The relentless and exhausting drama of the Democratic and GOP presidential primaries largely has kept the eyes of the world off of Hillary Clinton and the increasingly ominous developments in the emailgate scandal.
Despite the former secretary of state’s impressive ballot-box victories, her ethical woes multiply.
The number of classified emails on Clinton’s private computer server totals 2,115.
At her initial March 10, 2015 news conference on this fiasco, Clinton claimed that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”
Actually, “no” such emails actually exceed by 99 the number of years since the birth of Christ.
If the first reports on this intelligence catastrophe indicated that Clinton’s server contained 2,115 classified emails, the Duchess of Chappaqua would have left her press conference in the back of a squad car.
Clinton’s server held at least 22 emails that are too top secret to be made public, even if redacted. Moreover, The Washington Post reports that Clinton’s server contained 104 dispatches in which “officials have determined that material Clinton herself
wrote in the body of email messages is classified.”
Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s former State Department information technologist, has received immunity and has been singing, apparently to FBI agents and career federal prosecutors.
The topic: Why and how was Clinton’s private email server installed and operated?
Clinton reportedly paid Pagliano $140,000 on the side to manage her private server.
If so, that six-figure sum contradicts Clinton’s claim that “I saw it as a matter of convenience” to place that gear in her Chappaqua home, 267 miles northeast of her office.
The convenient thing would have been for Clinton to keep $140,000 and simply follow State’s standard procedures.
Clinton and her spokesmen have blamed her emailgate travails on “right-wing
outfits,” “right-wing
attacks,” and “Republicans in
Congress.”
But Pagliano was not immunized by Glenn Beck or the notorious Koch Brothers.
Rather, he has been shielded by a federal judge, at the request of Obama administration prosecutors. Clinton no longer can call emailgate a GOP fishing expedition — unless she considers Obama a Republican.
As legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein told
CNN: “The vast right-wing conspiracy didn’t put the server in her damn closet.”
The Justice Department seems poised to interrogate Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and other top Clinton aides, to see if, among other things, they exchanged passwords to read secret documents to which they had no authorized access.
For technical reasons, classified messages must have been moved, physically, from State’s secure system and then onto Clinton’s freelance server. This may have involved retyping classified text from secure computers onto unprotected PCs or by transporting documents between systems via thumb drives.
Clinton herself may face interrogation by the FBI and DOJ prosecutors, possibly before a grand jury. If so, this will be nearly impossible to hide from the campaign press corps.
Something supremely disturbing may emerge from all of this: Clinton’s abuse of state secrets may have alerted al-Qaida affiliated Islamofascist terrorists to the vulnerabilities of the U.S. consulate at Benghazi — and even the movements of the late U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
As Breitbart’s Aaron Klein reported, an April 24, 2011 email explained: “Stevens will be meeting with MFA in one hour and will make a written request for better security at the hotel and for better security-related coordination. He still feels comfortable in the hotel.
"They are looking into the idea of moving into a villa, but that is some way off.”
Could such an “Ambassador Stevens is here” message from the day of the deadly Benghazi terrorist attack be among some 30,000 “personal” emails that Clinton conveniently erased?
Either way, as if to confirm her profound detachment, Clinton told MSNBC Tuesday: “We didn’t lose a single person” in Libya.
Hillary Clinton is many things — among them, lucky.
How emailgate unfolds over the next few months will demonstrate whether her good fortune truly is infinite.
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.