By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2016
Republicans have offered Americans a non viable presumptive candidate for President. Democrat elites are offering their continuing model of failing up.
Failing up has become the hallmark of the Obama administration. Help crash the biggest bank in the country and take a bonus for yourself from the taxpayer bailout and you fail up as U.S. Treasury Secretary. Work as the lawyer for the Wall Street banks that crashed the U.S. economy and you fail up as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Become a partner at the law firm named in an historic court decision as a co-conspirator with Big Tobacco and you end up as the head of the Justice Department or the head of its criminal division. Fail to rein in systemic Wall Street abuses before they crash the U.S. economy in the greatest downturn since the Great Depression and the President will bestow even greater regulatory powers on you under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.
Now President Obama is going on the stump to make sure his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has the ultimate experience in failing up – all the way to the Oval Office. As President Obama was preparing to escort Hillary Clinton to a presidential campaign event yesterday on Air Force One, the Director of the FBI, James Comey, held a press conference to call her handling of Top Secret national security matters “extremely careless” and contradicted her serially false statements to the public about the matter.
The material in the FBI report was so damaging that one has to question if U.S. intelligence personnel would, or should, share Top Secret information in the future with Hillary Clinton should she become Commander in Chief.
Two scathing reports have now been issued by separate investigators into Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified national security matters over a non-government, private computer server located in the basement of her home. The first was issued by the State Department’s Inspector General at the end of May. It found that Clinton had told multiple untruths in the matter. The second report followed a criminal investigation and was delivered verbally yesterday by FBI Director James Comey. It also eviscerated multiple falsehoods Clinton has told the American people for more than a year.
Clinton has repeatedly stated to the public that nothing she transmitted on her private server was classified at the time it was sent or received but that some emails simply got an up-classification after further review. At her press conference on March 10 of last year, Clinton stated: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”
The FBI Director indicated yesterday that his agency’s many months of investigation proved that statement by Clinton to be false. Comey stated at his 11:00 a.m. press conference that out of the 30,000 emails that Clinton handed over to the State Department from her private server, the following were classified:
“…110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were ‘up-classified’ to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.”
Clinton had also told the public repeatedly that none of the emails carried classified markings. FBI Director ruled that statement to be false as well, stating that some of Clinton’s emails “containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.”
When a government worker with security clearance transmits material carrying a classified designation over a non-secure server, it should provide ample grounds for prosecution or, at the very least, a ban from future Federal government work. Comey said that his recommendation to the Justice Department would be “that no charges are appropriate in this case,” because he couldn’t find willful intent to engage in wrongdoing.
Clinton has also repeatedly indicated that she carefully went through her emails and sent all of her work-related emails to the State Department as they requested, while destroying her personal emails.
Comey threw cold water on that assertion as well, stating yesterday that “The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.”
Then there were Clinton’s repeated false statements about receiving approval to conduct her email messaging over a private server in her home. That assertion was shredded in a blistering analysis from the State Department’s Inspector General. In the video of her press conference of March 10, 2015, Clinton opened the subject of the private server with this statement:
“When I got to work as Secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department.”
Before the video concludes, the former Secretary of State repeats two more times that she had approval for use of the private server. But the Inspector General found that Clinton had never sought permission and her request would have been rejected if she had. The report noted:
“Secretary Clinton used mobile devices to conduct official business using the personal email account on her private server extensively, as illustrated by the 55,000 pages of material making up the approximately 30,000 emails she provided to the Department in December 2014. Throughout Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the FAM [Foreign Affairs Manual] stated that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized AIS, yet OIG found no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server. According to the current CIO and Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, Secretary Clinton had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with their offices, who in turn would have attempted to provide her with approved and secured means that met her business needs. However, according to these officials, DS and IRM did not—and would not—approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business, because of the restrictions in the FAM and the security risks in doing so.”
As a result of Hillary Clinton and her staff going rogue with this email server, FBI Director Comey concluded yesterday at his press conference:
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
The FBI investigation also showed that recipients of Clinton’s emails were hacked. Comey stated:
“We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.”
And the FBI report left open the possibility that emails were destroyed by her that might have damaged Clinton further. Comey stated:
“It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”
Ask yourself this simple question: what message does it send to the young people of America when reckless, incompetent behavior qualifies one for the highest office in the land.