May 13,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued
to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the
past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of
legal misery. Here is what happened.
Last week,
Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisors when she was
Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her
and have significant positions in her presidential
campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These
interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and
done in the presence of the same legal team which
represented all five aides.
The
atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of
the interrogations is to enable federal prosecutors
and investigators to determine whether these five
are targets or witnesses. Stated differently, the
feds need to decide if they should charge any of
these folks as part of a plan to commit espionage,
or if they will be witnesses on behalf of the
government should there be such a prosecution; or
witnesses for Mrs. Clinton.
In the same
week, a federal judge ordered the same five persons
to give videotaped testimony in a civil lawsuit
against the State Department which once employed
them in order to determine if there was a
"conspiracy" – that’s the word used by the judge –
in Mrs. Clinton’s office to evade federal
transparency laws. Stated differently, the purpose
of these interrogations is to seek evidence of an
agreement to avoid the Freedom of Information Act
requirements of storage and transparency of records,
and whether such an agreement, if it existed, was
also an agreement to commit espionage – the removal
of state secrets from a secure place to a non-secure
place.
Also
earlier this week, the State Department revealed
that it cannot find the emails of Bryan Pagliano for
the four years that he was employed there. Who is
Bryan Pagliano? He is the former information
technology expert, employed by the State Department
to problem shoot Mrs. Clinton’s entail issues.
Pagliano
was also personally employed by Mrs. Clinton. She
paid him $5,000 to migrate her regular State
Department email account and her secret State
Department email account from their secure State
Department servers to her personal, secret,
non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New
York. That was undoubtedly a criminal act. Pagliano
either received a promise of non-prosecution or an
actual order of immunity from a federal judge. He is
now the government’s chief witness against Mrs.
Clinton.
It is
almost inconceivable that all of his emails have
been lost. Surely this will intrigue the FBI, which
has reportedly been able to retrieve the emails Mrs.
Clinton attempted to wipe from her server.
While all
of this has been going on, intelligence community
sources have reported about a below the radar
screen, yet largely known debate in the Kremlin
between the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian
Intelligence Services. They are trying to come to a
meeting of the minds to determine whether the
Russian government should release some 20,000 of
Mrs. Clinton’s emails that it obtained either by
hacking her directly or by hacking into the email of
her confidante, Sid Blumenthal.
As if all
this wasn’t enough bad news for Mrs. Clinton in one
week, the FBI learned last week from the convicted
international hacker, who calls himself Guccifer,
that he knows how the Russians came to possess Mrs.
Clinton’s emails; and it is because she stored,
received and sent them from her personal, secret,
non-secure server.
Mrs.
Clinton has not been confronted publicly and asked
for an explanation of her thoughts about the
confluence of these events, but she has been asked
if the FBI has reached out to her. It may seem
counter-intuitive, but in white collar criminal
cases, the FBI gives the targets of its
investigations an opportunity to come in and explain
why the target should not be indicted.
This is
treacherous ground for any target, even a smart
lawyer like Mrs. Clinton. She does not know what the
feds know about her. She faces a damned-if-she-does
and damned-if-she-doesn’t choice here.
Any lie and
any materially misleading statement – and she is
prone to both – made to the FBI can form the basis
for an independent criminal charge against her. This
is the environment that trapped Martha Stewart.
Hence the standard practice among experienced
counsel is to decline interviews by the folks
investigating their clients.
But Mrs.
Clinton is no ordinary client. She is running for
president. She lies frequently. We know this
because, when asked if the FBI has reached out to
her for an interview, she told reporters that
neither she nor her campaign had heard from the FBI;
but she couldn’t wait to talk to the agents.
That is a
mouthful, and the FBI knows it. First, the FBI does
not come calling upon her campaign or even upon her.
The Department of Justice prosecutors will call upon
her lawyers – and that has already been done, and
Mrs. Clinton knows it. So her statements about the
FBI not calling her or the campaign were profoundly
misleading, and the FBI knows that.
Mrs.
Clinton’s folks are preparing for the worst. They
have leaked nonsense from "U.S. officials" that the
feds have found no intent to commit espionage on the
part of Mrs. Clinton. Too bad these officials –
political appointees, no doubt – skipped or failed
Criminal Law 101. The government need not prove
intent for either espionage or for lying to federal
agents.
COPYRIGHT 2014 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY
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Hillary Clinton lying
for 13 minutes straight
See also
Persian Gulf Sheikhs Gave
Bill & Hillary $100 Million:
“These regimes are buying access. You’ve got the
Saudis. You’ve got the Kuwaitis, Oman, Qatar and the
UAE. There are massive conflicts of interest. It’s
beyond comprehension,” Poole told TheDCNF in an
interview
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