PT: But it gets even worse than that! In March 2013, just one month later, a Romanian hacker nicknamed Guccifer broke into the email account of Sid Blumenthal, a friend of Hillary. From that, Guccifer found emails to and from Hillary and shared her private email address with the world in a number of news stories. At that point, the smart thing would have been to shut the server down, because it still contained over 60,000 emails from her time as secretary of state. But she didn't do that. And just a couple of months later, Platte River Networks took over and decided to transfer all her emails from the old server to a new one. They had a powerful anti-hacker software to keep it protected. But the software was so new that it wasn't finished for another four months, so it seems the server was completely unprotected again, not long after Guccifer alerted the entire world to her domain name, clintonemail.com. It defies belief that the Russians, Chinese, etc. didn't scoop up all of Clinton's emails at that time. It was like there was a wide open door with a big sign saying "all of Clinton's emails right here." It really is incredible.
Guccifer's snared HRC in 2013 through this email from Sid Blumenthal to Hillary
(Image by rt.com) Details DMCA
JB: Yikes! And you have still more bad news?
PT: Yes. I mentioned Sid Blumenthal above. There's a strange story with him. He was a longtime Clinton friend and confidant. When Clinton became secretary of state, she wanted to give him a job in the State Department. But Obama was dead against it, since Blumenthal was also a journalist and he led a vicious gossip campaign against Obama in the 2008 primaries. It seems Clinton simply gave him a do-nothing job at the Clinton Foundation at $120,000 a year, and then basically treated him like a government employee.
But he wasn't. He was a private citizen with no security clearance. And yet, somehow, he sent her about one email every other day for her four years as secretary of state, and most of them were long intelligence reports. Some of those seem to be based on his own sources or opinions, but the vast majority appear to come from other US agencies, especially the CIA and NSA. This is a big problem, because he should never have had such information, especially when he sent her clearly classified information. 24 of his emails to her have been entirely redacted, and many more were partially redacted, so this was real intelligence. In one case, he quoted NSA reports of a meeting of rebel generals in Sudan mere hours after the meeting took place! So, he essentially was running a private intelligence pipeline right into Clinton's inbox.
JB: In so many ways, Clinton seemed to be going on her merry way, doing as she pleased, heedless of the consequences. But this doesn't seem to have worked out too well. And all in order to avoid public scrutiny: How ironic!
PT: Yes, it definitely backfired. Clinton signed a pledge when she became secretary of state promising to safeguard all classified information. Part of that was stating she was able to identify unsecure and sometimes unmarked classified information so security officials could immediately secure it. In Blumenthal's case, it couldn't possibly have been more obvious that he had information he shouldn't have and that there was a serious security leak needing to be plugged.
To give one example, in July 2012, Blumenthal sent her an email about Egyptian politics which he marked "CONFIDENTIAL." (Even though he wasn't in government at the time, he had worked in the White House during the Bill Clinton presidency and he surely knew that "confidential" was one of the government's three official classification levels.) Then he gave the following warning (with the capitalization in the original): "SOURCE: Sources with access to the highest levels of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and Western Intelligence and security services. THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION COMES FROM AN EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SOURCE AND SHOULD BE HANDLED WITH CARE."
How on Earth could Clinton look at an email like that and not realize it contained classified information? When Clinton says she never received any emails that were clearly marked classified at the time, she counts on reporters and the public in general not being aware of emails like the one mentioned above. But it gets worse. Because at times, Clinton also mentioned classified information in her email replies to Blumenthal. That's more serious than sending a classified email to some other government official, because Blumenthal had no security clearance and Clinton had to know that. That should open her to yet more criminal charges.
JB: So?
PT: It's very simple: I think the law should apply equally to everyone. In recent years, we've seen time and time again when the rich and/or powerful get away with crimes. Normally, they're never even charged or investigated. Look at what happened to the bankers after the 2008 financial meltdown, for instance. Most of the big banks were found guilty of fraud and fined billions of dollars, but not a single banker was ever charged or convicted of anything. It's as if the banks somehow did it on their own without actual bankers involved.
The law is supposed to apply to Clinton the same as it would to you or me. Criminal behavior is criminal behavior, and you shouldn't get a pass just because you're a Democrat or you're running for president. There's no law that says you get a pass on your misdeeds because you're running against someone who could be even worse in office than you are. I think we'll lose our moral bearings if we go down that road. Republicans used that logic to argue Nixon should get a pass on Watergate, or that Reagan should get a pass on the Iran-Contra affair. If enough people are upset about this scandal, then Clinton will have no choice but to drop out. If we ignore the evidence out of fear that criticizing a Democrat could help the Republicans, I think we'll be setting ourselves up for disaster in the general election and beyond.
I'd be very worried for our country if Trump is elected president. But I'd also be very worried for our country if Clinton is elected president. We can look to the recent past to guess the future. For instance, Bill and Hillary Clinton already have said they would not step away from the Clinton Foundation if Hillary were to become president, so we can already see the conflict of interest scandals to come. I believe we as a country can do better than either Clinton or Trump. As I said, there's still time to make a change.
JB: You make a good point. Let's break here. Tomorrow, in part 2, we'll reveal some stunning secrets about the Clinton Foundation. Stay tuned!
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