RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton used more than a dozen email devices during her time as secretary of state, and a technician took steps to delete an archive of her emails after House lawmakers demanded they be saved, according to documents released Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The newly public information also shows that Mrs. Clinton was warned at the outset of her tenure by former Secretary of State Colin Powell that her work-related email messages could become subject to public release. And in an interview with FBI agents in July, the Democratic presidential candidate offered a defense of her handling of sensitive drone-strike conversations.

The new disclosures were contained in two documents released by the FBI on Friday—a report summarizing the bureau’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement, which concluded with a recommendation that she not be prosecuted, and a summary of her interview. The FBI said it was releasing the material in the interests of transparency.
On Friday, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said, “We are pleased that the FBI has released the materials from Hillary Clinton’s interview, as we had requested.” He added, “While her use of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the Justice Department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case.”

The documents disclosed few dramatic new facts, but they painted a picture of Mrs. Clinton as inattentive to computer security and unsophisticated about the classification system. They also confirmed a Wall Street Journal report in June that the FBI was especially concerned about email exchanges including Mrs. Clinton that concerned possible drone strikes.

Much in the documents is redacted, with information removed for security, privacy or other reasons, leaving significant gaps in the FBI’s information and conclusions.

The report contains the descriptions of an email exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Powell, secretary of state under President George W. Bush, in which Mr. Powell warned her two days after she became secretary that if her use of a BlackBerry became “public,” her emails could become part of the “official record and subject to the law.”

“Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data,” said Mr. Powell. A spokeswoman for Mr. Powell didn’t respond to a request for comment. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left wins many arguments by setting the framework of the debate, often by indignant brushback pitches establishing that certain topics are strictly out of bounds – on pain of banishment from polite media society. Generally, those topics are the ones they know can hurt them. As Nathan J. Robinson illustrates in a striking profile of the Clinton Foundation in Current Affairs, Camp Clinton is striving to set a firm rule for discussions of the “charity” now at center stage in the presidential campaign: Don’t you dare question the good work done by the Foundation. Robinson notes, for example, James Carville’s admonition that “somebody is going to hell” for questioning the Foundation’s fundraising practices in light of all the wonderful things we are to believe it does.

As has reliably been the case over the years, establishment Republicans and other Clinton critics feel compelled to salute Bill and Hill’s heroic dedication to “public service” – their unimpeachable intentions and sincere efforts – before zeroing in on the shenanigans by which the pair has managed to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Recall the praise heaped on the Clintons by the Bush family and Senator John McCain.

Things are no different when it comes to the Clinton Foundation: Public etiquette requires genuflection to the Clintons’ selflessness before one may marvel at how they grab with all four hands.

It is a good strategy. The Clintons’ grubbiness is surely extraordinary, but only by degree – albeit big degree. Putting the State Department or the White House up for sale is huge, but it is not different in principle from what other shady pols do on the smaller scale available to them. Since the public tends to think of politics as an inherently shady business, the Clintons are apt to be given immunity, even for their monumental corruption, if it is stipulated from the start that it is all for the greater good of charity on a grand global scale.

But of course, it’s not. Indeed, it is not charity at all. As acknowledged (in Robinson’s piece) by longtime Clinton confidant Ira Magaziner, head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, “the whole thing is bankable…. It’s a commercial proposition. This is not charity.” Robinson continues:

Instead of aid, the Clinton Foundation spends much of its effort “creating new markets,” finding lucrative investment opportunities in the developing world for Western private capital. These have included everything from “using business methods to streamline fertilizer markets in Africa” to “working with credit card companies to expand the volume of low-cost loans offered to poor inner city residents.” (Note that typically, enticing poor people into taking on large amounts of credit card debt is not among the activities of a charitable foundation.) Bill Clinton is open about the fact that in this work, he is trying to help corporations profit from the developing world. He attempts to “reinvent philanthropy” as a lucrative enterprise for his partners because, in his words, “I think it’s wrong to ask anyone to lose money.”

It’s hard to keep track of all the “commercial propositions” the Foundation is engaged in, because it operates in a highly unusual fashion. Ordinarily, charitable foundations make grants to outside organizations. But only 15% of the Clinton Foundation’s spending is on charitable grants. Instead, it spends most of its money on its in-house programs, whose efficacy can be far more difficult to track. The task is made even more difficult thanks to the Foundation’s ongoing allergy to transparency.

Partly because of that, Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, at one point added the Clinton Foundation to its watch list of problematic charities, and still does not rate the organization because its “atypical business model. . . doesn’t meet our criteria.” The Clinton Health Access Initiative has refused to allow the charity evaluation organization GiveWell to analyze its outcomes, and the Better Business Bureau has listed the Clinton Foundation as failing to meet the basic standards for reporting the effectiveness of its programs. Bill Allison of the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation has gone much further, and said that the organization operates as a “slush fund for the Clintons.”

The FBI-302 report of the interview of Hillary Clinton, along with the other notes of investigation released today, make for mind boggling reading. Most bracing is the fact that Mrs. Clinton had her server wiped clean sometime between March 25 and 31, 2015, only three weeks after the New York Times on March 3 broke the story of the server system’s existence. David notes that, at the same time the Democrats’ Janus-faced presidential nominee was outwardly taking the position that she “want[ed] the public to see my email,” she was having her minions frantically purge her emails behind the scenes. I’d add that this was five months before she feigned ignorance when Fox News’s Ed Henry pressed her on whether she’d “tried to wipe the entire server … so there could be no email – no personal, no official.” Henry finally asked, “Did you wipe the server?”

Famously, Clinton scoffed, “Like with a cloth or something?” But we now know, as the FBI notes recount, she had the server purged with a sophisticated software program, BleachBit, which eventually made it extraordinarily difficult for the FBI to recover her emails, several thousand of which were successfully destroyed. And remember: We’ve just learned that 30 emails related to Benghazi were on the server Clinton purged – emails that she never turned over to the State Department despite claiming repeatedly that she’d surrendered all of her government-related emails. I would thus note that the March 2015 purge right after public revelation of the server’s existence occurred long after Mrs. Clinton was well aware of several official government investigations of the Benghazi massacre – one by the State Department, several by Congress, and a judicial proceeding involving the one defendant who has been indicted for the terrorist attack.

There were also, quite obviously, several relevant Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigations. From what I’ve been able to glean so far, it is not clear from the FBI’s notes (and it was certainly not clear from Director James Comey’s press conference and House testimony) whether any consideration was given to indicting Mrs. Clinton for obstruction of justice and of government investigations – and if not, why not. Among the most eye-popping claims Clinton made to the FBI was that she was unfamiliar with the markings on classified documents. Yes, you read that correctly: one of the highest ranking national security officials in the United States government – an official whose day-to-day responsibilities extensively involved classified information; who had secure facilities installed in her two homes (in addition to her office) so she could review classified information in them; and who acknowledged to the FBI that, as secretary of state, she was designated by the president as “an Original Classification Authority,” meaning she had the power to determine what information should be classified and at what level – had the audacity to tell the interviewing agents that she did not know what the different classification symbols in classified documents signified. For example, when asked about an email chain containing the symbol “(C)” – meaning “confidential,” a designation ubiquitous in classified documents – Clinton claimed not to know what it meant and, according to the notes, “could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.”

“The United States is an exceptional nation,” she said. “I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead.” She asserted that “we recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity” and that “our power comes with a responsibility to lead, humbly, thoughtfully, and with a fierce commitment to our values”:

Because, when America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void. So no matter how hard it gets, no matter how great the challenge, America must lead . . . [O]ur network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional. No other country in the world has alliances like ours. Russia and China have nothing close . . . At our best the United States is the global force for freedom, justice and human dignity.

Hillary Clinton’s global vision reflects the fundamentally flawed post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Beltway Duopoly—neoconservatives and neoliberals—subscribe with equal zeal. Its key tenet is that our unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of a global order in which the U.S. Government treats each and every spot on the globe as an area of vital American interest, fiercely resists any change of regional power balances, and actively promotes regime changes. The resulting military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (and, if Hillary wins, there will be one in Syria) have been validated by the rhetoric of . . . well, she reminded us: “peace and progress,” “freedom and opportunity,” “justice and human dignity,” and by the invocation of American exceptionalism and indispensability (M. Albright). In world affairs America is supposedly motivated by “a fierce commitment to our values,” rather than mere interests.