With Clinton’s Nixonian Email Scandal Deepening, Sanders Must Demand Answers

by DAVE LINDORFF
CounterPunch, MAY 27, 2016

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The power couple’s two foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefitted from a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.

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However Politico reports that on Wednesday, a report by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General, has issued its report on the emails. It is a scathing indictment, concluding that Clinton failed to comply with US government and State Department policies on records, and that counter to assertions made publicly by her, she never sought permission from the department’s legal staff to use a private server — a request which if made, the report insists “would not” have been approved. The inspector general’s report states, “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

It’s not as though Clinton didn’t know what she was doing was wrong and even illegal. The just released report states that technology staff in the State Department’s Office of Information Resource Management, who raised concerns about her private server, were instructed by the department’s director, a Clinton appointee, “not to question the arrangement.” When one staffer mentioned that her private account could contain federal records that needed to be preserved “in order to satisfy federal recordkeeping requirements,” the report says the director of that office “stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by the department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further.” Yet the inspector general says that assertion by the director was false, as there was in fact no evidence that in the State Department’s office of the legal advisor had ever reviewed or approved the private system, or even been asked to do so by Clinton.

Again and again through her four years at State, Clinton is found to have resisted efforts to get her to stop using exclusively her private email to conduct official business. On several occasions, the report says, she expressly said her concern was having her mail subjected to FOIA, or in other words, public discovery. Clinton tried to claim that since her communications with State Dept. personnel ended up on their servers, there were records of her communications there. But as the report notes, that wouldn’t include any State Department-related communications she had with persons outside of the State Department or the government. And those are precisely the kinds of conversations that the public really needs to know about — particularly when we’re talking about someone who is running for the top position in government, and who has demonstrably spent years with her hand out to powerful people and organizations. After all, it is those communications that would include any discussions of financial transactions involving foreign or domestic interests seeking beneficial assistance from the Madam Secretary.

This scandal is not about someone simply ignoring some arcane rules. As Secretary of State, Clinton had a legal obligation to operate in an above-board, legal and transparent manner in conducting the business of government. Instead, for our years in office, she conducted that business in a manner that can only be called Nixonian, opting to openly violate the rules, to hide her communications from government oversight and public review, to dissemble about her allegedly having received clearance to do so, and even to attempt to erase records from her server when ordered to turn them over. Furthermore, suspicions have to be raised because if Clinton’s concerns were about people accessing her genuinely personal emails, she had only to set up a State Department email address and obtain a State Department secure Blackberry phone, and limit her personal server and personal Blackberry to genuinely personal emails and calls, conducting all State Department business on State Department systems. According to the IGO report, she studiously avoided doing that kind of segregation for four years despite frequent instructions and advice to do so.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/with-clintons-nixonian-email-scandal-deepening-sandes-must-demand-answers/