By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--March 5, 2015
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The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency's activities.The State Department itself ruled in 1995, long before then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was to become the nation's top diplomat, that emails are records within the meaning of the law. The "Foreign Affairs Manual" states:
Another important modern improvement is the ease of communication now afforded to the Department world-wide through the use of E-mail. ... All employees must be aware that some of the variety of the messages being exchanged on E-mail are important to the Department and must be preserved; such messages are considered Federal records under the law.Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who was previously director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, also weighed in. He told reporters that he believed that "the sole use of a private email account by a high-level official to transact government business is plainly inconsistent with the Federal Records Act and longstanding policies of the National Archives." But facts rarely get in the way of political spin in Brock's world. His pretended media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, put together a dishonest blog post that purports to exonerate Clinton. The title of the item, "Fox Legal Experts Agree: Hillary Clinton Did Not Violate The Law With Email," sounds like a slam dunk. The problem is the legal experts on Fox News Channel who spoke with Gretchen Carlson yesterday didn't make definitive pronouncements clearing Clinton. The two former prosecutors carefully used their words during a rapid-fire discussion. Former prosecutor Jonna Spilbor of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., first said Clinton didn't break the law but then in the same breath qualified her remarks to make it clear she was assuming that Clinton has preserved the elusive emails and will make them available. In fact it is far from certain if the withheld emails still exist or whether they will ever see the light of day:
I'm going to say "no" because at the time that she did what she did, when she used her own personal email, the law was very nebulous. All it basically said is, if you're going to use your own--it didn't even say you couldn't use your own personal email--it said any government use of email had to be preserved, so what did she violate? If we can get those emails now if she saved them on her desktop or wherever she saved them and they were preserved there's no law broken.Those are some mighty big ifs. Former prosecutor Arthur Aidala of New York, N.Y., said Clinton is going to have trouble if there is "a huge gap" in the emails. "The email is a problem." Aidala continued: "Benghazi is her biggest problem that we know of. That's what they're going to be looking at. They're going to look at the sequence of what is turned over. This is what they do in a criminal case when you're a regular person, but in terms of, was there a crime? You can't be convicted of a crime that didn't exist at the time you committed it," he said, reciting a legal axiom that does not apply to this case. He added that "When you become the secretary of state there is a common sense assumption that you're going to use 'Secretary Clinton' at 'US,' blah blah blah blah, 'dot' US dot gov and not to Yahoo." Of course, whether the post at Media Matters actually makes sense is a separate question. Anyone reading the headline who doesn't bother to watch the accompanying Fox News video will come away with the impression that legal experts think Clinton is being railroaded. The Clinton email fiasco is a reminder of just how underhanded and lawless the Obama administration is. The email situation and the difficulty in locating former IRS senior official Lois Lerner's computer hard drives together underscore how effective the administration is at making problems disappear. Although President Obama once promised "the most transparent administration, ever," his administration routinely ignores laws it doesn't want to follow. This includes laws governing official use of email. "Some ploys in this war on transparency are sophisticated, others comically crude," writes Christopher C. Horner, author of The Liberal War on Transparency: Confessions of a Freedom of Information 'Criminal'. "Many violate the letter of the law, and all of them violate the spirit of laws enacted to 'let the public know what their government is up to.'" Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and director of litigation for the American Tradition Institute, has detailed the abusive email practices of this administration. Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email account registered to "Richard Windsor," a fictitious EPA employee. Jackson conducted official business on the account with individuals both inside and outside the government. Department of Energy officials accessed 14 private email accounts to execute the loan guarantee program that benefitted scandal-plagued Solyndra. When he was deputy chief of staff at the White House, Jim Messina reportedly used an AOL email account to convince industry to support the creation of Obamacare. Messina now runs Organizing for Action, Obama's pressure group. The Obama White House used a privately owned computer server to communicate with others when discussing the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international organization pushing the myth of manmade global warming. The administration also "uses industry lobbyists as 'cut-outs' (go-betweens) to avoid direct written contact with groups, certain to be subject to" the Freedom of Information Act. Obama appointees have used "handles," or code names, when discussing prominent or controversial appointees who may become the subject of information requests, according to Horner. If Hillary Clinton succeeds Obama as president, expect four to eight more years of nonstop lying and deceit. Hillary, like Obama, is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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