Video: White House “disgusted” by Hillary e-mail scandal — and it’s getting worse
posted at 10:41 am on June 29, 2015 by Ed Morrissey
The issue of Hillary Clinton’s emails got deeper today. Not only did Hillary fail to give the State Department all of the work-related emails from her private server as she publicly stated, now it appears those she did submit may have been altered. That brings up all sorts of new questions about whether Hillary and her team have tampered with evidence in a government investigation:
Hillary Clinton withheld Benghazi-related emails from the State Department that detailed her knowledge of the scramble for oil contracts in Libya and the shortcomings of the NATO-led military intervention for which she advocated.
Clinton removed specific portions of other emails she sent to State, suggesting the messages were screened closely enough to determine which paragraphs were unfit to be seen by the public. …
Clinton selectively edited other portions of emails she declined to provide to the State Department.
For example, in July 2012, Clinton removed paragraphs from a Blumenthal memo that warned “simply completing the election…and fulfilling a list of proper democratic milestones may not create a true democracy.” Blumenthal also wrote — in sections that Clinton deleted before providing the document to State — that the government would likely be “founded on Sharia,” or Islamic laws.
The group advocating to implement Sharia, Ansar al-Sharia, is a designated terrorist group that played a role in the Benghazi attacks.
But Clinton hid how much she knew about that development.
This would present a huge legal issue for anyone whose name didn’t rhyme with Millary Minton. The Federal Records Act requires work-related communications to go to the National Archive, where the government determines what can and cannot be published for public review. That is why the Obama administration instructed its agencies not to use personal e-mails unless those communications were copied to official accounts, in order to comply with the FRA. Hillary and her team flat-out disregarded those directives and flouted the law in running their own private email system. Now, with records under subpoena by an official committee of Congress, it seems clear that Hillary and her team not only destroyed email subject to the subpoena but tampered with the evidence they did provide.
Any other government official would be looking at jail time for that kind of action. Sandy Berger got caught doing essentially the same thing with official government documents notunder subpoena (presumably for the same purpose, to clean up after the Clintons), and traded his law license in exchange for not getting prosecuted. The chances of Hillary Clinton getting investigated for this by the Department of Justice are roughly nil while Barack Obama is President, but it’s certainly a good argument for keeping that authority away from Hillary by ensuring she doesn’t succeed Obama to the White House.
That’s not to say that the Obama administration is entirely enamored of her flouting of the law. Ron Fournier told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that they’re getting pretty “disgusted” by it:
Really? As Joe Scarborough says, if they are “disgusted” by it, then they have an entire Department of Justice to investigate it. The lack of any action speaks louder than any anonymous leaks to the media of their supposed disgust. |
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