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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I too believe Clinton's conduct was abysmal and would've been thrilled to have seen a prosecution on the very obviously sketchy private server affair but Trump's absurdly hilarious comically ham-fisted obstruction attempts are the only aspect you need to draw a distinction.

As you said, we don't know if it was someone on Clinton's staff who did the wiping, and it would have been very difficult to prove in court.

We... do know, or at least the FBI does (the specific names were blocked out in FOIAs). The Benghazi Committee's first request for all relevant Clinton e-mails was sent November 18, 2014. In December 2014, Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills asked Platte River Networks to delete all e-mail information older than 60 days. This policy change was not implemented at this time. The Benghazi Committee sent out preservation requests to Clinton and to Platte River Networks on March 4th, 2015. Sometime between March 25th and the 31st, 2015, a Platte River employee used BleachBit to overwrite all Clinton e-mails, and that employee knew of the preservation request and that it covered this company and these files.

Platte River would also go out of its way to resist complying with or even recognizing a congressional subpeona.

Which doesn't necessarily say anything for Clinton herself, and maybe not even Mills. Well, Mills' original order was still violating the Federal Records Act, and the initial November 18 request is the sort of thing that traditionally is considered a preservation request, and the whole thing made Clinton's claims that she'd provided all relevant e-mails to the committee a farce.

But that Platte River Networks employee was never charged, or even seriously investigated. So it seems less found "very difficult" and more just untried.

There's the additional wrinkle that the entire point of the "private" server was almost certainly to evade FOIA and transparency/accountability. There's a long history of Federal bureaucrats using "private" equipment for their documenting and record-keeping; if they need the records they can treat them as official, but if they get FOIA'd they claim they've searched "official" records and found nothing, and if caught use the fig-leaf that the devices were "personal". One of the big times this came up is in Waco, where the overwhelming majority of documentation of the raid by ATF and the FBI was concealed from numerous investigations and lawsuits for many years by exactly this method.

It's obvious to me that Blues see all these arguments as scrambling attempts to insulate Trump, but I honestly don't care if he goes to jail. The point is that federal law enforcement is completely off the chain, and has been for years, maybe decades, maybe always. Hoover was never held accountable for his crimes and corruption, and he built the Bureau that we've inherited. They've been involved in serious malfeasance in every era from their inception till now. At some point we need to engage with the reality that the FBI has never abided the restraint of law.

You keep saying this. Evidence was destroyed but your argument is “well we can’t prove how so can’t do anything.” You put pressure on lower level people. You don’t give the immunity to start. You then either get them to flip for a deal or take the fall. That’s the opposite of what happened here because the investigators didn’t want to negatively conclude.

Could you specify where in the FBI reports they discuss this. Your link goes to a list of forty multi-page PDF's.

I think this is the part of Comey's statement where he discusses the issue

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters.

He says 'concern matters' rather than 'contain materials' which seems to imply a discussion of something classified Special Access rather than the transmission of the special access materials themselves.

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