ABC News followed up on Friday's Bloomberg piece with a report that aired Sunday morning on This Week. The network's Chief White House correspondent, Jonathan Karl, laid out the latest developments in Hillary Clinton's email scandal, including an "intriguing" quote from sources at the private company that set up her improper and unsecure server (via America Rising):
"Platte River Networks, the Colorado company that set up Clinton's server, told ABC News that it is highly likely that a full back-up of the server was made -- meaning those thousands of emails she deleted may still exist. The company says it's cooperating with the FBI."
Those last two sentences must send a shiver down Team Hillary's collective spine. They're casting about for methods of distraction and attack -- issuing nonsense spin memos, attempting comedy, blaming Republicans, etc. -- but the bottom line remains that the Obama Justice Department is investigating the gross mishandling of classified material (the existence of which she denied) on Hillary's rules-violating server. The probe was triggered by serious concerns put forward by two independent Obama administration Inspectors General. And those 'permanently' destroyed emails may still be intact somewhere. Their contents could be devastating. There are two pieces you should read about the legal side of this scandal; the first is an interesting and thorough explanation of the type of classified information that's been discovered on the infamous server, written by a former NSA analyst. The second is an excellent column by former Attorney General and federal judge Michael Mukasey, enumerating the laws Mrs. Clinton and her team may have broken. In addition to the legal hot water, Mukasey concludes that Clinton's actions and shifting justifications defy common sense:
The common-sense issues in this matter are more problematic than the criminal ones. Anyone who enters the Situation Room at the White House, where Mrs. Clinton was photographed during the Osama bin Laden raid, is required to place any personal electronic device in a receptacle outside the room, lest it be activated involuntarily and confidential communications disclosed. Mrs. Clinton herself, in a now famous email, cautioned State Department employees not to conduct official business on personal email accounts. The current secretary of state, John Kerry, testified that he assumes that his emails have been the object of surveillance by hostile foreign powers. It is inconceivable that the nation’s senior foreign-relations official was unaware of the risk that communications about this country’s relationships with foreign governments would be of particular interest to those governments, and to others. It is no answer to say, as Mrs. Clinton did at one time, that emails were not marked classified when sent or received. Of course they were not; there is no little creature sitting on the shoulders of public officials classifying words as they are uttered and sent. But the laws are concerned with the sensitivity of information, not the sensitivity of the markings on whatever may contain the information...Once you assume a public office, your communications about anything having to do with your job are not your personal business or property. They are the public’s business and the public’s property, and are to be treated as no different from communications of like sensitivity. That something so obvious could have eluded Mrs. Clinton raises questions about her suitability both for the office she held and for the office she seeks.
Here's the Morning Joe gang panning Hillary's incoherent and frivolous response to the email controversy -- with Joe Scarborough wondering what took the DOJ so long to seriously look into the matter, and Mark Halperin calling Clinton's campaign the least responsive to basic questions that he's ever encountered:
I'll leave you with Ross Douthat explaining why an indictment of Hillary Clinton is exceedingly unlikely (spoiler: Obama's politicized DOJ simply will not let it happen), plus an unflattering comparison from Bob Woodward:
Guy who brought down Nixon compares Hillary to Nixon http://t.co/XKAR23AVne
— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) August 17, 2015