The irony: fracking has only reached commercial-scale levels in the US, Argentina, Canada and China. Everywhere else, due to either geology or low oil prices, it has failed. So in some ways, GSGI was a mission failed. But it does show that this type of activity could continue under a Hillary Clinton Administration, just as it did under Obama's. And that is nothing but bad news from a climate change and ecological perspective.

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My guest today is investigative reporter, Steve Horn. Welcome back to OpEdNews, Steve.

Joan Brunwasser: The issue of Hillary's emails, hacked, deleted or insecure, is beginning to grow legs, despite major mainstream media apathy for several years. Your new piece that you co-wrote with Lee Fang just appeared in Intercept.com is: Hillary Clinton's Energy Initiative Pressed Countries to Embrace Fracking, New Emails Reveal. This is a new wrinkle. Can you get the ball rolling for us, please?

Steve Horn: Thanks for having me again! Okay, so it's important to differentiate our article with those based on the emails Hillary Clinton handed over that were on her private server. I've written articles based on those emails (known these days thanks to Bernie Sanders as the "damn emails," which he said "America is sick and tired of hearing about") too.

My stories on those "damn emails" centered around how she pushed oil/gas sector privatization in Mexico and how the State Department -- in handing over those emails she had stored on her private server at her private home over, which the State Department Inspector General recently berated-- redacted the entire job description of David Goldwyn, who headed up the Global Shale Gas Initiative that's the centerpiece of our article. Goldwyn now works as an industry lawyer, consultant and unregistered lobbyist.

The emails we tapped into for our story on The Intercept were obtained, like the private server ones, via the Freedom of Information Act. Tellingly, as our request was made before the private server request took place, there are NO emails in our hundreds of pages we received that emanate from Clinton or her closest aides that used the clintonmail.com email domain names. But we still got back interesting stuff, which expanded upon the great 2014 Mother Jones investigation about how Hillary Clinton's State Department sold hydraulic fracturing ("fracking," a horizontal drilling technique) of shale oil and gas around the world.

Our emails show that GSGI involved coordination among a plethora of federal agencies and it's important to note it wasn't just a State Department thing, but a "whole of government" approach touted by Goldwyn as such. State Department created its own Bureau of Energy Resources, under which sat GSGI. GSGI brought in delegations to the U.S. and sent delegations abroad for the purpose of selling U.S.-style fracking around the world.

Clinton now campaigns as a cautious supporter of fracking (and aired a fairly secretive anti-fracking ad in New York State that her campaign hasn't put up on YouTube like the rest of the ads its run), given certain conditions only under which she'd support it, but there's no evidence these conditions were part of her team's plan for selling fracking under the auspices of GSGI. So, it could just be pandering and to be honest, it probably is. Why wouldn't it be? This is U.S. electoral politics after all!

The irony of the story is that fracking has only reached commercial-scale levels in the U.S., Argentina, Canada and China. Everywhere else, due to either geology or low oil prices, it has failed. So in some ways, GSGI was a mission failed. But it does show or at least portend that this type of activity could continue under a Hillary Clinton Administration, just as it did under Obama's. And that is nothing but bad news from a climate change and ecological perspective.

JB: Lots to talk about here. First, a bit of clarification, please. You said that you got information via FOIA, but "tellingly" there were no emails from Clinton or her aides using the clintonemail.com domain. You were able to piece this story together without them?

SH: She had a team of her closest advisers that used the private server. Most miss that part of the story, but it's key. Her closest friend, basically second daughter, Huma Abedin, also used that private server as did close friend and adviser Cheryl Mills and a small group of others. It's outlined pretty well in a New York Times piece published back in March 2015 titled, "Membership in Clinton's Email Domain Is Remembered as a Mark of Status." In Putin's Russia, we call these types of folks "loyalists" to the regime. In the U.S., we call them "aides."

So, we got no emails from any of them even though I'm sure they had something to say about GSGI's operability. That's because technically their emails were not in State Department possession. They were in Clinton's possession, stored in a server tucked into a room in her New York state home.

We weren't able to piece together the whole story of course due to the private server issue. And there is still another round of emails to come through this request, as they're giving them to us on a rolling basis. FOIA is notoriously slow under the Obama Administration, the worst Administration in U.S. history on the issue.

But we got a lot of the story filled in from these, on top of the Mother Jones investigation. We can now accurately say Clinton served not only as the Secretary of State, but also the Global Secretary of Fracking.

JB: Global Secretary of Fracking, eh? I'm quite sure that Hillary would not be enamored with that moniker. Especially, as she is maneuvering herself leftward during the primaries. I'd like to know more about the secretive ad you referred to before. Isn't "secretive ad" an oxymoron?

SH: Of course she'd disagree and that's fine! But the facts speak for themselves. I don't think she'd be willing to sit and have an actual factual debate about these documents, and so her disagreement would ring hollow. As intrepid investigative journalist Izzy Stone once said, "All governments lie and nothing they say should be believed."

Which gets us to the ad. It's a seeming oxymoron, but what I mean by that is that it only ran in key districts that she was pandering to as an anti-fracking candidate in New York State, the first state in the union to ban fracking. She needed the anti-fracking vote in the state (it's a powerful voting bloc there, see the 2014 gubernatorial election that saw Green Party and anti-fracking candidate Howie Hawkins get about 5% of the vote), so she ran the ad on TV.

But the Clinton campaign didn't publish it online. Someone else saw it on TV (Brad Johnson of Climate Hawk Vote) and published it on YouTube. The Clinton campaign did not respond to questions for comment for our article, so it's still not clear why they haven't put the ad up like the rest of the ads they've run on TV and then put on YouTube.

But a likely answer is that the campaign still wants to rake in oil and gas money from lobbyists, individuals, etc., not wage any sort of assault on the frackers, as her opponent in the Democratic Party primary, Bernie Sanders, would (he supports a national ban). That money she's taken from the industry has of course been a great controversy and was elevated by the Greenpeace USA video that went viral in which she said she was "so sick" of the Sanders campaign "lying" about the fossil fuel industry money she'd taken for her campaign.

JB: I suppose it makes sense that she wants to have her cake and eat it too: she wants the support of the strong anti-fracking faction without jeopardizing big bucks from the industry they oppose. Who wouldn't if they could get away with it? And, so far, she's been able to pull that off pretty well, although, with social media in the mix, it's harder to do these days. I guess the Sanders campaign wasn't lying about the fossil fuel industry money after all!

But Hillary's led a charmed existence up until now considering that this whole email private server issue has been known for years; the Guccifer hack happened way back in 2013. Why is it taking so long for these stories to grow legs, Steve?

SH: Yeah, well anyone who cares about a sustainable planet wouldn't support it, but maybe the cake in the White House tastes better than the cake we all get to eat and we just wouldn't understand! At this point she could almost get away with anything due to the general public's fear of a potential Trump presidency. Welcome to U.S. presidential politics, where every four years -- in the void of a sustainable progressive third party being built -- we get a Democrat who runs his or her campaign on the politics of fear and lesser evilism. Groundhog Day should really be celebrated in November every four years during presidential cycles, not annually in February!

All joking and half-joking aside, I don't actually think as many people in the public took the Guccifer hack seriously in that they didn't think she literally had stored all of the emails on a private server. Maybe just some. No one, or at least few, thought she could be so cynical. Turns out they were wrong and this was a systemic effort by her and her top aides to dodge transparency. How many emails went "missing" that the public will never see? I hate to say it, but we'll never know.

JB: Several points: one, doesn't the FBI have virtually all of those once missing emails? So, we may not know but they do, and they can decide what to do about what the emails reveal, if FBI Chief Comey doesn't fold under pressure from the top not to indict. Also, Bryan Pagliano, Hillary's IT guy, whose entire cache of emails from the four years he served her has also gone missing, was offered immunity and may have lots to say that will shed light on the situation. You mentioned that Hillary's aides also using the private server is key to the whole puzzle. Tell us more about how and why that is relevant, please.

SH: It matters because it was an inner-circle, not just Clinton, privy to this secretive email server and non-state.gov email address. Transparency is a hallmark of democracy, secrecy a hallmark of tyranny. It shows, I'd say without a doubt, that Clinton and her inner-circle saw themselves as above the law (both FOIA and NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration and the laws enveloped in that agency that have to do with record-keeping and storage for historical posterity). Hell, Bob Woodward of Pentagon Papers and Washington Post fame even said Clinton's behavior here "reminds me of the Nixon tapes."

Bernie Sanders said "America is sick of hearing about ya damn emails" and Clinton apologists say the email thing is not a big deal and some sort of right-wing conspiracy theory, but I really don't see it that way. Obviously a lot of the emails have been retrieved and the FBI says they have them all in their possession now, but how the heck do we know? What went missing or is now gone? Is the FBI telling the truth? Hard to have definitive answers here, but certainly troubling questions that raise troubling thoughts.

JB: Indeed. I checked out the Woodward reference, which I had not heard before. It's from August of last year, before all the new revelations. I wanted to discuss the State Department review. This report by the Inspector General was delivered to Congress today, May 25th. Apparently, Hillary and her aides declined to be interviewed for the review. Nevertheless, the report was very critical of her and her email practices. What can you tell us, Steve?

SH: Honestly, I can't tell you much other than what the press has reported. It's 83 pages and I'm looking forward to reading it! But it's a big deal and I encourage people to read it for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Primary documents generally tell the real story of how the government (and corporations) work and for whom and this is no different.

JB: Good suggestion. You asked rhetorically how we could ever know whether all the emails have been recovered. I suppose we could ask the Russians, who apparently shadowed Guccifer, the Romanian hacker, and copied all the files that he intercepted. According to the New York Times, the review criticized the State Department as well. This whole scandal does not reflect well on either Obama or the State Department. Your thoughts?

SH: Yes, it's deeply troubling! I fear for transparency and what it will look like under a Clinton Administration, and same goes for Trump (but that almost goes without saying, given his horrid treatment of press thus far as a presidential candidate). These are important issues and shouldn't just be dismissed as some right-wing plot merely meant to trip up Clinton on her way to coronation.

JB: Agreed. Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

SH: Yes! Stay tuned for more on both the private server emails and their contents. Some crucial stuff got the chopping block during the edits that I will try to get out there as a separate story. That's it for now, but thanks for having me and I hope to come back in the coming weeks over the summer to chat more!

JB: Absolutely. We'll look forward to it. Thanks so much for talking with me again, Steve. Keep up the good work!

SH: The pleasure was mine. Thanks again!

***

prior interviews with Steve:

While You Were Sleeping, Obama Did WHAT for Oil and Gas Pipelines?! 1.11.2016

Obama's Keystone XL Pipeline Veto Just Smoke and Mirrors? 12.8.2015

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.