FBI holiday weekend document drop is devastating to Hillary

By Thomas Lifson

The decision to wait for late Friday on Labor Day weekend to release the FBI’s investigation notes of Hillary Clinton’s email practices offers further evidence of the politicization of the agency.  As the United States slides into a banana republic, we now know that a political thumb is on the scale at the two most feared federal agencies: the IRS and the FBI.

Still, one can understand why the Hillary faction wanted to obscure the documents, for they contain toxic revelations that disqualify Hillary Clinton from the presidency.

Normally, a holiday weekend ensures that few people analyze or even hear about the content of the documents.  But this is a presidential campaign, and the emails are a gift that keeps on giving to her opponents, with hackers and the slow-walk investigation dripping out further revelations.  Although her camp is already declaring, “Nothing to see here; move along,” the Trump campaign and the dissident media will not let this drop, and the facts are so disturbing (and consistent with Trump campaign themes) that when the Labor Day haze lifts, the issues will still be hot.

First and foremost: Hillary has blamed her head injuries for startling memory lapses.

Julia Edwards of Reuters reported that "Hillary Clinton told federal investigators she did not recall all the briefings she received on handling government records while U.S. secretary of state because of a concussion suffered in 2012."

A moment’s reflection reveals that Hillary Clinton has admitted that she was unable to adequately perform job functions directly related to national security because of a brain injury.  Donald Trump is already pushing this issue, but it is also critically important that a major campaign against the NFL – which is opening its pre-season now – stressing the seriousness of concussions’ effects on mental functions has been underway.  The American public, especially males, is on notice to take concussions very seriously.

Hillary Clinton has admitted to a disability due to her brain injury.

It is time for a discussion of Woodrow Wilson, the disastrous progressive segregationist who was disabled through much of his second term, and whose wife was de facto president of the United States, because his disability was hidden from the American public.

Bill Clinton’s role as first spouse is already problematic, especially considering the manner in which he defiled the Oval Office.  The possibility that he could end up exercising de facto presidential power in an unconstitutional third term is not anything that will comfort the Sanders faction.  Bill Clinton’s actual policies as president are far more conservative than Hillary’s proposals.

In a sure sign of how devastating this issue is, a female Democrat senator has already played the sexism card.  Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) took to MSNBC:

 

Second, the documents reveal that Hillary, who justified her private server on the grounds that she wanted to carry only one handheld device, actually had 13 of them in a four-year period.  What on Earth is the story there?  Almost everyone who votes carries a cell phone, and I daresay the percentage who have needed to have 13 different devices in the space of four years is well below a tenth of one percent.

There is a story here.  The media usually love a mystery, but it will up to us in the dissident media to keep this question open.

As with virtually every other aspect of the FBI interrogation notes, there was no follow-up to this revelation, no probing by the FBI.  As would be the case in any banana republic investigating a member of one of its ruling families.

Third, if we believe the story offered by Hillary, a laptop computer full of classified documents – her email archive disappeared when mailed with the USPS:

A laptop containing a copy, or “archive,” of the emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server was apparently lost—in the postal mail—according to an FBI report released Friday. Along with it, a thumb drive that also contained an archive of Clinton’s emails has been lost and is not in the FBI’s possession.

This is stunning negligence, and absolutely striking news: that some of the nation’s highest secrets were made available to any foreign power monitoring the secretary of state and willing to snatch mail from the capable hands of the Post Office.  Who on Earth would subject national security to the tender mercies of the USPS?

Where was the nationwide alert to recapture the missing archive?  Did the Clinton campaign notify security agencies?

This is disqualifying negligence.

We also have the first evidence that Hillary’s server was indeed hacked:

The FBI said it uncovered multiple instances of phishing or spear-phishing emails sent to Clinton’s account, including one that appeared to be sent from another State official’s account. Clinton responded to the email by trying to confirm that the person actually sent it, adding, “I was worried about opening it!”

But in another incident, the FBI noted that Abedin emailed someone (whose name is redacted) conveying Clinton’s concern that “someone [was] hacking into her email” after receiving an email from a “known [redacted] associate containing a link to a website with pornographic material.”

“There is no additional information as to why Clinton was concerned about someone hacking into her e-mail account, or if the specific link referenced by Abedin was used as a vector to infect Clinton’s device,” the FBI’s report states, and after roughly two lines of redacted text goes on to note that “open source information indicated, if opened, the targeted user’s device may have been infected, and information would have been sent to at least three computers overseas, including one in Russia.”

There is actually a lot more, and we will have time to sort it out.  But perhaps the most damning of the damning evidence that the FBI has been compromised is the entirely improper presence of Hillary’s consigliere Cheryl Mills at the interview.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO:

I suggested back in May that “the fix” was in in the investigation of the Clinton emails. The reason was that the Justice Department was allowing Cheryl Mills – a witness, if not a subject, of the investigation – to invoke attorney-client privilege on behalf of Mrs. Clinton in order to thwart the FBI’s attempt to inquire into the procedure used to produce Clinton’s emails to the State Department. Mills was a participant in that procedure – and it is the procedure in which, we now know, well over 30,000 emails were attempted to be destroyed, including several thousand that contained government-related business. When she worked for Clinton at State, Mills was not acting in the capacity of a lawyer – not for then-Secretary Clinton and not for the State Department. Moreover, as Clinton’s chief-of-staff, Mills was intimately involved in issues related to Clinton’s private email set up, the discussions about getting her a secure BlackBerry similar to President Obama’s, and questions that were raised (including in FOIA requests) about Clinton’s communications. That is to say, Mills was an actor in the facts that were under criminal investigation by the FBI. Put aside that she was not Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer while working for the State Department; as I explained in the May column, Mills, after leaving the State Department, was barred by ethical rules from acting as Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer “in connection with a matter in which the lawyer participated personally and substantially as a public officer or employee.” There is no way Mills should have been permitted to participate as a lawyer in the process of producing Clinton’s emails to the State Department nearly two years after they’d both left. I thought it was astonishing that the Justice Department indulged her attorney-client privilege claim, which frustrated the FBI’s ability to question her on a key aspect of the investigation. But it is simply unbelievable to find her turning up at Mrs. Clinton’s interview – participating in the capacity of a lawyer under circumstances where Clinton was being investigated over matters in which Mills participated as a non-lawyer government official.

Polls consistently tell us that around two thirds of Americans believe that the political establishment is not working for them.  We now can fully appreciate the extent of the politicization of our most sensitive federal agencies.  This may be our last chance to prevent a banana republic from solidifying and destroying the noble experiment of our founders.