PT: Let's put it this way: if you're trying to judge whether Clinton will be indicted or not just by looking at the non-redacted parts of the emails, then you're missing most of the serious evidence against her. The FBI has the security clearances to see ALL the emails. Obama has never been briefed by the FBI about the investigation, but it's possible he knows things through some other means. We clearly don't.
JB: What we do know is that there are lots of redacted emails with lots of redacted material in them, so that leads even a non-tech savvy layperson like me to understand that there's a lot of material that simply should not have been sent out using an unsecured server.
PT: Yes. I would say that based on what we know just from the unredacted material, plus what we can infer about the redacted material, there's more than enough evidence to charge her on that alone. The redacted material that we don't know about would only make matters worse for her. I would guess, though, the top secret emails are going to get someone indicted no matter what, because the security and secrecy of those are so great and so clear that it's not like you could just let that information slip without realizing that was highly classified. And if someone was that foolish, repeatedly, they'd have no business being anywhere near classified information again.
JB: So, we're in agreement there. What else have you got?
PT: Well, speaking of unknowns, there's also the matter of her deleted emails. At the end of 2014, when investigators asked for Clinton's emails, she turned over 30,000 emails that she said were work-related and deleted 31,000 emails that she said were personal. In August 2015, she even signed a legally binding oath in a court case vowing that she had turned over all her work emails. The only problem with that is that more emails keep showing up.
JB: How is that possible?
PT: Because when you send an email, you keep a copy and the recipient keeps a copy. When Clinton was secretary of state, the State Department archived far less than 1% of all emails, so Clinton probably figured there wouldn't be many other copies out there. But this turned into such a scandal that various organizations have been suing Clinton's aides for ALL their emails, so more keep coming to light. For instance, just a couple of days ago, the State Department turned over 100 more of her work emails.
JB: Emails that she had deleted and had no intention of turning over, apparently.
PT: Yes. The Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI had recovered most if not all of Clinton's deleted emails, and Bloomberg News reported, "Once the emails have been extracted, a group of agents has been separating personal correspondence and passing along work-related messages to agents leading the investigation...." That tells me a big portion of them in fact were work-related. What's in those? Why didn't she turn them over? For starters, she should be in legal trouble simply for not turning over all the emails she should have. But also, she may have deleted the ones that contain the most damning evidence. We don't know, but the FBI does.
JB: Got it. Next?
PT: There are many different ways Clinton could be in trouble. Another has to do with her private server. Simply having one violated department regulations in various ways, but it doesn't appear to have broken any laws, since laws take a while to catch up with technology. However, it's more complicated than that. Clinton hired a computer technician named Bryan Pagliano to set up and manage her private server. He worked at the State Department at the same time that he had a part-time job running her server, and having an outside job like that was against the rules, as both he and Clinton had to know. Each year, he signed a document affirming he had no outside job. But that was a lie, and the penalty for lying on that form is up to five years in prison.
Now, here's the big question: did he lie and generally hide the fact that he was managing Clinton's private server all on his own, or did Clinton tell him to do that? He was working directly for her the whole time. We don't know, since none of their correspondence has come out, and in fact, the State Department recently said that all of Pagliano's emails from Clinton's time as secretary of state are missing. And there are no Pagliano emails in the 30,000 work emails Clinton released, except for one where he wished her a happy birthday. So, something sure seems suspicious to me. It makes sense to me that Pagliano wouldn't have risked five years in prison all on his own, and that Clinton told him to keep any mention of her private server a secret, so it would remain out of reach of public records requests and future investigations. In which case, the FBI could have her on that. It's been reported that Pagliano has made an immunity deal and has been a "devastating witness," but we don't know exactly what he's told the FBI.
JB: I thought that, in order to make a private server secure, you need to hire a person or company that deals with high level cybersecurity. Pagliano was simply not qualified to do that. If that's so, why would Hillary bring in someone unqualified to make her home server as secure as possible, since she intended to flout the rules?
PT: That's a whole other issue that gets into possible charges of "gross incompetence," because the way her private server was run was so bad that it almost defies belief. It seems like Pagliano was more of a management guy and didn't know that much about server security. For the first two months Clinton was secretary of state, the server apparently didn't have any encryption on it at all! I could give you a whole list of ways it was poorly managed. But then in February 2013, both Pagliano and Clinton left the State Department and matters got even worse. With Pagliano leaving, Clinton turned the management of the server over to a small company in Colorado called Platte River Networks. They were a "mom and pop" shop, run out of a private apartment with no security alarm. The company didn't have the legal clearance to handle classified information, and none of their employees had any security clearances either.
JB: Really?
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