Comey’s announcement came on the heels of an 83-page report issued by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General (IG). Released on May 26, the IG’s report delivered a stinging rebuke of Clinton, finding that she had committed a bounty of administrative derelictions. Among her many missteps, according to the IG, Clinton never obtained department approval for using personal email, much less a BlackBerry mobile phone or a private server, to transact official business. Such practices, in fact, contravened a departmental policy adopted in 2005, advising employees to conduct day-to-day operations on an authorized automation system. The claim that her email usage was “permitted” during her term at the State Department is still published on Clinton’s official website. It is at best artful and misleading. The IG also found that Clinton continued to use the server without seeking technical assistance from the department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) to guard against leaks and hacking, even though two IRM staffers raised security misgivings about the server in 2010, and the server was briefly shut down in 2011 out of concerns that an unknown third party was attempting to break into it. Clinton’s oft-cited defense that her predecessors at the State Department also utilized personal email is similarly misleading. While Colin Powell conducted official business via a private email account, as did certain aides to Condoleezza Rice, the installation of a private server was unprecedented. The IG further faulted Clinton for waiting until December 2014, 21 months after leaving office, to turn over some 30,000 emails to the department. Under the provisions of the Federal Records Act, even before it was amended and tightened in 2014, Clinton was required to submit all work-related documents immediately upon her departure as secretary. Neither the IG nor Comey, however, commented directly on the propriety of Clinton’s unilateral decision to delete some 31,000 email messages from her server that she deemed were purely personal. Was other classified and top secret material contained in files that have been permanently erased? We’re unlikely to know now. The decision not to prosecute, however, will not end the email controversy, not by a long shot. The leniency shown to Clinton stands in stark contrast to the harsh sentences meted out to whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and former CIA analyst John Kiriakou for their alleged mishandling of classified material. As a result, we can expect the cries of double standards, political influence and corruption to persist and redouble as we head for the November election. At the same time, the increasingly proto-fascist Trump campaign will be fortified with a fresh set of inexhaustible talking points. Most disastrous of all, the race for the White House, which should be a cakewalk for the Democrats, will go down to the wire because the party has chosen as its leader a candidate driven by blind ambition, with an appalling disregard for accountability and transparency, who, when push came to shove, was too big to bring to the bar of justice. Rooted in Truth.
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#2016 election#barack obama#bill clinton#colin powell#condoleezza rice#david petraeus#department of justice#donald trump#email#hillary clinton#inspector general#james comey#loretta lynch#paul ryan#state department#td-original#too big to fail#wall street#washington d.c.