This quote is lifted from page 1 of "The Russia Hoax." (posted below)
"This may explain why the FBI and the DOJ were motivated not to charge Clinton. If they did so, Obama’s mishandling of classified communications would be exposed."
Chapter 1
Hillary Clinton’s Email Server
Convenience is not a legal principle.
—LORD JUSTICE EDWARD PEARCE, QUEENS BENCH, HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND AND WALES (1961)
This is a story of corruption. It begins, as it must, with
Hillary Clinton.
Clinton’s determination to set up a private email server in the basement of her home to use as the exclusive method for electronically communicating all of her official business as secretary of state was a fateful decision. At its core, the idea was fundamentally reckless. It also appears to have been criminal. More than any other event or factor, it led to the inexorable end to her aspiration to be President of the United States.
The Email Setup
Unraveling Clinton’s private server apparatus was complicated by the hidden nature of its design. The domain was not registered in her name, but under a separate identity even though the IP address was connected to the Chappaqua, New York, residence of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Indeed, the server itself was installed in the basement of their house.1 The State Department never certified the server as secure, as its rules require.2
Thus, anyone within the home, including those without security clearance, had physical access to it, as did the two individuals who were instrumental in its installation, operation, and maintenance, Justin Cooper and Bryan Pagliano.
Neither was cleared for handling classified information.3
Why would Clinton want to keep all her communications as secretary of state on a private server? The obvious answer is often the correct one. With no emails on a government account, Clinton would be able to avoid complying with various requests filed by the media and the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
This explanation is reinforced by the conscious decision she and her staff made not to utilize an electronic program called SMART, which would have preserved her records for the government.4
The motivation behind Clinton’s decision to use a secret server invites the question: if someone has nothing to hide, why hide?
People who engage in improper, if not illegal, activities often cloak them in darkness. They seek to obscure their illicit behavior.
Clinton may have wanted to hide decisions and mistakes that would look bad when she ran for president.
She may have wanted to keep from public view any evidence that she and her husband used her position of power in government to enrich themselves.
As will be detailed in Chapter 4, their charity, the Clinton Foundation, served as the conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed from foreign sources at the same time Hillary appeared to have exerted influence on their behalf.
At the same time, Bill pocketed tens of millions for speaking engagements overseas, many of them connected to his wife’s work.
The improper use of Clinton’s surreptitious server stands in stark contrast to the promises she made before taking office.
While campaigning for president in 2008, Clinton had promised complete transparency and vowed to fulfill all FOIA requests.5
In retrospect, her public assurances were nothing more than a carefully crafted deception. Her private server afforded her a clever and clandestine way to evade the public disclosure of her communications and to hide her self-serving deals.
On or about the day Clinton was sworn in to office, January 21, 2009, the State Department activated a classified email account on its secure government server for her benefit. Clinton never used it.6
Instead, she chose to utilize her unsecured private server for all her work-related communications, including classified documents.
How this went undetected during her four-year term remains inexplicable, unless those with knowledge were complicit in enabling her scheme or turned a blind eye to Clinton’s conduct.
Staffers at the State Department and the White House, including President Obama, regularly communicated with the secretary of state at her private email address.7
Documents uncovered by the FBI show that Obama used a pseudonym in communicating with Clinton on her private email account.8
Sometimes he did so while his secretary of state was overseas using an unprotected mobile device.
When the FBI showed a copy of one such Obama email to Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, she exclaimed, “How is that not classified?”9
Indeed, it surely was classified.
Thereafter, the White House refused to disclose the contents of any of the president’s emails involving his fake name. Obama was not only concealing his communications with an alias, he was mishandling classified information in the same negligent manner as Clinton.
This may explain why the FBI and the DOJ were motivated not to charge Clinton. If they did so, Obama’s mishandling of classified communications would be exposed.
It is hard to imagine that the president and others never noticed that Clinton was using a nongovernment, nonsecure private account. Indeed, emails prove that many of them did know.10
But the secretary of state was surrounded by long-time Clinton cronies. They shielded her. They were not about to challenge the person they were certain would become the next president of the United States. Clinton’s disdain for regulations and statutory law was also evident in her use of BlackBerrys linked to her home server, despite...
The Russia Hoax - Footnotes
Notes
Chapter 1: Hillary Clinton’s Email Server
1. Meghan Keneally, Liz Kreutz, and Shushannah Walshe, “Hillary Clinton Email Mystery Man: What We Know About Eric Hoteham,” ABC News, March 5, 2015; Josh Gerstein, “The Mystery Man Behind Hillary’s Email Controversy,” Politico, March 4, 2015.
2. Department of State, Foreign Affairs Manual, 5 FAM 8710 (“Users must not load classified information or Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) information onto unclassified systems . . .”).
3. Congressional Testimony of James Comey, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, July 7, 2016 (Question: “Did Hillary Clinton give noncleared people access to classified information?” Comey: “Yes.”); Richard Lardner, Associated Press, “Witnesses Refuse to Testify in Hearing on Clinton’s Email,” September 13, 2016.
4. Report by Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Clinton Email Investigation”—11 and 12, September 2, 2016; Report by Office of Inspector General, Department of State, “Office of the Secretary: Evaluation of Email Records Management and Cybersecurity Requirements,” May 25, 2016.
5. Senator Hillary Clinton’s Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., April 15, 2008 (“When I am president I will empower the federal government to operate from a presumption of openness, not secrecy. We will adopt a presumption of openness and Freedom of Information Act requests and urge agencies to release information quickly if disclosure will do no harm”), available at
Sen. Clinton on Openness.
6. Report by Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Clinton Email Investigation”—9 and 10, September 2, 2016.
7. Interview of President Barack Obama, CBS News, aired March 8, 2015; Reena
Flores, “Obama Weighs In on Hillary Clinton’s Private Emails,” CBS News, March 7, 2015; Kyle Cheney, “Clinton Aide Talked of Needing to ‘Clean’ Up Obama’s Comments on Email Server,” Politico, October 25, 2016; Lisa Lerer, “Top Obama Aides Knew About Clinton’s Private Email in 2009,” Associated Press, June 30, 2015.
8. Evelyn Rupert, “Obama Used Pseudonym in Emails with Clinton,” The Hill, September 23, 2016; Josh Gerstein and Nolan D. McCaskill, “Obama Used a Pseudonym in Emails with Clinton, FBI
Documents Reveal,” Politico, September 23, 2016; Daniel Halper, “Obama Used Pseudonym to Talk with Hillary on Private Server,” September 24, 2016.
9. Ibid.
10. Chuck Ross, “Top Clinton Aides Face No Charges After Making False Statements to FBI,” Daily Caller, December 4, 2017.
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