The Clinton Scandals

[Admin]

Those top secret emails in perspective..

Top secret information is another matter, but the stuff that showed up in Clinton’s private email wasn’t so special. Seven of the eight email chains dealt with CIA drone strikes, which are classified top secret/special access program—unlike Defense Department drone strikes, which are unclassified. The difference is that CIA drones hit targets in countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where we are not officially at war; they are part of covert operations. (Defense Department drone strikes are in places where we are officially at war.)

But these operations are covert mainly to provide cover for the Pakistani and Yemeni governments, so they don’t have to admit they’re cooperating with America. Everyone in the world knows about these strikes; nongovernment organizations, such as New America, tabulate them; newspapers around the world—including the New York Times, where some of the same reporters are now writing so breathlesslyabout Clinton’s careless handling of classified information—cover these strikes routinely. 

The other top secret email chain described a conversation with the president of Malawi. Conversations with foreign leaders are inherently classified. In other words, even if Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Syrian spies had hacked into Clinton’s email servers, and if they’d pored through 60,000 emails and come across these eight chains that held top secret material, they would not have learned anything the slightest bit new or worthy of their efforts. The FBI’s discoveries should be viewed in that context.

Hillary’s email scandal was overhyped.

[Admin]

Yes, yes, we are concerned with national security, right? So it's not ok for Clinton to have a private server, but it's ok for Colin Powell to circumvent the mail system..

And then there is this..

Donald Trump’s decision to offer up a politicized readout of his confidential national security briefings has set off alarm bells in the intelligence community, with some high-profile former officials warning the Republican nominee crossed a “red line.”

During the NBC’s Commander-in-Chief forum on Wednesday night, Trump said “there was one thing that shocked me” from the briefings he received, going on to say that he could tell that government officials were unhappy with President Barack Obama for not following expert advice.

Former intelligence officers alarmed by Trump's briefing readout - POLITICO

[Admin]

And of course, what happens to the narrative now? From Media Matters:

Thanks to the release this week of a January 2009 email from Colin Powell to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we now know definitively that the former Republican secretary of state advised Clinton on the wisdom of using private emails during her time at the State Department. We know that Powell thought it was fine to use that private email account to bypass State Department servers to communicate with friends and even “foreign leaders.”

We know Powell advised Clinton on how to circumvent federal records requirements while she was secretary of state: “Be very careful. … I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.” We know that while Clinton used private email for convenience, she didn't follow Powell's lead in seeking to deliberately use systems that avoided future public disclosures.

The Republican also complained that State Department officials didn’t want him using his PDA, what he termed an "ancient version" of Clinton's Blackberry: “[T]hey gave me all kinds of nonsense about how they gave out signals and could be read by spies, etc." But Powell said he ignored those warnings and used his PDA in his office suite.

As for the whereabouts of Powell’s own emails from his time at the State Department, “during his tenure, Powell had sent classified emails over his private AOL account - but as of July, had still not responded to a request to contact his service provider to retrieve them,” according to USA Today. “In both 2014 and 2015, the State Department asked Powell to provide all of his records that were not in the agency’s record-keeping system.” As Powell's email to Clinton suggested, he no longer has the emails from his personal account; the records of those communications with national and international leaders during his tenure as secretary of state are gone. (Powell defends the contents of his email to Clinton.)

That limbo status stands in sharp contrast to extraordinary scrutiny the press and Republicans have placed on Clinton’s private account emails, tens of thousands of which she voluntarily turned over to the government and have since been released to the public.

These helpful Powell revelations provide some welcome context to the email story. They also raise questions about how the press will deal with the new information, and why the press has seemed so uninterested in including the context of Powell's actions over the last year-and-a-half as it relentlessly pursued the Clinton email “scandal” story.

Keep in mind that we’ve known for quite a while that Powell used a private email account while serving secretary of state. And since March, we’ve known that Powell "handled classified material on unclassified email systems," according to ABC News, and that some of Powell’s emails contained "information classified at the Secret or Confidential levels.'" 

[Admin]

Pretty disturbing, a blanket absolve for corporate crimes, and a considerable contrast with the Clinton case.

FBI Director James Comey has concluded that Clinton did not act with the “necessary criminal intent” that would require prosecution for distributing classified information. The legal term of art for such a standard is mens rea, Latin for “guilty mind.” But many crimes have “strict liability” statutes, with no specific mens rea standard. In those strict liability cases, a violation of the law is enough, regardless of the intention of the criminal.

Strict liability was actually created in the late nineteenth-century to deal with deplorable conditions in factories. Because it was so difficult to get inside the head of the factory owners to suss out their intent, strict liability statutes allowed prosecutions for the safety violations themselves, regardless of whether the employer meant to commit a crime.

Both the GOP and the Democrats have been moving on a track to reduce mass incarceration, with buy-in from strange bedfellows like the ACLU and the Koch brothers. But late last year, the House Republican version of the criminal justice reform bill included a provision that would apply a blanket mens rea standard for all federal criminal cases. They’ve been fighting for it ever since mens rea reform” even appears in the Republican platform

Under the Republican standard, prosecutors would have to prove in all cases that defendants acted with knowing intent, and that they knew the activity was unlawful (or at least should have known).

This would have a far-reaching effect on corporate crimes. One often cited example involves the Peanut Corporation of America, which shipped salmonella-tainted peanuts across the country, sickening hundreds of people and killing nine. Last year, a Georgia court sentenced Stewart Parnell, the company’s CEO, to 28 years in prison on conspiracy charges, as well as the introduction of adulterated food.

If the House Republican provision became law, Stewart Parnell could only be found guilty if prosecutors presented evidence that he knew the peanuts were tainted, and that shipping them would amount to a felony for conspiracy. Given that Parnell probably never wrote an email that said, “let’s ship bad peanuts all over the country, which as you all know constitutes a federal crime,” getting a conviction on actions that killed nine people would be next to impossible. In effect, Parnell would be able to use ignorance of the law as a defense..

A blanket allowance of willful blindness wouldn’t just prevent corporate criminals from paying the price. It would also undermine corporate governance practices in favor of a strategy of not knowing too much. “Corporations collectively may act so that information of wrongdoing is not disseminated to decision-makers who might correct it,” said Public Citizen’s Weissman in his Senate testimony.


The Republicans’ attempt to insert this damaging provision into criminal justice reform has already had a rotten consequence: It’s opened a rift in what had been a bipartisan effort. That’s why the effort looks all but dead this year.


Liberals have speculated that the only reason the Koch brothers teamed up on reducing mass incarceration was to make corporate crimes harder to prosecute through the back door. And to be clear, it’s not like there’s a massive rush to prosecute white-collar crime right now; the purpose of criminal justice reform is to reduce mass incarceration, not to make hard-to-indict crimes even harder. Plus, in the wake of the financial crisis, we should be pushing to make executivesmore responsible for the actions of their companies, not less.


The same conservatives denouncing Clinton’s statements about classified information as an inadequate “ignorance defense” are political allies of the Republicans pushing for an ignorance defense for corporate executives. Sometimes, in fact, they’re one and the same: Bob Goodlatte, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, keeps describing Clinton’s email conduct as “careless” and “reckless.” In a letter to FBI Director Comey that said the non-prosecution of Clinton “defies logic,” Goodlatte even cited a part of the espionage statute that allows for prosecution based on “gross negligence” rather than “knowing intent.” But his criminal-justice reform bill would supersede that very statute.

Conservatives Say Hillary Clinton Can’t Plead Ignorance—but Corporate Criminals Can | New Republic

[Red Daniel]

Hillary Clinton left the New York City memorial marking the 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks after becoming "overheated," her campaign said.

From Business Insider. 

Do we hear anyone now about all those Clinton health conspiracies....

[Admin]

There is still plenty of conspiracy theory going around, Daniel..

These days we don’t live with the constant threat of tuberculosis and yet, from the way a certain segment of the rightwing fever swamp is treating Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, you’d think she was Fantine from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, some ghoul named Steve Malzberg – who probably can’t help it that he’s a dead ringer for 90s make-believe car salesman Joe Isuzu – and even Republican nominee Donald Trump have seized upon Clinton’s seasonal allergies and resulting cough as a sign that she is trembling at death’s door, barely able to function.

“People don’t cough like that,” Malzberg insisted on his Newsmax.com podcast last week. “People don’t have coughing fits ‘all the time’, in public, that go on and on and on and on and on and on. Not unless there’s something going on that’s not right.”

Please allow me to disabuse you of that notion, sir. Plenty of people “cough like that”, myself included. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 19.1 million adults over 18 were diagnosed with seasonal allergic rhinitis – also known as “hay fever” – in 2014, along 6.1 million children.

I cough at all the wrong times. Thank God I'm not Hillary Clinton | David Ferguson | Opinion | The Guardian

[Red Daniel]

And let's not forget that today we honor the victims of the worst terrorist attack on US soil, an attack on our freedom!

[Admin]

Actually, you're right about that Daniel, as it happens we were just watching a documentary about the firefighters who got caught up in 9/11, terrible stuff.

[Admin]

It could be simply this..

Pneumonia shares symptoms with a handful of other illnesses, including the common cold, making it difficult to diagnose. As a result, it's not entirely unfathomable that Clinton's doctors may have initially treated her for another illness. According to her doctor, Clinton was previously being treated for a cough related to allergies, the BBC reported.

Hillary Clinton has pneumonia: What is it? - Business Insider

[Red Daniel]

So where are you know with these allergies..