STRESS...it’s what for breakfast.
The Guinness world record for plate spinning is held by David Spathaky, who kept 108 plates spinning on sticks in a TV appearance in Bangkok in 1996.
Hillary Clinton might break that record. Although the FBI closed a year-long investigation into her private email server without recommending criminal charges, she is still standing in the middle of a forest of spinning plates that threaten to come crashing down before election day.
Before Clinton was nominated to be secretary of state in 2009, she and her husband agreed to abide by strict ethics rules to avoid any conflict of interest between Hillary’s work as secretary of state and Bill’s work raising money for the Clinton Foundation.
That’s when the private e-mail server was set up.
Secretary Clinton used the private server for all her government e-mail, which meant the State Department could not search her email correspondence when it was responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for public records. The State Department asked Clinton for her email records in 2014. She turned over 55,000 printed pages of what she called “work-related” emails and deleted about 30,000 e-mails she said were “personal.”
But 14,900 deleted emails were recovered by the FBI and are in the hands of the State Department. People who had filed FOIA lawsuits to get State Department records went right back to court to get them.
Meet the federal judges who are enforcing the Freedom of Information Act:
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Dept. of State, No. 1:15-cv-00687) has ordered the release of all the deleted Clinton emails starting on Sept. 13.
U.S. District Court Judges William P. Dimitrouleas (Larry Kawa v. U.S. Dept. of State, No. 9:15-cv-81560) and Amit P. Mehta (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Dept. of State, No. 1:15-cv-00692) have ordered the release of Benghazi-related emails to begin on Sept. 13 and 30, respectively.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Dept. of State, No. 1:13-cv-01363) has ordered the release by Sept. 30 of emails related to the dual employment of Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, who worked for a consultant with ties to the Clinton Foundation at the same time she worked for the government. Sullivan allowed Judicial Watch to send Clinton written questions about the private server (answers due back Sept. 29), and to question (by October 31) a State Department official who warned employees “never to speak of the secretary’s personal e-mail system again.”
Still more plates are spinning.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon (Associated Press v. U.S. Department of State, No. 1:15-cv-00345) is overseeing the release of the Clinton daily schedules that the AP is using to connect the dots between foundation donors and government meetings.
And more: The State Department inspector general is investigating Clinton Foundation projects, the families of two Americans killed in Benghazi have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Clinton over insecure communications, and two congressional committees just sent subpoenas to three tech companies that worked on Clinton’s private server.
And Wikileaks has promised to release the Clinton emails collected by hackers.
We don’t yet know the content of Clinton’s deleted emails, but we do know two things: She set up the private server right after she promised to abide by strict ethics rules to avoid the appearance of selling influence.
And she has been spinning like crazy ever since we found about it.