2016 Postmortem

imagine2015

(2,054 posts) Tue May 31, 2016, 02:18 PM May 2016

With Clinton’s Nixonian Email Scandal Deepening, Sanders Needs to Demand Answers

With Clinton’s Nixonian Email Scandal Deepening, Sanders Needs to Demand Answers
Key issue not being addressed is secret financial deals
by: Dave Lindorff
May 26, 2016

Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and while she’s slippery, she’s no dummy. She may have played dumb when asked earlier by reporters about her server’s hard drive being wiped clean of data before she turned it over to the FBI, saying, “What, like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works at all,” but she surely was involved in the deletion of her private emails -- over 30,000 of which were reportedly erased.

The power couple’s two foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefitted from a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.

This scandal is not about someone simply ignoring some arcane rules. As Secretary of State, Clinton had a legal obligation to operate in an above-board, legal and transparent manner in conducting the business of government. Instead, for our years in office, she conducted that business in a manner that can only be called Nixonian, opting to openly violate the rules, to hide her communications from government oversight and public review, to dissemble about her allegedly having received clearance to do so, and even to attempt to erase records from her server when ordered to turn them over. Furthermore, suspicions have to be raised because if Clinton’s concerns were about people accessing her genuinely personal emails, she had only to set up a State Department email address and obtain a State Department secure Blackberry phone, and limit her personal server and personal Blackberry to genuinely personal emails and calls, conducting all State Department business on State Department systems. According to the IGO report, she studiously avoided doing that kind of segregation for four years despite frequent instructions and advice to do so.

Bernie Sanders so far has declined to make an issue of Clinton’s email scandal, but as more information comes out from the Inspector General’s Office, from a FOIA lawsuit currently in the deposition stage in federal court, and ultimately from the ongoing FBI investigation reportedly nearing its conclusion, and with even the New York Times, a long-time Clinton backer, condemning her lying about the email server, it is becoming obvious that Sanders is being far too kind to her. When he pooh-poohed the scandal in response to a debate moderator’s question during the first televised public debate he had with Clinton, the scandal was still fairly new. Today, with release of the IGO report, it has become much more serious.

Sanders should start pointing out the obvious reality that should Clinton not come clean, and should she become the Democratic nominee for president this July, she faces the possibility of an embarrassing and damaging final report from the FBI during the election campaign, or perhaps even an indictment, and the certainty of five-months of hammering on the issue by her Republican opponent. Furthermore, if somehow elected, there will follow an inevitable and interminable campaign by Republicans in Congress to try and impeach her for her “high crimes and misdemeanors” committed while serving as Secretary of State in the prior administration. That would make a joke of her campaign slogan: “A president who gets things done.”