The Hillbillary Clintons long, sordid, and often criminal history

[DougMacG]

First, Chris Wallace this morning on radio called the move to keep (incriminating) emails on a private server a "genius", "politically genius" (meaning evil genius) move.  She served on the Watergate committee and learned from Nixon's mistakes.  Nixon could have destroyed his own incriminating evidence and didn't.  She faces about a month-long uproar now, a year and a half before the election, but then nothing jumps out later to take her down. 

I disagree.  This has lasting hurt.  She isn't as smart as she thinks she is or as smooth an operator as her slippery husband.  If she thought she was protected, she may have been sloppy with what shouldn't have been put in writing.  Those emails and other skeletons will come back to haunt her. 
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Famous people caught reading the forum (?), or in this case can we humbly say great minds think alike.  Charles Krauthammer writes with great clarity the same points all of us are making about the HRC email scandal:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/early-onset-clinton-fatigue/2015/03/12/5801a542-c8d8-11e4-b2a1-bed1aaea2816_story.html

Early Onset Clinton Fatigue

By Charles Krauthammer Opinion writer, Washington Post (today)

She burned the tapes.

Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate. Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned.

Today you don’t burn tapes. You delete e-mails. Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual: “I didn’t see any reason to keep them.” After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone.

How do we know that? She says so. Were, say, Clinton Foundation contributions considered personal? No one asked. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. We have to trust her.

That’s not easy. Not just because of her history — William Safire wrote in 1996 that “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady . . . is a congenital liar” — but because of what she said in her emergency news conference on Tuesday. Among the things she listed as private were “personal communications from my husband and me.” Except that, as the Wall Street Journal reported the very same day, Bill Clinton’s spokesman said the former president has sent exactly two e-mails in his life, one to John Glenn, the other to U.S. troops in the Adriatic.

Mrs. Clinton’s other major declaration was that the server containing the e-mails — owned, controlled and housed by her — “will remain private.” Meaning: No one will get near them.

This she learned not from Watergate but from Whitewater. Her husband acquiesced to the appointment of a Whitewater special prosecutor. Hillary objected strenuously. Her fear was that once someone is empowered to search, the searcher can roam freely. In the Clintons’ case, it led to impeachment because when the Lewinsky scandal broke, the special prosecutor added that to his portfolio.

Hillary was determined never to permit another open-ended investigation. Which is why she decided even before being confirmed as secretary of state that only she would control her e-mail.

Her pretense for keeping just a single private e-mail account was “convenience.” She doesn’t like to carry around two devices.

But two weeks ago she said she now carries two phones and a total of four devices. Moreover, it takes about a minute to create two accounts on one device. Ray LaHood, while transportation secretary, did exactly that.

Her answers are farcical. Everyone knows she kept the e-mail private for purposes of concealment and, above all, control. For other State Department employees, their e-mails belong to the government. The records officers decide to return to you what’s personal. For Hillary Clinton, she decides.

The point of regulations is to ensure government transparency. The point of owning the server is to ensure opacity. Because she holds the e-mails, all document requests by Congress, by subpoena, by Freedom of Information Act inquiries have ultimately to go through her lawyers, who will stonewall until the end of time — or Election Day 2016, whichever comes first.

It’s a smart political calculation. Taking a few weeks of heat now — it’s only March 2015 — is far less risky than being blown up by some future e-mail discovery. Moreover, around April 1, the Clinton apologists will begin dismissing the whole story as “old news.”

But even if nothing further is found, the damage is done. After all, what is Hillary running on? Her experience and record, say her supporters.

What record? She’s had three major jobs. Secretary of state: Can you name a single achievement in four years? U.S. senator: Can you name a single achievement in eight years? First lady: her one achievement in eight years? Hillarycare, a shipwreck.

In reality, Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history.

Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay. It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.

You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Peggy Noonan says she looks tired, not hungry.  On the other issue no one else will mention, I have wondered if Hillary's occasional disappearances had anything to do with so-called plastic surgery facial work being done.  Maybe that sounds sexist to ask, but it was fair for the media to ask Reagan if he colored his hair and use his denial as proof of dishonesty.  Below is the photo that ran with the Krauthammer column.  If she had work done, I think we can all agree it wasn't successful.  (Nothing personal against her, I am removing mirrors from my own home as aging sets in.)  Besides sexist, this sounds trivial, but a woman's aversion to photos like this being published, criticisms like this, and the efforts with makeup etc it takes to fight this might become the last straw as to why she doesn't run.

[Crafty_Dog]

March 13, 2015
Hey, Virginia Republicans, were you looking forward to voting in the 2016 presidential primary? Eh, we may not have one. Read all about the big decision facing the Old Dominion GOP.

Yup. Hillary Chose to Delete Consequential E-Mails

A lot of folks in Right-world think this is an extremely consequential revelation about the Clintons:

The Clintons play by their own set of rules. And in this case, the former Secretary of State explained, those rules bless her decision to erase some 30,000 emails from the family server despite knowing that the emails had become a subject of intense interest to congressional investigators. These were merely “private personal emails,” Clinton averred, “emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.” After she finished taking questions, Clinton’s staff disclosed that no one actually read through those 30,000-odd documents before she “chose not to keep” them.

As for why this might “seem like an issue,” the answer is not complicated. All federal employees have a legal obligation to preserve their work-related email–and the White House advises appointees to accomplish this by using official government addresses. Email sent to and from .gov accounts is generally archived. In this way, a consistent level of security is maintained. The nation’s history is preserved. Open-records laws are honored. And transparency gets a leg up on “Trust me.”

All this once made sense to Clinton. As a candidate for President in 2008, she included “secret White House email accounts” as part of her critique of the Bush Administration’s “stunning record of secrecy and corruption.” Now, however, Clinton is leaning heavily on “Trust me.” For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.”

This strikes experts as a haphazard way of analyzing documents. Jason R. Baron, a former lawyer at the National Archives and Records Administration who is now an attorney in the Washington office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, says, “I would question why lawyers for Secretary Clinton would use keyword searching, a method known to be fraught with limitations, to determine which of the emails with a non-.gov address pertained to government business. Any and all State Department activities–not just communications involving the keywords Benghazi or Libya–would potentially make an email a federal record. Given the high stakes involved, I would have imagined staff could have simply conducted a manual review of every document. Using keywords as a shortcut unfortunately leaves the process open to being second-guessed.”
Wait, there’s more, as Allahpundit explains:

Until last year, if you wanted to access State Department e-mail remotely, you needed a secure Blackberry issued by State for that purpose. And that Blackberry only handled department e-mail, i.e. State e-mail accounts actually did require a dedicated device. Apparently Hillary was right in thinking that, if she wanted to read private e-mail too, she really would have had to carry a second device.

But rather than do that and endure the hardship of fitting two four-ounce smartphones in her purse instead of one, she chose to defy security protocols and conduct all of her business, work and personal, from her unsecured private device. She didn’t care enough about security to have an official State e-mail account created for her in the first place so why would she care enough to read sensitive messages on an official, secured State Blackberry?

That adds a whole new level of risk to her e-mail habits, actually, since she was presumably using her personal Blackberry for work during overseas trips, when she was at
greater risk from foreign surveillance. Between that and the fact that State IT techs warned her about the vulnerability of her private server, there’s really no question that she knowingly, willingly created a major hole in national security simply because her selfish political desire to keep her messages away from the voting public was more important to her.

Yes, this blatantly violates the legal requirements.

I want to believe this will have serious consequences. But I don’t.

Who will run a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton over this? Our incoming attorney general? The confirmation vote is next week. Has any GOP senator even questioned Loretta Lynch whether she thinks this is a serious violation of the law and if, or how, the Department of Justice would investigate?

Do you think there’s a single U.S. Attorney -- all of whom were appointed by President Obama -- who wants to prosecute the Democratic presidential frontrunner?

Do you think there’s a jury that would convict her?

[Crafty_Dog]

1)
http://www.teaparty.org/16-year-old-girl-claims-former-president-bill-clinton-father-88728/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=16-year-old-girl-claims-former-president-bill-clinton-father

2)
Is Bill Chelsea's dad?
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/06/26/bill-clinton-chelseas-biological-father/

[Crafty_Dog]

 By
Peggy Noonan
Updated March 13, 2015 6:30 p.m. ET
1369 COMMENTS

Maybe we’re not stuck in Scandal Land.

For a while I’ve assumed Hillary Clinton would run for her party’s nomination and be a formidable candidate in the general election. After Tuesday’s news conference I’m not so sure.

Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners, and when she did she couldn’t sustain it. She looked at the ceiling and down at notes, trying, it seemed, to stick to or remember scripted arguments. She was shaky. She couldn’t fake good cheer and confidence. It is seven years since she ran for office. You could see it.

Her claims—she stayed off the State Department email system for “convenience,” she thought “it would be easier to carry just one device,” her server “contains personal communications from my husband and me”—were so transparent, so quickly disprovable. Minutes later journalists were posting earlier statements in which she said she carries two devices, and The Wall Street Journal’s report saying Bill has sent only two emails in his life.

This wasn’t high-class spin. These were not respectable dodges. They didn’t make you grudgingly tip your hat at a gift for duplicity. I could almost feel an army of oppo people of both parties saying, “You can do better than that, Hillary!”

This wasn’t the work of a national, high-grade political-response team, it was the thrown-together mess of someone who knew she was guilty of self-serving actions, who didn’t herself believe what she was saying, who didn’t think the press would swallow it, and who didn’t appear to care.

She didn’t look hungry for the battle, she looked tired of the battle.

Everyone knows what the scandal is. She didn’t want a paper trail of her decisions and actions as secretary of state. She didn’t want to be questioned about them, ever. So she didn’t join the government’s paper-trail system, in this case the State Department’s official email system, which retains and archives records. She built her own private system and got to keep complete control of everything she’d done or written. She no doubt assumed no one outside would ask and no one inside would insist—she’s Hillary, don’t mess with her.

She knew the story might blow but maybe it wouldn’t, worth the chance considering the payoff: secrecy. If what she did became public she’d deal with it then. When this week she was forced to, she stonewalled: “The server will remain private.”

Is it outrageous? Of course. Those are U.S. government documents she concealed and destroyed. The press is not covering for her and hard questions are being asked because everyone knows what the story is. It speaks of who she is and how she will govern. Everyone knows it.

She knows it too.

At the news conference she seemed like a 20th-century figure in a 21st-century world. Her critics complain it’s the 1990s returning but it isn’t, it’s only the dark side of the ’90s without the era’s peace and prosperity.

Mrs. Clinton is said to be preparing to announce her candidacy for the presidency in three to four weeks. But did that look like the news conference of a candidate about to announce? It lacked any air of confidence or certitude. For a year the press has been writing about the burgeoning Clinton Shadow Campaign. Where’s the real one?

Defenses of Mrs. Clinton were ad hoc, improvised, flat-footed. It all looks disorderly, as if no one’s in charge, no one has drawn clear lines of responsibility or authority. We hear about loyalists, intimates, allies, pals, hangers-on, Friends of Hill. People buzz around her like bees on random paths to the queen.

In 2008 Barack Obama had impressive, disciplined people around him—David Axelrod,Robert Gibbs,David Plouffe. I remember thinking at the time that they were something unusual in politics: normal. Hillary has people like David Brock, a right-wing hit man who became a left-wing hit man. Who’s he supposed to do outreach to, the other weirdos?

Is this thing really happening? Is the much-vaunted campaign coming together?

After the news conference I thought what I never expected to think: Maybe she doesn’t really want this. Maybe that’s what this incompetence is meant to be signaling.

Here I will speculate, but imagine being Hillary Clinton right now:

Her mother, the rock of her life, died in 2011. In the past years she’s had health issues. She’s tired, having worked at the highest levels of American life the past 25 years. She’s in the middle of a scandal and, being Hillary, knows that others might pop along the way.

Add this: Maybe she thought her ideological hunger, which was real, would sustain her throughout her life, and it hasn’t.

Maybe what happened to her, in part, is the homes of her Manhattan mega-donors. She’s been in the grand townhouses and Park Avenue apartments since 1992. She’d go in and be met and she saw what they had. Beauty. Ease. Fine art of a particular, modern sort, the kind that is ugly, that reminds its owners that just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t understand that life is hard, painful, incoherent. It is protective, cautionary, abstract and costs $20 million a picture.

But what lives they have! Grace and comfort and they don’t have to worry about the press, they don’t have to feel on the run, they don’t have to press the flesh with nobodies.

She’d like those things! But she went into “public service” and had to live on some bum-squat-Egypt Southern governor’s salary.

She wanted what they have. They’re her friends, no more talented than she. But they went to Wall Street and are oozing in dough. She stayed in the lane she was in. And she figures she missed out on the prosperity her husband presided over.

She has her causes—women’s rights, income inequality. But she can advance them in other ways.

Maybe she isn’t really hungry enough for the presidency anymore. And maybe she doesn’t have illusions anymore. She’s funded by Wall Street. Her opponent will be funded by Wall Street.

Maybe she’s of two minds about what she wants. But it’s not really hunger that’s propelling her now, its Newton’s law of inertia: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Maybe she thinks about another line of work, a surprising fourth act. She likes to be served, be admired, be taken care of by staff. But you can get those things without being president. If you are wealthy, and she is now—and maybe that was the purpose of all those six-figure speeches—you can get those things easily.

Maybe she doesn’t, really, want to run. Maybe she’s not sure she can. Or maybe she’ll go for it: It’s what she’s been going toward all her life.

Maybe Democrats who saw that news conference will sense an opening and jump in. There’s the myth of the empty bench, but it won’t be empty if she leaves it. That’s another law of physics: Nature abhors a vacuum.

We all talk so much about the presidency and who’s got the best chance. Maybe it’s not Hillary. Maybe that’s over and no one knows, even her.
Popular on WSJ

   

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-15/clintons-furious-obama-after-valerie-jarrett-linked-email-leak

[DougMacG]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-15/clintons-furious-obama-after-valerie-jarrett-linked-email-leak

White House non-denial denial:
... he answered with just two words: “Utter baloney.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/utter-baloney-wh-shoots-down-valerie-jarrett-hillary-email-leak-story/

[Crafty_Dog]

Apparently Pravda on the Hudson is backstroking; the article was "not without fault" , , ,

[DougMacG]

1)
http://www.teaparty.org/16-year-old-girl-claims-former-president-bill-clinton-father-88728/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=16-year-old-girl-claims-former-president-bill-clinton-father

2)
Is Bill Chelsea's dad?
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/06/26/bill-clinton-chelseas-biological-father/

+ 3) Valerie Jarrett leaked the HRC Clinton email info.

1)  Yes, the cute, blonde 16 year old looks like Bill, sounds totally possible and at least a little bit credible if a court is at least willing to hear the arguments (but they aren't).  A DNA test is either ordered or agreed to, paternity or not is determined quickly.  If this was true, then what happens?  Hillary is the victim which is how she broke out of the doldrums in the first place.  The new girl becomes a star.  Bill takes responsibility and lectures us about how we all need to do that, year of the woman, etc.  In other words, this would not be a political winner if true. In any case, that story disappeared from that link and SNopes says "fiction".  http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/clintonchild.asp.  We need to be careful what we spread...

2)  Yes, if these photos are actual, she is a spitting image of Webb.  But...  it can't be proven, they'll never admit to it, it's totally off-limits politically, and it doesn't amount to anything even if true.  If Arkansas is at all like state law here, the married husband is the legal father of the child no matter the actual DNA. Hillary would be seen as justified, plus Chelsea is 35 now, and a mother.  It can only turn back on the meddling accusers.

3)  Yes, someone like Jarrett and the Obama machine might be one source of some of Hillary's problems.  The author of 'Blood Feud' is just as credible as either the Clintons or the Obamas, which is not saying much.  Again, it won't be admitted to or proven.  NYT isn't giving up sources.  The two camps are bound to split apart if they haven't already.  But our interest IMHO is to paint them both with the same political brush, just as Obama in 2008 was always running against George Bush.

It is important that we defeat these people directly on their failed political ideology, and not get tempted with all the shiny objects that come floating by, Obama's birth certificate and these stories, etc.  Distractions don't change these facts: we are badly over-taxed, over-regulated and are in the process of letting our constitution, sovereignty, national security, fiscal integrity, monetary system, work ethic and culture go to hell if we don't change course pretty soon.

[Crafty_Dog]

Hey, I was just having a moment of fun

Anyway, here is today's Dick Morris:

http://www.dickmorris.com/obama-throws-hillary-under-the-bus-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

[Crafty_Dog]

second post

She’s weighed down with negatives, but do the Democrats have a choice?
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

466520736-676x450Hillary Clinton will not run in 2016 on the slogan of continuing the hope-and-change policies of Barack Obama. The president has not enjoyed a 50 percent approval rating since a brief period after his reelection. And he is no friend of the Clintons.

Abroad, chaos in the Middle East, failed reset with Russia, leading from behind in Libya, and the deaths in Benghazi are no more winning issues than are, at home, the Obamacare fiasco, $9 trillion in new debt, and the alphabet soup of the AP, IRS, NSA, and VA scandals.

The Democratic party has also radically changed in just the six years Barack Obama has been in the White House, as it suffered the greatest losses in Congress since the 1920s. Other than hoping for a serious Republican scandal, the Democrats can only cling to two assumptions. One is historic voter turnout by minorities. The second is bloc voting on the basis of racial and gender solidarity.

If there is insufficient turnout, or if groups do not vote in lockstep on the basis of their racial or sexual identities, then — witness the 2010 and 2014 elections — Democratic candidates can get walloped.

Why?

A paradox arose in Obama’s efforts at encouraging bloc voting. To galvanize groups on the basis of their race, tribe, or gender, the Obama cadre has resorted to divisive language  — “punish our enemies,” “nation of cowards,” “my people” — that turns off independent voters and even some liberal white voters. When the president weighed in during the trial of the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman by telling the nation that if he had had a son, that boy would have looked like Trayvon Martin, such an eerie tribal appeal bothered at least as many Americans as it may have stirred. Blacks and Latinos may appreciate Eric Holder’s constant sermonizing about white prejudice or Obama’s riffs on Skip Gates and Ferguson, but just as many other Americans do not believe that Gates was singled out on the basis of race and do not see how the thuggish Michael Brown, who had robbed a store and rushed a police officer, could conceivably become a civil-rights hero.

More importantly, there is no indication that Obama’s knack for firing up minority voters is transferrable in the same measure to other Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton. Once one appeals to tribal identity on the basis of race and appearance, one lives or dies with such superficial affinities. Hillary, in other words, is not Latino or black, and her winning 60 percent of the former or 85 percent of the latter would simply not be good enough under the formulaic racial bloc voting that Obama has bequeathed to Democrats. In addition, Obama seems to bestow voter resentment, as much as he does enthusiasm, on other Democrats. In 2014, it seemed that Obama harmed Democratic candidates a lot more than he helped them, especially when he reminded the electorate that his own policies were de facto on the ballot.

Nor are Obama’s bread-and-circuses issues catching on. Most Americans believe that the era of adolescence is over, and the next president will have to be an adult who puts away the golf clubs and ESPN monitors to clean up what will be $20 trillion in debt and a collapsed foreign policy. The public seems to accept that taxes can’t go much higher. No one thinks that borrowing trillions was a sign of government austerity. Too many, not too few, Americans appear to be hooked on entitlements. The borders are too porous, not too well guarded. Spiking the stock market was not the same as creating well-paying middle-class jobs. More gas and oil came despite, not because of, Obama.

What, then, is Hillary Clinton’s strategy for 2016?

Once again, mostly symbolism. Apart from Hillary and the idea of the first female president, the Democrats have little to turn to — which explains why Hillary may well be nominated even if her health and inclinations — and her disastrous performances — lean against it.

What won Barack Obama the presidency in 2008 was public anger over the Iraq war, fear following the 2008 Wall Street meltdown — and his own iconic status as potentially the first African-American president. Had the surge in Iraq succeeded a year earlier, or had the financial markets not crashed, or had the Democrats nominated a Joe Biden or a Howard Dean, then they probably would have lost the presidency.

Unfortunately for them, however, in 2016 there will be no incumbent Republican administration to scapegoat. “Bush did it” is now stale after six years. Blaming the Tea Party or the Republican House is likewise old hat. There is no success story to bandy about — no desire to bring on another Libya or expand Obamacare or borrow another $9 trillion.

There is only the war-on-women mantra that it is past time for a female president and Hillary has the best shot at making it. She is counting on the idea that blacks and Latinos will turn out for her as an icon of oppressed minorities in the manner they did for Obama, and that white working-class voters will forget the Democratic racial and gender pandering that is so often implicitly aimed against them.

On the face of it, the idea of Hillary Clinton as a feminist trailblazer should be ludicrous. Forty-four women have already served in the Senate since the first one did 93 years ago. When Hillary took over as secretary of state in 2009, there had not been a white male secretary since 1997.

Unlike national female politicians like Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina, Hillary Clinton gained public exposure only by virtue of marriage to the powerbroker governor and then president Bill Clinton. Implicit in her messaging is a return to Bill Clinton’s economic good times of the 1990s and the implication that he might well be running half the show — a subliminal and quite sexist message.

Take away the Clinton name, and Hillary Rodham would be no more likely to become president than would Democratic senators like Barbara Boxer and Barbara Mikulski. In her own public and private life Hillary Clinton has had few feminist credentials beyond her self-promotion. She never insisted on pay equity for her female staffers while senator. She did not object much when her husband’s political operatives sought to destroy the reputations of the women with whom he had liaisons — Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey — some of whom made powerful cases that they had been coerced into sexual encounters and then sullied and derided when they complained. For Hillary, if it was a question of believing that her husband had inappropriately solicited sex with a female subordinate or an otherwise vulnerable woman, or ensuring that her own meal ticket was secure, the choice was always a no-brainer.

Hillary has never been a very inspiring candidate. She is petulant when pressed, and appears at once bored and angry when cross-examined. Her stump speeches can be best characterized as high-pitched and punctuated with shrillness.

She does not so much habitually lie, as habitually see no problem with lying, as if she either cannot distinguish untruth from veracity, or simply believes that normal expectations of conduct should not apply to herself. Her mea culpas about the e-mail scandal were historic in that not a single declaration that she made could possibly be true: One does not need two smartphones to have two e-mail accounts; Ms. Clinton uses not just one but, by her own admission, four smart communication devices. The physical presence of security guards does not ensure a server’s security from cyber attacks. Bill Clinton does not use e-mail, and thus Hillary could not have communicated with him by that means as she claimed.

She seems unaware that no one has the right to decide when or if to comply with federal regulations when leaving office. No one has the right to be sole auditor of her own compliance with federal law. No other major Cabinet secretary in the Obama administration failed to have a .gov account. And on and on and on.

In sum, the Democrats have neither a winning agenda nor someone to blame this time around. They are stuck with only symbols and icons — and this time shaky ones at that. In 2016, choosing any candidate other than the potential first woman president would be as futile as running Joe Biden in 2008 instead of Barack Obama as the potential first African-American president. There would be no icon, not even a small chance of massive minority turnout, and certainly less bloc voting on the basis of tribe. In other words, for the Democrats, 2016 would hinge on just defending the Obama record and the principles of liberal theology — and thereby probably falling short on election day. It is either the worn-out idea of Hillary, warts and all, as both victim and trailblazer — or bust.

[DougMacG]

Victor Davis Hanson: "...Clinton will not run in 2016 on the slogan of continuing the hope-and-change policies of Barack Obama.

That's right.  They're having trouble coming up with a winning theme. 

Previously, here:  "...[lack of] excitement of kicking off a campaign theme called 'more of the same'.  http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1534.msg86635#msg86635

[DougMacG]

Hey, I was just having a moment of fun

Anyway, here is today's Dick Morris:
http://www.dickmorris.com/obama-throws-hillary-under-the-bus-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

I enjoyed it too.  I have been wondering about the credibility of Blood Feud author Ed Klein, once of Newsweek and referenced by Dick Morris.  Here he was ripped pretty badly for accuracy and sourcing by liberal radio on his 2005 Hillary book.  They are a little unfair to him, but mostly make the point he is willing to just repeat juicy things, unverified, to make a buck.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/watch-ed-klein-author-clinton-obama-smear-books-met-joe-conason-al-franken/

False but true, the overall point stands; there is a divide between the Clinton and Obama camps and it will get worse when she has to define how she is different.

[DougMacG]

One more liberal pundit, Washington Post's David Ignatius,  "I'm still not certain she's going to be a candidate."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/03/17/ignatius_on_hillary_clinton_im_not_certain_shes_going_to_be_a_candidate.html

Me neither.   

[Crafty_Dog]

http://freebeacon.com/blog/7-years-ago-today-hillary-said-she-came-under-sniper-fire-in-bosnia-was-called-out-by-sinbad/

[DougMacG]

Secretary of the Treasury isn't really a position of slouch.  The position, high in the order of succession to the Presidency, was held by many distinguished Americans including Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Mellon, George Schultz.  Now enter Jack Lew of the most transparent administration.  Did he notice Hillary used an email address not of the state.gov variety.  He was, after all, Undersecretary of State reporting to her.  He isn't able to even say the words, I don't recall.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/03/jack-lew-clams-up.php

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One other point on Clinton emails.  The system was set up by "President Clinton", is guarded 24/7 by Secret Service, is used presumably to take care of his official duties as former President among other things.  If so, then most likely it was paid for in full or in part with federal dollars, which makes it a public asset subject to oversight by Congress.  No?

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.dickmorris.com/the-clintons-personally-made-millions-from-quid-pro-quo-with-u-a-e-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

[DougMacG]

http://www.dickmorris.com/the-clintons-personally-made-millions-from-quid-pro-quo-with-u-a-e-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

It's hard to fathom the scale of the Clinton misdeeds, but remember the other William Jefferson - the Louisiana Congressman who got caught with $90,000 CASH in his freezer.  It is quite a vivid kickback that people can visualize and remember.  This allegation is to line up 222 of those stocked freezers throughout the Clinton household when the Feds come in to search.  Instead of sneaking in, it is done by wire transfer right under the Feds' watch.

Maybe the new Attorney General will open an investigation.  Lol.

[Crafty_Dog]

Did Foreign Governments Buy Influence With Hillary?
(http://patriotpost.us/posts/34031)

Hillary Clinton may be too mired in international connections to be an
unbiased president -- or hold any other public office for that matter. While
the Clintons couldn't accept donations from foreign governments to the Clinton
Foundation (http://patriotpost.us/articles/33399) while Hillary was secretary
of state, it didn't stop politicians in high positions in the Ukrainian,
Chinese and Saudi Arabian governments from giving millions. The Wall Street
Journal

(http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-charity-tapped-foreign-friends-1426818602)
reports, "All told, more than a dozen foreign individuals and their
foundations and companies were large donors to the Clinton Foundation in the
years after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, collectively
giving between $34 million and $68 million, foundation records show. Some
donors also provided funding directly to charitable projects sponsored by the
foundation, valued by the organization at $60 million." While every donor WSJ
spoke with claimed they were only giving to a charity they believed in, they
also had the potential to buy Clinton's attention. The Clintons certainly know
how to play this shadowy political game, as Hillary just happened to stall on
disclosing the donors

(http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/19/hillary-clintons-scandal-is-blowing-up-in-the-press-no-the-other-one/)
to her charity.

[DougMacG]

My first search to find Hillary commodity trading scandal background information brought up this thread as a top ten search result!  I've looked through some WSJ material from the 1990s but found neither the article Crafty referenced nor the editorial that I remember.  One interesting point at the start is that it was the NYT that first brought forward the story.  Her earliest explanation was that she got her information from the WSJ.  In response, the editors said we're flattered but no, it doesn't work that way.

In fact, the odds of doing what she did without cheating the system are one in 31 trillion against her, best case.  Assuming that the return is made in the most efficient way possible, this probability falls to approximately 1.5×10−16.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02920493
As the joke goes, so you're sayin' I got a shot!

What really was going on?

The person feeding her information and hand placing her trades with hindsight was chief counsel to one of the state's most powerful companies as her husband was Attorney General and leading candidate for Governor.  In crony corruption language, quid pro quo is the exchange of goods or services where one transfer is contingent upon the other.  "During Mr. Clinton's tenure as Governor, Tyson benefited from several state decisions, including favorable environmental rulings, $9 million in state loans, and the placement of company executives on important state boards."  (http://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/30/us/hillary-clinton-turned-1000-into-99540-white-house-says.html)


Politico, March 10, 2015
A few days after Hubbell’s resignation [Hillary's law partner who plead guilty for bilking clients], the New York Times ran a lengthy story about Hillary’s commodity trades. Her aides and lawyers had finally provided financial records to the Times, but only after the newspaper made clear that it was preparing to publish a detailed account of her trading profits.

Initially, senior aides to the Clintons said in March 1994 that Hillary “based her trades on information in the Wall Street Journal.” That explanation was subsequently dropped. An aide to Hillary then said she had withdrawn from the market in the fall of 1979 because she had found trading too nerve-racking in the final months of her pregnancy. But another White House aide quickly declared that excuse “inoperative” after it was disclosed in April 1994 that Hillary made $6,500 in a commodities-trading venture in 1980 but failed to report that profit to the IRS.

Shortly after that, Hillary took responsibility—in her standard combination of singular acknowledgment and plural blame—for her aides’ confusing answers to reporters, saying they stemmed from her being away, working on other issues. “I probably did not spend enough time, get as precise,” she explained, “so I think that the confusion was our responsibility.”

[No criminal investigation was made because the statute of limitations had long expired before the tax returns were made available.]


They note the similarity to the private email scandal press conference and a similar one in 1994:

By mid-April [1994], Hillary’s approval ratings had dropped from 56 percent the year before to 44 percent, a historically low mark for a First Lady. Aides knew that Hillary’s stubborn reluctance to speak with the press was one of the sources of the public’s displeasure with her. For weeks, her aides and friends had urged her to con- front the negative reports and innuendos in an open, candid way. It was one thing to stay in the background, but by not providing Americans with an example different from her initially off-putting public appearance, she was leaving it to her political enemies to define her.
In late April, Hillary told her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, “I want to do it. Let’s call a press conference.”
“You know you’ll have to answer all questions, no matter what they throw at you,” Williams responded.
“I know. I’m ready.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-emails-pink-press-conferences-115952_Page2.html#ixzz3VDuOabvg

[Crafty_Dog]

Nice work Doug!

"My first search to find Hillary commodity trading scandal background information brought up this thread as a top ten search result!"

Well done gentlemen!

   

Very good article, though I would LOVE to find that article that I remember in the WSJ.  Now thanks to this article here we have a much more narrowly defined time range to define our search.   What I remember of the article was that it appeared on the editorial page and was written by the man who had been the IRS attorney in charge of prosecuting tax frauds manipulating "commodity straddles".

[DougMacG]

Mrs. Clinton traded with Mr. Bone[known crook], the chief broker in 1978 at the Springdale, Ark., offices of Ray E. Friedman & Co., or Refco. In 1981, Mr. Bone was fined $100,000 and barred from trading for three years after an investigation of allegations that he had been allocating winning positions to favored clients.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/27/us/new-records-outline-favor-for-hillary-clinton-on-trades.html


Crafty: "...I would LOVE to find that article that I remember in the WSJ.  Now thanks to this article here we have a much more narrowly defined time range to define our search.   What I remember of the article was that it appeared on the editorial page and was written by the man who had been the IRS attorney in charge of prosecuting tax frauds manipulating "commodity straddles".  "

My subscription-based searching powers have expired but I will try with library resources when time permits.

[Crafty_Dog]

Excellent find on the NYT article.  Email me about researching the WSJ for that article.

[Crafty_Dog]

Hillary Can't Type: Look To Huma's and Cheryl's Emails; See 2016 Buzz

By DICK MORRIS

Published on TheDailyHillary.com on March 23, 2015

Don't expect a gold mine of emails on Hillary's private account.  Why not? Because
she doesn't know how to type.  That's right.  She writes everything out in longhand.
 Really.  Anyone who has spent time in meetings with her knows about her endless
yellow pads.

So her emails will most likely turn out to be very short and quick.  She wouldn't
spend a lot of time pecking out long letters.  No way.  That's why the Benghazi
Committee needs to also look very closely at the emails on private accounts that
Hillary's closest aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, maintained.  Anything more
than a few lines were most likely written by someone else on her behalf.  There's a
reason why Hillary set up and used private emails with them for official business:
all the important emails were likely written by her staff.  Without access to them,
we won't know what was going on.

The Clintons never used the White House computer for their own work.  Hillary even
wrote (or copied) her book manuscripts in long hand.  Although ghost writer Barbara
Fineman was paid $120,000 for writing It Takes A Village, she proudly waved hundreds
of hand-written pages on yellow legal pads to pretend she wrote it all herself.  She
never acknowledged Fineman's work.

Bill can't type either.  When I wrote his 1995 State of the Union Speech, I typed it
on an IBM Selectric that the White House dug up from the basement.  He told me that
he didn't want me to put it in the official computer system, because then his staff
would see it.

So, he carefully copied every word in his distinctive left hand penmanship.  I still
have a copy of it.  Then he pretended that he had written it himself.

The Clintons have figured out every which way to avoid disclosure of what they want
to keep private.  So don't expect a smoking gun in Hillary's emails.

Look, instead, to Huma, Cheryl, Jake Sullivan, and Philippe Reines -- if they still
exist.


Here's Exactly Why Hillary Kept Secret Email Accounts In Her House: See How Justice
Dept. Defends In Court

HERE'S EXACTLY WHY HILLARY KEPT SECRET EMAIL ACCOUNTS IN HER HOUSE: SEE HOW JUSTICE
DEPT. DEFENDS IN COURT

By EILEEN MCGANN

If there is actually anyone on the planet who has any doubts about why Hillary kept
a secret email server in her Chappaqua house, guarded by the Secret Service, a quick
look at the Justice Department's response to Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information
request for Hillary's emails will clear things up.  You can read it here:
http://list.dickmorris.com/t/687253/613051/7757/2/

Judicial Watch wants emails related to the Iran sanctions.  In defending the State
Department for failing to produce and records and not disposing Hillary's secret
emails, the Justice Department makes the case that any documents that are not under
their control are not covered by the Freedom of Information Act and, therefore, the
State Department has no obligation to search them.  Since Hillary -- and not the
State Department -- controlled them, they have no obligation to do anything with
them.

The government relied on a U.S. Supreme Court case against Hillary's newest pal,
Henry Kissinger.  Kissinger had his secretaries listen in to all of his phone calls
and take notes.

Hillary knew that would be their response and that's precisely why she went to the
trouble and expense of creating her own server.  The notoriously cheap Clintons,
used to the government and rich friends paying their tabs, made a point of leaking
that President Clinton paid for the server.  That's a first.  But it's important
because, presumably, if the Government paid for it, they could assert control.

Hillary and her lawyers thought of everything.  And now the Justice Department is
following the script that Hillary anticipated when she set up the secret system in
2009 just before she was sworn in as Secretary of State.  She wasn't taking any
chances that some government document could undermine her anticipated presidential
campaign.

And so far, it's working.  Here's what the Justice Department argued to the court:

"FOIA creates no obligation for an agency to search for and produce records that it
does not possess and control. See Kissinger v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the
Press, 445 U.S. 136, 152, 154-55 (1980); Nat'l Sec. Archive v. Archivist of the
U.S., 909 F.2d 541, 545 (D.C. Cir. 1990); Competitive Enterprise Institute v. Office
of Science and Technology Policy, ___ F. Supp. 2d ___, 2015 WL 967549, at *4-5
(D.D.C. Mar. 3, 2015). It certainly provides no basis for a court to issue a
subpoena for such documents." (Emphasis added.)

That's what Hillary is counting on.

But now the State Department has the emails that Hillary hand-picked to turn over.
So, it's hard to argue that they don't have to search at least those documents.
Instead, they want to be able to post them all on a web site.  Why?  That way we
will be the ones who have to search through 55,000 pages, not them.  If they were
required to comply with FOI, they would have to identify the responsive documents.
Oh, and by the way, Hillary's decision to hand over hard copies, instead of
electronic files was another ploy to make searching the documents more difficult.
There's no way to do a word search on manual documents.  She's not going to make
this one easy. It's typical Hillary -- hide, obfuscate, delay, stretch the legal
boundaries while screaming about the rights to keep private emails about your
mother's funeral.

The government's reliance on the Kissinger case is interesting.  Although the
Supreme Court recognized that transcripts of Kissinger's phone calls were official
records that were wrongfully removed, it found that only government agencies -- and
not the press or individuals -- could sue for their return.  Kissinger had taken the
transcripts from the State Department and placed them in a safe on the estate of
Nelson Rockefeller. (Conspiracy theorists, take note).  Eventually, he gave them to
the Library of Congress, which is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act.  He
signed an agreement barring public access until either 25 years after the donation
or 5 years after his death -- whatever is later.  But just recently, Kissinger
agreed that the transcripts and other papers of his can be made public.  Even
Kissinger finally came around to recognize the public's right to documents created
in the course of official government business.  Hillary should follow in his
footsteps.

Things are definitely heating up, but it's just the beginning.  Judicial Watch also
requested access to Hillary's server.  Last week, the Benghazi Committee subpoenaed
the server.  There are multiple pending Freedom of Information requests for her
emails, And the Benghazi Committee is looking at other people's emails, too -- like
Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.  Stay tuned.

[Crafty_Dog]

Hillary’s Record: Free of Accomplishments, Full of Setbacks
by Thomas Sowell
March 24, 2015 12:00 AM

The case for her in 2016 boils down to demographic symbolism. It is amazing how a simple question can cause a complex lie to collapse like a house of cards. The simple question was asked by Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, and it was addressed to two Democrats. He asked what has Hillary Clinton ever accomplished. The two Democrats immediately sidestepped the question and started reciting their talking points in favor of Hillary. But O’Reilly kept coming back to the fact that nothing they were talking about was an accomplishment. For someone who has spent her entire adult life in politics, including being a senator and then a secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has nothing to show for all those years — no significant legislation of hers that she got passed in the Senate, and only an unbroken series of international setbacks for the United States during her time as secretary of state. Before Barack Obama entered the White House and appointed Mrs. Clinton secretary of state, al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq had notified their higher-ups, stationed in Pakistan, that their cause was lost in Iraq and that there was no point sending more men there. Hosni Mubarak was in charge in Egypt. He posed no threat to American or Western interests in the Middle East or to Christians within Egypt or to Israel. But the Obama administration threw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over and began terrorizing Christians in Egypt and promoting hostility to Israel. In Libya next door, the Qaddafi regime had already given up its weapons of mass destruction, after they saw what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But President Obama’s foreign policy, carried out by Secretary of State Clinton, got Qaddafi removed, after which Libya became a terrorist haven where an American ambassador was killed, for the first time in decades. The rationale for getting rid of Middle East leaders who posed no threat to American interests was that they were undemocratic and their people were restless. But there are no democracies in the Middle East, except for Israel. Moreover, the people were restless in Iran and Syria, and the Obama-Clinton foreign policy did nothing to support those who were trying to overthrow these regimes. It would be only fair to balance this picture with foreign-policy triumphs of the Obama-Clinton team. But there are none. Not in the Middle East, not in Europe, where the Russians have invaded the Crimea, and not in Asia, where both China and North Korea are building up threatening military forces, while the Obama administration has been cutting back on American military forces. Hillary Clinton became an iconic figure by feeding the media and the Left the kind of rhetoric they love. Barack Obama did the same and became president. Neither had any concrete accomplishments beforehand besides rhetoric, and both have had the opposite of accomplishments after taking office. They have something else in common. They attract the votes of those people who vote for demographic symbolism — “the first black president” to be followed by “the first woman president” — and neither is to be criticized, lest you be denounced for racism or sexism. It is staggering that there are sane adults who can vote for someone to be president of the United States as if they are in school, just voting for “most popular boy” or “most popular girl” — or, worse yet, voting for someone who will give them free stuff. Whoever holds that office makes decisions involving the life and death of Americans and — especially if Iran gets a nuclear arsenal — the life and death of this nation. It took just two nuclear bombs — neither of them as powerful as those available today — to get a very tough nation like Japan to surrender. Anyone familiar with World War II battles in the Pacific knows that it was not unusual for 90 percent of the Japanese troops defending Iwo Jima or other islands to fight to the death, even after it was clear that American troops had them beaten. When people like that surrender after two nuclear bombs, do not imagine that today’s soft Americans — led by the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton — will fight on after New York and Chicago have been reduced to radioactive ashes. Meanwhile, ISIS and other terrorists are giving us a free demonstration of what surrender would mean. But perhaps we can kick the can down the road, and leave that as a legacy to our children and grandchildren, along with the national debt. — Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is http://www.tsowell.com. © 2015 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415855/hillarys-record-free-accomplishments-full-setbacks-thomas-sowell

[Crafty_Dog]

http://conservativetribune.com/gowdy-threatens-hillary-arrest/

[DougMacG]

...  I would LOVE to find that article that I remember in the WSJ.  Now thanks to this article here we have a much more narrowly defined time range to define our search.   What I remember of the article was that it appeared on the editorial page and was written by the man who had been the IRS attorney in charge of prosecuting tax frauds manipulating "commodity straddles".

Emailed to me this morning by James Taranto, Deputy Editor of the WSJ.   )

The Mystery of Hillary's Trades
By David L. Brandon
1724 words
7 April 1994
The Wall Street Journal
J
PAGE A14
English
(Copyright (c) 1994, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)
As former head of the IRS chief counsel's Commodities Industry Specialization Team in the mid-1980s, I have followed with great interest the media stories on Hillary Clinton's excellent adventures in the commodities markets. As a proud capitalist and free market proponent (and an avid beef eater), I would be the first in line to salute this woman's success with cattle futures. But based on my years of experience with these markets, her story just doesn't add up. In fact, the chances of someone making almost $100,000 in the futures markets on her first try are about as great as walking into a casino in Las Vegas, hitting the million-dollar jackpot on your first try at the slots, then walking out never to play again. It just doesn't happen that way.

For those unfamiliar with the details of Mrs. Clinton's remarkable venture into the commodities markets, she allegedly made more than $99,000 in cattle futures (and other commodities) in late 1978 and 1979, withdrawing from trading just before the markets went bust. No explanation has been offered of how Mrs. Clinton managed to satisfy state laws that require futures investors to demonstrate a minimum net income and net worth, nor how a novice could have such uncanny timing.

There is, in fact, a much more probable explanation for Mrs. Clinton's good fortune. The media have already suggested that trades may have been moved to Mrs. Clinton's account after gains had been realized. However, the stories thus far have not clearly focused on a common trading strategy called a "straddle" that was very much in vogue at the time.

Straddles have the unique ability to produce exactly equal and offsetting gains and losses that can be transferred or used by the straddle trader for a variety of purposes. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, straddles were used for all kinds of illegal activities, ranging from tax evasion to money-laundering and bribes. In fact, this activity prompted a number of legal and regulatory changes by the Reagan administration to curb the abuses.

Although it sounds somewhat esoteric, a commodities straddle is a relatively simple trading device.

A commodities futures contract is nothing more than an agreement between two parties to buy or sell a certain type of commodity (in Mrs. Clinton's case, cattle) for a stated price on some date in the future. If the price of the commodity goes up before the contract delivery date, the individual who agreed to buy the commodity will realize a gain equal to the difference between the current price and the contract price. The individual who agreed to sell will realize a loss in an equal amount. Conversely, if the price goes down, the buyer will lose and the seller will gain.

A straddle is created when an investor enters into contracts to both buy and sell the same commodity. In this case, any gain on one contract will be exactly offset by a loss on the opposite contract. While straddle trading today is used in a variety of legitimate ways, these transactions lend themselves to all sorts of abuses as well. Before regulatory changes in the 1980s, it was common to enter into straddles to wipe out large capital gains for tax purposes. For example, an investor who realized a $100,000 capital gain in the stock market might enter into a large straddle in the commodities market. When the commodity price moved, the investor would close the loss leg of the straddle and realize a $100,000 loss, which offset his gain in the stock market. The investor was not required to report the unrealized $100,000 gain in the opposite leg of the straddle until that leg was closed in the following year. Typically, the investor entered into another straddle in the following year, thereby indefinitely rolling over the capital gain into subsequent years.

Another ploy common during that time required the assistance of a friendly broker. An investor could create a straddle using two separate investment accounts with his broker. After the straddle had moved, so that a gain and an offsetting loss had been created, the friendly broker simply wrote in the name of the investor's tax-exempt retirement fund on the account that held the gain leg of the straddle. The result was that a loss was realized that was reported on the investor's tax return, while the gain went unreported in the tax-exempt retirement account.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the IRS began noticing large numbers of individual tax returns that curiously showed commodities losses just big enough to wipe out unrelated capital gains; no corresponding commodities gains, which would suggest a straddle, ever appeared on subsequent returns. Even more curiously, the profile of these investors always had one thing in common, which was limited experience or no prior experience in commodities trading. In the early 1980s, an IRS agent in Chicago thought to look into one taxpayer's retirement fund and, of course, found the hidden gain leg of the straddle.

After that experience, the IRS redoubled its efforts to seek out thousands of missing straddle gains. It found them in retirement accounts, in London, in the Cayman Islands -- almost anywhere a taxpayer thought he might hide them from the IRS. With respect to these thousands of mysterious, isolated commodities transactions that showed up on tax returns, the IRS uncovered some form of questionable trading in virtually 100% of the cases it investigated. Well before the close of the 1980s, the IRS had assessed more than $7 billion in delinquent taxes and penalties attributable to these transactions and eventually settled these cases out of court for approximately $3.5 billion.

While most of the IRS's efforts were directed at finding hidden gains of the ubiquitous straddle, the trading device could just as easily be used to openly transfer gains while hiding the offsetting loss. If someone desired to make an illicit payment to another party, a straddle could be used to accomplish this purpose with no incriminating or suspicious-looking bank withdrawals or deposits. In fact, the IRS found numerous incidents of straddles being used for money-laundering purposes.

Does Mrs. Clinton's trading activity fit the profile of the illegitimate straddle trader? She was a novice in the commodities markets who, against all odds, realized large gains. Although she intermittently realized losses, it does not appear that she ever had to risk her own capital beyond her initial $1,000 deposit, which itself may have been insufficient to cover even her first transaction (which netted her $5,300). According to the trading records released by the White House, most of Mrs. Clinton's gains were recorded as intra-month transactions. This means that these records include no information regarding key elements of the trade, such as the type and quantity of the contracts, acquisition dates, acquisition prices, etc. Such information is needed to determine whether trades were part of a prearranged straddle.

It also appears that Mrs. Clinton's broker, Robert L. "Red" Bone, was no stranger to the spicier practices of commodities trading, according to The Wall Street Journal's front-page article last Friday.

It seems more than coincidental that Mr. Bone was a former employee of Tyson Foods and that Mrs. Clinton's investment adviser, James Blair, was the company's legal counsel. Tyson, the poultry concern, is one of the largest employers in the state of Arkansas. The fact that the Clintons withheld disclosing only those tax returns that included their commodities gains until the transactions were reported by the New York Times in February also appears quite suspicious. From my standpoint as a former government staff attorney with extensive experience in these matters, Mrs. Clinton's windfall in the late 1970s has all the trappings of pre-arranged trades.

How would a straddle have been used in Mrs. Clinton's case? The Journal has already reported that gains theoretically could have been transferred to Mrs. Clinton's account, while "others" may have absorbed losses. Such a transaction could be accomplished with a straddle.

A party desiring to transfer cash to another's personal account for legal or illegal purposes could enter into a straddle in a particularly volatile commodity, such as cattle futures in the late 1970s. After gains and losses were generated in the opposite sides of the straddle, the gain side would be marked to the beneficiary's account, while the loss side would remain in the account of the contributor. The contributor might even be entitled to use the loss to offset other gains. Such a transaction would be not only well-hidden from government authorities but potentially tax-deductible.

No direct evidence of wrongdoing has been produced in the case of Mrs. Clinton's trading activity. In fact, no conclusive evidence of anything has been produced. In order to settle the legitimate questions surrounding her trades, a satisfactory explanation is needed for her apparently low initial margin deposit and whether the requirements relating to an investor's minimum net income and net worth were satisfied. In addition, the details of her numerous intra-month trades should be provided, as well as the details of the trades of persons who may have had a special interest in how well she did. If it is discovered that certain interested parties happened to realize losses in cattle futures at the same time, and they were comparable in size to the gains reported by Mrs. Clinton, this would amount to a "smoking gun."

This is not a matter of partisan politics. Even if the public had never heard of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the circumstances surrounding her unusual good fortune would still appear suspicious to anyone awake to abuses of the commodities markets. In this writer's experience, the normal trading world just doesn't work that way.

---

Mr. Brandon was a career attorney in the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 1989. During that time he also served as head of that department's Commodity Industry Specialization Team, which was responsible for coordinating and developing the IRS's legal positions on tax issues arising in connection with commodities transactions.

Dow Jones & Company

Document j000000020011029dq470095u

[ccp]

None of this stuff will stop the Clinton machine.  No matter what we hear the first response is, "no laws were broken".  Every single time and the machine rolls ahead.

The MSM fawns and the opposition just twists and wrings our hands in frustration.   

[DougMacG]

None of this stuff will stop the Clinton machine.  No matter what we hear the first response is, "no laws were broken".  Every single time and the machine rolls ahead.
The MSM fawns and the opposition just twists and wrings our hands in frustration.  

Yes, but laws WERE broken.  

That was Politico and NYTimes bringing it up again.

The Clinton machine was impotent in 2007-2008.  Their last national win was in 1996 when the youngest voters of 2016 were -2 years old.  Even then, with Bill's magic and a very weak opponent, they never won 50% of the vote.  

And she doesn't have his skills.

[ccp]

Answer:

Nothing.   Clinton has obstructed justice for decades.   Now she is the Democrat Party's premiere candidate.   Unless we have an O'Malley/Warren ticket challenge.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/benghazi-chairman-clinton-wiped-private-email-server-%e2%80%98clean%e2%80%99/ar-AAa7d9t

Could anyone imagine if a lower level government employee did this?

[DougMacG]

http://news.yahoo.com/did-hillary-clinton-destroy-evidence-wiping-clean-her-204359982.html
Did Hillary Clinton destroy evidence in 'wiping clean' her email server?  [Yes.]
Friday was the deadline for Hillary Clinton to respond to a congressional subpoena for emails and documents related to the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. She provided nothing since her email server had been wiped clean.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Her server is not the only place where her emails resided.  Deletion alone doesn't destroy all the information.  The steps they took to go further than that like demagnetization or dropping it into the Hudson River in the middle of the night are bound to look bad politically.  I share ccp's concern,  but don't believe this goes away just because she is a Clinton.  I saw one of her hacks on Meet the depressed tell us to move on and talk about issues that are important, but I did not see even the mainstreamers buying it.

If we are being outsmarted here by the Clintons, it can only be that they manufactured this scandal intentionally to distract from larger ones still hidden. 

This is only one of her problems.  She lacks the political skills of Bill, Barack, Reagan, Rubio, etc.    Her policies don't work.  She lacks separation from Obama.  They hid their records and stole from the White House last time they were leaving.  We still don't know what Bill was doing on Pedaphilia Island or where Hillary was help was not sent to Benghazi.  She has resume, but lacks accomplishments.   Not just as Secretary of State, but her policy debut as First Lady, and her experience when they took majority in the Senate.  Everything they did made things worse.  Her Russian reset didn't work.  Her Libyan overthrow didn't work.  Her economic ideas failed.  Her health care debut blew up.  Even the commodities straddles remain unanswered.   She won't be able to say anything like the most transparent administration ever is coming without even her own supporters breaking out in laughter.  Not exactly a dream come true for America in 2016.

All she can honestly is what an aide said about them, they lie with such ease.

[DougMacG]

I should add that Bill doesn't have the political skills of the Bill that we remember anymore either.

George Will piles on and remember his Washington Post columns extend out further than what right wing sites can reach.  He politely concludes with "voters will make an informed choice".  

When she announces she isn't running (and leaves the scene gracefully) we can finally let all this Clinton ugliness rest.  George Will is kind to say Bill looks grandfatherly.  The photo with it makes him look great-grandfatherly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/remembrance-of-clintons-past/2015/03/27/839f5d3a-d3db-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html

An abscess of anger seems to gnaw at Hillary Clinton, but the reasons for her resentments remain unclear. The world’s oldest party, which governed the nation during two world wars and is the primary architect of America’s regulatory and redistributive state, is eager to give her its presidential nomination, in recognition of . . . what?

The party, adrift in identity politics, clings, as shipwrecked sailors do to floating debris, to this odd feminist heroine. Wafted into the upper reaches of American politics by stolid participation in her eventful marriage to a serial philanderer, her performance in governance has been defined by three failures.

Her husband, having assured the 1992 electorate that voting for him meant getting “two for the price of one,” entrusted to her the project that he, in a harbinger of the next Democratic president’s mistake, made his immediate priority — health-care reform. Then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) urged him to begin with welfare reform, just as wise Democrats wanted President Obama to devote 2009 to economic recovery rather than health care, perhaps sparing the nation six years and counting of economic sluggishness.

Hillary Clinton enveloped her health-care deliberations in secrecy, assembling behind closed doors battalions of the best and the brightest — think of many Jonathan Grubers weaving complexities for the good of, but beyond the comprehension of, the public. When their handiwork was unveiled, it was so baroque that neither house of a Congress controlled by her party would even vote on it. This was one reason that in 1994 Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years — a harbinger of 2010, when Obamacare helped end Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as the first female speaker.

Clinton’s Senate interlude was an uneventful prelude to her 2008 presidential quest, which earned her, as a consolation prize, the State Department. There her tenure was defined by the “reset” with Russia and by regime-change-by-bombers in Libya.

Russia has responded by violently dismembering a European nation. Libya was the object of “humanitarian intervention,” an echo of Bill Clinton’s engagement in the Balkans that appealed to progressives because it was connected only tenuously, if at all, to U.S. national interests. Today, Libya is a humanitarian calamity, a failed state convulsed by civil war and exporting jihadists.

These episodes supposedly recommend a re-immersion in Clintonism, a phenomenon that in 2001 moved The Post to say, more in anger than in sorrow, that “the Clintons’ defining characteristic” is that “they have no capacity for embarrassment.” This judgment was rendered as two episodes were demonstrating that the Clintons in power were defined by their manner of leaving it.

Bill Clinton punctuated his presidency by pardoning the late Marc Rich, a fugitive who 17 years earlier had been indicted for tax evasion, fraud and racketeering. Rich also traded with Libya and South Africa in contravention of embargos and traded with Iran during the hostage crisis. His former wife reportedly contributed more than $1 million to assorted Democratic causes, $450,000 for Clinton’s presidential library and $10,000 to the legal defense fund necessitated by Clinton’s glandular life that led to the Supreme Court effectively disbarring him from practicing before it.

A year before the Clintons decamped from Washington to begin planning their return to it, they began trucking away from the White House $190,000 worth of furnishings. Perhaps exigencies dictated this; the couple was, Hillary Clinton says, “dead broke.” The furnishings became, as things often do with the Clintons, another occasion for an “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” tiptoe along the ledge of illegality. The White House chief usher thought many of the items were government property donated in 1993 to a redecoration project. Several donors of items said they were told this. Although the Clintons said that all the removed furnishings were personal gifts, they returned $28,000 worth of them.

As Hillary Clinton begins her campaign to again reside with the White House furnishings, remember an episode perhaps pertinent to the family penchant for secrecy and to her personal e-mail server. Sandy Berger, who had been President Clinton’s national security adviser, was his designated representative to the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks that occurred less than nine months after Clinton left office. While representing Clinton, Berger frequented the National Archives. Later, he was fined $50,000 for surreptitiously taking highly classified documents from the Archives and destroying some of them.

Another Clinton presidency probably would include a reprise of the couple’s well-known patterns of behavior. Voters will make an informed choice.

[DougMacG]

While we are remembering Hillary, remember her task force.  George Will said, think of a room full of Grubers.  They had all the secrecy they later accused Cheney's energy task force of.  The public hated the plan.  Dems lost Congress because of it, and Hillary was banned from policy assignments be her own husband.  Now she runs on her record?!  She led and they created a bureaucratic flow chart where people  in a hundred agencies, believed to be smarter than all of us combined making individual choices, make our decisions for us.  A version of this is now called Obamacare.

[Crafty_Dog]

Pasting Obj.'s post in Islam in America here

Revived Questions about Huma Abedin

Posted By Matthew Vadum On March 31, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com

Republican lawmakers are probing why Hillary Clinton’s longtime Islamist aide Huma Abedin was allowed to work at the State Department under a special, part-time status while simultaneously working at a politically-connected consulting firm.

Demands for information are coming from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) after the public learned both women used Clinton’s private Internet server and email accounts for Department of State correspondence.

But that’s only part of the endless sleaze and intrigue surrounding Clinton.

The media has also reported that Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton administration damage-control expert known for his relentless attacks on Clinton family enemies and for being the father of Israel-hating pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal, was apparently doing freelance work for Mrs. Clinton. Clinton tried to hire the elder Blumenthal at State but the Obama White House nixed the appointment because of Blumenthal’s aggressively slimy attacks on Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

After Blumenthal’s email was hacked in 2013, it was revealed that “starting weeks before” the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, “Blumenthal supplied intelligence” to then-Secretary Clinton that was “gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.”

Reports got some of the details wrong, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto.

“The reporters asked the most obvious question and got a partial answer: ‘A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica . . . that she has turned over’—meaning to the State Department—’all the emails Blumenthal sent to [Mrs.] Clinton,'” he writes.

That is incorrect, Taranto notes. “n reality she turned over no emails, only printouts,” which are of limited value as evidence.

Meanwhile, as evidence continues to accumulate that Clinton’s cavalier approach to state secrets put U.S. national security in jeopardy, the shady background of Abedin, who has known ties to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, is barely acknowledged on Capitol Hill.

Instead of examining Abedin’s disturbing family ties that make her employment by the U.S. government a threat to national security, Grassley is honing in on the sweetheart arrangement that allowed the operative to get on the public payroll while raking in money from private consulting.

Well, it’s a start, at least.

Grassley complains that many previous requests to the Department of State for information have gone unanswered, so now he is sending requests to the agency’s inspector general and to Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry.

It was about two years ago that Grassley demanded information about Abedin after she moved from being a full-time deputy chief of staff for Clinton to part-time status and then began working at Teneo, a politically connected consulting firm that claims to bring “together the disciplines of government and public affairs.”

In a July 2013 letter the State Department indicated Abedin was employed full-time from January 2009 to June 2012. It also indicated she did not disclose outside employment when ending her full-time status. The department kept her on as an adviser-expert, apparently at the hourly rate of $74.51 with maximum pay of $155,500 per year.

“A number of conflict-of-interest concerns arise when a government employee is simultaneously being paid by a private company, especially when that company (is) Teneo,” Grassley wrote in a March 19 letter to Kerry.

Grassley asked in the letter “what steps the department took to ensure that … Abedin’s outside employment with a political-intelligence and corporate-advisory firm did not conflict with her simultaneous employment at the State Department.”

“She converted from a full-time employee … with seemingly little difference in her job description or responsibilities,” he wrote. In essence Abedin retained the same job and was later hired by Teneo and the Clinton Global Initiative.

“It is unclear what special knowledge or skills Ms. Abedin possessed that the government could not have easily obtained otherwise from regular government employees,” Grassley wrote.

Grassley’s questions also come after the House Benghazi Select Committee learned that the former secretary of state deleted all the emails investigators were interesting in looking at.

On Friday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement, “We learned today, from her attorney, Secretary [Hillary] Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server.”

Destroying the electronic correspondence could be a federal crime since the documents were under congressional subpoena. As Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner,

“There’s no doubt Clinton withheld information that Congress demanded she turn over, and some Republicans believe the documents she destroyed were covered under a subpoena as well. But a look at the story behind the subpoena and other document requests from congressional Benghazi investigators is a tale of obstruction, delay and frustration that underscores the limits of Congress’ power to investigate Benghazi. Clinton and her aides had the means to make life very difficult for Republicans trying to learn the full story of the attacks in Libya, and they did just that.”

Disturbingly, Republicans have yet to focus on Abedin’s ties to the world of Islamic terrorism.

Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abedin’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood run deep. (She is also reportedly just as haughty and unpleasant to deal with as Clinton herself.)

Her mother is Saleha Mahmood Abedin, widow of the late Zyed Abedin, an academic who taught at Saudi Arabia’s prestigious King Abdulaziz University in the early 1970s. The year after Huma was born, Mrs. Abedin received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1978 the Abedins moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Abdullah Omar Naseef, then-vice president of Abdulaziz University, hired Mr. Abedin, a former colleague of his at the university, to work for the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), a Saudi-based Islamic think tank Naseef was then in the process of establishing. Mr. and Mrs. Abedin became members of the editorial board of IMMA’s publication, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. According to Andrew C. McCarthy, IMMA’s “Muslim Minority Affairs” agenda is “to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West.”

Naseef himself was a Muslim extremist with ties to al-Qaeda. In 1983 he became secretary-general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a militant organization with links to Osama bin Laden. Mrs. Abedin became an official representative of MWL in the 1990s. When her husband died in 1994, Mrs. Abedin became the IMMA’s director. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of its journal.

Mrs. Abedin is also a member of the board of the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR), which has long been banned in Israel because it has ties to Hamas. (In Arabic, dawah, or dawa, means the proselytizing or preaching of Islam.) She also runs the Amman, Jordan-based International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), a Muslim World League affiliate that self-identifies as part of the IICDR. The league, according to McCarthy, “has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.” IICWC promotes strict Sharia Law and advocates the rescission of Egyptian laws that forbid female genital mutilation, child marriage, and marital rape.

Mrs. Abedin is a founding member of the Muslim Sisterhood, a pro-Sharia organization consisting of the wives of some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian opposition newspaper Al-Liwa Al-Arabi has reported that Muslim Sisterhood members: “smuggle secret documents”; “spread the Brotherhood’s ideology by infiltrating universities, schools and homes”; “fulfill the interests of the Brotherhood”; and “organiz[e] projects which will penetrate [the Brotherhood’s] prohibited ideology into the decision-making in the West … under the guise of ‘general needs of women.’” Nagla Ali Mahmoud, wife of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist who was elected president of Egypt in June 2012, is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood.

When Huma Abedin returned to the U.S. and was an intern in the Clinton White House between 1997 and some time in 1999, she was a member of the executive board of George Washington University’s radical Muslim Students Association (MSA). The MSA had extensive ties to al-Qaeda.

From 1996 to 2008, Abedin was employed by IMMA as assistant editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

Her brother, Hassan Abedin, an associate editor at the journal, was at one time a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. During his fellowship, the Center’s board included such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated figures as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Abdullah Omar Naseef. Huma’s sister, Heba Abedin, is an assistant editor with the journal.

Someone with Abedin’s background shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of power in Washington.

Yet Hillary Clinton trusted her with vital secrets of state and then erased their electronic correspondence.

What are these two women hiding?

[Crafty_Dog]

Doug!!!

You are AWESOME!!!  THAT IS THE ARTICLE!!!  How did you pull off finding it?  How did you get all  the way up the food chain to James Taranto?   I am impressed!

[Crafty_Dog]

Third post

Notable & Quotable: Bill Clinton on Religious Freedom
‘Government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone’s free exercise of religion.’
March 30, 2015 7:33 p.m. ET
13 COMMENTS

From President Bill Clinton’s remarks at the signing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the White House South Lawn on Nov. 16, 1993:

The free exercise of religion has been called the first freedom, that which originally sparked the development of the full range of the Bill of Rights. Our Founders cared a lot about religion. And one of the reasons they worked so hard to get the First Amendment into the Bill of Rights at the head of the class is that they well understood what could happen to this country, how both religion and government could be perverted if there were not some space created and some protection provided. They knew that religion helps to give our people a character without which a democracy cannot survive. They knew that there needed to be a space of freedom between government and people of faith that otherwise government might usurp.

They have seen now, all of us, that religion and religious institutions have brought forth faith and discipline, community and responsibility over two centuries for ourselves and enabled us to live together in ways that I believe would not have been possible. We are, after all, the oldest democracy now in history and probably the most truly multi-ethnic society on the face of the Earth. And I am convinced that neither one of those things would be true today had it not been for the importance of the First Amendment and the fact that we have kept faith with it for 200 years.

What this law basically says is that the government should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes with someone’s free exercise of religion. This judgment is shared by the people of the United States as well as by the Congress. We believe strongly that we can never, we can never be too vigilant in this work.
Popular on WSJ

 

[Crafty_Dog]

Hillary Obstructs Congress
She erased emails after the Benghazi probe wanted to see them.
March 31, 2015 8:02 p.m. ET
WSJ

If the House panel investigating Benghazi really wants to get a look at Hillary Clinton’s emails, perhaps it should subpoena the Chinese military. Beijing—which may have hacked the private server she used to send official email as Secretary of State—is likely to be more cooperative than are Mrs. Clinton and her stonewall specialists now reprising their roles from the 1990s.

On Friday Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, disclosed that he couldn’t cooperate with the Benghazi committee’s request that she turn over her private server to an independent third party for examination. Why not? Well, the former first diplomat had already wiped the computer clean.

Of course she had. What else would she do?

The timing of the deletions isn’t entirely clear. Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy says they appear to have been deleted after Oct. 28, 2014, when State asked Mrs. Clinton to return her public records to the department. That could qualify as obstruction of Congress, as lawyer Ronald Rotunda recently argued on these pages.

The deletions certainly violate Mrs. Clinton’s promise to Congress on Oct. 2, 2012, when the Benghazi probe was getting under way. “We look forward to working with the Congress and your Committee as you proceed with your own review,” she told the Oversight Committee. “We are committed to a process that is as transparent as possible, respecting the needs and integrity of the investigations underway. We will move as quickly as we can without forsaking accuracy.”

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kendall say the vanishing emails don’t matter because State and the committee already have all the relevant documents and emails they’ve asked for. But State and the committee don’t have the actual emails, only the printed copies she provided to State.

And State had previously assured the committee it had everything it had asked for before Mrs. Clinton coughed up 850 pages of email copies from her private server this month—emails State couldn’t turn over before because she hadn’t provided them despite clear State Department policy that she and other officials do so.

Mrs. Clinton’s real message to Congress: You’ll see those emails over my dead body.

Mrs. Clinton is a student of history. In the 1970s she served as a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee that investigated Watergate. There she saw how Richard Nixon’s release of his tape-recorded conversations led to his resignation from the Oval Office. It appears she absorbed the lesson that Nixon should have burned, er, wiped clean, the tapes.  (MARC:  She was also fired from the committee by her supervising attorney for dishonesty in court filings.)

Two decades later, Mrs. Clinton was First Lady and her billing records from her days at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas were under federal subpoena. For two years no one could find them.

Then in January 1996, the same Mr. Kendall who now assures us Mrs. Clinton has turned over all relevant emails revealed how Hillary’s lost Rose Law files had miraculously been discovered on a table in the first family’s private quarters in the White House. No one could say how they got there. The woman who discovered them said they had not been on the table a week or two earlier, when she had last been in the room.

In a dispatch reporting on the discovery, the New York Times put it this way: “The release of the records is the latest of several instances in which the Clinton White House has declared a document search to be exhaustive, only to later stumble on important material.” She’s doing it again.

The question now is what Congress can do, if anything, to retrieve those “wiped” emails. In theory, the House could subpoena Mrs. Clinton’s emails and take her to court. But Mr. Gowdy concedes that going this route would take “years and years.” Meantime, Mrs. Clinton would make Lois Lerner of IRS infamy look like a model of cooperation.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department isn’t about to investigate, so the sanction will have to be political. Team Hillary and her media palace guard think the email story will fade, and they’ll help by calling it “old news” within a fortnight.

Democrats could provide one check on her stonewalling if anyone runs against her in the presidential primaries. Then her Nixonian character would become an issue. But so far the only Democrats who might run are second-stringers who are bidding to be Vice President and so wouldn’t want to speak truth to Mrs. Clinton’s power. Thus her Democratic coronation proceeds apace. It’s going to be fascinating to see if the voters are as eager as Democrats to be governed again by Clinton-Nixon mores.
Popular on WSJ

[DougMacG]

"Her story just doesn't add up."  "Mrs. Clinton's windfall in the late 1970s has all the trappings of pre-arranged trades."  "The normal trading world just doesn't work that way."
   - Former chief prosecutor of the IRS Commodity Industry Specialization Team

Doug!!!

You are AWESOME!!!  THAT IS THE ARTICLE!!!  How did you pull off finding it?  How did you get all  the way up the food chain to James Taranto?   I am impressed!

Thanks Crafty.  I felt he owed me a favor. )  In reality, he has great staff who actually read and research what comes in for the purpose of building their own column content.  A combination of good things came together, with your memory you hit the keyword phrase exactly, we were able to narrow the time frame to a couple of months and they have unique and complete access to the source.  This article is from 1994 while the WSJ online was launched in 1996; only an internal wsj pdf search was going to find this in any digital format.  Since we were clear about our purpose and it came directly from wsj, that gives us permission to re-print with copyright noted, as we did.  Now run our link past all your Hillary supporting lefties for comment, lol.

http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1534.msg86824#msg86824


Please keep an eye on Taranto's future columns to see if he uses the material.  This is a key piece to the case that the Clintons are forever crooks.  This information about this corrupt, criminal practice combines with the mathematical fact that there is less than a one in 31 trillion chance that her story of just due diligence and good luck is what really happened.   

The Clintons' rise to the governor's mansion of Arkansas was made possible by their participation in this ring of organized crime and corruption.  They didn't declare the income in 1980 and they hid their tax returns from scrutiny until the statute of limitations expired.  Why shouldn't she answer for that now if a (pretend) vetting process is about to occur.  The underlying crime was a felony and the pile of money they received looks exactly like the cash found in the freezer of the disgraced Louisiana congressman.  Bill wouldn't have been President if not having been Governor, and Hillary Clinton wouldn't be under consideration for President now if not for Bill's rise back then.  The quid pro quo components of this are detailed in this thread.  The truth of what happened then is most relevant now.

The 1 in 31 trillion chance that she really is that lucky is not even that, demonstrated by the fact that she knew to stop when her criminal source dried up.  No gambler that lucky can stop on a dime and never try again!

This was a long time ago?  Good, then show us your current records.  Money coming in, money going out, official favors arranged or disbursed, and all the related correspondence.   Oops, that's been destroyed.

It's okay, we know the pattern.
--------------------------------------

The Mystery of Hillary's Trades
By David L. Brandon
7 April 1994
The Wall Street Journal
PAGE A14
(Copyright (c) 1994, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)

As former head of the IRS chief counsel's Commodities Industry Specialization Team in the mid-1980s, I have followed with great interest the media stories on Hillary Clinton's excellent adventures in the commodities markets. As a proud capitalist and free market proponent (and an avid beef eater), I would be the first in line to salute this woman's success with cattle futures. But based on my years of experience with these markets, her story just doesn't add up. In fact, the chances of someone making almost $100,000 in the futures markets on her first try are about as great as walking into a casino in Las Vegas, hitting the million-dollar jackpot on your first try at the slots, then walking out never to play again. It just doesn't happen that way.

For those unfamiliar with the details of Mrs. Clinton's remarkable venture into the commodities markets, she allegedly made more than $99,000 in cattle futures (and other commodities) in late 1978 and 1979, withdrawing from trading just before the markets went bust. No explanation has been offered of how Mrs. Clinton managed to satisfy state laws that require futures investors to demonstrate a minimum net income and net worth, nor how a novice could have such uncanny timing.

There is, in fact, a much more probable explanation for Mrs. Clinton's good fortune. The media have already suggested that trades may have been moved to Mrs. Clinton's account after gains had been realized. However, the stories thus far have not clearly focused on a common trading strategy called a "straddle" that was very much in vogue at the time.

Straddles have the unique ability to produce exactly equal and offsetting gains and losses that can be transferred or used by the straddle trader for a variety of purposes. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, straddles were used for all kinds of illegal activities, ranging from tax evasion to money-laundering and bribes. In fact, this activity prompted a number of legal and regulatory changes by the Reagan administration to curb the abuses.

Although it sounds somewhat esoteric, a commodities straddle is a relatively simple trading device.

A commodities futures contract is nothing more than an agreement between two parties to buy or sell a certain type of commodity (in Mrs. Clinton's case, cattle) for a stated price on some date in the future. If the price of the commodity goes up before the contract delivery date, the individual who agreed to buy the commodity will realize a gain equal to the difference between the current price and the contract price. The individual who agreed to sell will realize a loss in an equal amount. Conversely, if the price goes down, the buyer will lose and the seller will gain.

A straddle is created when an investor enters into contracts to both buy and sell the same commodity. In this case, any gain on one contract will be exactly offset by a loss on the opposite contract. While straddle trading today is used in a variety of legitimate ways, these transactions lend themselves to all sorts of abuses as well. Before regulatory changes in the 1980s, it was common to enter into straddles to wipe out large capital gains for tax purposes. For example, an investor who realized a $100,000 capital gain in the stock market might enter into a large straddle in the commodities market. When the commodity price moved, the investor would close the loss leg of the straddle and realize a $100,000 loss, which offset his gain in the stock market. The investor was not required to report the unrealized $100,000 gain in the opposite leg of the straddle until that leg was closed in the following year. Typically, the investor entered into another straddle in the following year, thereby indefinitely rolling over the capital gain into subsequent years.

Another ploy common during that time required the assistance of a friendly broker. An investor could create a straddle using two separate investment accounts with his broker. After the straddle had moved, so that a gain and an offsetting loss had been created, the friendly broker simply wrote in the name of the investor's tax-exempt retirement fund on the account that held the gain leg of the straddle. The result was that a loss was realized that was reported on the investor's tax return, while the gain went unreported in the tax-exempt retirement account.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the IRS began noticing large numbers of individual tax returns that curiously showed commodities losses just big enough to wipe out unrelated capital gains; no corresponding commodities gains, which would suggest a straddle, ever appeared on subsequent returns. Even more curiously, the profile of these investors always had one thing in common, which was limited experience or no prior experience in commodities trading. In the early 1980s, an IRS agent in Chicago thought to look into one taxpayer's retirement fund and, of course, found the hidden gain leg of the straddle.

After that experience, the IRS redoubled its efforts to seek out thousands of missing straddle gains. It found them in retirement accounts, in London, in the Cayman Islands -- almost anywhere a taxpayer thought he might hide them from the IRS. With respect to these thousands of mysterious, isolated commodities transactions that showed up on tax returns, the IRS uncovered some form of questionable trading in virtually 100% of the cases it investigated. Well before the close of the 1980s, the IRS had assessed more than $7 billion in delinquent taxes and penalties attributable to these transactions and eventually settled these cases out of court for approximately $3.5 billion.

While most of the IRS's efforts were directed at finding hidden gains of the ubiquitous straddle, the trading device could just as easily be used to openly transfer gains while hiding the offsetting loss. If someone desired to make an illicit payment to another party, a straddle could be used to accomplish this purpose with no incriminating or suspicious-looking bank withdrawals or deposits. In fact, the IRS found numerous incidents of straddles being used for money-laundering purposes.

Does Mrs. Clinton's trading activity fit the profile of the illegitimate straddle trader? She was a novice in the commodities markets who, against all odds, realized large gains. Although she intermittently realized losses, it does not appear that she ever had to risk her own capital beyond her initial $1,000 deposit, which itself may have been insufficient to cover even her first transaction (which netted her $5,300). According to the trading records released by the White House, most of Mrs. Clinton's gains were recorded as intra-month transactions. This means that these records include no information regarding key elements of the trade, such as the type and quantity of the contracts, acquisition dates, acquisition prices, etc. Such information is needed to determine whether trades were part of a prearranged straddle.

It also appears that Mrs. Clinton's broker, Robert L. "Red" Bone, was no stranger to the spicier practices of commodities trading, according to The Wall Street Journal's front-page article last Friday.

It seems more than coincidental that Mr. Bone was a former employee of Tyson Foods and that Mrs. Clinton's investment adviser, James Blair, was the company's legal counsel. Tyson, the poultry concern, is one of the largest employers in the state of Arkansas. The fact that the Clintons withheld disclosing only those tax returns that included their commodities gains until the transactions were reported by the New York Times in February also appears quite suspicious. From my standpoint as a former government staff attorney with extensive experience in these matters, Mrs. Clinton's windfall in the late 1970s has all the trappings of pre-arranged trades.

How would a straddle have been used in Mrs. Clinton's case? The Journal has already reported that gains theoretically could have been transferred to Mrs. Clinton's account, while "others" may have absorbed losses. Such a transaction could be accomplished with a straddle.

A party desiring to transfer cash to another's personal account for legal or illegal purposes could enter into a straddle in a particularly volatile commodity, such as cattle futures in the late 1970s. After gains and losses were generated in the opposite sides of the straddle, the gain side would be marked to the beneficiary's account, while the loss side would remain in the account of the contributor. The contributor might even be entitled to use the loss to offset other gains. Such a transaction would be not only well-hidden from government authorities but potentially tax-deductible.

No direct evidence of wrongdoing has been produced in the case of Mrs. Clinton's trading activity. In fact, no conclusive evidence of anything has been produced. In order to settle the legitimate questions surrounding her trades, a satisfactory explanation is needed for her apparently low initial margin deposit and whether the requirements relating to an investor's minimum net income and net worth were satisfied. In addition, the details of her numerous intra-month trades should be provided, as well as the details of the trades of persons who may have had a special interest in how well she did. If it is discovered that certain interested parties happened to realize losses in cattle futures at the same time, and they were comparable in size to the gains reported by Mrs. Clinton, this would amount to a "smoking gun."

This is not a matter of partisan politics. Even if the public had never heard of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the circumstances surrounding her unusual good fortune would still appear suspicious to anyone awake to abuses of the commodities markets. In this writer's experience, the normal trading world just doesn't work that way.
---
Mr. Brandon was a career attorney in the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 1989. During that time he also served as head of that department's Commodity Industry Specialization Team, which was responsible for coordinating and developing the IRS's legal positions on tax issues arising in connection with commodities transactions.

Dow Jones & Company
Document j000000020011029dq470095u

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[DougMacG]

Has anyone here read "John Adams" or other great biographies of past Presidents or founding fathers?  Did Eleanor Roosevelt destroy her emails, er personal letters, memories, notes, photos?  Just to cover up some kind of scandal?  I kind of doubt it.

But Hillary says she did this.  Why?  Convenience reasons?  Doesn't pass the smell test.   
Ann Althouse writes:

I’ve been fixated on Hillary’s statement she destroyed her personal email, which I noticed she slipped in at the beginning of her press conference. Did she really mean that? Why would a woman who values her friends and family—and who has written 2 memoirs of her life—not want to preserve personal correspondence? . . .

Now, maybe it’s just a lie. She didn’t really destroy these records and is only claiming that she destroyed them so that we won’t attempt to gain access to them. But if she really did destroy them, why would she sacrifice so much? It could be that everything she cares about went to Chelsea and a few others who she knows will keep all of her email. Thus, it’s retrievable. Maybe it’s not such a huge sacrifice. But 31,830 private records destroyed? That sounds quite drastic, and it stokes the suspicion that she did shunt damaging work-related email into the “personal” category, then destroyed it all so that no one could ever check her work.

[G M]

Wiping the hard drives so they cannot be forensically recovered pretty much means physically destroying them. Far from easy or convenient.

[DougMacG]

Wiping the hard drives so they cannot be forensically recovered pretty much means physically destroying them. Far from easy or convenient.

http://m.wikihow.com/Destroy-a-Hard-Drive

Melt it, hammer it to pieces, dispose of the pieces separately, attach a heavy weight to it and drop it into the Hudson or Potomac.  Better yet, salt water.  When we hear the details of the extreme measures they took to destroy, we will have an idea of how incriminating the evidence is.  

The recipient's side of some of these emails still exist.  Who deletes an incriminating or embarrassing email from the Clintons?  It's like saving a blue dress just in case no one ever believes you.

[Crafty_Dog]

Roger Clinton Told FBI That He Accepted Foreign Cash For President Bill Clinton
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on TheHillaryDaily.com on April 3, 2015
Raking in foreign cash is nothing new to the Clinton family.  Bill Clinton's brother, Roger, told FBI agents that he "received money for President Clinton from foreign governments" during Bill's presidency.

Roger claimed that, after the first few times he brought back money for the President, either Bill or his staff told him that the President could not accept money from foreign governments and that he should send the money back.

Now, that's a good one, isn't it?  What are the odds that Roger Clinton packed up wads of cash and sent it back to where it came from?  And what about the first few times?  What happened to that money?

In 2002, the House Committee on Government Reform issued a scathing report on the Clinton Presidential Pardons with disturbing findings about the President's brother:

"Roger Clinton engaged in a systematic effort to trade on his brother's name during the Clinton Administration."

The section on Roger went well beyond just pardons and included a number of his other schemes to trade on his relationship to the President. His combined take was $700,000 -- and that's just what he deposited in his bank account and could be traced.  It seems likely that he pocketed or spent at least some additional cash. Roger insisted that his brother was aware of his activities and approved of them.

Roger admitted to receiving $335,000 in cash and travelers checks from foreign sources such as South Korea, Venezuela, and Taiwan that were deposited into his account during Bill's presidency.  Roger refused to tell the Committee why he had received the checks, but apparently told the FBI that a lot of it was for overseas "concerts" by his band.  The Committee noted that the fact that the travelers checks were provided in blank "suggests that the funds were intentionally provided to Clinton in a manner calculated to conceal their origin."  All of the travelers checks were purchased overseas and brought to the U.S. by Roger Clinton, who did not disclose them to Customs officials as required by federal law.

The Committee also noted that it was likely that there were more travelers checks and case that was not deposited into his account.

The House Committee uncovered these checks in Roger Clinton's bank account:

CASH OR TRAVELERS CHECKS PAYMENTS TO ROGER CLINTON
Date Deposited   Type of Check   Origin   Purchaser Name   Amount
November 30, 1998   American Express   Unknown   Chen Jianxing   $1,000
December 1, 1998   American Express   Taiwan   Huang Xian Wen   $15,000
December 8, 1998   American Express   Taiwan   Huang Xian Wen   $23,000
December 15, 1998   Citicorp   Taiwan   Unknown   $90,000
December 15, 1998   Unknown   Unknown   Unknown   $29,000
December 15, 1998   Visa-Sumitomo   Taiwan   Lin Mei Guang   $4,000
December 15, 1998   American Express   Taiwan   Huang Xian Wen   $2,000
July 12, 1999   American Express   Unknown   Unknown   $20,000
July 12, 1999   Citicorp   South Korea   Sook-Eun Jang   $5,000
November 30, 1999   Citicorp   Taiwan   Unknown   $3,000
November 30, 1999   Citicorp   Taiwan   Unknown   $10,000
November 30, 1999   Citicorp   Taiwan   Unknown   $5,000
November 30, 1999   Visa   Taiwan   Unknown   $1,000
November 30, 1999   Visa   Taiwan   Xu Jingsheng   $3,000
November 30, 1999   Citicorp   Venezuela   Pedro Jose Garboza Matos   $38,000
November 30, 1999   Unknown   Unknown   Unknown   $40,000
February 22, 2000   American Express   Taiwan   Qu Guang Yin   $7,000
March 24, 2000   Citicorp   Venezuela   Pedro Jose Garboza Matos   $3,000
April 5, 2000   American Express   Taiwan   Mou Chuanxue   $4,000
April 17, 2000   American Express   Taiwan   Qu Guang Yin   $13,000
April 17, 2000   American Express   Unknown   Suk Eun Chang   $5,000
May 15, 2000   American Express   Unknown   Unknown   $5,000
July 13, 2000   Citicorp   South Korea   Seung-Chul Ham   $1,000
July 27, 2000   Citicorp   South Korea   Seung-Chul Ham   $2,000
July 31, 2000   Citicorp   South Korea   Seung-Chul Ham   $4,000
August 2, 2000   American Express   Unknown   Unknown   $1,000
August 11, 2000   American Express   Unknown   Unknown   $1,000
Total               $335,000
TOTAL PAYMENTS RECEIVED = $335,000

In addition to the $335,000 listed above, Roger also deposited $85,000 in cash in his personal bank account between January and November 1998. In December 1999, he deposited a $70,000 travelers check from "Suk Eun Chang" as well as a $10,000 travelers check from the same source.  Clinton refused to disclose the source of these funds, saying only that he got some of the money for performing in foreign countries with his band.  The Committee was unable to find Suk Eun Chang to set any further information. 

Roger also said that his foreign hosts gave him gifts such as rugs and vases, paid for his transportation and provided a presidential security guard in the host country.  They were particularly generous -- they even added money to pay for the taxes on the money they paid.

Wow.  Wonder whether the Beatles got such a deal?

Roger Clinton also got funds allegedly for his musical appearances form Edvard Akopyan who paid the president's brother $61,100 in 1999 when he was acting "as a middleman in scheduling Roger's appearance at a musical concert in Kazakhstan."  Does anyone really believe that Roger's talents were in such demand?  These funds, are sure to heighten the controversy surrounding payments to the Clintons from foreign sources during Hillary's service as Secretary of State.  That they were sometimes intended for the president himself and that President Clinton encouraged the practice, adds a new dimension to the corrupt payments to the Clinton family.

In addition, the Cuba Travel Services company engaged Roger for $30,000 to lobby his brother to lift travel restrictions to Cuba.  He was never registered as a lobbyist or agent of a foreign government as required, but provided evidence that he spoke to his brother about the issue.

Although he lied to the FBI about it, Roger also accepted $50,000 from the Gambino crime family to lobby for executive clemency for Rosario Gambino, a mob leader serving a 45 year sentence for drug trafficking.  Although he was unsuccessful in this effort, he deposited the funds nonetheless.

(He also accepted $43,500 for his unsuccessful attempt to secure a pardon for Garland Lincenium, whose family sold their life savings to pay Roger Clinton and his agents.)

Roger solicited several other people in his pay-for-pardon scheme, but they didn't fall for it.

So think about it.  Can you think of any legitimate reason that foreign governments would pay Roger Clinton?

It was the beginning of the amazing Clinton family foreign money boondoggle.
The 2016 Buzz -- All The Latest News on the Candidates and Issues. 

[Crafty_Dog]

http://conservativetribune.com/gowdy-threatens-hillary-arrest/

[G M]

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519
Jump to navigation
Cornell University Law SchoolSearch Cornell

U.S. Code › Title 18 › Part I › Chapter 73 › § 1519
18 U.S. Code § 1519 - Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy

Current through Pub. L. 113-296, except 113-287, 113-291, 113-295. (See Public Laws for the current Congress.)

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
 

[Crafty_Dog]

Heh, heh, heh.
 

[G M]

Heh, heh, heh.
 

If you or me had done this, this is what we would face. However, Hillary has nothing to worry about. Even Nixon wasn't willing to destroy the tapes.

[ccp]

"No controlling legal authority"

Worst case for her is she is disbarred.

No biggy.  She would still be qualified to run for the highest office on the planet.

[DougMacG]

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519
Jump to navigation
Cornell University Law SchoolSearch Cornell

U.S. Code › Title 18 › Part I › Chapter 73 › § 1519
18 U.S. Code § 1519 - Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy

Current through Pub. L. 113-296, except 113-287, 113-291, 113-295. (See Public Laws for the current Congress.)

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Even if no crimes are charged, it is good to know serious laws with serious consequences govern this.  You don't just wipe out your emails that are under investigation.  The committee even offered the State Dept as a third party to review them, not Republican partisans.

I doubt that Hillary was writing blatantly incriminating emails even if she knew she would later delete her end of the emails and destroy the server.  Still, the statute is clear and there is plenty of reason to believe the alleged destruction of the server included correspondence under federal investigation.  We don't know she was the one to order the destruction of the server.  She said it was originally set up as Bill's server.  Maybe she was the victim again, and now is just standing by her man!

We also don't know the server was really destroyed; that sounded to me like a trial balloon put into the public airwaves by a surrogate.  I don't believe it was destroyed.  They hid it over by the Rose Law Firm records knowing no one will ever come up with a search warrant.

Mainstream journalist Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News believes the email scandal may be more damaging to her than now thought and made a key point often made here, she does not have anywhere near the level of political skill to dodge these things that her husband had. 

Halperin said Hillary Clinton “may end up meeting her match” in Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC).  Clinton has a history of being a good witness for herself on Capitol Hill, ...Gowdy “may have tougher and better prepared questions for her than she’s ever faced as a witness on the Hill and that could spell a lot of political trouble for her.”
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/03/31/halperin-hillary-may-end-up-meeting-her-match-in-gowdy/
------------------------
At Real Clear Politics they say that their leasing of office space means she is in.  I am not feeling very good about my bet with ccp (that she won't run) right now.  I should have gone breakfast, lunch and then dinner and gone for better than even odds.  All the facts are coming together that the right answer for her is to not run.  Unfortunately, she may be the only person in the world who doesn't know that.

[Crafty_Dog]

Investor’s Business Daily published a long article on Tuesday night, collecting the opinions of current and former intelligence officials about the national security threat posed by Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

It feels like a floodgate bursting open.  These experts are absolutely beside themselves over Clinton’s irresponsible conduct as Secretary of State.  Former NSA officer John Schindler called it “a counterintelligence disaster of truly epic proportions.”

“She may have deleted 30,000 emails before turning her files over to the State Department,” observed former U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive Michelle Van Cleave, “but that doesn’t mean that the Russians and the Chinese don’t have them.”

Ever since Clinton began destroying subpoenaed evidence and refusing to hand her server over for analysis, it’s been a running joke among Internet wags that if Congress wants to see her email, they should ask the Russians and Chinese for copies.

But that’s not really a joke.  The intelligence community has to assume, based on the weak security of Clinton’s secret server — slipshod even by private corporate standards — that every piece of sensitive information she ever handled has been compromised.  Her server was called “clintonemail.com” — it was easy to find.  Her email was completely unencrypted for three months after she became Secretary of State.

“It’s a disaster for U.S. policy.  It’s a huge boon for the former KGB and the Iranians,” said a veteran intelligence officer who spoke to IBD anonymously.  The officer found Clinton’s claims that she never handled classified information through her private server laughable — “how the hell could she do her job without it?”

Also, as Schindler pointed out to IBD, we have to assume there was “bleed-over” into her private email as well, since we’ve discovered instances of Clinton mistakenly replying to official messages as if they were personal correspondence.

The IBD piece was most likely put together before news broke about Russian hackers penetrating White House systems; one suspects these intelligence experts are even more apprehensive about the risks Clinton took in light of those developments.  There is some discussion in the Investors’ Business Daily piece about how foreign spies might have used Clinton’s vulnerable server as a launching pad for attacks on other government systems.  The sort of “spear phishing” attack used to get into the White House system would be especially potent if malware-laced emails were ostensibly coming from the Secretary of State.

“It would be possible for a hostile service to use the server as a platform to deliver other malware to other targets of their choosing, based on their knowledge of whom the former secretary and president were communicating with,” said Paul Joyal, the former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

A senior former Defense Department official seconded that notion: “If they’re getting into her server, they’re not just extracting stuff.  They’re going to do things that could be planted from other sources.”

Most of these experts called for the sort of extensive independent analysis of her server that Clinton has adamantly refused to allow — in fact, she’s still tampering with the machine, as it became known last week that she deleted everything she didn’t decide to turn over to the State Department.  Given her manipulation of the data, it might already be impossible to learn everything counterintelligence experts need to assess the possible penetration of the system.  (You can bet she did a lot more to destroy the emails she doesn’t want security experts, Congress, or the American people to see than merely click the “Delete” buttons in her email program.)

“Why Clinton hasn’t offered to turn over the server to the FBI, or why the FBI has not seized it to assess the damage to national security, is unclear,” IBD writes.

Is it?  There are a lot of questions swirling around this debacle, including the extent to which Hillary Clinton jeopardized national security, but her motivation really isn’t one of them.  There’s nothing mysterious or unprecedented about the Obama Administration’s belief that Democrat royalty is above the law, either.  Did anyone seriously expect agents of this politicized Justice Department to raid Hillary’s mansion in Chappaqua and seize that computer?

[Crafty_Dog]

a more complete version

http://news.investors.com/politics/040715-746883-hillary-clinton-email-server-vulnerable-to-china-russia-iran.htm?p=full

Hillary Clinton's private email server was a spy magnet for the Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other intelligence services, say current and former intelligence officials.
As secretary of state, Clinton routed all her government-related email through the server, based in her house in Chappaqua, New York. She reportedly hired a Cablevision (NYSE:CVC) subsidiary to run the server, with antivirus protection from Intel's (NASDAQ:INTC) McAfee. And she registered her domain name, clintonmail.com, through Network Solutions.

Intelligence professionals fear that the use of the privately installed server, free of certified government defenses against foreign interception, has been a boon to foreign cyberspies.
"By using her own private server with email — which we now know was wholly unencrypted for the first three months of Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state — she left this easily interceptable by any decent 21st century SIGINT service," said John Schindler, a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer. SIGINT is shorthand for signals intelligence, or electronic spying.
"The name Clinton right on the email handle meant this was not a difficult find," Schindler said. "We should assume Russians, Chinese and others were seeing this."

'Epic' Counterintelligence Disaster
"In all, this is a counterintelligence disaster of truly epic proportions, not to mention that, since Clinton admitted she did not use higher-classification email systems at all" — systems like SIPR and JWICS, Schindler said — "we have to assume some bleed-over into her unsecured private email too, which makes this even worse."
SIPR is the Secret Internet Protocol Router network that the Department of Defense runs to ensure secret communications for the U.S. military, other agencies and certain allies. JWICS is the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System for top-secret government communication. Both provide secure communications for the State Department and secretary of state. Clinton's private server was not protected by the Department of Homeland Security's Einstein intrusion detection system, which relies on NSA systems, for official State Department emails.

"She may have deleted 30,000 e-mails before turning her files over to the State Department, but that doesn't mean that the Russians and the Chinese don't have them," said Michelle Van Cleave, former U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive.
Others say that the potential damage to U.S. national security is so grave that the FBI should seize the server and conduct a forensic analysis to determine the extent of foreign penetration. That analysis would be part of what is called a damage assessment, which is routine after any suspected security breach.

FBI Forensic Analysis
However, the FBI might not find anything now, according to Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of a House investigative panel, who says that Clinton had the server wiped clean. Still, the forensic analysis by trained personnel could yield valuable clues about foreign spies gaining access to America's most fiercely guarded secrets. Gowdy has called on Clinton to appear before his committee for what he called a "transcribed interview regarding her use of private email and a personal server for official State Department business."
Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., a former prosecutor, said that the FBI should conduct a forensic analysis of any attempted foreign penetrations, to determine which foreign intelligence services might have hacked into Clinton's email server.
"Denying a legitimate request by the Bureau to examine her computer would certainly suggest that America's security is not Clinton's highest priority," Buck said.
"The FBI investigated a sitting CIA director for intentionally disclosing classified information. The Bureau can certainly investigate whether a former secretary of state unintentionally disclosed classified information," Buck said. "The motive may be different, but the potential damage to national security is similar."

Why Clinton hasn't offered to turn over the server to the FBI, or why the FBI has not seized it to assess the damage to national security, is unclear. A Clinton spokesperson declined to comment.
In a question-and-answer sheet provided to reporters, Clinton did not address the issue. The FBI won't say whether or not it made a request or took possession of the server. The Bureau does not have the device, according to a highly placed FBI source. That source is not cleared to speak to the press and could not speak on the record.

The lure of reading a secretary of state's emails would exert a pull on any foreign spy, intelligence officials say.

Where, on a scale of one to 10, would any sitting secretary of state rank as a target of foreign spies? "10, of course," said Van Cleave. "That being the case, all of her e-mails would have been potentially of interest to any number of foreign parties."
"A target like this would be at least a 10, maybe 10-plus if the enemy knew the email address and server," said Robert W. Stephan, a former counterintelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who also served 19 years in the CIA. "If a foreign intelligence service determines that it is indeed the secretary of state's private communications/e-mail/server and even given the security measures that were set up, it would still be a top target for some sophisticated services," Stephan said. "Obviously Chinese, Russian, and Cuban, and possibly Iranians and North Koreans."

That statement presumes that the server was strongly protected against outside penetration, which does not seem to be the case. News reports indicate that the server's security configurations were done improperly, protecting Clinton's personal privacy and not national security, and that, even if everything was done by the book, that type of server and software package remains vulnerable to a good hacker.
"A 16-year-old can break into a server, and certainly a government sophisticated enough to break into the Sony (NYSE:SNE) system can break into Hillary Clinton's system," said Rep. Buck. "That's a no-brainer."
How would adversary spy services exploit this intelligence? "The positions, the interests, the communications between the secretary of state and her staff are of great interest to any foreign intelligence service, whether hostile or friendly," said Paul Joyal, former director of security of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"The American secretary of state using an open, unprotected server? That's an invitation to a party," said a veteran intelligence officer who asked for anonymity because he still holds active clearances. "All of her private musings. There's no secretary of state who doesn't communicate with classified information. How the hell could she do her job without it?"

Gateway To Government Systems?
"From a counterintelligence perspective, (for) anyone with any responsibility for intelligence, counterintelligence and security, this thing is a monumental disaster," the longtime senior intelligence officer said. "It's a disaster for U.S. policy. It's a huge boon for the former KGB and the Iranians."
Some experts are concerned that foreign spies could have penetrated the server as a gateway to breaking into other government systems, including classified communications.
"The real question is, what if any intelligence collection was being done on a private server somewhere?" Joyal said. "The only way to know is for the proper federal authorities to impound the server and do a forensic analysis."
"It would be possible for a hostile service to use the server as a platform to deliver other malware to other targets of their choosing, based on their knowledge of whom the former secretary and president were communicating with," Joyal said.
'Vast Deception Potential'

Foreign spies could use their access to Clinton's server to warp or distort information that government officials rely on. "If they're getting into her server, they're not just extracting stuff," said a senior former Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They're going to do things that could be planted from other sources."
"The denial and deception potential here is vast," said John Schindler, referring to intelligence tradecraft in which a spy service denies or conceals information, and seeks to deceive other countries. "Not to mention that any shady games played" by the Obama Administration "would be known to Moscow and Beijing — but not to the American public."
"It could affect a number of people within the U.S. government and, for that matter, people around the world," Joyal said. "It would behoove the federal government to conduct a forensic analysis of the server itself."
Until such a forensic analysis is done, he said, authorities simply will not know the answer.
"This should not be politicized," said Joyal. "It should be done with hard-nosed national security interests driving the forensic analysis."

• Waller is a senior reporter at the American Media Institute, a nonprofit news service.


Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/politics/040715-746883-hillary-clinton-email-server-vulnerable-to-china-russia-iran.htm#ixzz3Wjj4n2YJ
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