The Clintons' War on Women (39 page)

Hillary, at twenty-seven years old, drafted memoranda and advocated for these rule changes despite Zeifman (her boss, to whom she lied about drafting them) telling her not to because most Congressional leaders were firmly against changing any of the rules at the time of a major national scandal. Hillary’s unauthorized, fraudulent proposals were voted down in the House.

Zeifman’s diary also tells of an unauthorized study of Nixon’s wrongdoings and set of standards against which to judge them, conducted by Hillary, liberal professors, and some of her impeachment committee pals. The study was kept secret from Congress and later published and made available for sale in bookstores. It was never found whether Hillary or anyone involved with the unauthorized study received royalties for the publication.
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The
New York Post
conversely explored the dichotomy between the email deletion of Clinton and the taped conversations held by the notoriously paranoid Nixon. As the
Post
comments, Clinton at least learned something from Watergate: destroy potentially threatening evidence whenever you can. Nixon never burned his White House Tapes, though he could have. Clinton had her private email server wiped clean after Congress and the State Department issued subpoenas for her emails. Only selected emails were handed over, so her attorneys could try to claim compliance. The hacking of longtime Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal’s email points to intelligence information about Benghazi being sent from Blumenthal to Clinton, several weeks before the attacks. But with Clinton’s email server cleaned out, the nation will never know what happened. If only it had been so easy for Nixon. As the
Post
says, he’d be jealous.
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The
National Review
examined further the parallels between Hillary and “Tricky Dick,” also pointing out that Nixon never erased his tapes while Clinton had her entire email server wiped. They also point out that many in the GOP had concerns about Nixon but they were ignored because of what seemed like a sure victory. The
victory was short lived and did tremendous, extensive damage to the Republican Party brand for many years. Democrats seem to have reached the same moment with Hillary. Many Democrats have their doubts but are being told she is the inevitable candidate.
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The end result of Nixon’s presidency was to stain the Republican Party as untrustworthy. It would take years to clean up the damage.

Standard operating procedure for State Department officials is to use high-security government-run servers to send electronic communications such as emails. By this method all electronic correspondence is automatically protected and saved in high-security government files. There are several reasons for this.

First is security. As secretary of state, the bulk of Clinton’s emails would pertain to classified, sensitive but unclassified, and non-personal correspondence related to the State Department. We don’t want anyone hacking in on what could be classified or sensitive communications. Many of the government’s foreign policy strategies are configured and communicated within other government agencies. Those communications are not for general public scrutiny.

A second important issue related to using government servers falls into what is called “transparency.” This means that in the future, these protected emails can potentially be accessed by anyone, in the government or citizenry, if those emails are part of an investigation or request under the Freedom of Information Act. The concern over Hillary’s sidestep of these two issues is troubling at the least, and may constitute the worst breach of Federal Records Act regulations as well as State Department policy. The Foreign Affairs Manual was codified by the State Department, which ruled in 2005 that employees could only use private email accounts for non-governmental correspondence except in emergencies and then only if they were turned over to be entered into government computers. That ruling also forbade State Department employees from including “sensitive but unclassified” information on private emails except for some very narrow exceptions.
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According
to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, if an agency allows its employees to use a personal email account, it must ensure that the emails are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.

The beginning of the disclosure that Secretary of State Clinton was bypassing federal regulations came during the Benghazi hearings when the Congressional committee investigating the Benghazi attack asked the State Department for all relevant emails. In turn, the State Department asked for Clinton to turn over all of her non-personal emails from her time as secretary. In late 2014, she handed over 55,000 pages of emails. This initiated a landslide of questions that pertained to why Hillary would violate existing rules and protocols by sending official State Department business over her private email.

The idea that Hillary Clinton was innocent of violating federal regulations can be answered by a quote from Hillary herself. In the midst of the 2008 presidential race, she took a jab at the Bush administration’s use of non-governmental email accounts by stating that “Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps. We know about secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts.” There is another fascinating recording of Hillary’s understanding of emails and their potential use as evidence. In 2000, Hillary was recorded telling a donor that she didn’t like using email. Home video footage from 2000, shot at a fundraiser by a donor, Peter Paul, showed then Senator Clinton talking about how she had chosen to avoid email for fear of leaving a paper trail. “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I?—I don’t even want—Why would I ever want to do email?” she said. “Can you imagine?” she then asked.

Hillary Clinton, in her own defense, has stated that her use of personal emails stemmed from the fact that she didn’t want to carry two cell phones, yet in March 2015, she admitted that she had carried four devices. She has also stated in her defense that because her emails were sent to people with “.state” and “.gov” addresses, she was
in the clear because those addresses would have been saved on government servers. This, however, is not true. The State Department disclosed that it had no way of routinely preserving senior officials’ emails. Instead, the department relied on individual employees to decide if certain emails should be considered public records, and if so, to move them onto a special record-keeping server, or print them out and manually file them for preservation. Since then, the State Department began using a system that automatically keeps the emails of the department’s highest-ranking officials—like the deputy secretary of state, and under assistant secretaries.
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ABC News has now identified at least two ways in which Clinton may have broken federal rules. During her tenure at the State Department she appears to have violated an existing 2005 rule. And after her tenure, it appears that she did not heed a 2013 rule change that may have put her in violation.

Let’s review the timeline of Clinton’s history with email.

2000

2005

2007

2008

2009

2012

2013

2014

2015

Hillary’s complete disregard of protocol was enabled by the fact that there seemed to have been no one in charge of monitoring Hillary’s use of a private email account. According to existing rules, that job fell upon the office of a permanent, independent inspector general. The problem is that for five years, including all of Clinton’s time as secretary, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General never had a confirmed inspector.
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The Inspector General Act of 1978 established independent watchdog offices for every major federal agency, led by an official nominated either by the president or the agency. There are currently eleven inspector general positions open.
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It could be that either President Obama or the agency have yet to nominate, or because a presidential nominee has yet to be confirmed by Congress. The Office of Inspector General has had its own problems. In 2007, the State Department’s Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard, resigned over allegations that he’d impeded investigations into Blackwater and corruption in Iraq. By September 2013, several months after Clinton left State, the department finally had a permanent inspector.
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A little too late? In view of Hillary’s blatant disregard for the law, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

Longtime
Clinton retainer James Carville openly boasted about Hillary’s intent to maintain a private server to avoid congressional oversight. “I suspect,” Carville said, “she didn’t want [Republican Congressman] Louis Gohmert rifling through her emails, which seems to me to be a kinda reasonable position to take.”
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The erasure of Hillary’s emails of course buried the roadmap of the nexus between the secretary of state’s office and the Clinton Foundation, leading Bill Clinton to claim that there was not one shred of evidence proving specific quid pro quos between contributions to the foundation and State Department decisions and policies.