Let's begin with a flashback to Hillary Clinton's infamous March 2015 United Nations press conference, at which she unleashed a barrage of since-exposed lies and fabrications. Here she is insisting that in the process of unilaterally deleting more than 30,000 emails off of her unsecure, national security-compromising, rules-violating server, she and her team of lawyers turned over all messages to the State Department "that could possibly be work-related." Watch:
It has since been revealed that this, among many other things, was untrue. She withheld or deleted email exchanges pertaining to Libya with her shady, well-compensated and banned-by-the-Obama-administration adviser Sidney Blumenthal -- whose personal emails were also hacked, and about whom Clinton has lied. She failed to disclose an email interaction with Gen. David Petraeus. We learned last week that she also withheld a damning email that shed light on how a problem with her bootleg server, which she was specifically warned was a security threat, caused the State Department to temporarily lower its secure system's firewall. May I remind you that Mrs. Clinton did not merely lie to reporters and the public before that blue backdrop last year; she also certified under penalty of perjury that she'd fully complied with a court order to hand over all official emails to the State Department. This is CNN's report from last August:
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 a judge requested she do so, a state department spokesman confirmed to CNN on Sunday. Clinton signed a declaration obtained by CNN, which said "While I do not know what information may be 'responsive' fr purposes of this law suit, I have directed that all my e-mails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done." This follows U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordering the State Department to have Clinton as well as two former top department aides to state under penalty of perjury they have produced all government records in their possession.
We've detailed above how this sworn certification was false in at least three instances. And now there's more. Take it away, Associated Press:
An additional 165 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton's time at the State Department surfaced Monday, 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. The emails were not among the 55,000 pages of work-related messages that Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. They include a March 2009 message where the then-secretary of state discusses how her official records would be kept. "I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State," Clinton wrote to Abedin and a second aide. "Who manages both my personal and official files? ... I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want."
Dozens of additional work emails Clinton "failed to hand over last year that were sent through her private server," including missives to and from one of her top aides, Huma Abedin. The system she wanted and designed was a secretive private one, specifically because she wanted full control over "personal" content, as was made clear in the scathing Inspector General report last month. And the beauty of the private server, from her perspective, was that she could determine what would constitute "personal" material, allowing her to keep politically sensitive information away from the prying eyes of records request filers -- with the trade-off of making high-level national security secrets extremely vulnerable to the prying eyes of enemy regimes and two-bit hackers. The only reason these dozens of work emails ever surfaced is because (a) Abedin submitted them to the State Department from her own records, and (b) a conservative group successfully sued for access to them. The former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting has said publicly that she only deleted strictly personal emails, using wedding planning and yoga as examples of the sorts of items she saw fit to erase. That explanation has been disproven over and over again.
Hillary Clinton falsely attested in public and in legal documents that she'd turned over all work-related emails. She did not. And it does not require a conspiratorial mind to wonder what darker secrets may lurk among the supposedly "personal" emails she destroyed that were not sufficiently benign that they were allowed to remain floating around elsewhere for potential discovery. In other words, if Clinton had an urgent reason to have a virtual paper trail wiped away permanently -- which appears to have been the whole point of implementing her improper scheme in the first place -- it stands to reason that she'd have been a lot more diligent about ensuring that it was truly gone. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the FBI's data retrieval operations center. I'll leave you with a timely reminder of Hillary Clinton's testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi last fall. Her performance was praised far and wide in the media, as if the panel hadn't laid a glove on her. In fact, they'd unearthed dramatic evidence proving that she'd deliberately misled the public about the nature of the attacks. And then there was the following exchange about work-related emails. At first, she testifies that all emails related to official business (i.e., not yoga) were submitted, but sings a different, gobsmackingly self-serving tune when challenged with countervailing evidence:
Secretary Clinton could not explain why she failed to turn over 15 Libya-related emails. https://t.co/STmPMsAizfhttps://t.co/OED2TUbZnl
— Benghazi Committee (@HouseBenghazi) October 26, 2015
"I was under no obligation to make any of [Blumenthal's] emails available unless I decided they were work-related." That says it all, really. She appointed herself as the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of what "counted" as official correspondence, and she evidently concluded that dozens of plainly work-related messages were not. Hillary Clinton is ethically unfit for the presidency.
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