Hillary blames GOP for email probe despite evidence
Dismisses it as 'grasping at straws' while FBI prepares case
Published: 11 hours ago
NEW YORK – In the first one-on-one debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Democrat presidential primary rival Hillary Clinton assured her party she was “100 percent confident” nothing would come of the FBI investigation into her use of a personal email server to transmit classified information, attributing the controversy to a Republican political attack she described as “grasping at straws,” despite reports the FBI has a solid case against her and is preparing to refer the case for indictment.
In Durham, New Hampshire, Thursday night, debate moderator Chuck Todd asked Clinton if she could reassure Democrats that her email scandal “isn’t going to blow up your candidacy,” if she were to become the party’s presidential nominee.
Clinton immediately equated her email scandal with the controversy over her role in Benghazi, in which she initially blamed the terror attack on a protest over YouTube video. She claimed both controversies were attacks contrived by Republican political operatives.
“Absolutely I can,” Clinton replied to Todd, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” ”You know, before it was emails, it was Benghazi; and the Republicans were stirring up so much controversy about that. And I testified for 11 hours, answered their questions. They basically said, ‘Yeah, didn’t get her. We tried.’ That was all a political ploy.”
Watch Clinton’s comments:
However, as WND has reported, a former U.S. attorney who communicates regularly with sources in touch with the Clinton investigation, Joseph diGenova, says there's no doubt “the FBI is building a case, and it’s going to be referred to Attorney General Loretta Lynch for indictment and prosecution.”
DiGenova previously disclosed that the FBI investigation of Clinton’s use of home-based private email has expanded from a concern that she and her top aides violated federal laws governing the handling of classified intelligence to an investigation of political corruption.
The 'Stop Hillary' campaign is on fire! Join the surging response to this theme: 'Clinton for prosecution, not president'
In addition, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, in an interview with WND, said sources in the FBI have told him they have a “slam dunk” case against Clinton and are preparing to recommend to Lynch that she be prosecuted.
And in a bombshell disclosure Jan. 8, an email sequence surfaced in which Clinton on June 17, 2011, instructed her top foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to remove the classified security markings from classified documents she wanted sent by fax.
“Turn [the classified document] into nonpaper with no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton instructed Sullivan in clear violation of national security laws regarding the handling of classified documents – an offense there is no evidence Powell or Rice ever contemplated committing.
Republicans trying to 'beat up on me'
When Clinton assured Todd she was “100 percent confident" there would be no fallout from the FBI investigation, she downplay the probe's importance, suggesting it was a routine examination to clear up what amounts to an institutional problem.
“This is a security review that was requested. It is being carried out. It will be resolved,” Clinton said.
“But I have to add if there's going to be a security review about me, there's going to have to be security reviews about a lot of other people, including Republican office holders, because we've got this absurd situation of retroactive classifications.”
Clinton's tactic of equating her State Department email scandal to the criticism of her role in handling the Benghazi attack and its aftermath traces back to comments she made to ABC News the day before the Iowa caucuses.
“This is very much like Benghazi,” Clinton said Jan. 31 in an exclusive interview on ABC's “This Week with George Stephanopoulos." “Republicans are going to continue to use it, beat up on me. I understand that. That's the way they are.”
“After 11 hours of testimony, answering every single question in public, which I had requested for many months, I think it's pretty clear they're grasping at straws and this will turn out the same way,” she said.
But Clinton's handling of the email scandal fits a pattern, wrote The Atlantic staff political writer David A. Graham in a Jan. 29 article titled “From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton Scandal Primer.”
Clinton's attempt to equate her email scandal to Benghazi, blaming both on partisan GOP attacks, is a Clinton family tactic to deflect continuing political scandals that today wears thin, he opined.
Graham wrote:
Her use of a private email account became known during the course of the Benghazi investigation. Thus far, the investigations have found no wrongdoing on her part with respect to the 2012 attacks themselves, but Clinton’s private-email use and concerns about whether she sent classified information have become huge stories unto themselves. This is a pattern with the Clinton family, which has been in the public spotlight since Bill Clinton’s first run for office, in 1974: Something that appears potentially scandalous on its face turns out to be innocuous, but an investigation into it reveals different questionable behavior. The canonical case is Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978. While no inquiry ever produced evidence of wrongdoing, investigations ultimately led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.
WND reported Wednesday that Judicial Watch in January released 246 pages of previously undisclosed internal memos from Ken Starr’s Office of Independent Council investigation in 1998 showed prosecutors had evidence Hillary Clinton and her associate Webb Hubbell at the Rose Law Firm, Arkansas, were guilty of criminal fraud in the Watergate affair.
Judicial Watch said the newly released documents also show Clinton and Hubbell engaged in a criminal cover-up conspiracy that included destroying material documents and lying under oath to federal authorities. Their efforts, Judicial Watch said, were aimed at preventing the Whitewater affair from denying Bill Clinton the White House in 1992 and from derailing his presidency in its first term.
'They did it, too'
In the debate Thursday night, Clinton attempted to downplay the email controversy also by citing the actions of former Republican Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
“Now, we had a development in the email matter today when it came out that Secretary Powell and close aides to former Secretary Rice used private email accounts," she said. "And now you have these people in the government who are doing the same thing to Secretary Powell and Secretary Rice's aide they've been doing to me, which is that I never sent or received any classified material. They are retroactively classifying it.
“I agree completely with Secretary Powell, who said today this is an absurdity,” she continued. “And so I think the American people will know it's an absurdity. I have absolutely no concerns about it whatsoever.”
Critics jumped on Clinton’s attempt to equate her use of a private email server with reports that Powell and Rice staff members also received classified national security email on their private email accounts.
“From someone who wants to be commander in chief, the American people deserve the truth, rather than Secretary Hillary Clinton’s murky denials and a drummed up ‘everybody did it’ defense meant to distract,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement published on his House website. “The attempt to paint her predecessors in the State Department as equal offenders in mishandling classified material is an insult to what we now know to be the truth.”
NBC news reported Thursday that State Department Inspector General Steve Linick said the State Department has determined that 12 emails examined from the State Department archives contained national security information now classified “secret” or “confidential,” with two of the messages sent to Powell’s personal email account and 10 sent to the personal accounts of Rice’s senior aides.
In an interview with NBC News, Powell challenged the conclusion, saying nothing that went to his personal account was secret, while a spokesman for Rice said the emails were about diplomatic communications.
NBC further reported that Linick noted none of the messages were marked classified when originally sent, and none were determined to include information from the intelligence community.
Powell told NBC the two messages in question originated with ambassadors – one in the Philippines and the other in Europe – and both were first circulated on unclassified State Department systems and sent to his personal account by his assistant.
Powell added, “I did not use my email account for any classified matters because I had a classified computer on my desk.”
Top secret emails surface
In contrast to Clinton, neither Powell nor Rice ever operated a private email server based in their home while they were secretaries of state. And neither were accused of receiving national security documents on private email accounts that were classified at the top security level as “top secret” documents containing “SAP,” or Special Access Program, information.
On Jan. 29, Josh Gerstein and Rachael Bade at Politico reported the State Department formally determined that 22 of the messages from Hillary Clinton’s private email account were “top secret,” a security classification reserved for information that can cause “exceptionally grave” damage to national security if disclosed.
Politico further reported that more than 1,600 emails in Clinton’s private account were deemed classified.
The same day, Jan. 29, the Associated Press reported the 22 top secret emails in question contained 37 pages that were being withheld from the public because they contain “highly restricted, classified material that could point to confidential sources or clandestine programs like drone strikes.”
'Word games'
Fox News legal analyst Judge Anthony P. Napolitano, in an op-ed piece published on FoxNews.com Thursday, dismissed as “word games” Hillary Clinton’s assertion that she did not know the emails were classified because none were transmitted with a classified designation marked on the document.
“First, under the law, nothing is ‘marked classified.’ The markings are ‘confidential’ or ‘secret’ or ‘top secret,’ and Clinton knows this,” Napolitano wrote.
“Second, under the law, it is not the markings on the email headers that make the contents state secrets; it is the vulnerability of the contents of the emails to impair the government’s national security mission that rationally characterizes them as secrets,” he continued.
Napolitano said Clinton knows this "because she signed an oath on Jan. 22, 2009, recognizing that state secrets retain their secrecy status whether ‘marked or unmarked’ by any of the secrecy designations.”
“She knows as well that, under the law, the secretary of state is charged with knowing state secrets when she comes upon them.”
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