Hillary Email Scandal News Roundup, Panicked Liberal Media Edition

When Hillary Clinton claimed that her use of a private email server was legal, it turns out (///shocked face///) that she was full of bullion. Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, says otherwise according to the mouthpiece of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy known as The New York Times:

A federal judge on Thursday said that Hillary Rodham Clinton did not comply with government policies in her exclusive use of a personal email account while she was secretary of state, challenging her longstanding position that she abided by the rules.

At a hearing for a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department, the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, said that “we wouldn’t be here today if the employee had followed government policy.”

Judge Sullivan also opened the door for the F.B.I., which is investigating whether there was classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s account, to expand its inquiry to pursue emails that she may have deleted. The judge ordered the State Department to ask the F.B.I. to give it any emails recovered from Mrs. Clinton’s private server that were not already in the State Department’s possession or that may be related to the lawsuit.

The New Yorker worries that Hillary could face criminal charges over her various misdeeds:

Clinton's decision to use a private email rather than a .gov email address to conduct official business was certainly inadvisable, and possibly illegal ... "This email system was set up obviously to defy the Freedom of Information Act," the MSNBC host said. "Emails were completely immune from every single Freedom of Information Act request." Regardless of Clinton's motive (she says she used one email address for "convenience"), her use of a private account did mean that multiple FOIA and congressional requests sent to the State Department came back empty or incomplete, since Clinton did not turn over her emails until December 2014...

...Aside from the new possibility that Clinton perjured herself, recent reports that classified information may have passed through clintonemail.com present the biggest legal threat to the candidate... ...There are ... several provisions in the Espionage Act that could apply to Clinton... The maximum penalty for these crimes is a $250,000 fine and up to ten years in prison.

And Newsweek also refutes another Clinton lie, namely that the sensitive emails on her server were only classified as SECRET or TOP SECRET after she'd received them. In fact, they were "born classified".

For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids...

...In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.

..."It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Let's step back for a moment and consider:

• Hillary Clinton is the first federal official to operate her own email server (not just use a private email account) to avoid Freedom of Information requests

• She did so in order to prevent any scrutiny of her conflicts of interest related to trading State Department favors for "donations" to the Clinton Foundation

• Her server, operated out of a bathroom in an apartment building, was apparently hacked by a variety of foreign intelligence agencies

• Those foreign entities had access to TOP SECRET messages that Hillary Clinton illegally handled on an unclassified system

• Her selfish, criminal actions plainly endangered U.S. national security interests

That is all. Talk amongst yourselves. Topic: who was the first truly great painter of the Renaissance?


Hat tip: BadBlue News.