The Chris Moeller Archives

Hillary Clinton explains privacy for us

"I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so."

Which corrupt American politician said that? Answer: then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the day that Chelsea Manning's court-martial was scheduled to begin.

Clinton herself conducted classified foreign policy business on a personal email account untethered from secured federal government servers. She was required by law to preserve emails sent to and from her personal account, and she didn't do that either, deleting 32,000 of them, including some that had been stamped as classified, according to Reuters.

Hillary has alternately apologized and claimed she did nothing wrong in this case. On July 7th of this year, she claimed she had the full authority of her predecessors to use the private server. On September 9th, she said she was "sorry for that" to ABC News, Then on September 27th, she claimed again on Meet the Press that she had the authority. She first made the claim that there was no classified information on her server, but those claims ended when hundreds of classified documents were discovered.

This case involving her time spent as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 seems to be getting sidetracked by the fact that Clinton is currently running for president. (It's not the other way around.) Unfortunately, during this party primary portion of the race, partisan Democrats also don't seem to think the issue is important, including her opponents. A Clinton spokesperson has called the issue "nonsense," but it was the State Department, not politicians, that alerted the issue to the FBI's counterintelligence office, and a U.S. District Judge (Emmet Sullivan) appointed by Clinton's husband that ordered State and the FBI to work together on the case, stating that "we wouldn't be here today if this employee had followed government policy." The current U.S. President, Clinton's former boss, called it "a legitimate issue" last week on 60 Minutes, even as he confusingly also said that criticism of it was "ginned up" because of politics.

Clinton knows about "ginning up" security issues. Again this week, one of the signers of the first-round U.S.A. Patriot Act repeated her criticism of Edward Snowden, perpetuating a smear against Snowden that his files had "fallen into a lot of wrong hands" (or by "a lot of wrong hands," does she mean the American people?) and insisting incorrectly that Snowden could have substituted his actions by taken his concerns about NSA overreach instead to his superiors, when in fact he and others had already done so multiple times and to no avail.

In this link, the Federalist has a list of some of the statutes Clinton has violated with her private email actions. They include sending classified materials over an unsecured, unclassified system, and disseminating classified materials to private citizens (such as Sidney Blumenthal) that do not have security clearances. Notice the last paragraph, a factual statement: "The 2009 executive order signed by Obama states that U.S. officials who negligently disclose classified information to unauthorized individuals are subject to any and all federal sanctions provided for by law." Obama has prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined, including NSA whistle blower Tom Drake who was accused of "mishandling" information that was not considered classified at the time, and a Naval Reserve officer who "mishandled" classified military materials even without an intent to distribute them to anybody. Clinton's getting a major hall pass here, considering these two sorry individuals. She might also be guilty of perjury. She signed an affidavit on August 10th, "under penalty of perjury," that she had turned over all government-related emails.

The woman Glenn Greenwald has called "the ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption" appears to have created, at her former post, a personal computer system designed to shield the details of her public actions from ever being accessed by the public. Her sinister motives seem clear enough to me. If a member of Congress, journalist, or private citizen were to file a Freedom of Information Act request in a matter involving Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State-- and many of them have, there's a good chance that the item of public record no longer exists. The State Department has acknowledged that Clinton's private email account "shielded" her from these requests. Americans (Democrats) should remember that this was not just a private email account she was using for government business, it was a private email account maintained on a private server. The entire matter marks her as a better fit for a prison jumpsuit than the presidency. Chelsea Manning's motivation was whistle blowing a war crime and she got 35 years at Leavenworth.

posted by CM @ 2:53 PM