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Hillary Clinton never signed separation form that required her to turn over all e-mails

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National Review reports:

After days of fending off the question, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki admitted on Tuesday that the department has no record of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing a separation form that could open her up to perjury charges.

Form OF-109 is a document required to be signed by all State Department employees as they exit the department. In it, the employee claims, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has turned over all relevant communications to the government at the time of his or her departure.

By turning over her private e-mails at the end of 2014, two years after leaving office, Clinton violated that agreement — if, in fact, she signed it.

On Tuesday, the State Department finally indicated that she did not — or at least, they have no records of her doing so. “We have reviewed Secretary Clinton’s official personnel file and administrative files, and do not have any record of her signing the OF-109,” Psaki said on Tuesday. “It is not clear that this form is used as part of a standard part of check-out across the federal government, or even at the State Department. So we’re certainly looking into that.”

AP reporter Matt Lee pressed Psaki, asking why the department had previously intimated that the form was “required” and if Clinton’s non-signature violated any rules.

“It’s not a violation of any rule, no,” she said, saying that signing the form may not be a common departure practice and that “there are differences between regulations and, certainly, recommendations.”

“The form exists, certainly,” Psaki said. “Beyond that, I don’t have more statistics on what percentage of State Department employees sign on departure from the building.”

“Yes, the form exists, and it exists for a reason,” Lee replied. “It doesn’t exist simply because someone thought, ‘Hey, let’s have a form that someone has to sign!’ It exists for a reason, and probably a pretty good reason, right?”

“Well, there are probably hundreds of forms in the federal government that exist — thousands, tens of thousands of forms that exist,” Psaki said. “So I don’t know that I would over-emphasize the existence of a form.”

They don’t have a record of her signing a required form. Everyone is supposed to sign that form before leaving the State Department. If the signed form were recovered, then she would be guilty of perjury for keeping a private e-mail server and deleting the e-mails. Add the missing e-mails to the millions of dollars of donations to the Clinton Foundation, and you have the makings of a serious, serious scandal.

Your puny laws don't apply to Queen Hillary!
Your puny laws don’t apply to Queen Hillary!

My absolute favorite liberal journalist is Ron Fournier, who writes for the very left-wing National Journal.

He says this is a big deal:

National Journal Senior Political Columnist and Editorial Director Ron Fournier said that Democrats are “scared to death” over the scandals regarding donations to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s emails on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.

“Don’t buy the spin, they [Democrats] are scared to death. And there’s a lot of them who are already starting to think ‘is she really the best candidate for us?’…Their bench, compared to the Republican bench is awfully, awfully thin. And there’s a lot of Democrats, by the way, who are saying ‘follow the money.’ A lot of Democrats are really worried about the Foundation, that’s what they’re really worried about” he stated.

Earlier, Fournier said that the Clinton Foundation’s acceptance of Chinese donations is “a big issue. There’s a lot of other ways the Chinese government, and the Saudis, and the [Qataris] — there are other ways that they can help the world if that’s what they want to do. They’re giving their money to the Clinton Foundation for a reason. They want something out of it. So I know, what I really want to see in these e-mails is any e-mail that mentions the Foundation and mentions one of the donors.”

Watch:

This should sink Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and it will, so long as the heat stays on.

White House turns its back on transparency

You might recall that previously, Barack Obama told us that his administration would be the most transparent ever:

But the White House is now refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests:

The White House is exempting an office from compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, angering open-government advocates, who accuse President Barack Obama of not living up to his pledge to run the “most transparent administration in history.”

The White House said Tuesday that the move to exclude the White House Office of Administration from the federal open-access law reflected a court ruling that predated the Obama administration and wouldn’t have any effect on its commitment to open records and its compliance with requests for records.

“This is a matter of just cleaning up the records that are on the books,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. “It has no impact at all on the policy that we had maintained from the beginning to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, when it’s appropriate.”

The move, announced Tuesday in the Federal Register, came as news organizations marked Sunshine Week to showcase the public’s right to know, and it drew sharp criticism from advocates who already give the administration poor marks for news-media access.

“This is another example of the White House position avoiding transparency,” said John Wonderlich, policy director of the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation. “Instead of creating more and better access to information, it’s trying to control it.”

“The president has routinely failed to deliver on his promise,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who’s proposed a law that would reduce the use of exemptions to withhold information from the public.

The most transparent administration in history? Not a smidgeon of corruption? Not so much.

News

Could Hillary Clinton be sent to prison because of her secret e-mail server?

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Your puny laws don't apply to Queen Hillary!
Your puny laws don’t apply to Queen Hillary!

The first way is in the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

The Obama administration will soon find itself in court having to explain to federal judges why it never told anyone former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a secret email address, potentially spoiling dozens of open records requests, experts said Wednesday.

And Mrs. Clinton could face up to three years in prison per message if she is found to have broken her word and handled classified information on the secret account, one open records expert told The Washington Times.

The legal challenges have already begun, with The Associated Press filing a federal lawsuit saying the State Department has foiled five years’ worth of requests for Mrs. Clinton’s emails, but never told them or the court that she kept her own server — meaning that her emails weren’t being searched.

The article points out that because Clinton had a secret, personal e-mail server, it will be difficult to prove that she handled classified information unless someone on the other end of one the e-mails shows up.

The State Department itself could face sanctions for refusing to own up to the existence of Hillary’s personal e-mail server when processing Freedom of Information Act requests:

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which for years has battled for access to State Department records, said they are already preparing to ask several federal courts to review whether the Obama administration was skirting the law by not including Mrs. Clinton’s email server in its searches for documents.

“We had hundreds of requests. The State Department knew from the beginning these records weren’t being searched, and no one told us about it, no one told the courts about it,” Mr. Fitton said.

[…]The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday that could test the limits of the government’s ability to go after emails. Despite five years of questions, the State Department never said it didn’t have control over Mrs. Clinton’s emails, the AP said, suggesting that officials were breaking the spirit of open records when they said they were conducting searches for records.

“State’s failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s governmental emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP’s requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires,” the news organization said in its lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

The second way that Hillary Clinton could go to prison is described at Fox News:

A former Justice Department lawyer says Hillary Clinton, despite her claims that she broke no rules or laws, may have committed a violation in leaving the State Department without turning over all official emails and records.

Shannen Coffin, a senior lawyer under the George W. Bush administration, pointed to a “separation” form that he said officials are supposed to sign upon leaving the department.

His argument: If she signed the form, she probably gave a false statement and broke the law; if she didn’t, she ran afoul of department policy.

The form — OF109 — certifies that the person who signs it has turned over all “classified or administratively controlled” materials, as well as all “unclassified documents and papers” relating to official government business.

It’s unclear whether Clinton indeed signed that document. But Coffin told Fox News, “If that’s the case, there’s no question [she broke the law].”

“Making a false statement in this context,  knowingly and willfully — which I can’t imagine anything more knowing and willful than knowing you have 55,000 records sitting in your home — if you do that, it is a felony,” he told Fox News’ “The Kelly File.”

The form cites “criminal penalties” for knowingly falsifying or concealing information.

“Every employee at the State Department has to sign this little piece of paper when they leave,” Coffin said. And if Clinton did not sign that document, he added, “why not?”

Here’s the video:

National Review reports that the State Department spokeswoman declined to produce the form:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki couldn’t tell reporters on Thursday if Hillary Clinton signed an official records form presented to all employees as they leave the department — a crucial question in determining whether the former Secretary of State committed a felony by failing to turn over government e-mail records.

[…]“A former DOJ attorney has asked if, under department policy, Secretary Clinton — like all officials here in this building, when they depart or separate from this office, has to sign something called a form OF-109,” a reporter asked Psaki on Thursday. “It’s a separation statement declaring that when you leave office, you turn over not just classified materials, but any documents for official purposes. Did she sign –”

“I think this has been asked,” Psaki interrupted. “It was more than two years ago. I don’t have an update on that specific question at this point.”

Here’s the video:

Select Committee chair Trey Gowdy is continuing his Benghazi investigation, and the chair of the National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ron DeSantis is thinking of starting his own investigation of Hillary.

He said this on the Hugh Hewitt show:

HH: I want the audience to know Congressman DeSantis is a Harvard Law grad as well as a veteran of the Armed Services, and knows of which he speaks when it comes to national security. And I believe you were on the National Security Subcommittee of Government Oversight, are you not?

RD: I’m the chairman, Hugh, so this is right up our alley. And we’re definitely going to pursue the security aspect of this, because, and I think it’s been written up pretty well in some of the blogs, the State Department has been hacked before. And they have a lot of resources that they put into to maintaining the integrity of that system. If she used Google or Microsoft or one of those, they put in some resources, too. She set up her own system, and so the question is did she invest any of her personal resources to make sure that this had integrity and was not susceptible to being hacked? And those are answers that we’re going to find out.

HH: How are you going to go about pursuing that, Congressman DeSantis, because I know Trey Gowdy’s got the Select Committee. But their scope begins really with our invasion of Libya, or our intervention in Libya. And the scope of her breaking of official norms begins the day she enters into office if not before with this private email server.

RD: No doubt about it, and I think we’re going to defer for the Libya stuff to Chairman Gowdy. He’s been working on that. But I’m going to urge our chairman, Jason Chaffetz, to use the full committee and as well as my subcommittee to look at all of what she did for her four year period, because we need to know whether there was any type of compromise of sensitive military. You see, in the military, if you send something over unclassified channels that is classified, it does not matter whether somebody actually intercepted. You assume that there’s been a security breach, and you change your affairs accordingly. And I find it hard to believe that she would have had four years as Secretary of State and not discussed sensitive matters over that email. And I think the American people deserve answers to those questions.

Defense analyst Frank Gaffney says that there is no way that Hillary’s claim that she never sent or received classified information is true. So we have to wait for those investigations to find them, then we can hold her accountable.

News

Hillary Clinton deleted 32,000 e-mails, refuses to turn over her home-based server

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The Washington Times reports on her press conference, which only featured questions from reporters handpicked by her spokesman Nick Merrill.

Excerpt:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton deleted nearly 32,000 emails she deemed private from her time in the Obama administration and refused Tuesday to turn over her personal email server, insisting she “fully complied” with the law and that voters will have to trust her judgment.

Answering questions for the first time about her emails, Mrs. Clinton said she’s turned over to the State Department 55,000 pages of emails she deemed work-related, but said she got rid of the rest last year. She defended her decision to keep control of her emails by using a private account, saying previous secretaries did the same thing, and saying it was more “convenient” for her this way.

“I wanted to use just one device for both personal and work emails instead of two,” she said in a hastily called press conference after she spoke at the U.N. Conference on Women.

She lied about Benghazi, claiming it was a protest caused by a Youtube video. So we know that she is capable of lying for gain.

Well, is she telling the truth this time?

But her explanations are already coming under fire. One conservative group, America Rising PAC, said Mrs. Clinton has previously said she keeps both a BlackBerry and an iPhone.

Mrs. Clinton also said the email server was set up for her husband, former President Clinton, but his office told The Wall Street Journal that he has only sent two emails in his life, and both were during his time as president, which ended in 2001, or eight years before the private server was created.

It’s not a “conservative group” that said that she had two devices – it’s Clinton herself:

Read about that video here.

She deleted half her e-mails:

Of the 62,320 emails in her account, her office said 30,490 were deemed public business, while the remaining 31,830 were deemed private.

And she won’t let anyone see the private server she kept in her home:

Congressional Republicans said Mrs. Clinton shouldn’t take credit for turning over her emails since it was only done under pressure from the House committee probing the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.

[…]The former first lady flatly rejected turning over her server, saying she’s already done enough in her mind to comply with her obligations.

This is just plain stupid:

Some cybersecurity analysts have said maintaining a private server was an invitation to hacking, but Mrs. Clinton said the system was kept on property guarded by the Secret Service, and she asserted there “were no security breaches.”

Secret Service people walking around outside a home do not prevent penetration attacks.

We have to have the actual server and check to see whether it was secure or not. If she doesn’t give it to us, along with ALL the e-mails, then we don’t know whether it’s been compromised, and we don’t know what the enemies of the United States would have seen in the event of a breach of security. This is not a case where we can “trust” her – we have to know for certain.

Another thing – why is she printing out e-mails and giving it to the State Department for them to then give it to Trey Gowdy’s Select Committee? Why not just give them the server? It’s not easy to conduct an automated search on pieces of paper, that’s why. She is deliberately slowing down the Benghazi investigation by refusing to provide searchable electronic copies.

The concerns about a security breach are not idle. We already KNOW FOR CERTAIN that State Department e-mails were hacked.

In March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his e-mail hacked by “Guccifer” — the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush’s paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the “clintonemail.com” domain. The content of some of those e-mails was published by RT.com.

The hacked e-mails are the reason why we know that she intentionally set up her domain on the day she took office. This was not done by accident – it was deliberate.

What difference does national security make?
What difference does national security make?

Investor’s Business Daily reminds us other mysteries that the e-mails would shed light on:

What we do know, as Catherine Herridge of Fox News has reported, is that emails scattered through those obtained by Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that there existed a “Benghazi Group,” a code phrase used inside the State Department for a Benghazi damage-control operation led by Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines, who has been described as Hillary Clinton’s “gatekeeper.”

The two ran interference for Hillary during the 2012 Benghazi attack and were involved in what has been dubbed “Operation Basement” — going through documents and emails and turning over only those not damaging Hillary Clinton’s reputation or political future.

“Cheryl Mills was instrumental in seeing the big lie was put out there,” says Judicial Watch head Tom Fitton. “What’s notable thus far is we received no emails from or to (Clinton). You have to wonder whether these aides went offline and were using secret accounts to communicate with her about the Benghazi attack.”

You also have to wonder if Hillary and her State Department staff were also busy concocting the inflammatory Benghazi video lie.

Ron Fournier of the National Journal advises that the emails may help us “follow the money” that has flowed into Clinton Foundation coffers, a tale of possible “pay for play” involving unknown promises in exchange for donations.

Fournier writes that “Hillary Clinton’s secret communications stash is a bombshell” whose “greatest relevancy is what the emails might reveal about any nexus between Clinton’s work at State and any donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation from U.S. corporations and foreign nations.”

But there is more here than just the Benghazi cover-up and the Clinton Foundation donations – there are real national security concerns. We need to get our hands on that server and all the e-mails in order to know whether we have a breach, and if so, what has been breached. It is incredibly unprofessional and a firing offence (in my opinion) for her to tell us “just trust me”. That is not in the best interest of the security of the United States. And it shows why we ought not take Hillary Clinton seriously as a candidate for the Office of the Presidency. She is in it for herself, not for the good of her country. This is all about her – her ambitions.

UPDATE: Two of her top aides were also using personal e-mails, not State Department e-mails.

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