Former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli: Hillary broke the law

Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians
Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians who refuse to obey the law

Well, there were some more revelations on the weekend about Hillary’s use of a private, unsecure e-mail server. She used the private e-mail server to bypass the security regulations of her employer, so that she could communicate secretly without having her e-mails be the subject of inquiries.

Here’s the latest from leftist Reuters: (H/T JoeCoder)

The U.S. Defense Department has found an email chain that Hillary Clinton did not give to the State Department, the State Department said on Friday, despite her saying she had provided all work emails from her time as secretary of state.

The correspondence with General David Petraeus, who was commander of U.S. Central Command at the time, started shortly before she entered office and continued during her first days as the top U.S. diplomat in January and February of 2009.

You might remember that David Petraeus was critical of the administrations foreign policy decisions – at least until news of his affair with his biographer came to light, silencing him.

More:

News of the previously undisclosed email thread only adds to a steady stream of revelations about the emails in the past six months, which have forced Clinton to revise her account of the setup which she first gave in March.

[…]The email arrangement has drawn criticism from political opponents who accused the Democratic presidential front-runner of sidestepping transparency and record-keeping laws and of potentially exposing classified information to hackers.

Forget “potentially”. As I pointed out before, every single e-mail on her server is in the hands of foreign governments who don’t like us very much. That’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of a former Deputy Director of the CIA.

Anyway, more from the original article:

[…]As recently as Sunday, she told CBS when asked about her emails that she provided “all of them.”

[…]The emails with Petraeus also appear to contradict the claim by Clinton’s campaign that she used a private BlackBerry email account for her first two months at the department before setting up her clintonemail.com account in March 2009. This was the reason her campaign gave for not handing over any emails from those two months to the State Department.

The Petraeus exchange shows she started using the clintonemail.com account by January 2009, according to the State Department.

Clinton’s spokesmen, who did not respond to questions, have acknowledged that other work emails from later in her tenure were also missing from the record Clinton handed over. They have declined to say why.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now examining Clinton’s server as it looks into the possible mishandling of classified information between Clinton and her staff.

Now, let’s get a legal assessment of all of this from former attorney general of Virginia, Ken Kuccinelli.

He writes:

Clinton originally denied that any of her emails contained classified information, but soon abandoned that claim. So far, 150 emails containing classified information have been identified on her server, including two that included information determined to be Top Secret.

She then fell back on the claim that none of the emails in question was “marked classified” at the time she was dealing with them. The marking is not what makes the material classified; it’s the nature of the information itself. As secretary of state, Clinton knew this, and in fact she would have been re-briefed annually on this point as a condition of maintaining her clearance to access classified information.

Then there’s location. Clinton knowingly set up her email system to route 100 percent of her emails to and through her unsecured server (including keeping copies stored on the server). She knowingly removed such documents and materials from authorized locations (her authorized devices and secure government networks) to an unauthorized location (her server).

Two examples demonstrate this point.

When Clinton would draft an email based on classified information, she was drafting that email on an authorized Blackberry, iPad or computer. But when she hit “send,” that email was knowingly routed to her unsecured server — an unauthorized location — for both storage and transfer.

Additionally, when Clinton moved the server to Platte River Networks (a private company) in June 2013, and then again when she transferred the contents of the server to her private lawyers in 2014, the classified materials were in each instance again removed to another unsecured location.

Next we have the lack of proper authority to move or hold classified information somewhere, i.e., the “unauthorized location.”

While it’s possible for a private residence to be an “authorized” location, and it’s also possible for non-government servers and networks to be “authorized” to house and transfer classified materials, there are specific and stringent requirements to achieve such status. Simply being secretary of state didn’t allow Clinton to authorize herself to deviate from the requirements of retaining and transmitting classified documents, materials and information.

There is no known evidence that her arrangement to use the private email server in her home was undertaken with proper authority.

Finally, there’s the intent to “retain” the classified documents or materials at an unauthorized location.

The very purpose of Clinton’s server was to intentionally retain documents and materials — all emails and attachments — on the server in her house, including classified materials.

The intent required is only to undertake the action, i.e., to retain the classified documents and materials in the unauthorized fashion addressed in this statute. That’s it.

It borders on inconceivable that Clinton didn’t know that the emails she received, and more obviously, the emails that she created, stored and sent with the server, would contain classified information.

I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would sell out the interests of her country in a heartbeat, if it meant improving her own political situation. We have to judge candidates by their past actions. That’s what she’s done, and that’s what she’d do. I have friends in the military and in law enforcement who are impacted by politicians with loose lips. I don’t want a traitor as commander-in-chief.

Why fiscal conservatives should care about abortion rights

I'm Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this study
I’m Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this report

One reason to care is that abortion providers get taxpayer funds. Consider this report on Planned Parenthood funding, which was reported by Life News.

Excerpt:

In a new report published by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the pro-life legal group lays out the various ways Planned Parenthood has engaged in abuse and potential fraud with American tax-dollars. The report alleges that 45 public audits of Planned Parenthood affiliates, and 57 known audits of state family planning programs, found that a “total of more than $129.7 million in waste, abuse, and potential fraud in federal and state family planning funding programs, the lion’s share of which goes to Planned Parenthood.”

Additionally, the report says that $14.4 billion of Planned Parenthood’s federal Medicaid expenditures were improper payments and the abortion company engaged in other billing violations, including “billing in excess of actual acquisition cost or other statutorily approved costs for contraceptives and Plan B products, inappropriately billing for services that were not medically necessary or not provided at all, and duplicate billing.”

ADF’s report, Profit. No Matter What., reads, “Updates in this 2015 edition include a new federal audit of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, specifically aimed at Planned Parenthood of North Texas; new federal audits of state family planning programs in California and Nebraska, totaling nearly $12 million; and more complete information on Planned Parenthood and other abortion and family planning facilities’ other financial malfeasance.”

Fiscal conservatives are opposed to government waste. We shouldn’t be handing taxpayer money to organizations that engage in fraud and abuse. If you’re against government waste and fraud, then you’re against government waste and fraud in abortion. I know pro-choice libertarians who want to remove government funding for abortions for precisely this reason.

Now let me give a reason. Everyone understands that when you have this much debt, and so many entitlement programs going bankrupt, that we cannot afford to eliminate the next generation of works. Who will pay for these entitlement programs if there are no workers? We are competing with all the other left-leaning countries for skilled immigrants. That may be part of the solution, but it is not the full solution. Not only should we not be aborting the next generation of taxpayers who have to keep these programs afloat, we should also be encouraging natural marriage, since this is the best environment to raise future workers who are moral and well-adjusted. Divorce and single motherhood are not good for raising the next generation of productive workers. Many social issues play a part in the economy.

Barna poll: what would people like to hear about in church sermons?

Church sucks, that's why men are bored there
Church sucks, that’s why men are bored there

This is from Glenn Beck, not someone I pay any attention to. But the poll was done by Barna, and the results are interesting.

Excerpt:

An prominent Christian pollster joined Glenn on his T.V. program Tuesday night to unveil the findings from a new poll, which sought to identify the top issues church-goers want to hear about from their pastors. The findings fascinated Glenn, who has been saying for a long time the way to wake our country up should be through our churches.

Joined by historian David Barton, pollster George Barna from the American Cultural & Faith Institute presented his research in which nearly 3,000 active church-goers were surveyed about the issues they want to hear about most in church.

Top 12 Issues the Church Wants to Hear:

1. Abortion: Beginning of life, right to life, contraception, adoption, unwed mothers. 91%

2. Religious persecution/liberty: Personal duty, government duty, church response, global conditions. 86%

3. Poverty: Personal duty, government role, church role, homelessness, hunger, dependency. 85%

4. Cultural restoration: Appropriate morals, law and order, defensible values and norms, self-government. 83%

5. Sexual identity: Same-sex marriage, transgenderism, marriage, LGBT. 82%

6. Israel: Its role in the world, Christian responsibility to Israel, US foreign policy toward Israel and its enemies. 80%

7. Christian Heritage: role of Christian faith in American history, church role in US development, moder-day relevance. 79%

8. Role of Government: Biblical view, church-state relationship, personal responsibility, limitations. 76%

9. Bioethics: Cloning, euthanasia, genetic engineering, cryogenics, organ donation, surrogacy. 76%

10. Self-governance: Biblical support, personal conduct, impact on freedom, national sovereignty. 75%

11. Church in politics/government: Separation of church and state, legal boundaries, church resistance to government. 73%

12. Islam: Core beliefs, response to Islamic aggression, threat to US peace and domestic stability. 72%

David Barton went on to present several Action Steps that church-goers can do right now, to help get their churches off the sidelines and their pastors preaching about these important issues.

Well, I certainly found these poll results interesting, and that’s why I try to have a variety of topics on this blog.

The first thing I thought when I read that list is that pastors would have to be reading about things outside the Bible in order to know how to speak about them. For example, to talk about abortion, it helps to read books by Scott Klusendorf, Frank Beckwith, Robert George and Christopher Kaczor. Now, I’ve talked to some friends who have been through seminary, and it sounds to me that they read very little on the substance of these kinds of issues, and a lot about spiritual fluff. Maybe, instead of focusing so much on the packaging, they can focus more on the content. The list is pretty clearly a list of serious controversial issues. But in church I feel that the emphasis is always on feelings and agreement.

So, let’s see. How should we go about getting the churches to speak about these issues? I really have no idea, and I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to start to talk about how the Bible is supported by evidence, or about what anti-Christians skeptics say, or about how the Bible applies to issues in the real world. The pastors just seem to be not interested in all the most interesting things in the world, for some crazy reason. I love the list – I wish I heard these things discussed in church.