Good day all. A story came out this morning from the Los Angeles Times that the FBI would like to speak with her regarding her bathroom mail server.
Now the LA Times is not noted as being a right wing newspaper, so in the case of Cankles, they would have more credibility, such as it is, with the Liberal side of the country than say Fox News or the Washington Times. If the FBI has now moved to the point where they want to speak to Cankles and her minions aides, then I’m going to guess that they are in the last phases of their investigation. Here are the details from the Los Angeles Times:
Federal prosecutors investigating the possible mishandling of classified materials on Hillary Clinton’s private email server have begun the process of setting up formal interviews with some of her longtime and closest aides, according to two people familiar with the probe, an indication that the inquiry is moving into its final phases.
When it comes to these sorts of investigations, I, like pretty much everyone else, learned how they work from television, which means we have it completely wrong. That said, Cankles has this tendency to lie like a cheap rug even when she doesn’t need to. She will no doubt have her lawyer present and he’s probably going to sit on her like a two ton anchor.
Those interviews and the final review of the case, however, could still take many weeks, all but guaranteeing that the investigation will continue to dog Clinton’s presidential campaign through most, if not all, of the remaining presidential primaries.
I’ve been hearing that the FBI wants to wrap this up in a nice pretty bow by May. If they do that, then it’s in the hands of Loretta Lynch, and you can expect the whole thing to just be disappeared.
No dates have been set for questioning the advisors, but a federal prosecutor in recent weeks has called their lawyers to alert them that he would soon be doing so, the sources said. Prosecutors also are expected to seek an interview with Clinton herself, though the timing remains unclear.
Of course, the fact that Clinton is running around the country campaigning does work in her favor of avoiding the FBI investigators, but that will work only so long. I have no doubt that the agents will be more than happy to intercept Cankles somewhere on the campaign trail if needed.
The interviews by FBI agents and prosecutors will play a significant role in helping them better understand whether Clinton or her aides knowingly or negligently discussed classified government secrets over a non-secure email system when she served as secretary of State.
Judging from the released information so far, it’s a given that they did know. What I think is going to happen is the FBI is going to set up a perjury trap for Clinton and her minions. This is why I think her lawyer will be sitting on here. Clinton’s first thought in such a situation is how to protect herself and her money. This usually means lying through her teeth. Her lawyer will probably have Cankles taking the 5th, (instead of her normal “Drinking a 5th), to try and keep lying to a federal agent from being added to the list of charges. (That was one of the initial charges against General Petraeus. He lied to the investigators)
The meetings also are an indication that much of the investigators’ background work – recovering deleted emails, understanding how the server operated and determining whether it was breached – is nearing completion.
“The interviews are critical to understand the volume of information they have accumulated,” said James McJunkin, former head of the FBI’s Washington field office. “They are likely nearing the end of the investigation and the agents need to interview these people to put the information in context. They will then spend time aligning these statements with other information, emails, classified documents, etc., to determine whether there is a prosecutable case.”
Oh to be a fly on the wall for those interviews.
Many legal experts believe that Clinton faces little risk of being prosecuted for using the private email system to conduct official business when she served as secretary of State, though that decision has raised questions among some about her judgment.
The only reason Clinton won’t be prosecuted is politics. From what is in the public record, she broke a number of laws over the handling of classified material. People I know who have held security clearances have said that if they had done what Clinton did, they would have been locked up and the key thrown away a long time ago.
They noted that using a private email system was not banned at the time, and others in government had used personal email to transact official business.
This is the old chestnut, put out by the PLFD’s, that it was just fine for Clinton to have her own mail server and conduct official business on it. Actually, it wasn’t. She did this to avoid having to answer Freedom of Information requests as well as congressional oversight. There is also that pesky statute regarding the handling of classified information.
The bigger question is whether she or her aides distributed classified material in email systems that fell outside of the department’s secure classified system.
Since it’s come out that Top Secret, Special Access Program information was sent through Cankles wide open mail server, and the only way it could have been sent to it was if it had been transcribed from the secure network over to the insecure internet accessible system, yeah, it’s safe to say they distributed it.
But even if prosecutors determine that she did, chances she will be found criminally liable are low.
Whistling in the dark again?
U.S. law makes it a crime for someone to knowingly or willfully retain classified information, handle it in a grossly negligent manner or to pass it to someone not entitled to see it.
And Cankles managed to check all three boxes on that one.
Clinton has denied using the email account to send or receive materials marked classified.
And that was very quickly proven to be an outright lie.
Though some emails have since been deemed to be too sensitive to release publicly, Clinton’s campaign has attributed that to overzealous intelligence officials and “over-classification run amok.”
The decision on whether to prosecute could be difficult. Vladeck, the law professor noted the differences between Clinton’s email issue and two previous cases involving the mishandling of classified material that resulted in prosecutions and guilty pleas.
The two cases were general Petraeus and former Clinton rumpswab, Sandy Berger. In Petraeus’s case, the information never went beyond Petraeus’s girlfriend. Berger stole and destroyed documents that would have made the Clintons look bad. Cankles problem was that she was storing classified data on an unsecured mail server. That server was probably hacked by every intelligence service on earth one they found it. That makes it a much more serious breach then what the other two did.
It’s a toss up right now on whether or not Cankles will be charged. Most people, Stephen Vladeck excepted, believe that Hillary Clinton willfully broke the law, and may have, and probably did, put the United States at risk. I think that the reason this investigation has gone as long as it has is due to the willful destruction of evidence by Clinton, the stonewalling by the State Department, and more importantly, the political nature of who Hillary Rodham Clinton is, and what she is trying to do.
If, as expected, the FBI recommends criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton, and Loretta Lynch refuses to do so, we may very well see some seriously high level resignations from the Justice department, along with some very interesting leaks to the media and congress. Hillary Clinton could end up being the first president to face potential impeachment before she even takes the oath of office.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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