The laws are for the little people.

Accuse the Hillary of violating the law and undermining national security and she cackles like a Bond villain.

I know that I would be laughing if the FBI was investigating me.....not at all.

The nice thing about having a president in office - or running for office - is that there is never any bad news.

CNN says "Ignore the man behind the curtain."

//ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: But you've got to – you've got to admit, Robert, that the Republicans are delivering any script that – that Bernie Sanders may need to go after [Hillary] Clinton. What's her ammo against Bernie Sanders?

ROBERT ZIMMERMAN, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Look, here's the deal: any Democrat who resorts to reciting Republican talking points is going to hurt themselves amongst the grassroots-

BANFIELD: So you're saying you don't think he's ever going to touch the e-mail scandal – or, it's not even a scandal-

ZIMMERMAN: It's not even a-

BANFIELD: It's really a controversy. But 'scandal' is the Republicans' word for it-

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah-

BANFIELD: So far, no one has determined there's any scandal there.

ZIMMERMAN: Of course not! And I think Senator Sanders is too fine a person to engage in reciting Republican talking points like that. But there will be debates around issues; debates around policy; and it's going to be pretty exciting. This is going to be an historic debate, because CNN's present – really, bringing the Democrats to the nation for the first time.//

Imagine if this was a Republican.

//She can’t figure out a fax machine

In one email revealed in an early batch, Ms. Clinton couldn’t get a fax machine to work. Her top aide, Huma Abedin, tried repeatedly—via an email exchange—to help the former secretary of state.

Ms. Abedin: “Can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax.”

Ms. Clinton: “I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work?”

Ms. Abedin: “Yes, but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line.”

Ms. Clinton: “I did.”

Ms. Abedin: “Just pick up phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up.”

Ms. Clinton: “I’ve done it twice now.”

Ms. Clinton then sent a final email on the matter, writing, “Still nothing. Call Oscar if they need help. I’ll be out of pocket for an hour or so.”//

SNL, Comedy Central, late night hosts....all would be over this.

Remember "No blood for oil"?

Remember "Halliburton"?

Actually fomenting a civil war is perfectly hunky-dory when an FOH (Friend of Hillary) does it.

//So Trey Gowdy sent a formal letter to Elijah Cummings over the latter’s intolerably and pettily partisan hackwork with regard to the Benghazi Committee (@RBPundit categorizes it as ‘BEASTMODE,’ which is highly accurate).  There are a lot of interesting things in this letter.  A lot of brutal commentary on Rep. Cummings’ willingness to say one thing in private and another in public, for example. But I found this part about Sidney Blumenthal to be highly entertaining reading:

Beyond the pure politics that were occurring at this time, perhaps more disturbing it that at the same time [Sidney] Blumenthal was pushing Secretary Clinton to war in Libya, he was privately pushing a business interest of his own in Libya that stood to profit from contracts with the new Libyan government – a government that would exist only after a successful U.S. intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi. This business venture was one he shared with Tyler Drumheller and Cody Shearer, the authors of the information sent to Secretary Clinton. It is therefore unsurprising that somebody who knew so little about Libya would suddenly become so interested in Libya and push an old friend in a powerful place to action – for personal profit.

While Blumenthal and Drumheller have both acknowledged a personal stake in the business venture, known as Osprey Global Solutions, they have downplayed their involvement to the Committee. New documents received by the Committee, however, indicate more extensive involvement than previously known.

As a reminder: Sidney Blumenthal was not some mere hanger-on to Secretary Clinton. He was supposed to become a formal adviser when Clinton became Secretary of State, only to be told no by the White House.  Blumenthal still operated as a confidant afterward, only informally. The record shows that he was a constant presence in Hillary Clinton’s utterly non-secure online discussion of Libya. He had influence over the decision making process. And a company that Sidney Blumenthal ran allegedly benefited from it.//

Stay classy, Hillary.

Stay classy....

...and honest.

//Good morning, ma’am,” a member of the uniformed Secret Service once greeted Hillary Clinton. “F*** off,” she replied. That exchange is one among many that active and retired Secret Service agents shared with Ronald Kessler, author of First Family Detail, a compelling look at the intrepid personnel who shield America’s presidents and their families — and at those whom they guard.//

Hillary Clinton...

...wrecking the American economy and keeping America dependent on foreign oil just be tweeting.

//It could have been Hillary Clinton's tweet that did it.
Just after the US government had given the go-ahead for Shell to restart its exploration in Alaska, the Democratic presidential candidate took to the social media site.
"The Arctic is a unique treasure," Mrs Clinton said on Twitter. "Given what we know now, it's not worth the risk of drilling."
Which seemed to ignore the fact that drilling has been taking place in the Arctic for decades - for example oil was first discovered in one of the main basins, Prudhoe Bay, in 1968.
The area is still producing around 250,000 barrels per day and is one of America's largest producing fields.
Shell knows that its every move in the Arctic is scrutinised commercially, politically and environmentally.
Quite rightly, of course, when it comes to exploration in one of the most environmentally sensitive areas in the world.//

Liberalism - Slogans, not rules.

Rules change, but the slogan remains.

//Does Hillary Clinton believe her husband is a rapist?

Now before you bite my head off, the question is a fair one given what the Democratic candidate said in a speech before a “Women for Hillary” event earlier today:

“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

The vast majority of conservatives and liberals who are deeply concerned about sexual assault will agree with Clinton’s larger point. I don’t think anyone would disagree that victims of sexual assault who come forward have a right to be heard, a right to be taken seriously, and a right to have their claims thoroughly investigated. But Clinton goes a step further and says they have “the right to be believed.”

Well, as it happens, her own husband has been accused of sexual assault. Not once, but several times. And contrary to Clinton’s bold new standard, the media and Democrats alike elected not to believe a single accusation. “In media accounts, [Paula Jones] tends to be portrayed as a trailer-park floozy digging for money and celebrity,” Newsweek admitted back in 1997. Clinton’s own stalwart ally James Carville was just as blatant: “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, there’s no telling what you’ll find,” he said.//

CNN was on at the gym yesterday.  It had the words "Clinton apologizes for emails" on for a solid 5 minutes.

The liberal media desperately wants to be able to declare that Hillary's violation of law and undermining of American society is over so "let's move on."

Jonah Goldberg says:

//So Hillary Clinton mumbled some kind of apology yesterday: “Even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails,” she told ABC News. ”That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.” This raises the question: Who gives a rat’s ass? Were you demanding an apology from Hillary Clinton? I wasn’t. I wanted the facts. And those are still in short supply. Which raises a second point: What the Hell is she talking about when she says the State Department “allowed” her private, off-site, server? First off, Hillary Clinton was running the State Department. Does she mean that she allowed herself to do it? If so, this may be the greatest example of Clintonian weasel-wording yet. If she doesn’t mean that, can we have the name of the official who told Clinton it was okay? Can we have the paperwork? Or is the Clinton team still drawing straws to see who gets to take one for the team?//

Hillary wants you to pay attention to the squirrels.

It is not classified because it is marked; it is marked because it is classified.

//It’s actually easy to see why. John Schindler did a nice worked example that I’ve linked before, showing how a document is marked; I’d recommend it to anyone. But the reasoning behind it is simple: some information, if released, would cause significant damage. Let’s say I’m working in the State Department, and I’m concerned with Elbonia. There are a number of sources that CIA can be feeding me, and State has its own resources. So, I may have stuff crossing my desk that says:

The U.S. military attache was talking with his valet about the increasing number of Elbonians ordering military-style fur hats.
The ambassador had a meeting with the head of the opposition party who tells him that there is a new super-secret program taking lots of money away from his pet project.
The NSA is intercepting cell-phone calls from the prime minister of Elbonia to his minister of defense asking about progress on Project Guillaume Tell.
Satellite imagery shows construction of a long straight railroad track with a 1500-meter curved construction at one end and a great big pulley at the other.
The analysts at CIA, and the person on the Elbonia Desk at State, might reasonably conclude there is a massive intercontinental ballistic crossbow program going on in Elbonia.

I can promise you that each of these memos is marked, as anything from “sensitive but unclassified” to TOP SECRET Talent Keyhole NOFORN. Our military attache knows that if he fails to do it, he’ll end up with a job even less desirable than being military attache in Elbonia, as difficult as such a job might be to imagine. But how does the military attache know to mark it?

The answer – and the derived authority that authorizes him to mark it – comes from Executive Order 13526, signed by President Barack Obama and issued on December 25, 2009, which says material should be classified when (Section 1.4):

[I]ts unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security in accordance with section 1.2 of this order, and it pertains to one or more of the following:

(a)  military plans, weapons systems, or operations;

(b)  foreign government information;

(c)  intelligence activities (including covert action), intelligence sources or methods, or cryptology;

(d)  foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources;

(e)  scientific, technological, or economic matters relating to the national security;

(f)  United States Government programs for safeguarding nuclear materials or facilities;

(g)  vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems, installations, infrastructures, projects, plans, or protection services relating to the national security; or

(h)  the development, production, or use of weapons of mass destruction.”

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to decide which clause applies to each item on my list of memos, except to note that the fact the leader of the opposition is talking with the ambassador is the sort of thing that could get the leader of the opposition found dead one morning, having committed suicide by shooting himself six times in the back of the head.

The thing is, knowing that the ambassador is meeting with the leader of the opposition isn’t sensitive because someone marked the papers – it’s sensitive because if word got around, it could get someone killed. The stuff from satellite imagery is sensitive because we don’t want people to know how good our imagery is. The cell-phone intercepts are sensitive because we don’t want the Elbonians to know we can listen to their cell phones. But it’s not sensitive because someone marked it – it’s sensitive because of what it is./

Laws are for the little people.

And, certainly, Clinton-apologists will pretend to believe that Hillary had nothing to do with this guy committing perjury and a felony in failing to answer "conflict of interest" forms honestly.

//Asked in early August about whether Pagliano had been paid privately to maintain the server, a State Department official said that the agency had “found no evidence that he ever informed the department that he had outside income.”

This week, a different State Department official said he could not clarify Pagliano’s pay situation, citing “ongoing reviews and investigations” of Clinton’s e-mail setup.

Pagliano did not list the outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year. The State Department has said Pagliano concluded his full-time service in February 2013, which coincides with Clinton’s departure as secretary. He remains a State Department contractor doing work on “mobile and remote computing functions,” according to a State Department spokesman.//

Hillary revealed.

Maybe this is why she was trying to control her emails.

//Ponder that one again for a moment: She e-mailed one person to call yet another person with an order to bring her a beverage. A normal person, incapacitated and laid out in a hospital bed, can usually get beverage service in fewer steps than what Hillary was requesting.

The Washington Free Beacon has repeatedly raised concerns about Hillary’s inability to remember basic details such as names, dates, and meetings. Now these are normal occurrences for senior citizens and nothing to be ashamed of, but combined with Hillary’s medical history of strokes and concussions (one of which, according to her husband, took almost six months to recover from and was serious enough to prevent her from testifying in front of a House committee), we have reason to be uneasy. Questions must be answered before we entrust the most stressful job on the planet to someone who, by all appearances, can barely walk from one side of a room to the other without outside assistance. If I’m negotiating debate terms with a nominee Hillary Clinton, I don’t agree to anything less than three standing debates, each 90 minutes long, with no stools, chairs, or podiums, town-hall style.

Washington DC is incestuous...

...but the average citizens are the ones getting screwed.

Lanny Davis brown-noses Hillary.

Of course, she could drop puppies into a blender on live television...

...and her media sycophants would declare that the country had developed a taste for puppy-frappe.

Hillary Clinton clearly illegally mishandled top secret information.

We know this because the emails are being release with the marking of "classified," effective the date Hillary sent the emails.

Another take.

This is bad for Hillary and bad for America.

The implication is that there is such a large hole in American information security that "Top Secret" information - which is supposed to be "air gapped", i.e., not connected to the internet - is being copied onto a flash drive and then casually sent on the internet to irresponsible politicians.

//This information would always be air-gapped. There is no (legitimate) way that a computer system could be connected to TS//SI//TK//NOFORN data and to the outside world.

What can happen is that someone copies information, onto a piece of paper or a thumb drive (actually systems that can handle TS shouldn’t have thumb drives either, but it’s too easy to sneak one in or out) and then copied into an email in an uncontrolled system – a cell phone or a laptop or an iPad. The person doing it has to know that it’s coming from a secure system, has to know how sensitive the data really is; they go through lots of training, repeated reminders, and come and go to the office through a freaking vault door that would do credit to a bank.//

Most incompetent elites ever.

Lucky us.

//A JOURNALIST WHO REQUESTS ANONYMITY WRITES:

WHAT NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT BUT WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO WORRY ABOUT

Hillary will be totally blackmail-able if elected. Here’s the logic:

1. It’s safe to say that there were things on that server which could cause Hillary tremendous harm politically – which is why she destroyed the evidence that would have been exculpatory if you believed her explanation. In my mind, it’s also why she used a private server to begin with.

2. She is lying about what was on that server, potentially to include while under oath in her upcoming congressional testimony.

3. If someone had all the copies of her emails and those of her staff, they could readily blackmail her because of the above. They’d have proof of her wrongdoing and her lying about it.

4. Hillary Clinton, as both a future Presidential candidate and a sitting Sec. of State would have been one of the Top 100 intelligence targets in the world and probably one of the top 10.

5. It’s thus certain that the Chinese and Russians would each have had a team focused on accessing her communications.

6. Every security expert I know of has said it’s a virtual certainty the Chinese and Russians both gained access to her server and all her emails. From what I know about their capabilities, I’d agree.

There are probably a bunch of folks in China and Russia who are praying (even if they’re atheists) for Hillary to be elected. If she wins, they own the President of the United States. I can just imagine in a meeting with Putin, Hillary being told to back off supporting Ukraine or he’ll release her emails (as he hands her a folder containing the most damaging ones for her to peruse). Put in that position, would Hillary fall on her sword or sacrifice a country like Ukraine? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to be living in Ukraine…

Someone with that kind of vulnerability to blackmail shouldn’t be allowed to sweep the floors of the NSA, much less run our country./

Good point.

Predictable

What leftist media.

//COVER-UP: MAJOR NEWSPAPERS KEEP HILLARY’S E-MAILS OFF THE FRONT PAGE, NewsBusters reports:

Four of the country’s largest newspapers on Wednesday kept the latest developments in Hillary Clinton’s growing E-mail scandal off the front page (one kept it out of the paper completely). The revelation that the Democratic candidate had top secret information on her server was relegated to the bottom of page A13 in the New York Times.

The Washington Post managed to place the news that Clinton will finally turn over her server on A2. The Los Angeles Times hid the story on A9. All of these newspapers, however, did better than USA Today, which completely skipped Clinton’s scandal in the print edition.//

Let's move on - Nothing to see.

The media will attempt to convey the narrative that Hillary just chose to give her servers to the FBI to "get to the bottom of this."

//UPDATE: AP: FBI "TAKES POSSESSION" OF HILLARY'S SERVER, LAWYER'S THUMB DRIVE:

The media's silence on this will be spectacular.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. official says the FBI has taken possession of Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails, a few of which have been deemed to contain classified information.
The official is not authorized to be quoted by name and requested anonymity.


The official says the FBI recovered two thumb drives containing the emails from Clinton�s lawyer, David Kendall.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley says two of the emails, which traversed Clinton's insecure home email server, were deemed "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information." That�s one of the government's highest classifications.//

Hey, legal beagles!

Why would Hillary Clinton's aide's (Cheryl Mills) attorney instruct her to destroy all of her electronic records while an investigation was pending?

Why would she be allowed to do that?

Why wouldn't the lawyer be subject to obstruction of justice charges?

But there it is in Exhibit A filed with the Court.

Must be something I don't understand.

There is literally no bottom to Clinton corruption.

Via Instapundit:

//HUMA ABEDIN’S “SPECIAL EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP”: The Washington Post reports that longtime Clinton confidant and aide, Huma Abedin (also wife of disgraced Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner) was overpaid by the State Department and may have violated the State Department’s conflict-of-interest rules due to her “special employment relationship” with the Clintons:

In letters sent Thursday to Abedin, Kerry and the Office of Inspector General, [Senator Chuck] Grassley wrote that staff of the inspector general had found “at least a reasonable suspicion of a violation” of the law concerning the “theft of public money through time and attendance fraud” as well as “conflicts of interest connected to her overlapping employment.”

Grassley also raised the possibility that efforts to investigate Abedin’s actions were thwarted because many of her exchanges were sent through Clinton’s private e-mail server. . . .

Since 2013, Grassley has been inquiring about Abedin’s “special government employee” status, which during her final six months at the State Department allowed her to take outside employment with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm led by longtime Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band.

 Paul Mirengoff over at PowerLine notes:

By allowing it, Clinton wasn’t just helping a friend boost her income. She was increasing the potential leverage of the Clinton machine, and in ways that could, and maybe did, benefit the Clinton Foundation.

The Abedin scandal is thus related to the “Clinton cash” scandal.

It is also related to Hillary’s email scandal. According to Grassley, the State Department investigators have “reason to believe that email evidence relevant to [its] inquiry was contained in emails sent and received from her account on Secretary Clinton’s non-government server, making them unavailable to [the investigators’ office] through its normal statutory right of access to records.”

It’s all just another thread in Clinton’s intertwined, rotten ball of corruption. The fact that her closest aide-de-camp has received special favors and status is par for the course.//

Mary Antoinette on the Potomac. 

Hillary Clinton surprised that the peasants don't have enough cake to eat.

//“Hillary Clinton admitted today that she was ‘surprised’ to learn that the people who told her small businesses have struggled in recent years were actually correct,” Joel Gehrke writes at NRO:

Clinton noted that small business creation has “stalled out,” to her chagrin. “I was very surprised to see that when I began to dig into it,” she said while campaigning in New Hampshire. “Because people were telling me this as I traveled around the country the last two years, but I didn’t know what they were saying and it turns out that we are not producing as many small businesses as we use to.”

The struggles of small businesses during President Obama’s administration are hardly a new subject on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney raised the issue throughout the 2012 presidential election.

“Small businesses lack the confidence they need to expand and hire new workers, and the President’s looming tax hikes are threatening to destroy another 700,000 jobs,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in September of 2012, for instance.

In a statement, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus mocked Clinton for expressing such surprise, pointing to reports of the cost increases Obamacare has imposed on small businesses.

”At every turn, Hillary Clinton has supported top-down Washington-driven policies that have stacked the deck against small businesses,” Priebus said. “Hillary Clinton can’t possibly be a champion for everyday Americans when she doesn’t understand their most basic economic concerns and was ‘surprised’ to learn that small businesses are struggling.”//