...but you don't explain exactly how he or his administration could have stopped this primary process from continuing. What do you have in mind there? I'm following you, wanting to understand more.

.. and let Bernie be the Nominee.

Or, at least, I want to believe that

FBI chief Comey is a Republican.



I'm deeply suspicious of the timing here while acknowledging Hillary dragged this out by not producing her emails for almost 2 years in defiance of the FOIA requests.

Sucks.

Thanks for looking at Paul's timeline. Its a masterpiece.

of Obama given his neoliberalism and being a New Dem who used a lot of shall we say loose campaign rhetoric that progressives desperately wanted to hear, but he is a solid and ethical man.

He will not jeopardize that honor by intervening in an investigation even if the outcome is bad for the Party. He may not have wanted an investigation but once it got under way, that became a different matter all together.

like minds.. I do believe Obama to be solid, ethical and clean. One of the few I can remember in my lifetime, with the exception of Carter, I believe he too was of equal character.

I really, really hope and pray she doesn't fling this shite on him.

even if they are conservative and centrists Democrats, so I truly hope she doesn't fling this shit at Obama either!

It is so callous and cynical. She thought so little of him, or so highly of herself, that she ran a rogue foreign policy right under his nose, out of sight. She used Blumenthal, who had explicitly been banned from advising her by Obama because Blumenthal had savaged Obama during the 2008 primary.

AND......drum roll..........she has risked Obama's reputation and legacy.

So many unforgivable actions she's taken, if this happens...

"We can't let President Obama's legacy end up in Donald Trump's hands"!!!!

She is a narcissist. She only gives a shit about her and those she considers to be objects of convenience as long as you are useful. After that, to fuck with you, I am doing what I want.

Yes, she has. I just hope Obama remains the honorable man and does nothing to screw with this just to protect now his reputation and legacy.

However what I do expect is a shitstorm scandal if Trumps (or other republican front group) opposition research comes into play and works her campaign over making Kerry's swiftboating, Fast and Furious, and Benghazi look like child's play.

It's soooo predictable, I cannot for the life of me figure out why the party establishment didn't insist she stand down on this run. Despite promises to support her (back in 2008) this should have immediately given them cause to make a different decision.

And oh, the selection of DWS as chair was insanely stupid.

Very easy to draw conclusions.

But as some would like to say, don't conclude conspiracy when stupidity is more likely the source of the problem.

That one's easy, she *is* the party establishment viewed by many as the rain maker.

It's just a little over a month to go when all Bernie Supporters will be banned from DU.

They can't say they haven't been forewarned. We have done everything to inform them of the very predictable outcome of the general election with HRC as their nom. We'll all lose, but it won't be because we didn't give it a damn good effort to avoid that loss.

.

I have some faith that there will be a proper comeuppance for her actions. But I won't hold my breath either.

I think after Fitzmas, my faith withered pretty quickly.

We're all painfully aware that Justice in Amurika has been woefully absent with regard to race and class, that way for centuries.

In our lifetimes we rarely see Justice served when it comes to the TPTB.

But... for a glimmer of hope, may it be so..

is that tiny glimmer of hope.

Nothing is constant, everything changes, and this neoliberalism will soon pass as well. I truly hope it is in my lifetime, but I will work hard so that whenever it is, it does occur!

It's been a long one, since 1968 for me.

But I'm still strong, and still fighting!

In solidarity, yes. La Lucha!

I worked and voted for Jesse Jackson. When he was defeated, I couldn't join the Democratic Party. I saw the rise of Clintonism, and I knew where it was headed. And it was away from the Rainbow Coalition New Deal/Great Society to a twisted corporate loving neoliberalism with faux progressive rhetoric. With Hillary we can now add a horrid neocon foreign policy cred.

Lucha a muerte, my friend!

at length why it is extremely unlikely that she did anything that will be prosecuted.

"Because, see, as was pointed out, using private servers was nothing new ..."

Do you have a link for that? Because that's not what I've been seeing. Powell and Rice were found to have (Powell) a very few emails on private accounts (think Hotmail . But not private-in-your-house-servers. I've been off the net a lot this week, so if I've missed some new revelations I like to see them.

"... State Department IT personnel."

Not just any personnel. He was her IT guy from her 2008 campaign. Clinton brought him to State Dept. He wasn't just some schmuck that wasn't paying attention. I'd venture he probably followed orders. From her. YMMV.

https://www.gwu.edu/~action/2008/clinton/clintonorg.html

Director of IT Bryan Pagliano
Prior to joining the Clinton team, Pagliano was infrastructure team lead at Community IT Innovators for over seven years through to Aug. 2006. University of Maryland - Robert H. Smith School of Business, 2007. B.A. in political science from Emory University, 1998.

I might have missed it. Its late and I'm tired. Can you highlight that?

Sarah Palin using Yahoo isn't analagous fyi.

it was not setup or used by governmental officials, only aides. Now that doesn't make it right, but it is different.

A comparable thing would be as if Huma Abedin had worked with the DNC to setup a private server for communication among the various aides and support staff at the SD.

What happened here has never happened before. Clinton hired her own IT guy to setup an insecure server on her private property through which she conducted affairs of state with not only aides but also foreigners and other government officials.

.. regarding her leadership ability is abuse of power in getting the server in the first place, rather thsn a 67-year-old woman's IT knowledge of all the various ways of attack.

If Bryan Pagliano was the only person who signed off on the server besides Clinton, I have a hard time believing at least someone didn't question it.

Still, I look forward to everything he has to say being made public.

to know that a private server helps her thwart FOIA and classified documents protocol.

He was her server admin. It doesn't mean that others were not aware of what he was doing.

I don't know about you but I have worked in large enough bureaucratic structures including both military and civilian that I know that communication and awareness of what other divisions or departments are doing can be grossly negligent and even non-existent. Peter literally doesn't always know what Paul is doing.

Look at cases like Arthur Anderson and Enron and Tailhook for pertinent examples.

alligned with her to run the State Department. It may well be that anyone who was a career professional in IT might have had reported to a Clinton person who reported to Cheryl Mills. If that is the case, a person troubled by this would quickly see that talking to his boss or his boss' boss will do nothing if this is what Clinton wanted.

You would have needed a whistle blower and, until this all blew up two years after she was out of office taking all her emails with her, does this really seem like something to go to the media or the WH with?

...and it ended up in the care of a server farm with no security clearance, no security at the facility, and then ended up on a cloud that was not secured nor maintained by workers with security clearance.

pieces of evidence and it does surprise me that so many bury their heads in the sand about this.

Palin isn't pertinent to the conversation. That nincompoop never made it close to Washington, thank gawd!

See TM99 post #8

In the case of the Bush server scandal

it was not setup or used by governmental officials, only aides. Now that doesn't make it right, but it is different.

A comparable thing would be as if Huma Abedin had worked with the DNC to setup a private server for communication among the various aides and support staff at the SD.

What happened here has never happened before. Clinton hired her own IT guy to setup an insecure server on her private property through which she conducted affairs of state with not only aides but also foreigners and other government officials.
----------------------------------

She was head of State, not an aide. She had been offered a secure comp setup in her office. She turned it down. She demanded a Blackberry- type setup like the Prez had, and was told 'no'. So why on earth would she take that step of having HER IT guy setup a server in her home? Avarice? Ego? Narcissism? See, this is the very essence of the problem a lot of us have with it. In her friggin' home. I'm not the smartest chica in the world and even I know that's the stupidest thing in the world! None, NONE!, of the possible reasons she could have done this for are acceptable in anyone expecting to hold the highest office in the land.

Ya can't say she's the smartest best candidate running, and then lay her poor choices off on the underling. The underling she toted from her campaign to State. If she isn't smart enough to handle SoS, then why the hell should she get a shot at CiC?

Here's a couple of timeline entries about that:

March 2007 - 2008: The Bush Administration gets embroiled in a private email scandal. A Congressional oversight committee investigates allegations that the White House fired US attorneys for political reasons. The committee asks Bush officials to turn over relevant emails, only to find that government work had been conducted on private email addresses. Millions of emails are deleted and permanently lost, preventing the committee from continuing their investigation. Bush officials use email accounts associated with a private gwb43.com server owned and controlled by the Republican National Committee, which is a private political entity not covered by government oversight laws. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2007) (Vox, 3/2/2015) In 2015, shortly after Clinton's use of a private email address will be revealed, Vox will comment, "That [Bush administration email] scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush's presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama's first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as secretary of state, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same." Vox will also note, "Perhaps even more stunning is that the Obama White House, whose top officials were presumably exchanging frequent emails with Clinton, apparently did not insist she adopt an official email account." (Vox, 3/2/2015)


June 20, 2007: Clinton publicly criticizes the Bush administration's use of non-governmental email accounts: While campaigning for president, Clinton says, "Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps. We know about secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts. ... It's a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok." (ABC News, 3/6/2015) (The Hill, 3/5/2015) This is a reference to a scandal that became public earlier in the month, where it was found that White House adviser Karl Rove and other officials had used private email accounts and then deleted all their emails before investigators could get them. (Vox, 3/2/2015)

the SD IT staff has confirmed that they had no idea that Pagliano was running an illicit off-site server. They saw he was on staff but he never reported to them and were not paid by him. She was his boss not them.

She bought him, she brought him, she owns him and anything he built for her.

And this alone promotes a theory of definite intent to subvert FOIA and to get around classified documents protocols in order to allow Blumenthal access that he was denied by Obama.

Accidental mishandling or unintentional mishandling are equal crimes to intent.

when it comes to classified documents. If it borders into intent, then we may be looking at something like treason, which would be the willful mishandling of classified documents as opposed to accidental or unintentional.

....(and I don't think this is likely myself; just reporting what some thing) believe that Hillary was selling secrets to foreign entities by doing government business over unsecured transmission.

using her Foundation to help secure funds and arms for 'friends'.

Moriah, thanks for showing a sincere effort to understand all this.

I want to point out though that I don't really have a "thesis." I'm not a legal expert by any means, and the legality of all this is gets into some complicated areas. An important thing to remember is that we, the public, don't fully know what's going on yet. The chances are good that the most damning evidence, if it exists, has not been made public, and may never be made public. For instance, what's in those 22 top secret emails? It could be that the public truly won't know for decades, because if they're really that vital and secret, then they still shouldn't be made public. If there ever was a trial, I imagine a lot of it would have to be held behind closed doors, to keep secrets secret.

I honestly don't know if the FBI will recommend her indictment or not. Frankly, a lot of it depends on the people making the decisions, especially FBI Director Comey. One reason I put all the info in the timeline is so that actual legal experts could look it over and weigh in with their opinions.

But even they won't know. We all can only guess, based on some small percentage of the evidence the FBI has. Sometimes, even "slam dunk" legal cases are never pursued. For instance, if you look at who else has been prosecuted for revealing classified information, it has been quite arbitrary. It seems to me that unwanted whistleblowers have been prosecuted harshly while those who leaked information favorable to the government didn't get prosecuted at all.

However, I do know that what I've seen so far sure looks like some combination of incompetence or illegality to me. (Or perhaps "gross negligence" which is incompetence so severe that it merits punishment.) Others may disagree. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I hope people carefully check out all the available evidence before making sweeping statements like this scandal is nothing to worry about at all.

Since your main interest is in the IT aspect, let's look at that. A lot of the facts simply are not known yet. Clinton has not explained some very basic aspects about her server set-up, which is quite suspcious in and of itself. The Hill recently had an article called "Seven Lingering Questions in the Clinton Email Investigation." I could add a lot more than seven! But here's what they say about one of them:

Was the server secure?

Clinton’s camp has refused to outline precisely which digital protections she used to safeguard the information on her private server. Independent cybersecurity analysts have concluded that the server went at least two months without using standard encryption protections that make data inaccessible to hackers.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January said “the odds are pretty high” that foreign spies in China, Russia or Iran would have gotten access to Clinton’s data. Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, testified before Congress that, for foreign intelligence agencies, the server “would represent opportunity.”

I mean, the comments about a "devastating witness" sound a bit over the top and I don't really take them for much...

But why give him immunity? You've got him for 5 years on the violations. I wouldn't think it really pays to lie on the form so it seems odd.

The whole wiping thing was pretty amateur it seems. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to keep the info a whole lot safer than it was. I mean, start by encrypting the disk with some real encryption software. The Feds would have a whole lot tougher time getting in (and by tougher I mean impossible if done well). Would make wiping a whole lot better.

Honestly I think this whole thing blew up in their face. I think she started out thinking she was dealing with a Benghazi committee which she could get rid of backups and then tell them oops, they're gone and that the committee should go f*** themselves. Then someone noticed the classified and the FBI got involved, and she couldn't really tell them to go f*** themselves, and they know how to recover information. And they recovered information.

Really, if the FBI hadn't been involved, this would have been the same old same old. She would have had her private server. She would have decided what to turn over. She would have turned it over. Republicans would have griped that they wanted more and she should give them everything. She would have said no. It would have been a headline for a week and forgotten by all except the hardcore few.

Possibly but the president trumps IT and the FBI. This is where the whole indictment fantasy breaks down. For example in the experience you described the president of the company could have had any one of the players fired or not fired. The authority of the SOS derives from the US president and the NSA and the rest of the intel apparatus serve at the pleasure of the president who is also commander-in-chief. So matters of security that aren't governed by statute, i.e. aren't treasonous or felonious, would ultimately require his authorization for prosecution. And since the Justice Department is an executive function he could also pull the plug on the investigation if he chose to. Of course he could also be impeached forthwith, so he won't, but he does have that authority.

Which is to say that despite his having appointed Inspector Javert -- and keep in mind that getting appointments through Congress is a challenge for him -- it's PBO's call as to what happens to whom on this. That's why there isn't going to be an indictment and also why I can just about guarantee that Javert will be out of a job next January.

I agree that you're right, it's highly unlikely Clinton will ever be put on trial, no matter what the evidence is. At some point, politics comes into it, and Obama's comments have shown how he feels.

That said, the key to me is if the FBI recommends an indictment of Clinton or not. If a recommendation were to happen, that would be very damaging to her campaign at the very least. And depending on the charges and evidence presented, that could put the Justice Department in a difficult situation. If Loretta Lynch goes ahead with an indictment, obviously that would be bad for Clinton. But if the FBI recommends an indictment and Lynch decides not to indict, that will be a big controversy in and of itself that the Republicans would definitely pounce on. Lynch might also appoint a special prosecutor to decide or otherwise kick the can down the road after the election, but that wouldn't be good for Clinton either.

So yeah, Obama has the power to weigh in. But only after the FBI makes its decision to recommend an indictment or not. In terms of this election, again, I believe the pivotal question is what the FBI decides to do or not.

And frankly, let's be honest, there are all kinds of potential conflicts of interest here that could affect matters. It's very possible that if Clinton is elected president, she could decide to keep Lynch as the attorney general, so that gives Lynch a strong motive not to indict. But it's also very possible that Comey's job could be hanging in the balance too. Perhaps if a Republican becomes president he stays as FBI director, and he doesn't if Clinton wins. So that gives him a strong motive to recommend an indictment.

I know FBI directors are given 10-year terms in order to try to insulate them from political pressure, so in theory Comey's term is supposed to last until 2023. But it could be that a President Clinton could fire him if she doesn't like him. Or he might be protected like judges are. I'm not sure what the rule is.

It would be nice if this was strictly a non-political case judged solely on its legal merits, but that's not very realistic, given the stakes.

A lot depends on November of course but a strong win and he's out. The only thing that would save him now would be finding evidence of a quid pro quo in Hillary's correspondence and you can bet that's what he's furiously looking for. But otherwise he has nothing and if he pulls anything he'll lose his public reputation as well as his job. And even if he claims he's found a big fat bribe I don't think it will go anywhere and I don't think Hillary should or will withdraw. Seriously, do you?

By "he," I take it you mean Comey?

I think it would be great if both Comey and Lynch pledge to resign after their decisions on this, so there could be no possiblity of them making decisions to further or extend their careers. But fat chance of that happening.

A quid pro quo is just one thing that could come out of this. It's a matter of how much of a stickler Comey wants to be. I have no doubt there are illegal things that have been done that he could charge her for re: the classification of emails. But in other cases, people have been willing to let a certain amount of mishandling of classification info slide. The simple fact is that some areas of the law are strictly enforced and others are not. For instance, people abuse the rules about religious nonprofits and hardly anyone ever gets punished, because the government doesn't want to be seen as prosecuting religion.

I believe he also would have a slam dunk convincting her for obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, since we already know of three instances where more of her work emails came out that she didn't turn over, and media reports indicate there's more of that coming. Bloomberg News reported the FBI has recovered Clinton's 31,000 deleted emails and were sorting them into work and non-work, which suggests a lot of work ones got deleted. But again, sometimes people get prosecuted on that, and sometimes they don't.

Prosecutors have a lot of leeway over what they decide to do. It's been noted that in previous cases Comey has been a real stickler. For instance, he prosecuted one financial fraud case based on one line in one email. The truth is, nobody knows what he's going to do.

He's a partisan on a witch hunt and his agency is not supposed to interfere in elections but historically of course they do. The criminality of his interference is a question for lawyers but certainly his violation of whatever "protect and serve" he swore to is grounds for dismissal. I don't think he's Obama's friend but Barack is meticulous in these matters and would never engage in a public food fight especially in such a dangerous one. But theres a precedent and I don't doubt that he'll pull the plug if Hillary asks him to, and I think she will.

I think you're jumping the gun on calling Comey "a partisan on a witch hunt" when he hasn't announced anything yet. But if that's the approach you're going to take, I think that'll be a hard sell. Remember that Obama appointed him after he'd been out of government for about eight years. And he's been praised by both Democrats and Republicans for having great integrity and impartiality. Here's the timeline entry on that:

June 21, 2013: President Obama nominates James Comey to be the next director of the FBI; Comey starts a ten-year term. While announcing the nomination, Obama comments, "To know Jim Comey is also to know his fierce independence and his deep integrity. ... He doesn't care about politics, he only cares about getting the job done. At key moments, when it's mattered most, he stood up for what he believed was right. He was prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong." Comey had been the deputy attorney general during the Bush administration. Obama's comment about giving up a job is reference to a 2004 incident where Comey (and others) threatened to resign unless President Bush canceled a surveillance program before its legal authorization expired. Bush gave in and canceled the program. (The White House, 6/21/2013) Comey is approved by the Senate later in June and starts his ten-year term as FBI director on September 4, 2013. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/4/2013) Comey will later be in charge of the FBI when it investigates Clinton's email scandal.


I cut that short. Obama went on and on praising Comey and his integrity and independence from political considerations.

I agree that Comey <could> let partisan politics sway him. That's basic human nature, to have biases. But he has a sterling reputation of being independent and impartial, so that would be hard to prove. If Comey does recommend Clinton's indictment (still an unknown at this point), the whole country might end up debating his motives and background.

From his association with a former president, Frank got a great deal in Kazakhstan: