillary Clinton's use of personal email.  The White House counsel's office was not aware at the time Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state that she relied solely on personal email and only found out as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Clinton's Parallel Government and Obama's Great Miscalculation.  When it was revealed last week that the Clinton Foundation accepted money from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, Fox anchor Bret Baier asked a good question:  "How big a problem is this becoming?  Now not only for Clinton but for the [Obama] administration?"  Now with latest revelations that for purposes of digital communication Hillary essentially ran her own parallel government, it's clear that Clinton's ethical lapses should also be a scandal for President Obama.  But to understand where Obama went wrong here it's instructive to remember how he approached the idea of nominating Hillary to be his secretary of state after the 2008 election.

Hillary Clinton: Too big to fail.  Here's the good news for Hillary Clinton:  She is a bona fide rock star.  She consistently tops the list of the most admired women in the world, and she is arguably one of its most powerful.  Not since Margaret Thatcher has a woman commanded the attention of so many while having to answer to so few.  And nothing — not even losing a second Presidential election, I'd wager — can diminish the level of stardom and influence she has achieved.  Here's the bad news:  All this should probably disqualify her from becoming the next President of the United States.

Who's ready for a Marie Harf grilling over Clinton email scandal?  [Scroll down]  Harf claims Clinton was in line with the practices of Sec. Condolleezza Rice.  That is not true, according to reports on Rice's practices.  Sources contend she rarely used e-mail to conduct official business — more understandable in the world of 2006 than now — but that when she did, it was on official state.gov servers.

Clinton Emails Inject Obama's Administration Into 2016 Fray.  The White House counsel's office was not aware at the time Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state that she relied solely on personal email and only found out as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Hillary Clinton says she's asked State Department to make emails public.  Hillary Clinton said late Wednesday [3/4/2015] that she had asked the State Department to make thousands of her emails available to the public, her first public response to a furor that followed the revelation that she used a private email account for her correspondence while secretary of state.

Secrets of Clinton emails revealed.  Chelsea Clinton went by the pseudonym Diane Reynolds, and Hillary used the same email account that was dedicated to her work at the State Department to plan her daughter's wedding, a new report has revealed.  At the center of the controversy is Hillary Clinton's email account [...], which was set up a day before she was confirmed in 2009 by a Senate committee to join newly elected President Barack Obama's cabinet.

Clinton State Department Ousted Ambassador Using Private Email.  In 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration abruptly stepped down from his post.  According to a Foreign Policy report by Josh Rogin (now a reporter for Bloomberg), Gration was the subject of a withering evaluation from the State Department: [...]

Something to hide.  There's a new chapter in the familiar Clinton dodge, this one written by Hillary.  On Monday [3/2/2015] The New York Times reported that Mrs. Clinton stubbornly refused to use a government email account during her tenure as secretary of state, choosing instead a private account to better hide her emails.  This likely violates the U.S. Records Act, and we've seen this kind of Clinton subterfuge before.  The Associated Press reports that Mrs. Clinton's private email server is registered to one Eric Hoteham, a name connected to presidentclinton.com and wjcoffice.com, an address no longer in use.  Bill Clinton (aka wjc) used this address when he was in the White House. Fast forward 14 years, over to Benghazi and through the woods, and the email address for Mr. Hoteham is traced to the Clinton residence in Chappaqua, New York.

If Not Hillary Clinton, Then Who?  Clinton's allies are already insisting the email story — that Clinton exclusively used her personal email address while at the State Department — is a nothing-burger.  It isn't news.  It will blow over after conservatives have had their 48 hours of outrage.  After all, it's unclear whether Clinton actually violated any rules!  Move along, nothing to see here.  But the story doesn't make the Democrats' only current hope look good.

Awkward Petraeus precedent as Hillary may face criminal liability over her secret email system.  It must have seemed like a good idea at the time to prosecute General David Petraeus over mishandling of classified material.  But that was before it came to light that Hillary Clinton did not bother with an official and secure State Department email account, instead preferring to use a private server under her own control that lacked the kind of security measures in place at the state.gov domain.  Now, explicit comparisons of the two former officials are being drawn.

Hillary Clinton Still Doesn't Get It.  A cornered Clinton is a craven Clinton, which is why we should view Hillary Rodham Clinton's latest public relations trick with practiced skepticism.  "I want the public to see my email," she tweeted Wednesday night [3/4/2015].  "I asked State to release them.  They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."  If she wants us to see her email, why did she create a secret account stored on a dark server registered at her home?

Did Hillary Commit a Felony?  Plenty of lawyers, including some who have a lot of experience with federal-records laws, have opined that Hillary Clinton did not "technically" violate the law.  Reasonable minds may disagree, but that conclusion is hard to accept.  The Federal Records Act requires the preservation of any official "record," which is defined functionally to require preservation whenever a record relates to the performance of a federal official's duties.  There is little question that Hillary Clinton was conducting official business on her private e-mail account, and her turning over 55,000 pages of documents only after she left office all but concedes that (but may not concede the full scope of her use of that account).

In 2000 Video Hillary Clinton Says She Doesn't "Do Email" Because Of Investigations Into Her.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has come under fire in recent days after the New York Times revealed she exclusively used a private email address to conduct official business in her capacity as the nation's top diplomat.  A subsequent Associated Press report revealed Clinton used a computer server registered to her New York state home to send and receive email, a move they described as "highly unusual."

Hm: Hillary was warned over private e-mail use, security?  Several have wondered, surely there was someone in the Clinton orbit who said, "Hey, maybe it's not the greatest idea ever for you to ignore federal records acts, never get a government e-mail, and so obviously hide everything you do during your tenure at the State Department."  Well, there wasn't anyone close enough to her to care to get the message through, apparently, but there was someone.

Clinton Ran Homebrew Computer Service For Official Emails.  The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The Hillary Cover-Up and the End of Democracy.  On Monday [3/2/2015], The New York Times reported that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never — not once — used her official State Department email address for her official communications.  Instead, she utilized a private email account, effectively protecting her emails from public scrutiny.  The Washington Post then broke the news that Hillary had registered her email address the same day her confirmation hearings for secretary of state began.  In other words, Hillary knew she would be secretary of state conducting official business, and coincidentally opened a private email account at the same time to guard her from Freedom of Information Act requests.

Planet Hillary Sends in The Cavalry to Debunk Email Scandal, Fails to Correct the Record.  One Hillary Clinton ally believes the New York Times owes Clinton an apology.  David Brock, known for his loyalty, went on Morning Joe Wednesday [3/4/2015] to come to Clinton's defense.  Brock called Michael S. Schmidt's article about Clinton using a private email address while Secretary of State "sloppily done" and demanded a retraction.  Instead, the reporter doubled down.  Schmidt reported Wednesday that when Clinton was asked for emails related to the Benghazi scandal, the State Department did not hand over any emails from Clinton's personal account.

Hillary Clinton's Criminal Activities Must Disqualify her from the Presidency.  'Witch hunts" sometimes find a witch, and those who dismissed the establishment of the House Benghazi Select Committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., as just another witch hunt are eating their words.  The existence of a personal account that Hillary Clinton used to conduct government business as secretary of state was discovered by the committee and reported by the New York Times.  Clinton's use of this personal account explains why investigations of the Benghazi terrorist attack — and her culpability in our diplomatic mission's vulnerability there, the failure to heed warnings and the cover-up afterward — failed to find much email evidence of her direct involvement.

Other Hillary State Dept Aides Held Private Email Addresses For Secretive Communication.  We shared this expectation last evening within hours of finding out about the secret Clinton email accounts.  Specifically, regarding Huma Abedin.  If there were other State Department Officers and aides to Hillary who held similar email profiles Abedin would definitely be at the top of the list.

Hillary's Benghazi problem is back.  Monday night [3/2/2015], it was revealed that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account the entire time she served as secretary of state.  Not only does conducting official business with a private account violate federal law, it raises a host of concerns ranging from whether or not her communications were secure from foreign intelligence services, to whether we'll be able to piece together an accurate historical record.  Given Hillary Clinton's legal troubles in the 1990s relating to keeping track of documents, it seems implausible she was not aware of the illegality of what was going on.

Hillary Clinton's private e-mail address at State reinforces everything people don't like about her.  The New York Times' report Monday night that Hillary Clinton never used an official government e-mail address during her time as secretary of state, a possible violation of requirements for federal officials to archive their correspondence, is a perfect storm of political bad news for the soon-to-be presidential candidate.  Why?  Because it reminds and reinforces for people many of the traits that they do not like in the Clintons while also suggesting a level of hubris that is very dangerous for someone who is the biggest non-incumbent frontrunner for a presidential nomination in modern political history.  Let's tackle — point by point — why this story is so bad for Clinton. [...]

The Lessons of Hillary Clinton's Secrecy.  We now know that Hillary Clinton evaded government record-keeping and jeopardized national security by using a private email account while Secretary of State.  Troubling as this incident is, it points to larger and more disturbing lessons about the woman who may become our next president.

Hillary Clinton's email server traced to home-based service: AP.  The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.  If the details in the AP report are true, they add a new level of secrecy and sophistication surrounding her e-mail use while she was at the State Department, observes CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan.

NYT: Hillary conducted official State business on her private e-mail account — all of it.  Ever wonder why multiple investigations of the Benghazi attack failed to turn up much from Hillary Clinton's e-mails?  So did the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the facility and the failures that led to it.  To their surprise, the Secretary of State had conducted all of her e-mail on a private account rather than an official State Department account — and her aides had carefully culled only the e-mails they wanted investigators to see.

Report: Hillary Clinton Evaded Government Email While Secretary Of State.  The New York Times is reporting that, during the time that she served as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account with unknown security protocols to communicate with State Department employees, others in the Federal Government and, presumably, foreign government officials, in what appears to be a violation of both the letter and the spirit of Federal record keeping laws.

Hillary Set Up Her Off-the-Books Email Account the Day Her Confirmation Hearings Began.  No, it wasn't a mistake, or an oversight.  Clinton's efforts to drag her correspondence into the unaccountable shadows were carefully planned and deliberate.  They required a great deal of cooperation from the rest of the Obama administration, which had to pretend not to notice that none of Hillary's mail was coming from the State Department's domain.  And we're not talking about a couple of messages sent improperly here and there, or even the sort of secretive backstage communications network Obama administration officials are so fond of (and which, let us stipulate, politicians of both parties, at every level of government, have employed.)  No, Hillary Clinton routed all of her correspondence through her off-the-books account, and only a portion of it was captured when her email slipped into the in-boxes of other officials who did use properly archived accounts.

Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.  Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record.

Hillary Clinton 'used an unsecured personal email account for her four years as Secretary of State.  Hillary Clinton used only a personal email address to conduct official government business during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State in a 'serious' breach of protocol, officials have said.  The 67-year-old former first lady did not acquire nor use a government email account while serving in the position from January 2009 to February 2013, State Department officials said.  She also failed to preserve her correspondence on the State Department's servers — something that is required of officials under the US Federal Records Act — until two months ago.

Clinton may have broken transparency rules with email use at State.  Former Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton might have violated transparency rules by solely using her personal email address for official business, according to a report in The New York Times.  That means that her official correspondence from her tenure at the State Department wasn't immediately backed up on government servers, so aides had to comb through emails to hand official work over to the State Department.  So far, aides gave the agency 55,000 emails, according to the Times, and recently turned over 900 pages discussing the attacks on the annex in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

Does Clinton Email Report 'Breathe New Life' into Benghazi Investigation?  Last night [3/2/2015] the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton had used a personal email address while Secretary of State, meaning portions of her correspondence were potentially not archived by the department per federal regulations.  The discovery was made by the Benghazi Select Committee, to which Clinton submitted about 300 emails as part of its investigation into the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Libya.  The revelation of Clinton's personal email account and the possibility that it portends of an unknown number of emails not captured by the State Department's system would appear to be the exact sort of treasure trove for which committee head Trey Gowdy (R-SC) was looking.

Will Rep. Trey Gowdy and Benghazi Select Committee Subpoena Hillary's Personal Emails?  The New York Times reported yesterday [3/2/2015] that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have violated the law by exclusively using a personal email account to conduct State Department business and further that Clinton did not EVER have an official State Department email.  It is required by the Federal Records Act that all government emails and records must be preserved.  Clinton's aides did not take any action to preserve Hilary's private emails, the only record of her communications.  The New York Times also reported that Clinton's people sent over 55,000 emails and documents to the State Department only TWO MONTHS AGO to comply with federal record keeping laws.

Hillary's Choice.  Hillary Clinton is responsible for her choices.  Bad choices.  Dodge federal transparency and security rules for email.  Take money from foreign countries that discriminate against women and seek influence over U.S. policy.

Clinton e-mail scandal disqualifies her for president.  [Scroll down]  Clinton was nowhere to be found when members of both parties complained about the NSA wiretapping scandal conducted by President Obama.  Clinton has yet to denounce President Obama for maintaining a kill list of American citizens without providing them any due process.  She not only did not denounce Obama Administration officials from maintaining secret e-mail accounts — she set one up herself.  This is a classic case of partisan doublespeak.  Hillary Clinton is not to be trusted.

Democratic Donors Unfazed By Hillary Clinton's Use of Private Email.  Top Democratic donors say they are unfazed by the disclosure that Hillary Clinton conducted State Department business on a personal email account, although several said she could fend off Republican criticism by addressing the issue head-on and announcing her candidacy for president.  The presumed front-runner for the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential nomination had generally avoided controversy until the email issue emerged.


President Obama discusses the Clinton email scandal:

Obama still thinks Clinton email use didn't hurt national security.  The top White House spokesman said Tuesday [5/31/2016] that President Obama stands by his earlier statement that Hillary Clinton didn't do anything to jeopardize national security by using a private server for all of her work email when she ran the State Department.

Obama's latest defense of Clinton has lawyers cringing.  The president tried to remain neutral for months in the race for the White House, and pledged only to get involved in the general election after the Democratic Party had selected its nominee.  But this month, Obama waded into the increasingly contentious primary to bat down Bernie Sanders' argument that Clinton is not qualified to be president, and more recently appeared to diminish the severity of her alleged mishandling of classified documents on her private server.

Obama puts his thumb on the scale for Hillary.  [Scroll down]  Naturally, the assumption is that the Clintons have this thing wired, that she's got it all rigged the Chicago Way. [...] All the president had to do was decline to comment.  Officials do that all the time with pending investigations.  But the president didn't decline.  He talked.  And he knows that every word a president says has profound weight.  So with Mr. Obama all but testifying for Clinton, saying what she did was unintentional, that it may have been careless but ultimately harmless, well, you don't need a be a mountain man to read those tracks in the snow.

Machiavellian or dumb?  Obama's take on Hillary Clinton's emails is hard to figure out.  President Barack Obama's recent remarks to my Fox News colleague Chris Wallace about Hillary Clinton's email issues were either Machiavellian or dumb.  It is difficult to tell from them whether he wants the mountain of evidence of her criminal behavior presented to a federal grand jury or he wants her to succeed him in the White House.  He cannot have both.  His efforts to minimize his former secretary of state's diversion of emails from government-secured servers to her own non-secure home server by calling it "careless" may actually harm her in the eyes of the public or even serve as a dog whistle to the FBI.  That's because carelessness is a species of negligence, and espionage, which is the failure to safeguard state secrets by removing them from their proper place of custody, is the rare federal crime that can be proved by negligence — to be precise, gross negligence.

Leading Republican Rips Obama For Insulting Decision to 'Opine' About Clinton Email Probe.  The Senate's No. 2 Republican criticized President Obama's recent decision to "opine" publicly about the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email, calling the move inappropriate and insulting.  Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) reiterated his call for the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the investigation during remarks to the Senate floor Thursday [4/14/2016], adding that Obama's remarks earlier this week reinforced the need for an objective party to investigate and possibly prosecute Clinton, a former member of the administration.  During an interview that aired on Fox News Sunday, Obama admitted that Clinton displayed a "carelessness" in handling her emails but dismissed concerns about her correspondences holding classified information.  While none of Clinton's messages were marked classified on her email, the federal government has determined that over 2,000 are currently classified, 22 of which at the "top secret" level.

Obama Declares Hillary Innocent, Then Guarantees No Interference.  [T]he reason the email affair of the Democrats' presidential front-runner is so important is that it has already been proved that she handled classified information, after categorically denying doing so, through the private server she set up at her home in New York state.  Unlike protected government communications, those emails could have been intercepted or later compromised by foreign governments like those of Russia or China, or by nongovernmental personnel tied to terrorists.  So when President Obama went on to double down on his claim last year that "I can tell that you this is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered," he was doing, as president, exactly what he was promising not to do — interfering.  In fact, he was declaring her innocent before she has been proven guilty or not guilty.

Obama's Latest View on Secrecy Overlooks Past Prosecution of Leaks.  When President Obama defended Hillary Clinton's email practices in a television interview over the weekend by saying, "there's classified, and then there's classified," he was only repeating what critics of government secrecy have long contended: that most of what is classified is merely sensitive, a little embarrassing or perhaps a policy debate still in progress.  But these are distinctions the Obama administration has not necessarily made in its treatment of classified information when dealing with news organizations, whistle-blowers or government officials accused of leaking information.

Obama Again Uses His Main Lie-Tell: "Period".  If you've kept up with our president's lying tells you'll recognize one of them in the following:  You can keep your doctor, period.  You can keep your plan, period.  You'll save $2500 a year, period.  More recently he's been quoted as saying that Iran has not broken the Nuke deal, period.  So at this point we have the advantage of knowing how to tell if Obama is lying (aside from his being awake and talking).  When Chris Wallace of Fox News last weekend asked him if he was involved in the FBI investigation of Hillary's email and server issue he said that he was not, "Period".  So there you have it from the supreme ruler's mouth.  Obama is heavily involved in getting Hillary out of her mess and no punishment will be inflicted on her at all.

Obama: "There's Classified, And Then There's Classified".  In the quote above, our beloved president was of course referring to Hillary's exposing of classified national secrets via her unsecured and illegal email server, and without question he asserts that Hillary has done nothing wrong, so we can expect the outcome of the FBI investigation into her destructive ramblings about the globe as Secretary of State to reflect what he wants to not happen here.  There will be no consequences for her destructive and illegal behavior and she'll continue her pursuit of the presidency.

Barack Obama, National Security Risk.  Barack Obama has made some of the stranger foreign policy decisions in American history such as going into Libya even after the Iraq debacle and making the nuclear deal with (aka billion-dollar hand-out to) Iran.  Now we know why.  He simply doesn't care about our national security.  He practically said as much on Fox News Sunday this weekend [4/10/2016].  As Obama explained to Chris Wallace regarding the contents of Hillary Clinton's email currently under FBI investigation, "there's classified and then there's classified."  He further opined that all Hillary was guilty of was "carelessness."  What a bizarre and lawless thing for a president to say while a federal investigation is being undertaken by over a hundred FBI agents.  Put simply, the president of the United States is a security risk.

Obama's 'classified' comments strike nerve.  President Obama's latest defense of Hillary Clinton has struck a nerve with both the GOP and government leakers such as Edward Snowden.  The president's comments — "there's classified and then there's classified" — suggested some classified information is more sensitive than other classified information, uniting in scorn critics across the political spectrum.  To advocates for government transparency, the remarks stunk of duplicity by suggesting that federal classification rules are arbitrary and don't apply to the Democratic presidential front-runner.

Obama vows no influence in Clinton email probe, defends terror fight.  President Obama repeatedly vowed there would be no political influence over the Justice Department's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state — in a wide-ranging interview with "Fox News Sunday" in which he also ardently defended his efforts to defeat the Islamic State and other terror groups amid criticism about his perceived indifference.  "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," Obama said."  "Nobody is above the law.  How many times do I have to say it?"

The Editor says...
If you believe anything Barack H. Obama says, especially when he's this emphatic, you obviously haven't browsed through the catalog of Obama's lies.

Not Really TOP SECRET TOP SECRET.  [Scroll down]  Now this is almost unbelievable from a variety of perspectives, but we have grown accustomed to Obama's transgressions against propriety and taste as well as the legal order.  Today President Obama gives us a new top secret security classification for the benefit of Hillary Clinton:  Not really top secret top secret.  Loose translation:  forget about it.  The fix is in.  Incidentally, the exposure of national defense information through gross negligence makes out a felony violation of the Espionage Act.  You don't have to mean to do it.  You just have to do what Clinton did.

Obama Interferes in Hillary Email Case.  President Obama on Sunday [4/10/2016] appears to have inappropriately interfered in an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton, suggesting she did little that was seriously wrong and touting her as a woman who might have exhibited "carelessness" but had done "an outstanding job" as secretary of state.  "I continue to believe that she has not jeopardized national security," Obama said during an interview on Fox News on Sunday [4/10/2016].  "There's a carelessness in terms of managing emails that she has owned and she has recognized, but I also think it's important to keep this in perspective.  This is somebody that has served her country for four years as secretary of state and done an outstanding job."

Obama vows 'no political influence' in Clinton email probe.  President Obama repeatedly vowed there would be no political influence over the Justice Department's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state — in a wide-ranging interview with "Fox News Sunday" [4/10/2016] in which he also ardently defended his efforts to defeat the Islamic State and other terror groups amid criticism about his perceived indifference.  "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," Obama told "Fox News Sunday."  "Nobody is above the law.  How many times do I have to say it?"

Obama tells Loretta Lynch not to prosecute Hillary on classified email crimes.  Interviewed by Chris Wallace of Fox News, President Obama pulled down the blindfold on Lady Justice and signaled that there was no crime at all when Hillary Clinton set up an unsecured private server and left classified information vulnerable to hacking by the world's intelligence services.  He also created a new category of classification:  "top secret top secret" as opposed to mere "top secret," which he averred to Chris Wallace might be information that could be gleaned from public sources.  All in all, it was a remarkable performance, in which the president of the United States in effect told the Justice Department not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

Obama: 'I Guarantee That There Is No Political Influence' in Any DOJ Investigation.  President Obama said he can "guarantee" that the ongoing FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails will be based on evidence, not politics. [... But] the Obama Justice Department previously has sidestepped investigations that could prove damaging to the president.  Under former Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department refused to turn over documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation, for which Holder was held in contempt of Congress.  And the Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute former IRS official Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress after she to testify about the improper scrutiny given to conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status.


The Inspector General's report:

The overlooked bombshell of the IG report.  Before the report was released, we knew from Comey's July 2016 statement that Clinton's private emails included "seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received."  We also knew that the FBI "also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail."  Comey further declared, "We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account."  And he speculated that, given how "extremely careless" Clinton had been, it was "possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account."  Well, it turns out, the FBI knew with certainty at the time that hostile actors had in fact gained access to classified information via Clinton's emails.

The FBI Deliberately Ignored 'Golden Emails,' Crucial Abedin Messages And More.  The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Hillary Clinton have a HUGE Weiner problem that is even bigger than we first realized.  According to the recently released inspector general report, on September 28 and 29, 2016 the New York office of the FBI immediately reported to the Washington headquarters its discovery of, first, 141,000 and then 350,000 emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner — also known as "Carlos Danger," a now-convicted sex offender.  Mr. Weiner is the husband of Hillary Clinton's inseparable aide Huma Abedin.

The Buried Lede of the Inspector General's Report.  Buried in Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz's report on the Clinton email investigation lies a disturbing passage concerning information obtained by the FBI alleging that Attorney General Loretta Lynch attempted to put her thumb on the scales of justice to exonerate Hillary Clinton.  "Comey said that he also was concerned about an issue specific to Lynch," Horowitz reports.  "As discussed in more detail in the classified appendix to this report, Comey told the OIG that the FBI had obtained highly classified information in March 2016 that included allegations of partisan bias or attempts to impede the Midyear investigation by Lynch."  What, specifically, did the "highly classified information" indicate?  It is "highly classified," so we naturally remain in the dark.  What justified making the information "highly classified"?  Nuclear secrets?  A list of U.S. spies abroad?  War plans to invade Canada?  We do not know.  But in an age when the Justice Department assails words that merely embarrass with redacting markers, the words "highly classified" provoke curiosity rather than close questions.  Comey's manner of dismissing the information does not inspire confidence.

Clinton Email IG Report:  Why Is The FBI Still Covering For Discredited Agents At The Heart Of The 'Investigation'?  Two agents and an attorney at the heart of the FBI's Clinton email "investigation" expose flagrant political bias at the heart of that probe.  So why won't the FBI release their names to the public?  And given what these key players said, how did the inspector general come to conclude that the "investigation" was unbiased?  Were changes made to water it down?

Understanding Hillary's Crimes.  An overwhelming wealth of story lines emerge from the IG report on the Clinton email "investigation," as I call it, released this past Thursday.  I posted it via Scrbid here.  Andrew McCarthy pointed out before the election in 2016 and repeatedly since (perhaps most recently here), the fix was in from the beginning.  The fix was in because Obama was in on the wrongdoing and he was the head of the executive branch at the time.  When Obama spoke, as he did, FBI Director James Comey took his cues from him.  She meant no harm, Obama said.  There was nothing to see there!

Dinesh D'Souza on IG Report:  In America Today There Are Quite a Few Criminals with Badges.  On Thursday, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his much anticipated review on FBI and DOJ actions during the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  The IG report found an institutionalized corruption and bias and far left operatives influencing policy throughout the upper echelons of the FBI.  Inspector General Horowitz referred FIVE FBI employees for investigation after MORE disgusting anti-Trump text messages surfaced.  The five FBI employees have not been named at this time.

The Anatomy of a Partisan Pile-Up.  The picture that emerges of Jim Comey from the Inspector General's report is one of an astonishingly arrogant weirdo, an FBI director who pompously talked about "norms" while shattering them on his own say-so — from crowning himself the de facto attorney general, thereby sparing Hillary an indictment, to lesser offenses of self-indulgence, such as his richly ironic use of Gmail to conduct official business.  Anyone who goes to the trouble of slogging through this mountainous report will wonder how such an unreliable and self-deluded flake could hold any position at the FBI, let alone serve as the chief witness in Mueller's investigation of a sitting president.

IG report:  DOJ official sought Clinton campaign job for son, then shared case info with Podesta.  The Justice Department inspector general report released Thursday [6/14/2018] faulted a former DOJ official for sending then-Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta a "heads up" about the release schedule for Clinton's emails — as he also tried to get his son a job with the campaign.  Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report found that former Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik demonstrated "poor judgment" in failing to recognize appearances of a conflict of interest or properly recuse himself from investigations related to Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.  The report, which looked at the FBI and DOJ's handling of the Clinton email investigation, found that Kadzik asked Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon in April 2015 for a job for his son — while Kadzik was involved in discussions about Clinton-related matters.

Why Hasn't Peter Strzok Been Fired Yet?  I don't understand why he wasn't showed the door the day the IG discovered the "we'll stop it" text.  Whether he actually did anything to stop Trump is key for investigative purposes but beside the point for employment purposes.  The mere appearance of impropriety in having a federal official on the Clinton/Trump beat talking about "stopping" one presidential candidate is so foul that you have to fumigate.  Step one is Strzok finding a new career.

IG Report:  FBI Agents Regularly Received Free Handouts From Journalists.  The Department of Justice inspector general identified a number of instances where FBI employees regularly spoke with members of the media and received a number of free perks from journalists including meals and tickets to various events.  On page XII in the report, the IG says the department "identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters."  The IG expressed "profound concerns bout [sic] the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered our review."

The IG Report Shows that the Fix was In from [the] Start of the Clinton Email Investigation.  The long-awaited report from the Justice Department's inspector general about the FBI's handling of the Clinton email scandal seems to absolve the bureau of any political bias.  What it really shows, however, is that the FBI — under pressure from President Obama — was just going through the motions the whole time.

Inspector General's Report:  FBI May Have Covered up Weiner Laptop to Help Clinton.  Democrats have long complained that then-FBI Director James Comey's announcement in late October 2016 that he was re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails cost them the presidential election.  But the report of the Department of Justice Inspector General, released Thursday, shows that the FBI may actually have neglected an investigation into emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop in an effort to stop Donald Trump from winning.

Comey Broke From FBI Procedures in Clinton Probe, Watchdog Finds.  Former FBI Director James Comey was "insubordinate" in handling the probe into Hillary Clinton, damaging the bureau and the Justice Department's image of impartiality even though he wasn't motivated by politics, the department's watchdog found.  Although the report issued Thursday [6/14/2018] by Inspector General Michael Horowitz doesn't deal directly with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry into Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion with those around Donald Trump, the president and his Republican allies in Congress were primed to seize on it as evidence of poor judgment and anti-Trump bias within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department.

IG Report:  FBI Agent Said Trump Voters 'Poor, Uneducated, Lazy, POS'.  The Justice Department inspector general released a 500-plus page report on misconduct by FBI agents and DOJ staff working on the Hillary Clinton investigations.  Among many other topics, the IG report documents the content of texts and instant messages sent by FBI agents.  The communications show favoritism towards Hillary in the agents' personal views, but also in how various aspects of the investigation should be conducted.  They also reveal a rancid contempt towards Donald Trump as well as Americans who support him.

Report rebukes Comey, but says no bias in Clinton email case.  Former FBI Director James Comey made a "serious error of judgment" when he announced shortly before the 2016 U.S. presidential election that he was reopening an investigation into candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server, the Justice Department's internal watchdog said on Thursday [6/14/2018].

IG report suggests either Bill Clinton or Loretta Lynch is lying about their tarmac meeting.  Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report strongly indicates that either former Attorney General Loretta Lynch or former President Bill Clinton is lying about how Clinton came to board Lynch's plane at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix in June 2016. That meeting took place as the FBI was conducting its investigation into Hillary Clinton's possible mishandling of classified material.  When it became public, the meeting thus raised concerns that Lynch was being pressured by or colluding with the former president to prevent Hillary Clinton from being prosecuted.  Yet while Horowitz's report does not shed light on whether the Hillary Clinton email investigation came up in the meeting between Lynch and Clinton's husband (both parties deny that it was raised), the report does suggest that Bill Clinton or Lynch is lying.  Because the two stories do not add up.

DOJ watchdog sets date for release of long-awaited review of Hillary Clinton probe.  The long-awaited watchdog report on the FBI and DOJ's Hillary Clinton investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign will be released next Thursday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said.  In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Horowitz said "we anticipate releasing the report on June 14, 2018."  That day is also President Trump's birthday.  The inspector general also told committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in the letter that he has accepted the invitation to testify about the report on June 18, meaning his scheduled appearance before the committee is being delayed again.

Who leaked portions of the IG report, and why?  [Scroll down]  Up until now, there have been no leaks at all from the I.G.'s office itself, so a leak at this late stage most likely comes from a subject asked to review it.  In other words, the leaks came from people anxious to minimize the impact of the report when it finally comes out and to shape its impact in a direction favoring a narrative hostile to conservative concerns.  As to the delay of the report, last night, Joseph DiGenova expressed my worst fears to Sean Hannity — that big-time pressure is being brought to bear on the I.G. to sanitize it.

Stop Sanitizing the Inspector General's Report and Deliver It Now.  Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email "matter" (and other things, no doubt) has been completed for weeks.  Nevertheless, you and I, the taxpayers who paid for it, have not been permitted to see it.  Only the "elect" — those in that American nomenklatura composed of upper echelons of the DOJ, FBI and intelligence agencies — have been given the privilege of perusing the roughly 500 pages in their pristine form.  We, the poor citizens, will probably never get that chance — and even that slim likelihood diminishes the longer this seemingly interminable process takes, increasing the opportunity to exercise the red pen.  Why has this happened?  Nothing, I'm afraid, could be more obvious.  Those same privileged elites in our government are being given or are taking the time themselves to sanitize the report, to bowdlerize the contents in order not to offend (or worse) certain parties.  This is only fair, they would say.  If people are being accused, they should have a chance to defend themselves.  Indeed.  But not before they are accused.

The Collapse of the Collusion Narrative.  The inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, is apparently only a week away from a release to the Congress (i.e., the world) of his report on the official handling of the Clinton emails affair.  His report is reportedly 400 pages, and there has never in recent history been a 400-page nothingburger.  It would be astounding if there were not further criminal referrals for some of Trump's prominent tormenters, presumably starting with Comey, as there were for former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe from the inspector general's first report.

Hillary lies to create the illusion of transparency.  Mrs. Clinton spurned the idea her decision to use a private email server as Secretary of State was a way to avoid public record searches, and said it was more of a matter of convenience that was allowed by the State Department, which broke no laws.  "There's only so much I can control," Mrs. Clinton said of what she considered unwarranted attacks on her email server, adding her responses to federal authorities investigating the matter contained "more transparency and more information than anybody I'm aware of that's ever served in the government."  Not true.  Lies, according to a State Department Inspector General report leaked on Wednesday [5/25/2016].

How EmailGate Weakened America's National Security.  Last week's devastating report by the State Department Inspector General has made it plain to all who wish to see that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, violated numerous regulations pertaining to federal records and cybersecurity, then lied effusively about it to the public.  That State IG assessment has left Clinton's defenders without much of a leg to stand on if they want an honest, fact-based defense of her actions in EmailGate.  Therefore, Team Clinton has resorted to their customary deceptions and dissimulations, buttressed by legalisms designed to obscure truths rather than reveal them.

Inspector General Report Effectively Terminates Hillary Clinton's Presidential Aspirations.  With a State Department Inspector General's report concluding that Hillary Clinton was not, and would not have been, permitted to use a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, the mainstream media have been forced to finally wake up and take notice of this persistent Clinton scandal.  But instead of reporting that the revelations demonstrate how unfit Mrs. Clinton is for president, these news reports largely focus on the claim that it was merely record-keeping policies, or rules, which were broken.  "When two IT staffers raised concerns in 2010 that the system might not properly preserve records, the official said the system had been reviewed by attorneys and chided the staffers 'never to speak of the Secretary's personal email system again,' the report says," according to The Washington Post.  "The IG's office said it could not find evidence of such a legal review."  In other words, the IT department was strong-armed into accepting Hillary's dangerous email setup.

Hillary on the ropes.  The inspector general's report is damning to Mrs. Clinton.  It refutes every defense she has offered to the allegation that she mishandled state secrets.  It revealed an email that hadn't been publicly made known showing Mrs. Clinton's state of mind.  And it paints a picture of a self-isolated secretary of state stubbornly refusing to comply with federal law for venal reasons; she simply did not want to be held accountable for her official behavior.  The report rejects Mrs. Clinton's argument that her use of a private server "was allowed."  The report makes clear that it was not allowed, nor did she seek permission to use it.  She did not inform the FBI, which had tutored her on the lawful handling of state secrets, and she did not inform her own State Department information technology folks.  The report also makes clear that had she sought permission to use her own server as the instrument through which all of her email traffic passed, such a request would have been flatly denied.

Clinton, aides tried to use wireless devices in secure areas.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aides tried to use personal hand-held electronic devices inside areas used to store classified information, according to the just-released State Department inspector general report.  The Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the State Department's security arm, told the inspector general that in March 2009 Mrs. Clinton rejected an offer from security officials to provide her with a secure government smartphone.  "DS was informed that Secretary Clinton's staff had been asking to use BlackBerry devices inside classified areas," said the report, released late last month.

White House Can't Defend Hillary's (Lack Of) Cooperation With Inspector General Probe.  During Tuesday's White House briefing, Press Secretary Josh Earnest dodged a question asking him to defend Hillary Clinton's decision not to cooperate with the Inspector General's probe into her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.  The report the Inspector General's office released in late May stated Clinton refused to use a government email to avoid risking making her personal records "accessible."

How EmailGate Weakened America's National Security.  Last week's devastating report by the State Department Inspector General has made it plain to all who wish to see that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, violated numerous regulations pertaining to federal records and cybersecurity, then lied effusively about it to the public.  That State IG assessment has left Clinton's defenders without much of a leg to stand on if they want an honest, fact-based defense of her actions in EmailGate.  Therefore, Team Clinton has resorted to their customary deceptions and dissimulations, buttressed by legalisms designed to obscure truths rather than reveal them.

Hillary Clinton's Emails Now Might Finally Take Her Down.  This past week has been a milestone of sorts for those who closely follow the continuing saga of Hillary Clinton's wrongful use of email systems during her tenure as Secretary of State.  But the kind of milestone it was depends on where you stood when the week began.  For those of us who recognized from the outset that Ms. Clinton's exclusive use of a personal email system for all her official business (not to mention her unprecedented use of a private server atop that) was a clear violation of the Federal Records Act ("FRA"), the findings of the State Department's Inspector General ("IG") to that effect in his May 25 report were no surprise.  In fact, on the admitted facts of the case, no other conclusion was possible, and it was simply another "shoe waiting to be dropped."

Six Clinton  lies  contradictions exposed by State's audit.  [#4] It wasn't against the rules:  In July of last year, Clinton told CNN her private email use was not problematic because "there was no law, there was no regulation" prohibiting her from using a personal account.  She has repeatedly argued that her record-keeping practices were "above board."  However, the inspector general concluded Clinton did indeed violate rules that were in place at the time she served as secretary of state.  "Secretary Clinton should have preserved any federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records ... 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," the report said.

State Department Destroys 6 Clinton Lies About Her Email Server.  The State Department Investigator General released an 83 page report on Hillary Clinton's email practices as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 — and ripped her over and over again for corrupt practices and lies.  Here are six of those lies, debunked: [...]

Top 3 Lies Hillary Clinton Told About State Department Emails.  The State Department Office Of Inspector General (IG) released an audit last week that was absolutely damning to Hillary Clinton.  Comparing the "Evaluation Of Email Records Management And Cybersecurity Requirements" with the former secretary of state's past excuses and explanations could only conclude she was lying — pretty much at every turn.  Here are a few of the most notable, relevant statements made by Mrs. Clinton that have now proven to be categorically false.

Hillary Clinton is Compromised.  To assess just how damaging a new State Department Inspector General's report on Hillary Clinton's email practices is to her political career, one need only take note of the fact that the former secretary of state has disappeared.  When trouble arises, Clinton predictably scurries back into her bunker and allows the news cycle to sort itself out — presuming perhaps that the unfocused political media will tire of the story faster if she does not provide them with any new material to parse.  That is not an invalid operating theory for dealing with an ADD-afflicted press.  16 months into this scandal however, Clinton should know by now that this story isn't going away.  Further, the IG's report is objectively damning beyond its trite political value.  The report casts doubt on the notion that Hillary Clinton can serve as an unprejudiced commander-in-chief of the armed forces.  In fact, to swear Clinton into the presidency may seriously jeopardize American national security.

We Now Know Hillary Lied Multiple Times About Her Email Server.  Ever since news broke that Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized and unsecured private e-mail server for all of her correspondence as secretary of state, she has defended herself with several arguments.  None of the information transmitted through the server was classified, Clinton insisted at first, a claim that has been proven false in well over a thousand instances.  Even after that fell apart, Clinton claimed that the use of private e-mail for official business fell within the rules of the State Department and that she had ensured that the server met the department's security requirements.

Hillary Clinton's Emails:  Lying in Plain Sight.  Even after the inspector general's report was released, Clinton continued to spin lies.  She told ABC News and CNN that her use of a private server was "allowed."  It was not.  Indeed, the report found that her modus operandi presented "significant security risks."  State Department officials warned of hacking attempts, which she did not heed.  In an email she explained, "I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible."  So she risked national security.  According to the report, when staff spoke up about those risks, a staffer was told "never to speak of the Secretary's personal email system again."  Last week, the Associated Press reported that Clinton claimed, "I have provided all my work-related email."  Wrong again.

Hillary Clinton's endless lies.  With the Clintons you can always count on one thing — it's never the crime; it's the cover-up.  For more than a year former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has insisted her use of a private email server during her tenure at State was no big deal — nothing her predecessors didn't do.  However, according to a new inspector general's report, "By Secretary Clinton's tenure, the department's guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated.  Secretary Clinton's cybersecurity practices accordingly must be evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives."  The IG also found, "Secretary Clinton should have preserved any federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records... 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..."  We also know she destroyed 32,000 emails because they were "personal."  How do we know that?  Well, because she says so.

Clinton email headache is about to get worse.  A scathing inspector general's report this week was just the first in what is likely to be a series of official actions related to her private server stemming from the FBI, a federal courthouse and Capitol Hill.  Clinton's presidential campaign has failed to quiet the furor over the issue, which has dogged her for more than a year.  In the next few weeks — just as the likely Democratic presidential nominee hopes to pivot towards a general election — it will face its toughest scrutiny yet.

Origin of Key Clinton Emails From Report Are a Mystery.  After 14 months of public scrutiny and skepticism over Clinton's motives in keeping her emails secret, new questions emerged Thursday [5/26/2016].  They centered on her apparent failure to turn over a November 2010 message in which she worried that her personal messages could become accessible to outsiders, along with two other messages a year later that divulged possible security weaknesses in the home email system she used while secretary of state.  The Clinton campaign has previously denied that her home server was breached, but newly revealed emails show an aide worried it could have been compromised.

Clinton's Style of Deception More Insidious than Trump's.  The State Department's inspector general released a report this week concluding that Hillary Clinton is a breathtakingly brazen and consistent liar.  No, that's not a direct quote.  Bureaucrats don't talk that way under the best of circumstances — and this IG, Steve Linick, is an Obama appointee whose report is about the apparent Democratic nominee for president.  So it's all the more shocking, then, that the report confirms nearly everything Clinton's critics have been saying.  By setting up a secret email server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., without proper authorization from any legal or security official, Clinton displayed a cavalier disregard for national security and an outrageous desire to hide her doings from Freedom of Information Act requests, government archivists, Congress, the press and, ultimately, the American people.

Cornyn: IG Report Shows Need for Special Counsel to Probe Hillary's Server.  The Senate majority whip today [5/26/2016] reiterated his call for a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server in the wake of the State Department inspector general's report that sharply criticized the practices of the former secretary of State.  The IG found that Clinton, who refused to be interviewed for the investigation, used the home-based server throughout her term as senator and in her 2008 presidential campaign, and kept on using it once at the State Department.

EmailGate Just Crippled the Clinton Express.  Running for president this year, after her abortive 2008 effort against Barack Obama, has not worked out quite as planned for Hillary Clinton.  This was supposed to be her year, at long last.  After enduring a quarter-century on the national stage — including tough years by the side of her gifted but scandal-prone husband — 2016 finally lined up as Ms. Clinton's best shot at moving back into the White House, this time with her in the Oval Office.  That outcome is looking less likely by the day.

Hillary Emails Confirm Private Server [was] Set Up For Secrecy.  It seems so long ago that Hillary Clinton unconvincingly told a packed press conference at the U.N. that she used a private email server "for convenience," instead of using the government server like all other executive branch employees.  It wasn't for convenience sake, though.  Not at all.  It was to keep Hillary's emails secret and outside of federal records laws and the Freedom of Information Act.  Now she is caught red handed in her lie.  The State Department Inspector General has released a "smoking gun" email exchange between Secretary of State Clinton from her top personal aide Huma Abedin indicating her concern that Hillary's emails were not being received by her employees.

Hillary Clinton, Drowning in Email.  Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency just got harder with the release of the State Department inspector general's finding that "significant security risks" were posed by her decision to use a private email server for personal and official business while she was secretary of state.  Contrary to Mrs.  Clinton's claims that the department had "allowed" the arrangement, the inspector general also found that she had not sought or received approval to use the server.  So far, no security breaches have been reported; a separate F.B.I. investigation is looking into that.  But above and beyond security questions, the inspector general's report is certain to fuel doubts about Mrs. Clinton's trustworthiness, lately measured as a significant problem for her in public polls.

The Clintons and the comeuppance at hand.  The 83-page summary of the State Department's investigation of Hillary's determined use of a private email server, stubbornly used despite dozens of warnings from high and low in the government, was released Thursday [5/26/2016] and it's devastating.  Beginning in late 2005, when widespread use of email was first introduced, the State Department revised its Foreign Affairs Manual and "issued various memoranda specifically discussing the obligation to use Department [email] systems in most instances and identifying the risks of not doing so."  Hillary knew these rules and she knew the risks when she arrived as secretary of State, and she ignored them.  Rules are necessary to guard the nation's secrets from prying eyes, but such rules were not for Clintons.  Rules never are.  So outrageous has Hillary's wanton disregard for rules and responsibility become that even her friends are saying enough is enough.

Clinton Campaign Responds to IG Report By Again Claiming She Did Nothing Wrong.  [Their] statement discounts these facts:  a) Hillary Clinton maintained a personal server in addition to a number of personal email addresses.  This is unique.  Other Secretaries of State who used private email from time to time weren't using private servers set up inside their homes.  b) The inspector general found Hillary Clinton violated the Federal Records Act by deleting tens-of-thousands of emails from her personal email server before turning over what she deemed to be government business emails to the State Department prior to her departure in 2013.  Other Secretaries of State did not engage in mass deletion as Clinton did. [...] c) Thousands of pieces of top secret, classified information have been found on Clinton's private server.

State Dept IG Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Government Records Act and Refused to Speak to Investigators.  The report is devastating, although it transparently strains to soften the blow.  For example, it concludes that State's "longstanding systemic weaknesses" in recordkeeping "go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State."  Yet, it cannot avoid finding that Clinton's misconduct is singular in that she, unlike her predecessors, systematically used private e-mail for the purpose of evading recordkeeping requirements.

Clinton's inexcusable, willful disregard for the rules.  Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 has been justifiably criticized as an error of judgment.  What the new report from the State Department inspector general makes clear is that it also was not a casual oversight.  Ms. Clinton had plenty of warnings to use official government communications methods, so as to make sure that her records were properly preserved and to minimize cybersecurity risks.  She ignored them.  The 83-page report declares that "beginning in late 2005 and continuing through 2011," the department revised its Foreign Affairs Manual and "issued various memoranda specifically discussing the obligation to use Department systems in most circumstances and identifying the risks of not doing so."  Ms. Clinton didn't.

Report on E-mailgate shows Hillary can't be trusted.  Here's the bottom line:  Virtually everything Clinton has said about her emails has been a lie.  And no longer can supporters laugh off Emailgate so easily.  Hillary's culpability and her flouting of the law now seem clear.  But that leaves one more shoe to drop:  Will Attorney General Loretta Lynch indict the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee?  If she doesn't, she'll need a good excuse why.

Hillary Clinton's email problems just got much worse.  One of the two big dominoes in the Hillary Clinton email controversy toppled today:  The State Department's inspector general released its report on the email practices of Clinton and a number of other past secretaries of state.  (The other major domino is, of course, the FBI investigation into Clinton's decision to exclusively use a private email server while serving as the nation's top diplomat.)  The report, which you can read in its entirety here, badly complicates Clinton's past explanations about the server and whether she complied fully with the laws in place governing electronic communication.  And it virtually ensures that Clinton's email practices will be front and center in Donald Trump's fusillade of attacks against her credibility and honesty between now and Nov. 8.

FNC's Bret Baier Absolutely Dismantles Hillary Spox on IG Report About Her E-Mail Server.  Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon conducted a number of interviews on Wednesday in reaction to the State Department Inspector General's scathing rebuke of Clinton's private e-mail account and server, but none measured up to FNC's Special Report host Bret Baier and his calm, thorough dismantling of Fallon.  Baier jumped right into the substance by showing video of Clinton repeatedly claiming her e-mail server was legal before noting that "[a]s you know, the Inspector General's report says something completely different" and providing an extensive quote from the IG about Clinton having failed to seek approval and notify the State Department.

Brzezinski: It Feels Like Hillary Clinton is 'Lying Straight Out' About Her Emails.  Liberal Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski has been one of Hillary Clinton's staunchest critics over her email scandal, and she said Thursday [5/26/2016] it felt like Clinton had lied "straight out."  Brzezinski challenged reporter Andrea Mitchell as to whether Clinton was lying as well, but Mitchell said she couldn't say for sure.  She acknowledged "there are so many inconsistencies."  A damning report from the State Department Inspector General Wednesday [5/25/2016] condemned Clinton's email practices as secretary of state, showing she violated clear rules about records-keeping.  As MSNBC reported, the IG served to "directly contradict" repeated claims by Clinton that her email conduct was permitted and aboveboard.

Leona Clinton and the little people.  Ever since Hillary Clinton first acknowledged in March 2015 that she had concealed her work emails from the public for up to five years, she and her allies have repeatedly claimed that she broke no rules.  They didn't care that the experts said otherwise.  It made no difference to their thinking that Clinton had obviously thwarted the purpose of both State Department rules and the entire purpose of the Freedom of Information Act.  But the task of defending, which is the Pavlovian impulse of her entourage to any suggestion of Clintonian misconduct, became more difficult on Wednesday [5/25/2016].  The State Department's Inspector General released a 78-page report to lawmakers that concluded that she broke the law.

State Department Inspector General:  Hillary's Private Bathoom Email Server Was, In Fact, Illegal.  The IG went on to note that Clinton and her lackeys failed to notify the State Department of possible security breaches (yet another crime) and that her exclusive use of a personal server was "an inappropriate form of [record] preservation."  Had a normal peon engaged in Hillary's email skulduggery while handling classified government documents, they'd be breaking rocks at Leavenworth and not wheezing while walking down flights of stairs while wearing Mao-style pantsuits.

The Clintons:  New York's Sixth Crime Family.  In a report that surfaced Wednesday, the State Department inspector general pulverized Hillary's claims that her outlaw e-mail server was perfectly legal.  The report said that Hillary "did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."  When staffers warned that her private server was vulnerable to hackers, they were ordered "never to speak of the Secretary's personal e-mail system again."  Indeed, in a January 9, 2011, e-mail, technology aide Bryan Pagliano wrote, "We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min."  And when then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin suggested that Hillary use government e-mail, she chose personal secrecy over national security:  "I don't want the personal being accessible."

Clinton campaign's email defense takes hits from all sides after IG report.  Hillary Clinton's myriad statements explaining her exclusive use of personal email for official business while secretary of state are coming under heavy fire from all sides in the wake of a damaging inspector general report — and her campaign's insistence the report proves her practices were nothing unusual is being met with similar criticism.  Top Republicans from presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump to House Speaker Paul Ryan slammed Clinton over the report, accusing her of breaking agency rules to "serve her own interests" and putting security at "risk" in the process.  But aside from shows of support from Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, other prominent voices in Washington were similarly unsparing toward the Democratic presidential front-runner.

Everyone is Missing the Most Troubling Part About Hillary Clinton Email Audit!  [Scroll down]  However, what is probably the most troubling about all of this is that, despite these blatant violations, there will be absolutely no legal repercussions for Mrs. Clinton for this offense.  She's off the hook!  Why aren't all the pundits screaming about that?  As LawNewz.com's contributor, Dan Metcalfe, wrote about several weeks ago, anyone who violates this law (and leaves office) will face zero consequences.  That's because it is a civil law, not a criminal law, and penalties only apply to current federal employees.  Employees, like Clinton and Powell, who leave office, can skirt punishment.  The Federal Records Act is in place not only to provide the American public with some level of transparency but also "to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency's activities."  "There are absolutely no penalties provided by law for this misconduct," Metcalfe said.  He would know, Metcalfe was the founding director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy.

NBC, ABC Cover for Hillary After Release of Damaging E-Mail Report.  NBC News tried to play it down, first by reporting on it after leading the night with the riots at Donald Trump's rallies in New Mexico and California.  "An independent government report is breathing new life into the controversy that just won't go away for Hillary Clinton," Nightly News host Lester Holt whined while leading into the story.  Clinton fan, Andrea Mitchell was the reporter on the case and she described the development as, "Today Hillary Clinton again dogged by her e-mail controversy."

Emails Add to Hillary Clinton's Central Problem:  Voters Just Don't Trust Her.  For more than a year, Hillary Clinton has traveled the country talking to voters about her policy plans.  She vowed to improve infrastructure in her first 100 days in office, promised to increase funding for Alzheimer's research and proposed a $10 billion plan to combat drug and alcohol addiction.  But as the Democratic primary contest comes to a close, any hopes Mrs. Clinton had of running a high-minded, policy-focused campaign have collided with a more visceral problem.  Voters just don't trust her.  The Clinton campaign had hoped to use the coming weeks to do everything they could to shed that image and convince voters that Mrs. Clinton can be trusted.  Instead, they must contend with a damaging new report by the State Department's inspector general that Mrs. Clinton had not sought or received approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Clinton: State Dept. report critical of email server won't affect presidency.  Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said Wednesday night [5/25/2016] a State Department report critical of her use of a private email server is not "going to affect either the campaign or my presidency."

State Department audit faults Clinton on emails, says she broke records rules.  The State Department watchdog, in an extensive and detailed report, accused Hillary Clinton of flouting federal records rules and cybersecurity guidelines with her exclusive use of personal email for government business while secretary of state. [...] But the report singles out Clinton's failures as more serious.  The report includes numerous revelations, including that her server was at one point "attacked," that Clinton declined to be interviewed for the audit and that Clinton never sought approval to use her personal account for government work.

Clinton Email Scandal:  Hillary Never Got Legal OK For Her Risky Setup.  When Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server located in the basement of her New York home became public a year ago, Clinton claimed that there was nothing wrong with what she had done.  "I fully complied with every rule I was governed by," she said at her March 2015 news conference.  She's repeated that claim many times since.  But a new report from the State Department's inspector general says that, in fact, Clinton broke the rules.

Hillary Clinton failed to report several hacking attempts, grew afraid of opening emails.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a secret email to conduct official business broke a number of department policies, an inspector general concluded in a report sent to Capitol Hill Wednesday that also suggests she used the account to try to hide her communications from the public.  The 83-page report, obtained by The Washington Times, is devastating in its evaluation of Mrs. Clinton's behavior, saying it can find no record of her getting approval from either security or legal staffers for her unique arrangement.  The report also undercuts many of her campaign's explanations for her use of the system, dismisses comparisons to her predecessors' email use, and points to repeated hacking attempts that she failed to report.

Hillary Clinton clobbered by State Department audit.  Hillary Clinton disregarded various State Department guidelines for avoiding cybersecurity risks, an internal audit found Wednesday [5/25/2016], faulting her and past secretaries of state for weak information management.  And she failed to report numerous attempted hacker intrusions into a private email server she maintained at her home.  Despite guidelines to the contrary and never seeking approval, Clinton used mobile devices to conduct official business on her personal email account and on that private server, a 78-page analysis from the department's inspector general concluded.  She never sought approval from senior information officers, who would have refused the request because of security risks, the audit said.

Hillary's summer of scandal.  A long-awaited State Department inspector general report on the impact of personal email use on recordkeeping at State was released to lawmakers on Wednesday, and concluded that Clinton violated the agency's records rules.  And as many Americans prepare for the traditional Memorial Day kickoff to the summer season, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills is scheduled to sit for a sworn deposition Friday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch.  Mills' testimony would be the first known time a member of Clinton's inner circle has been questioned under oath in the email controversy.  Another top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is set to testify next month.

State Dept Audit Faults Clinton in Emails.  Hillary Clinton disregarded various State Department guidelines for avoiding cybersecurity risks, an internal audit found Wednesday [5/25/2016].

State Dept Audit Faults Clinton in Emails.  A State Department audit has faulted Hillary Clinton and previous secretaries of state for poorly managing email and other computer information and slowly responding to new cybersecurity risks.  The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report by the agency's inspector general Wednesday [5/25/2016].  It cites "longstanding, systemic weaknesses" related to communications.  These started in the secratary of state's office before Clinton's appointment to the post, but her failures were singled out as more serious.


The FBI neglects to indict Hillary Clinton:
This subsection has moved to a page of its own, located here.


Hillary Clinton's use of file-wiping software:This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2024 by Andrew K. Dart

Immunity deals stopped FBI from investigating BleachBit use in Clinton email case.  In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch Wednesday, four Republican committee chairmen demanded to know why Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two witnesses who also served as Clinton's personal attorneys, were granted such expansive protections despite the FBI's awareness that they had participated in potentially illegal activities.  For example, the FBI agreed to limit its search to emails written after June 1, 2014, but before Feb. 1, 2015.  By doing so, investigators were barred from looking at emails authored around the time Mills and David Kendall, Clinton's lead attorney, held a pair of conference calls with technology contractor Paul Combetta that immediately preceded his use of BleachBit to erase thousands of Clinton's emails.

Yes, the Fix Was In.  With concerns about Hillary Clinton's health intensifying, Congress is poised to revisit the FBI's investigation of her e-mail scandal.  As the Washington Examiner's Byron York reports, the House Government Oversight Committee chaired by Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) will begin hearings this week.  The committee is especially troubled by the facts that (a) unbeknownst to Congress, the Justice Department gave immunity to a key witness; yet, (b) prosecutors and the FBI indulged that witness's refusal to answer critical questions.  Specifically, Paul Combetta, a technician at Platte River Networks (the Colorado firm retained by the Clintons to handle the private e-mail system), is the person who destroyed Clinton's e-mails despite the fact that they were under congressional subpoena.  Nevertheless, he was permitted to invoke attorney-client privilege — not his own, mind you, but Mrs. Clinton's — in declining to discuss any instructions he received before (and after) carrying out the mass deletion of tens of thousands of Clinton e-mails, a task for which he used the "BleachBit" program in an effort to ensure that the deleted e-mails would be irretrievably lost.

Giuliani: Clinton acted 'with criminal intent'.  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed Sunday that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton "acted intentionally and with criminal intent" in regard to the private email server she used while secretary of state.  Giuliani, a Donald Trump surrogate and former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement released by Trump's campaign that Clinton's "powerful evidence of criminal intent" was how she deleted 33,000 emails and erased them with "expensive BleachBit software" that he claims is "used by criminals seeking to hide evidence from law enforcement."

The Editor says...
Bleachbit is not expensive software; in fact, it seems to be surprisingly affordable if not free.

Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena.  [Scroll down]  Shortly after providing that data dump to the State Department, in "December 2014 or January 2015," both Heather Samuelson and Cheryl Mills requested that all emails be removed from their computers using "a program called BleachBit to delete the e-mail-related files so they could not be recovered."  For her part, "Clinton stated she never deleted, nor did she instruct anyone to delete, her e-mails to avoid complying with FOIA, State or FBI requests for information."  Of course not.  Hillary knew it would be a little too obvious to specifically instruct her staff to permanently delete the emails but she also knew it might be "inconvenient" to have them around.  So, she simply "decided she no longer needed access to any of her e-mails older than 60 days."  See?  She never specifically said to delete anything she just made a simple administrative decision on document retention policies.

Hillary's Emails:  Soaked in Bleach.  [Scroll down]  When questioned about the contents of the emails that Hillary and her team deleted and that have never been turned over to investigators as mandated, the company line that she and her team have stuck to is that they were mostly related to Hillary's yoga classes (anybody else not buy that Hillary does yoga?) and Chelsea's wedding and other such banalities irrelevant to the state.  If that's true, then why the BleachBit?  Sure, the software makes it easy, but make no mistake:  using BleachBit is an extreme measure.

FBI may not have been able to detect software used to scrub Clinton servers.  The developer of the Bleachbit software told the Daily Caller that the FBI may not have been able to detect its use in scrubbing the private email server used by Hillary Clinton. [...] It seems probable that many of the 14,900 emails recovered by the FBI were from sources other than the server.

Clinton's use of BleachBit avoided 'money trail' in email destruction.  Hillary Clinton's decision to use BleachBit to scrub her private email server could have been based on the fact that the free software can be downloaded and used with complete anonymity, the program's developer said.  Andrew Ziem, the creator of BleachBit, pointed to a recent CNN report about his software in which a computer security expert had speculated that Clinton's team would have selected a more expensive, more sophisticated service if it truly sought to conceal records.

Hillary Gets (More Than) a Little Help from Her Media Friends.  [Scroll down]  Indeed, we learned this week that Hillary used software called "BleachBit" to erase emails from her private server, a software that "helps users delete files in a way to 'prevent recovery and hide traces of files deleted'.  I'm sure even as credulous an observer as [Ruth] Marcus would have to concede that this seems rather extreme for emails which Hillary claimed were just about yoga and wedding plans.

CNN Tries to Whitewash Hillary Email Deletions.  BleachBit is not only the program at the center of the latest Clinton scandal.  It's what the media does for Hillary's scandals.  Let's start with CNN. [...]

Industrial strength data-erasing software company BRAGS that Hillary Clinton used their product to 'wipe' her email server.  A software company that sells a brute-force data erasure program is boasting that its technology gave Hillary Clinton the power to 'wipe' her private homebrew email server before it fell into the hands of the FBI.  Application developer Andrew Ziem wrote in a Thursday night [8/25/2016] press release that his BleachBit software prevented the FBI from accessing emails that Clinton deleted.  'Last year when Clinton was asked about wiping her email server, she joked, "Like with a cloth or something?"  It turns out now that BleachBit was that cloth.'

Hillary Clinton BleachBits her past.  While Hillary Clinton was preparing to deliver a big speech portraying Donald Trump as a racist, a figure from Clinton's recent unhappy past — Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi — added a new word to the 25-year vocabulary of Clinton scandals:  BleachBit.  That is the name of a publicly-available utility used to delete material from a computer's hard disk.  And it's not just for casual, quickie deletes of junk mail.  It's for when a user really wants to destroy material on a computer so that no one will be able to recover it.  According to Gowdy, BleachBit is what Clinton and her legal team used, or at least part of what her team used, to destroy the 30,000 or so emails on her secret system that she deemed "personal" from her years as secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton Deleted Emails Using Program Intended To 'Prevent Recovery'.  Hillary Clinton's team of aides and lawyers deleted emails from her private server using a software program intended to "prevent recovery" and hide traces of deleted files.  South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed the information during an interview on Thursday [8/25/2016] on Fox News.  Citing notes that FBI investigators took during their probe of Clinton's private email server, Gowdy said that Clinton's team used open source software called BleachBit to remove tens of thousands of emails from her server.

Gowdy: Clinton used special tool to wipe email server.  [Congressman Trey] Gowdy (R-S.C.) said the use of BleachBit, computer software whose website advertises that it can "prevent recovery" of files, is further proof that Clinton had something to hide in deleting personal emails from the private email system she used during her tenure as secretary of state.  Clinton has long said that the deleted emails were all of a personal nature, relating largely to yoga and her daughter's wedding, but Gowdy said he did not know whether the Democratic nominee considered emails pertaining to the Clinton Foundation to be personal.

Clinton team used special program to scrub server, Gowdy says.  Hillary Clinton's team used more than just a "cloth" to scrub her private server — employing a special program known as BleachBit to delete her private emails and try to prevent their recovery, a senior Republican on the House oversight committee who has read the FBI's investigative file told Fox News. [...] The account is striking considering that Clinton, at a rare press conference last year in Las Vegas, seemed to claim ignorance when asked by Fox News whether she wiped her server.  "What, like with a cloth or something?" Clinton quipped, adding:  "I don't know how it works digitally at all."  Yet Gowdy said her team was using BleachBit, which is like an electronic shredder that permanently scrambles data.





Press conference, March 10, 2015

When elites lie without much consequence, the public follows their examples.  Hillary Clinton, to be candid, is a habitual fabulist.  She entered public life lying about everything from her 1-1000 cattle futures con to the location of her law firm's subpoenaed legal documents.  Recently she has been unable to tell the truth in any context whatsoever.  She will lie about big and small, trivial and fundamental, from the immigrant myths about her grandparents to the origins of her own name Hillary to her combat exposure in the Balkans. [...] Her press conference on the disappearing emails was unique in American political history in that everything Ms. Clinton said was, without exception, a demonstrable untruth.

How Many Lies Did Hillary Pack Into Her Press Conference?  In her brief press conference on Tuesday, which was meant to clear the air on her unusual use of a private email account while secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made several claims that even the mainstream press have begun to question.  Some seem like outright fabrications, others are dubious assertions, and some just unanswered questions.

The Eight Biggest Lies Hillary Told At Her Email Press Conference.  Actually she lied through her teeth but that is the Clinton way.  Going through the text of her press conference about her emails again, I found ten statements which I believe are false.  Since research only turned proof for only eight of them, the below only contains the first eight of her lies.

Hillary's email explanation is self-contradictory — here's how.  The problem with Hillary Clinton's explanation for her use of a personal email server and account for government business goes beyond the demonstrable falsehoods and suspicious nature of setting up such an arrangement.  Hillary explained that she turned over all work-related emails to the State Department, and "chose not to keep" (i.e., deleted) the personal emails on the server.  Thus, according to Hillary, the server now only has work related emails.  But Hillary says that she will not turn over the server to a neutral person for review, because the server has her personal emails on it.  But she already said the personal emails are not on it anymore.

Does Anyone Believe Hillary Clinton?  On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton said she set up a private email account simply because it seemed more convenient than carrying two phones — which in her world probably translates into having an aide carry two phones.  She said she deleted private emails only.  By the way, half of the 60,000-plus emails on the account were personal.  Oh, and she deleted them. [...] We all know why she set up a private account.  She didn't want to leave a paper trail.  She didn't want the media to get ahold of documents that might require explanation during her inevitable run for the White House in 2016.

Carefully scripted Hillary knocked out of comfort zone.  "I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two," she said.  Never mind that it's much easier to set up two email systems on one device than it is to set up a whole dark server hidden from the government.  And leave aside that a woman who travels with a very large entourage on non-commercial flights could probably manage two devices.  I'm sure she's right.  She set up the server for convenience — but not the convenience of sparing her the load of an additional 4-ounce phone.  When you want to hide what you're doing, a private server is definitely the way to go.

Hillary explains, eyes roll.  Clinton expects us to take her word that the deleted emails deal only with trivialities and that she transmitted no classified information.  However, nothing in Clinton's history suggests that we should take her word on anything, and her 20 minute (or so) appearance raised additional questions about her honesty.  For example, Clinton said she "fully complied with every rule."  Yet, as the Washington Post reminds us, even the Obama administration has said that Clinton did not follow its policy against using private or commercial e-mail for government business.

Internet Catches Hillary in Three Provable Email Falsehoods:
  #1: Hillary only used one phone
  #2: Bill Clinton uses email, too
  #3: There were no server security breaches

White House Squirms Trying to Defend Hillary Clinton's Deletion of Thousand of Emails.  In Tuesday's press conference, Hillary Clinton addressed the issue of her use of a personal email address for official State Department business.  Clinton mentioned that she deleted roughly half of the emails because she deemed them personal.  She defended this action by saying that they include details of her daughter's wedding as well as yoga poses.  During Wednesday's [3/11/2015] White House press briefing, Press Secretary Josh Earnest could not escape a barrage of questions on Clinton's statements.

White House won't say whether Obama uses private email.  White House press secretary Josh Earnest Wednesday [3/11/2015] declined to say whether President Obama uses a private or a government email address, claiming the president's personal security as a reason for withholding an answer.  "I'm not going to be in a position to talk about the president's email address for a variety of reasons," Earnest told reporters Wednesday when asked if Obama uses a private or a dot-gov email address.

Clinton's email explanation won't placate critics.  The message from Hillary Rodham Clinton:  Trust me.  But in a 21-minute news conference to address why she used a private email account as secretary of state, the favorite for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2016 did little to try to build that trust among those willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Democrats Are Ready for Hillary and Stuck with Her.  The good news was that after a week of ominous and politically damaging silence, Hillary Clinton emerged to answer questions from the press about her emails and demonstrated that she had no intention of letting this story deflect her from her goal of winning the presidency.  The bad news was that barely-suppressed rage about having to answer those questions and arrogant "trust me" attitude not only failed to defuse this controversy, it also raised serious questions as to whether she had the temperament to run a successful campaign for the presidency.  Taken together, it is more or less a perfect storm for a party seeking to hold onto the White House next year without having Barack Obama on the top of the ticket.

Hillary Clinton deleted 32,000 'private' emails, refuses to turn over server.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton deleted nearly 32,000 emails she deemed private from her time in the Obama administration and refused Tuesday to turn over her personal email server, insisting she "fully complied" with the law and that voters will have to trust her judgment.  Answering questions for the first time about her emails, Mrs. Clinton said she's turned over to the State Department 55,000 pages of emails she deemed work-related, but said she got rid of the rest last year.  She defended her decision to keep control of her emails by using a private account, saying previous secretaries did the same thing, and saying it was more "convenient" for her this way.

Are we ready for 10 more years of wrath from the eternal Woman Scorned?  Hillary Clinton's press performance Tuesday afternoon was, truly, everything Americans could have hoped for from our former First Lady, Modern Joan of Arc, Lady Macbeth, Senate carpetbagger and eternal public Woman Scorned.  She was everything she has ever been, always was and ever will be.

Multiple Contradictions in Clinton's First Comments on Email Scandal.  Hillary Clinton spoke publicly for the first time since her practice of using a private email address as secretary of state was revealed, and said the sole reason for the decision was "convenience."  The press conference came after nearly two weeks of silence from Clinton following the initial report that she exclusively used a personal email address during her time as secretary of state.  It was later revealed she set up a private email server to house emails for both herself and her top aides.  Clinton said she made a mistake when she "opted for convenience."  She said she chose not to use a government email address because she did not want to carry multiple devices.

Shameless.  Hillary stonewalled and has now outsourced her problem to attack-dog subordinates and Democratic stalwarts who, she believes, have Hillary — or no one — for 2016.  I guess the message is "I'm lying, so what?"  Remember Richard Nixon's vain attempt to keep Watergate tapes because he alone had determined that some were only private in nature and did not relate to government business or subpoenas — and the subsequent reaction to his "gaps."  That is Hillary Clinton's absurd line of something like "secretary of state privilege," and thus her press conference could only end in disaster.  After all the obfuscation, the only thing that one can take away from this embarrassing performance is that Hillary Clinton envisioned her own personal server for just such contingencies:  to trash a large percentage of her incoming and outgoing e-mails after becoming the sole arbitrator of what constituted her own, and her government's, business, and thus the preserver or destroyer of all her communications.

Jon Karl Grills Hillary: Why Did You Wait 2 Years to Comply with Email Rules?  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took questions from eager reporters on Tuesday about her personal email address, which she used exclusively instead of a government account during her time at the helm of the State Department.  Clinton said she opted for "convenience" in using just one email account (instead of carrying multiple phones), but added in hindsight "it would have been better if i'd simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn't seem like an issue."

Hillary said she emailed with Bill, but the thing is ...  Bill Clinton doesn't use email.  At a press conference on Tuesday [3/10/2015], Hillary Clinton said the server that housed her emails while she was secretary of state (that was reportedly housed at her home in New York) was set up for President Bill Clinton.  She also said that some of the "personal" emails she deleted were between her and her husband.  But just before Hillary began the press conference at the United Nations building, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bill Clinton does not use email.

Hillary Clinton: A Pay Phone Candidate in an iPhone World.  Staggered by self-inflicted wounds, the former secretary of State faced a choice between the right way and wrong way to manage a public-relations crisis in the post-Internet era, when the 1990s tactics of deflection, deception, and victimization are far less effective.  She chose the wrong way.  Rather than be transparent, completely honest, and accountable, Clinton doubled down on the 1990s.  She refused to turn over her emails stored on a secret service in violation of federal regulations.  She defended contributions to her family's charity from foreign nations that discriminate against women and support terrorism, a brazen contradiction to her public profile.

Hillary Flashback: I Have Two Phones.  At an event on February 24, Hillary Clinton said that she owns both an iPhone and a Blackberry.  When asked if she prefers iPhone or Android, Clinton responded "iPhone, OK, in full disclosure — and a Blackberry."  [Video clip]

Hillary speaks on email scandal.  She claims she used the server set up for Bill Clinton's post-presidency office, and therefore it was fully secure.  However, Fox News just reported that Bill Clinton has stated that he has sent only 2 emails in his life. [...] She will not let any other parties get their hands on her server.  She claims that because personal emails are on it, nobody should have access.  However, as Judge Andrew Napolitano and some others have pointed out, she is the one responsible for mixing official and private emails on the same server, and so must bear the burden of verification that she did not delete any emails. [...] She claimed there were no security breaches on the server.  As if she could possibly know.

Hillary Clinton had a duty higher than convenience.  Hillary Rodham Clinton offered a soupcon of regret at a news conference Tuesday [3/10/2015] for having used private e-mail exclusively during her nearly four years as secretary of state.  "Looking back, it would've been better" if she had not used a private e-mail account for official business, she conceded.  Ms. Clinton said she decided to do so for "convenience" because "I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails instead of two."

State Dept. Source: Hillary Likely Used Unauthorized iPad, iPhone as Sec. of State.  Besides exclusively using a secret email account to conduct official government business, it's likely that Hillary Clinton also used unauthorized electronic equipment — an iPad and an iPhone — as Secretary of State after being warned not to, a veteran State Department official told Judicial Watch this week.  On at least half a dozen occasions Clinton's top aides asked the State Department's Office of Security Technology to approve the use of an iPad and iPhone, according to JW's inside source.  Each time the request was rejected for security reasons, the source confirms.  The only mobile device that meets the agency's security standards is the BlackBerry, JW's source said, adding that the Office of Security Technology — Bureau of Diplomatic Security's Directorate of Countermeasures must approve all equipment such as cameras, phones and communication devices for all officials.

Hillary's Prickly Apologia.  Hillary Clinton's reliance on that word during her news conference at the United Nations on Tuesday minimized the exemption from standard procedure that she allowed herself when she decided — all on her own — to use only a private email address for both personal and government business.  She told reporters that she hadn't wanted to be weighed down by a second electronic device.

Fact Check: Clinton and Her Emails.  Federal officials are allowed to communicate on private email and are generally allowed to conduct government business in those exchanges, but that ability is constrained, both by federal regulations and by their supervisors.

Clintons and controversy: The circus is back in town.  Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet even announced that she is running for president, but the spectacle of the Clinton years is unfolding again, touched off by the controversy over her practice of using a private email account, rather than an official one, while she was secretary of state.

America's Ex-Wife.  Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bill Clinton does not use email.  A few hours later, Hillary said he did use email.  She said it was convenient for her to only use one email account and one device.  Two weeks ago she said she used both an iPhone and a Blackberry.  In fact, anyone savvy enough to go the private server route should be savvy enough to know an iPhone or Blackberry can handle multiple email accounts.  In fact, former Secretary of Defense Gate, who served along Hillary Clinton, used one device with multiple email accounts.  Hillary also said the server was someplace protected by the Secret Service.  Of course, that mean physical protection.  What about the internet connection?  Therein lies the rub.  Hillary Clinton clearly decided the rules did not apply to her.

Hillary's Train Wreck Press Conference: The Gender Card, The Spin, The Lies & The Many Unanswered Questions.  Hillary did herself no favors by claiming that the private e-mail account was strictly about convienience, that she did not want to have to use more than one device.  She certainly has not had that problem since leaving the State Department.  According to Legal Insurrection, Hillary appeared at Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women and ostentatiously made note that she "had both an iPhone and ... a Blackberry."  In addition, there's this from Hot Air regarding her time at the State Department:  "Judicial Watch claims that not only did she operate multiple devices, she insisted on using Apple products even though State's IT people told her that their enhanced security is designed for Blackberry only."  Moreover, the reason she gives for refusal to allow a neutral third party to inspect her server is even more obviously a lie (thanks, Bill).  Hillary says that she will not allow a third party to inspect her server is because it contains private communications between her and her wayward husband, former President Bill Clinton.  But according to Bill's spokesperson, Bill has sent all of two e-mails in his entire life, both when he was President.

In light of Clinton email scandal, media continues search for GOP comparisons.  News that Clinton used a likely compromised "homebrew" server to send and receive sensitive government documents has dominated headlines for the past two weeks.  And although Clinton maintained this week in a press conference that no classified material ever passed through her server during four years she served at State, doubts remain.  "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email," Clinton said Tuesday during a press conference that drew harsh bipartisan criticism.

Liar, liar, Hillary's pantsuit is on fire.  She can't help herself.  Hillary Clinton is addicted to deception.  The news that she used an iPad as well as BlackBerry demolishes her already-ridiculous claim that she set up a private e-mail server so she would only need to carry one gadget as secretary of state.  At a March 10 press conference, Clinton put it this way:  "I thought using one device would be simpler, and, obviously, it hasn't worked out that way. Looking back, it would have been probably ... smarter to have used two devices."  Those comments, her first public ones on the scandal, are now revealed as a lie.  What a way to start a presidential campaign!

Update:
Emails: Hillary Used iPad And Blackberry, Despite Previous Claim.  Leading Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the nation that she only used one device, a Blackberry, for her official email while secretary of state, and she promised those emails were secure.  But new emails to her friend Sidney Blumenthal casts doubt on that assertion.  In an email dated Aug. 30, 2012, then Secretary Clinton was soliciting more intelligence from Blumenthal, who was not a State Department employee, regarding an upcoming meeting with the National Transition Council of Libya.  The NTC was the governing body of Libya after the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.  In the solicitation, Clinton mentioned that she was without Blackberry coverage or power after Tropical Storm Irene hit the East Coast.  As a result, she switched to a "new iPad" for her email and wasn't sure her emails were going through.


Press conference, August 18, 2015

Vote For Hillary, Not Convicted of Anything Yet.  Hillary Clinton has maneuvered her presidential campaign into a lose-lose situation — of her very own making.  Tuesday [8/18/2015] Clinton's second journey to become the first female to capture her presidential spouse's former office took on even more water with a disastrous abbreviated news conference in Las Vegas.  Remember last spring after the first of several campaign launches, she wouldn't take any media questions?  That lasted more than a month.

Hillary goes to Vegas, loses big with performance at press conference.  Wearing a prison-orange pantsuit yesterday, Hillary Clinton dug the hole she occupies several feet deeper with Tuesday's [8/18/2015] North Las Vegas gym presser.  Even normally supportive liberal pundits were appalled at her performance.  Ron Fournier of the National Journal, who has known and been fond of the Clintons since covering them in Little Rock, counted six separate lies, evasions, and mis-directions in appearances on Fox News and MSNBC.  Even Chris Matthews was shocked, discussing the presser on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning [8/19/2015].

The Shrug Heard Round the World: Hillary Clinton Jokes About Wiping Email Server 'with a Cloth'.  The contentious exchange took place between Fox News' Ed Henry and Hillary just after an event in Las Vegas.  The question was prompted by an NBC News report in which unnamed sources at the FBI expressed confidence it could recover data from Hillary's server despite the fact that an attempt had been made to wipe it.  [Video clip]

Hillary Clinton won't say if her server was wiped.  In a testy exchange with reporters following a town hall meeting in North Las Vegas, Clinton responded, "What, like with a cloth or something?" when asked if the server had been wiped.  "I don't know how it works at all," she added.  After Ed Henry of Fox News pressed Clinton on the issue repeatedly, an aide ended the question-and-answer session and Clinton turned to walk away.  Another reporter shouted a question about whether the e-mail issue will ever go away.  Clinton turned and shrugged.  "Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys," she said.

Press Conference Disaster: Hillary Refuses To Say If She Knew Her Server Was Wiped.  Following her town hall event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton was challenged by skeptical reporters to explain her email arrangement, and once again she insisted that everything she did while secretary of State was "legally permitted."  Clinton also refused to say if she knew that her email server, which was turned over to the FBI last week, had been wiped clean of data.  Fox New's Ed Henry asked Clinton if she plans on taking responsibility for her email scandal rather than making jokes about Snapchat and blaming Republicans.

Hillary Clinton's dumpster fire press conference.  America's addled grandma, Hillary Clinton, made a campaign stop in North Las Vegas today.  ["]More than 300 cheering and applauding people welcomed Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton to a town hall at the Pearson Community Center in North Las Vegas where she was scheduled to speak Tuesday.["]  [...] You read that right.  A crowd of 300.  She also had a press conference.  Instead of the somnolent, compliant press corps she usually faces (I've been told the mixed aromas of Polident and Depends has a soporific effect) she found one that was strangely awake and a little hungry and irritable.  They weren't interested in student loans.  They were interested in top secret emails kept of servers stored in bathrooms.

Hillary loses her cool when hounded about email servers.  According to reports, the FBI, which has possession of Clinton's server, believes there was an attempt to wipe it clean of data, but missing messages can be recovered.  Clinton talked to reporters after a Vegas speech, and defended her decision to not hand over emails that she deemed private.

Clinton apologists: Hey, just wait until Hillary testifies before Congress!  To call Hillary Clinton's press conference yesterday a disaster is to engage in understatement.  In a brief two-minute exchange with Fox News' Ed Henry, Hillary tried changing history by claiming totally voluntary transparency, and then put on a dumb-grandma act when asked about an act to which her attorney admitted months ago. [...] It's a two-minute exercise in falsehoods, false posturing, and stonewalling.

Clinton's Self-Inflicted Wounds.  Tuesday's news conference in North Las Vegas provided the latest installments in a series of misleading statements Mrs. Clinton has made since aides announced that last December they had turned over to the State Department 31,000 work-related emails.  In early March, it was revealed that Mrs. Clinton had used only a personal email account to conduct official business as secretary of state — potentially a violation of federal regulations.  The Associated Press then traced the account to a private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

5 mistakes Hillary Clinton made in her latest e-mail press conference.  [#2] She casts the whole thing as normal and everyday.  I don't doubt that there are regular disagreements between the State Department and the intelligence community's inspector general about who gets to look at what.  And we know that other secretaries of state have used private e-mail addresses.  But what Clinton elides over are these two facts:  (1) She is the first secretary of state in history to exclusively use a private e-mail address and server while on the job, and (2) she is running for president in 2016.  Those two facts explain why her situation does (and should) get more attention and scrutiny.

Hillary Clinton Covers Up Yesterday's Cavalcade of Lies With, Get This, More Lies.  The self-imputed Only Honest Man in DC, Ron Fournier, counted Hillary's lies in yesterday's press conference and came up with six.




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