The fundamental issue surrounding the Hillary email scandal is: what is she hiding? What could she have expected that would be so damaging to her career that she would be willing to justify risking national security and becoming entangled in an embarrassing web of lies? We may never know, the argument collapsed because Hillary’s lawyers unilaterally destroyed over 30,000 emails, some of which related to her work as Secretary of State, contradicting her claims. They threw these messages in the trash without any independent oversight and then wiped the server tidy. Or did they? Via Bloomberg, hmm: :
The FBI is trying to determine whether data from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server may still be located elsewhere, a U.S. official said. After seizing the server Wednesday, agents are trying to determine whether email backups may have been saved on another computer, said the official, who asked not to be identified. The official said it was one of the next logical steps in the agency’s investigation into whether the former secretary of state’s private email account handled classified information. Barbara Wells, an attorney for Platte River Networks, the Denver-based company that has managed Clinton’s private email since 2013, said in a phone interview Thursday that the server turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation “is empty and does not contain any useful data.” But Wells added that the data on Clinton’s server was moved to another server that still exists. She ended the conversation after further questioning, refusing to say whether the data still existed on this other server and who was in possession of it… Subsequent calls and emails to Wells and the Clinton campaign went unanswered … The suggestion that some of the data Clinton deleted from her private email server might still exist came when the Democrat provided her server government officials who investigate whether classified material may have been improperly disclosed. Clinton and several of her closest aides used private email accounts while she was the country’s top diplomat.
Was the data “migrated” before or after the mass deletion by Team Hillary? Maybe we’ll finally get answers to some of these questions. Godspeed, the FBI’s computer forensics team. May your investigative mission prosper and fulfill the Clinton campaign’s absurd desire for “all the facts to come out” or whatever. In the meantime, we may have a clearer picture of the topics discussed in two top-secret emails discovered (so far) on her unsecured private server. Officials inform Related press that Clinton’s advisers, but not Clinton herself, discussed the government’s position highly secret drone program in emails found on Mrs. Clinton’s server:
Two emails found on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private server that the auditor deemed “top secret” include a discussion of a news article detailing a U.S. drone operation and a separate conversation that may inappropriately refer to top secret material or merely reflect the information collected regardless U.S. officials who reviewed the correspondence told the Associated Press… The officials, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, work in intelligence and other agencies. They did not detail the content of the emails due to ongoing questions about the classification level. They claim that Clinton herself did not provide confidential information, and that none of the emails she received contain explicit mention of interception of communications, confidential interview methods or any other form of confidential information gathering. The drone exchange begins with a copy of a news article discussing the CIA’s drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere, officials say. Although this is a secret program, it is well known and often mentioned. The copy contains a reference to classified information, and a Clinton aide follows top secret information in a way that could be considered corroboration, they said. However, several officials described this claim as uncertain. But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community’s inspector general, appears more suspicious. Officials say nothing in the message was “taken” from classified documents, although they differed on where the information in it came from. Some have argued that this incorrectly indicates highly classified material, while others denied it was a classic case of what the government calls “parallel reporting” – different people know the same thing in different ways.
Some Hillary defenders will utilize these details as partial vindication. The true secret of the “top secret” material may be questionable, and Mrs. Clinton was not the person who leaked it. But she is solely responsible for the creation and operation of her unsecured personal server. She is responsible for what passes through this server and for the actions of her inner circle to whom she has granted access to the server. Despite what her campaign keeps telling her, aided by Hillary’s friends in the state, two different inspectors general have made it clear that classified content discovered on her server is classified thennot after the fact. Recall also that the Justice Department’s investigation of the feds by these IGs was the result of a review of a diminutive sample of her emails. Four of the 40 messages examined contained classified information. It is not far-fetched to assume that huge amounts of sensitive and secret data lurk within Hillary’s tens of thousands of emails – both saved and destroyed – NO check. The State Department is reportedly resisting calls from the intelligence community to hand over all emails that Hillary belatedly sent to her former agency. Of course, no one has possession of her thousands of deleted emails, at least not yet. I’ll leave you with this: :
In a make-or-break survey of voters in six swing states: Hillary Clinton is currently 13 points behind her typical Republican opponent, a jump from last month’s 8-point deficit.
The poll, which will be released later today, was conducted on behalf of the pro-GOP group American Crossroads by pollsters Vox Populi. 1,908 registered voters in the city participated in the telephone survey Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.While the GOP nominee will certainly have greater liabilities than a standard-bearer — though he will likely have some advantages, too — a deficit of this size is bad news for Clinton as she tries to outpace other potential intraparty rivals.
The main caveat: This is a partisan GOP poll that shows weaker results for Hillary than other mainstream polls. But impartial pollsters also discovered Mrs. Clinton sucking wind in crucial battleground states, and her favorability, trustworthiness and empathy ratings have also fallen across the country.
