Just a few weeks ago, she told CBS News, “I’ve encouraged all of (my staff) to be very forthcoming”. But through her lawyers, Clinton declined to be interviewed by Inspector General Steve Linick or his staff. Thus Californians probably will vote in the June 7 primary without the benefit of knowing what Clinton has to say for herself on the legal record – and with an FBI criminal investigation pending. Abedin and Sullivan are now Clinton campaign aides and Nides, currently vice chairman of the Morgan Stanley financial services firm, is a major Clinton fundraiser.
Advertisement
Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post: “The report suggests that Clinton at State was the queen bee, to be unquestioningly served by the hive”. The hurricane is gaining force and her lies are being called out by the State Department inspector general who is an Obama administration appointee. Had she done so, she likely would have learned that neither of them used a private email server.
Secretary Clinton believed her emails to and from officials on their state.gov accounts were automatically captured and preserved in the State Department’s electronic system.
Although Clinton argued again in a Univision interview on Wednesday that her use of a personal account was “not at all unprecedented”, the memo from Podesta alludes to the distinct aspects of her arrangement. Neither she nor her campaign has claimed, until Podesta’s letter, that she thought that her email setup was carrying on in the tradition of her predecessors.
In particular, Clinton did not turn over all her email when she left office in February 2013 because it was stored on her home server.
“Rules are made to be broken” is a saying that has many variations, but perhaps no one has summed up Hillary Clinton’s attitude (and Bill’s, too) about rules more than the late science-fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, who said: “I am free, no matter what rules surround me”.
“I would’ve been the most unpopular person in that building [had I been there]”, Krongard told Fox News. Isn’t what Hillary Clinton did far worse than that, if she potentially compromised US secrets?
So the State Department’s own inspector general’s report of Mrs. Clinton’s clearly forbidden and blatantly law-breaking activities isn’t a smoking gun?
How, how, how could Clinton & Co. – this is a massive failure of staff as well – have failed to reconsider the permissibility, not to mention the wisdom, of this practice? She told staffers, “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible”.
The officials also said they were “unaware of the scope or extent” of her email practices, even though Clinton exchanged hundreds of thousands of messages with people in government from her personal account. Clinton must assure voters that this is not the way she would conduct business in the White House.
‘The Inspector General just came out with a report, it was not a good report for Secretary Clinton, ‘ Sanders said. Having said that, it’s true her nongovt account was on her family’s server, as opposed to commercial email account.
CLINTON: “In the fall, I think it was October of a year ago (2014), the State Department sent a letter to previous secretaries of state asking for help with their record-keeping, in part because of the technical problems that they knew they had to deal with”. This directly conflicts with her statements that she had received approval to use her personal server to conduct official State Department business.
Advertisement
The State Department has released more than 52,000 pages of Clinton’s work-related emails, including some that have since been classified. In that meeting and another that Bentel had with a different staff member who raised concerns, Bentel directed the staff members to “never to speak of the secretary’s personal email system again”. She put national security at risk.
