Hillary Clinton’s “inevitable” cruise to the presidency has crashed onto the twin sandbars of the Sanders surge and the FBI’s seizure Wednesday of the private computer server and thumb drives that likely contain classified documents. Thus, it is useful to review her initial statements on Emailgate. In hindsight, she swaddled journalists in lies.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material,” Clinton declared at her March press conference. This was a lie. There was classified material.
Among the 30,490 e-mails that Clinton handedthe State Department last December, the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community (ICIG) sampled 40 and discovered that four (or 10 percent) were classified. Of these, two (or 5 percent) “
when originated” weredesignated “Top Secret//Si//Tk//NoForn.”
This information was not just sensitive, such as when Clinton might visit, say, Islamabad — which could tantalize the Pakistani Taliban. Rather, these involved such things as satellite images and electronic intercepts. Executive Order 12356 of 1982 specifies that these secrets’ unauthorized disclosure could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” If the ICIG’s sample mirrors Clinton’s other e-mails, some 1,500 could be Top Secret.
“I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was
sent and received,” Clinton claimed on July 25. Why such confidence?
A State Department official told Fox News, “Someone would have had to strip the classification markings from that information before it was transmitted to HRC’s personal email.” If true, this would have helped Clinton say that she never saw anything labeled classified. If Clinton and any aides colluded in such document tampering, this would constitute a criminal
conspiracy.
“I opted for convenience to use my personal email account,” Clinton said in March. “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” Not true.
On February 24, just two weeks before her press conference, Clinton boasted about her technophilia. She told the Silicon Valley Conference for Women: “I’m like two steps short of a hoarder. I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone, and a BlackBerry.”
Clinton told journalists in March: “I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department.” Dubious.
At a minimum, Clinton seems to have withheld from State nearly 30 e-mails, largely regarding Libya, from Sidney Blumenthal — the Clintons’ real-life Doug Stamper and someone whom Obama forbade her to hire. Instead, the Clinton Foundation paid Blumenthal who, in turn, supplied unvetted back-channel intelligence to America’s then-top diplomat.
Among Blumenthal’s 30 e-mails to Clinton, State forwarded only one to the House Benghazi Committee. Blumenthal furnished the other 29.
Clinton’s e-mail server, she said, “was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches.” Not quite.
Perhaps the server “was” in Chappaqua, surrounded by the Secret Service. On Wednesday, however, the FBI seized the device across the Hudson River — in a New Jersey facility affiliated with Platte River Networks, a Colorado-based technology company. Evidently, PRN moved the server there in June 2013.
Clinton said, “It was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their .gov accounts so those e-mails would be automatically saved in the State Department system to meet record keeping requirements.” Untrue.
Clinton communicated with top advisor Huma Abedin via her own private clintonemail.com
account. It’s one thing to exchange personal messages via such means (e.g. “See you for yoga after the Cabinet meeting.”) It’s quite another to conduct
foreign policy outside official e-channels.
E-mailgate burst into the news on March 2. Clinton’s press conference was March 10. She had eight days to recall details, check records, consult with advisors, and then step forward and tell journalists the truth. Instead, Hillary Clinton stood up and wove a tapestry of lies.
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Read more reports from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.