Clinton is both seemingly caught by surprise and annoyed by the question all at once. Neither of those is a good reaction to what Cooper is asking. Both together make for a uniquely bad response.
I actually watched this live while sitting in the Atlanta airport last night. I thought her response was great. It was great because it was honest. How many among us would refuse $675k to give a speech? Be honest… not many, right? But honesty isn’t playing well in the Democratic primary these days. Between the anti-capitalists and just plain envious, there aren’t many defenders for Hillary on this.
by Owen | 1947, 31 Jan 1616 | Politics | 1 Comment
I suspect there are dozens of examples of big Clinton Foundation donors benefiting from the State Department’s actions (or inactions) during her time in office.
When the U.S. State Department was presented with hard evidence identifying Boko Haram as a growing terrorist threat in Nigeria, the agency failed to take action for several years. Why the delay despite the evidence? That’s a fair question for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton since she headed the agency at the time and is now seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Boko Haram is the same group that kidnapped over 200 female students from Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria just over a year ago. Clinton, the self-described champion of women’s rights, was first presented with reports highlighting Boko Haram’s aggressive posture back in 2010. Yet, the State Department did not officially designate the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) until December 2013. During that time, Boko Haram gained significant footing at the expense of vulnerable populations.
Was a Nigerian land developer, who has donated large sums to the Clinton Foundation, a factor in delaying Boko Haram’s FTO designation? U.S. Senator David Vitter is exploring this possibility by examining the relationship between the Clintons and the developer, Gilbert Chagoury. His background is checkered to say the least. Chagoury plead guilty in British court to bribery, but avoided prison by returning portions of the money involved in his scheme. He also obtained immunity from prosecution in a looted assets case in Nigeria in exchange for returning money held in Swiss bank accounts. A list of all Clinton Foundation donations that includes Chagoury is available here. He has contributed about $5 million to the Foundation in recent years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that details Chagoury’s long and complicated relationship with the Clintons.
by Owen | 1815, 30 Jan 1616 | Politics | 1 Comment
As we all knew, President Obama knew full well that his Secretary of State was using a private email address to do her government business.
WASHINGTON — The State Department on Friday said for the first time that “top secret” material had been sent through Hillary Clinton’s private computer server, and that it would not make public 22 of her emails because they contained highly classified information.
The department announced that 18 emails exchanged between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama would also be withheld, citing the longstanding practice of preserving presidential communications for future release. The department’s spokesman, John Kirby, said that exchanges did not involve classified information.
Remember that the crime is not whether or not Clinton knew these documents were classified at the time of transmission. The crime is that she was sending and receiving them on an unsecured server. If she had been using the secured government system like she was supposed to, it wouldn’t have mattered if she knew they were classified or not.
EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails “too damaging” to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.
The determination was first reported by Fox News, hours before the State Department formally announced Friday that seven email chains, found in 22 documents, will be withheld “in full” because they, in fact, contain “Top Secret” information.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III sent a letter to leaders on congressional intelligence committees last week detailing the findings from a review of Clinton’s emails, Fox News reported Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for the inspector general confirmed to CNN the report was accurate.
Two government agencies flagged emails on Clinton’s server as containing classified information, the inspector general said, including some on “special access programs,” which are above “top secret” in classification level.
There were “several dozen” emails in question, according to Fox News, beyond the two previously reported emails containing top secret information.
The June 17, 2011, exchange focused on a set of “talking points” on an unspecified subject that Clinton had waited for since the previous evening. After senior adviser Jake Sullivan emailed her about “issues sending secure fax,” Clinton suggested he turn it “into nonpaper w/no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”
Nonpaper refers to an informal document, without official markings like letterhead or logos, not saved for records.
The more-than 51-minute propaganda video comes on the heels of a war of words between Trump and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clintonover her suggestion that the real estate mogul’s controversial remarks about Muslims would be used to recruit jihadis.
The video includes a clip of Trump calling for a “shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the [bleep] is going on,” Trump says in the clip. The group bleeps out Trump’s use of the word “hell.”
More than 1,200 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server during her time at the State Department have now been deemed classified, after the agency publicly released its eighth batch of the messages late Thursday.
The agency released roughly 5,500 more pages of emails from the private email account that Clinton exclusively used during her four years at Foggy Bottom, with an additional 275 messages now upgraded to classified, bringing the total number of retroactively classified emails that moved through Clinton’s unsecured server to 1,274.
While most of those were elevated to the “confidential” level, according to a State Department official, two in the most recent batch were upgraded to the “Secret” level, a more sensitive classification for issues that affect national security.
Clinton, after the scandal about her use of private email broke in March, initially said that there was no classified material on her email account. She has since stressed that she did not send any classified information and that no messages she sent or received were marked classified at the time.
Hillary Clinton is a hardcore liar who endangered national security with her lies. And you Democrats want her to be our next president… let that sink in.
Clinton ordered a senior State Department official in August 2012 to look into the request. Her action came three months after an investor in the mining firm emailed Marc Mezvinsky, Chelsea Clinton’s husband and a partner in Eaglevale Partners LP, a New York hedge fund, asking for his help in setting up State Department contacts.
Clinton relayed a copy of the investor’s email to Thomas Nides, then a deputy secretary of state and now vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, a major New York financial services firm. “Could you have someone follow up on this request, which was forwarded to me?” Clinton asked Nides. He replied: “I’ll get on it.”
The emails do not show whether Clinton or other State Department officials met with Harry Siklas, the investor who contacted Mezvinsky, or with executives from the Florida-based firm. Clinton’s official calendars, recently obtained by The Associated Press, also do not show any meetings between Clinton and Neptune representatives.
Clinton’s campaign declined through a spokesman to discuss the issue, despite AP asking detailed questions about the matter since Nov. 30. The AP attempted to reach Siklas and a Neptune executive, Josh Adam, by phone, email and in-person visits to their homes last week but received no replies.
In the email, Siklas also said that his then-employer, Goldman Sachs, was representing Neptune.
This should come as a surprise to nobody. Of course hackers were trying to get into the email of the Secretary of State of the United States of America. That’s why it was woefully dangerous and criminally negligent for Clinton to keep her email on a private system in the first place.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email server, which stored some 55,000 pages of emails from her time as secretary of state, was the subject of attempted cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013, according to a congressional document obtained by The Associated Press.
While the attempts were apparently blocked by a “threat monitoring” product that Clinton’s employees connected to her network in October 2013, there was a period of more than three months from June to October 2013 when that protection had not been installed, according to a letter from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. That means her server was possibly vulnerable to cyberattacks during that time.
Walking out of the event, Zapata, the student who had hoped Clinton would win her over, was less than enthusiastic.
“She could have been better,” she said. “She made us wait over an hour for her. I understand she is on a tight schedule, but she could have at least apologized for being late.”
“It could have just been better,” Zapata said, rushing out to get to her job at Starbucks.
Sure people will run late from time to time because circumstances intervene, but when you are habitually tardy it means that you do not respect the people with whom you are meeting. It means that you think your time is more important than theirs. This isn’t about politics. It’s about rude, narcissistic people. We see the same thing from people in our jobs and personal lives and it is just as aggravating. The thing is that you have to put up with it if it is your boss, but if it’s someone who wants something from you – like a job, PO, vote, etc. – then there’s no reason to tolerate it.
I know it’s shocking to learn (again) that Hillary Clinton is a liar, but she is. And worse, she’s lying about a pretty massive breach of national security.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has discovered a chain of emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of state, officials told The Associated Press. The disclosure adds to the questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner’s unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.
The messages were exchanged with Gen. David Petraeus when he led the military’s U.S. Central Command, responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began before Clinton entered office and continued into her first days at the State Department. They largely pertained to personnel matters and don’t appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said, but their existence challenges Clinton’s claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department. Not doing so was a mistake. I’m sorry about it, and I take full responsibility.
No, it wasn’t a mistake. It was a flagrant violation of the law in an effort to conceal her activities from public scrutiny. But the fact that she is finally giving the appearance of an apology is an acknowledgment that she is plummeting in the polls. She’s trying to stop the slide, but this isn’t going to cut it. It’s not the issue itself. It’s that this issue reminds everyone of who Hillary is and how she conducts herself.
The former aide to Hillary Clinton who helped set up and maintain her private email server has declined to talk to the FBI and the State Department inspector general’s office, as well as a congressional committee, invoking his Fifth Amendment rightnot to incriminate himself, sources familiar with the investigation confirmed to Yahoo News.
The move by Bryan Pagliano, who served on Clinton’s 2008 campaign and later as a technology officer in the State Department, to decline to cooperate in two federal probes considerably raises the stakes in the Clinton email investigation, the sources said. It confronts the Justice Department with a decision about whether to grant him immunity in exchange for his testimony — a move that could be taken only were the department to escalate the probe into a full-scale criminal investigation, the sources said.
“Maybe when we get all this behind us, people should say hey, ‘let’s take a deep breath here and try to figure out, is that the best process?’ But right now, it doesn’t frustrate me. It’s just the reality,” she added. “And I’m trying to do a better job of explaining to people what’s going on so that there’s not all of this, you know, concern and there’s some sense made out of the confusion, and to answer people’s questions.”
She isn’t trying to do a better job of explaining anything. She is trying to come up with a plausible lie. The truth is easy to explain. A SOS, Hillary Clinton illegally used a private email server for all of her government correspondence – including the transport of government secrets. The reasons for her behavior are immaterial, but they probably have something to do with her desire to prevent the public and history from being able to scrutinize her work.
Donors who have publicly expressed support for a Biden run have been contacted by the Clinton team, according to donors and Democratic strategists who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations. Even Clinton herself has made a few calls, they said, to express her disappointment.
While Clinton and her team speak warmly of Biden in public, they have taken steps to show their dominance over the party’s establishment and President Barack Obama’s political infrastructure in hopes of quietly discouraging the vice president from entering the race.
The effort comes as Clinton and the Democratic field of candidates prepare to address members of the Democratic National Committee on Friday during their summer meeting in Minneapolis. The night before her formal address, Clinton made her case in private briefings to attendees. Meanwhile, representatives from a super PAC backing Biden plan to woo delegates in his absence.
“I have great deal of admiration and affection for him,” Clinton said of Biden during a stop in Iowa on Wednesday. “I think he has to make what is a very difficult decision for himself and his family. He should have the space and the opportunity to decide what he wants to do.”
What is interesting is that Hillary appears to be going so soft behind the scenes. The usual Clinton MO is to cut opponents off at the knees. She must be quite fearful about angering Biden and his supporters.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – 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.
While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as “Classified,” it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.
But the details included in those “Classified” stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.
The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton’s emails from her time as the nation’s most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department’s own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not.
A cocky Hillary Clinton on Tuesday shrugged off the questions swirling around materials culled from her private email account which the U.S. intelligence community has since classified as ‘top secret,’ making light of a reporter who asked if she had ‘wiped the server’ clean.
‘What, like with a cloth or something?’ Clinton chuckled? ‘Well, no. I don’t know how it works digitally at all.’
The contentious exchanges with reporters from CNN and Fox News came during a press conference following a town hall event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Clinton stuck to the most recent version of her denial that she may have exposed state secrets to prying eyes by exclusively using a non-secure email account, hosted in her upstate New York home, during the four years she was secretary of state.
‘Whether it was a personal account or a government account,’ she said, ‘I did not send classified material. And I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified – which is the way you know whether something is.’
