Why Did Obama Tolerate Hillary’s Use of Secret E-mail?

Thanks to Clinton’s flouting of record-keeping laws, the substance of her communications with the president — on Benghazi, say — remains a mystery

Politico is reporting that President Obama knowingly corresponded with then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton via the latter’s private e-mail address. That does not necessarily mean Obama knew Clinton was systematically flouting administration rules and federal record-keeping law. It does, however, mean he and administration officials had to know she was conducting official business over non-secure, non-government e-mail — even in communicating with the president of the United States; even though the White House claims Obama, as his top aide Valerie Jarrett puts it, “has a very firm policy that e-mails should be kept on government systems”; and even though the president and the State Department forced the resignation of Obama’s ambassador to Kenya, in part over his use of private e-mail to conduct government business.

1. We are not dealing in this scandal with run-of-the-mill federal officials. As Kevin Williamson pointed out in his excellent column over the weekend, President Obama is the head of the executive branch. As a matter of constitutional law, all executive power is reposed in him; his subordinates exercise power only at his indulgence. Similarly, Clinton was the head of the State Department, answering only to the president. As a department head, she was obliged, as a core part of her duties, to enforce compliance with federal laws and administration policies — a big part of which involves personally following them.

As I related in Faithless Execution, the Framers prioritized presidential accountability in designing the Constitution:

In sum, as the chief executive, the president is responsible for any failures or misconduct by his subordinates.

With the help of a sympathetic media, President Obama studiously strikes the pose of a spectator who has no responsibility for the actions of his underlings (or, for that matter, for the negative consequences of his own policies). Clinton takes an “everybody does it” tack in attempting to explain away her derelictions. Even if it is true that many federal employees occasionally break record-keeping rules, “everybody” in government does not systematically operate outside those rules, as Clinton did. But put that aside. The head of a department is not an “everybody.” Even as the former secretary of state is preparing to ask the country to put her in the ultimate leadership position, we are evidently supposed to overlook the deplorable leadership example she set in her last gig.

2. A theme of Clinton’s coming campaign is to be that she is more realistic and hawkish when it comes to America’s enemies than the hard-left Obama Democrats that are the party’s mainstream. In reality, this is nonsense: There is little if any real daylight between Clinton and Obama on foreign and national-security policy — that’s why she lasted four years as secretary of state. But let’s, as Clinton might say, engage in the “willing suspension of disbelief” on that for the moment. What does it say about Clinton’s purported realism about America’s enemies that she would conduct the highest-level government business — matters of life and death — on an unsecure communication system that could be easily hacked by hostile nations that we know spend prodigious amounts of their energy on cyber-espionage?

3. One of the main things we can confidently deduce from the Obama–Clinton private e-mail communications is that what we’ve been hearing the past several days about the president’s insistence on sound record-keeping practices and transparency is so much hot air. If Obama personally and willingly communicated a number of times with then–secretary Clinton via her private e-mail address, then he had reason to know that she was not complying with stated administration policy (and State Department policy) to conduct government business on government e-mail systems. He also had reason to be concerned — if he really cared — that she was violating government record-keeping laws and procedures. (We can’t say he knew for certain because the record-keeping laws allow a federal official to communicate by private e-mail as long as a record is preserved. But, common sense says, the more often and routinely one observes that a government official is using private e-mail, the more likely it becomes that the laws are being flouted.)

Most tellingly on this score: Secretary Clinton plainly knew that the president was not serious about stringent record-keeping and transparency. Otherwise, she would not have dared communicate with him repeatedly by private e-mail — and, of course, he would not have been sending e-mail to her private address.

4. While the wayward communication procedure followed by Clinton and indulged by Obama tells us a great deal, it is not as important as the substance of their communications. As I’ve previously observed, Obama and Clinton clearly knew, from the first minutes of the Benghazi terrorist attack — in which four American officials were killed, including our ambassador to Libya — that it was, in fact, a terrorist attack. Within two hours, they knew that the local al-Qaeda affiliate had claimed credit. Yet, Secretary Clinton put out a deceptive statement shortly after 10 p.m. that night blaming an anti-Muslim video for the violence. That statement was issued only minutes after a phone call between Clinton and Obama — a phone call the White House initially said never happened, changing its story only after Clinton testified about it.

In the weeks that followed, the Obama administration aggressively promoted the fraudulent narrative that the video caused the Benghazi violence and buried the fact that it was a terrorist attack with involvement by al-Qaeda — the organization Obama was then claiming on the campaign trail to have “decimated.” Obama and Clinton even recorded public-service messages for Muslim audiences overseas, implying that the video had caused the attack. Secretary Clinton told Charles Woods, the father of former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the Benghazi attack, that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted” . . . and soon after, the Justice Department arrested and prosecuted Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the producer of the video, as if he were the real culprit.

It is difficult to imagine anything more potentially relevant to the investigation of the administration’s actions in connection with Benghazi than to explore the substance of all Clinton’s communications by whatever medium — particularly the Obama–Clinton communications — throughout the evening of September 11, 2012, and in the days and weeks that immediately followed.

How can it be that obtaining Clinton’s private e-mails was not a priority for the governmental bodies that have investigated, or are investigating, the Benghazi affair? Not just the House select committee currently tasked with the probe; how, for example, could the House Intelligence Committee have purported to complete an investigation and issue a report without learning of Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail? And, if (as I suspect) the Intelligence Committee did know about the private e-mails, why were we not told about them? How could the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) — whose mission was to assess the State Department’s performance in connection with Benghazi — not have discovered or reported the fact that the secretary of state was using private e-mail that was not part of the government records?

Oh, that’s right: Secretary Clinton handpicked the ARB, which conveniently chose not to interview her (it’s not like she was an important witness or anything, right?). Meanwhile, her top aides allegedly removed pertinent documents from the files the State Department delivered to the ARB.

Do Bammy’s Czars all use private e-mail, too?

Probably Sara. If Hilary used her own domain then every recipient knew she was in violation of federal law. If someone, probably the NSA because they will have all of Hillary's communications, hid the source of Hillary's mails. Does anyone open and email that doesn't identify the source? Would anyone receiving a very generous salary have the courage to point out the federal law Hilary was violating? Many, probably most, of Hilary's email recipients were lawyers, who presumably swear to report felonies, but who believes they would? Obama's regime may have ordered Hilary to use a private email channel. These people have the CIA there to hide and protect their activities.

Remember Lois Lerner. Anyone familiar with the Enterprise Outlook servers used by government, and familiar with government practices, knows that Outlook's databases are redundant in depth, almost certainly geographically distributed, and server arrays recover transparently from the failure of individual disks. Furthermore, government users are not permitted to store their emails on a private or local computer. Laptops are left in taxicabs and hotels, thieves acquire thousands of laptop and desktop computers every year. Some employees, like a former CIA director, violate that rule, and punishment becomes a political variable. For Lerner to claim that a disk failure resulted in a loss of email was nonsense, aimed at the naïve. She was given her alabi and promised protection.

Remember that Daryl Issa appears to have stalled investigating Lerner and Goudy has stalled over Benghazi. Who knows from whom the pressure came. J. Edgar Hoover was said to be a master of blackmail. The corruption is very deep, and has been since the cleaning out of Obama's passport files from State Department archives in 2008 by an IT specialist employed by the man who is now our CIA Director, John Brennan. The IT specialist was murdered after having turned state's evidence. He was sitting in his car in front of his church in Virginia with a small caliber bullet to the back of his head (from newspaper report). This CIA Director was identified as a Wahhabi Convert, by retired Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral James Lyons. Lyons was founder of the Red Cell, the intelligence branch of the Navy Seals, which he commanded for some years. Lyons wasn't the only source, but, since Brennan was Saudi Chief of Station when he converted, and since only Muslims may be present during conversion, the CIA agents present had also converted, and are not about to speak publically. How deep does it go?

Hillary's Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin, is also a Wahhabi Muslim, and also had/has an account on Hilary's personal server. Huma was hired by the Clinton Library from a job at a Muslim Brotherhood front. Huma's parents (father now deceased), were senior Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Petroleum is more valuable than gold to most of the world. The people and groups implicated, throughout "our" government reflect the petroleum largess being liberally (no pun intended because there are probably as many Republicans on the take as Dems) distributed to keep our representatives, judges, and military silent.

This email "scandal" is just pro-forma misdirection, a minor irritation, since those who set up Hilary's domain, if indeed there really was one, are too smart not to have built a wall anticipating the discovery of the presumably secret email domain. They know the kerfuffle will be forgotten soon.

The IRS was used to silence Congressman Nathan Deal, who had the nerve to publically ask about Obama's eligibility in 2009. He resigned rather than spend years and money he could not afford, to defend himself from House Ethics Charges based upon eight or ten year old tax filings. He became a very successful governor of Georgia, and of course, never received the written answer he requested.

Who knows what Petreaus knew. We will never find out. We do know that Karl Rove was the largest source of funds for Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, to which board of Directors Norquist appointed Suhail Kahn, son of Islamic Society of North American founder, Mahboob Khan; both father and son have committed to Jihad to replace our Constitution with Sharia. Norquist also founded The Islamic Free Market Institute with terror funder Abdul Rahman Al-Amoudi and Grover's Wahhabi brother in law. al-Amoudi is now serving a prison sentences for financing terrorism. Grover also sits on the board of the National Rifle Association. Our government has been thoroughly penetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hilary is right in the middle. Of course no one will ever see her email.

If the government didn't count our votes I'd worry about Elizabeth Warren. As either Stalin or Trotsky or Lenin explained (I've had several people claim each of the three as the true source), "It only matters who counts the votes". We are bystanders in a struggle for what remains of a thoroughly compromised government. Now that Iran and North Korea have the long range missiles and warheads to render us helpless (EMP), should China or Russia decide to act, the group controlling the anchorman with the skillfully hidden past is probably aligning what remains of the U.S. for a fire sale.

When China can destroy the well-being of most Americans by halting iPhone, iPod, or iPad manufacturing, and listen to slop about global warming and rising sea levels, which justify hundreds of billions of dollars accrued to crooked cronies who take their cut just before bankruptcy of their green enterprise, we are sitting ducks. The goal of global alliances was clearly enunciated by candidate Obama ("I am a citizen of the world") and even our presumably free press.

Even our "conservative" News Corp with Fox and the WSJ had their editorial pages scrubbed by Alwaleed who boasted of it when Murdoch bought the WSJ and fired the chief editor immediately. Alwaleed has major holdings of Cisco, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Citibank, AIG, and dozens of other corporations through Kingdom Holdings. controlling ninety five percent of Saudi investment.

Alwaleed's most important investment may have been Barack, according to the most famous black attorney in the U.S., Percy Sutton. For Alwaleed and the Saudi family it is about survival. When Obama apparently decided, after Egypt threw out Obama's Muslim Brotherhood guy Morsi, to change horses and support Iran, instability escallated. That may be what Benghazi was about. We are just bystanders now. Hilary is performing a little theater to keep the proletariat talking about the small stuff.

If we get another chance it would be well to understand the words of the congressman and judge who tried Lincoln's assassins, Ohio's John Bingham in one of his addresses to The House prior to passage of his bill, The 14th Amendment:

I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen….

The issue to our justices and founders is allegiance. Obama never claimed natural born citizenship, in fact boasted of his allegiance to dreams from his Muslim communist father. Obama demonstrates that, while not a perfect predictor, natural law was the best our founders and framers had. Very little has changed since 1787, or 1867, or 1885 when natural born citizenship was confirmed as positive law, or when it was used in 1939 to make Marie Elg a natural born citizen, after being taken by her then naturalized parents back to Sweden and raised there. Even our naturalization oath specifies "sole allegiance to our Nation", because allegiance is most often passed parent to child. Wong Kim, born to domiciled Chinese parents - they lived here for most of their lives - in San Francico, was made a naturalized citizen at birth, just because his parents were aliens. He was not made a natural born citizen. Obama told us he was born a British Subject but no politicians had the courage to point out that he was therefore not eligible by Article II Section 1. Obama told the truth. He has stayed in office because we are ignorant, and/or justifiably fearful of losing the lives we have to tyrannical agents of our Executive branch, the IRS and Justice departments. Only law that is honored can help us stay free, and we are losing our freedom.

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