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AP: Hillary's State Dept. calendar omitted meetings with political donors and cronies

By Dan Calabrese ——--June 24, 2016

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I'll give the Associated Press one cheer for doing this reporting, but only one because they really only care about misbehavior by Democrats when it inconveniences the media. Even so, if you want the champion among politicians of scrubbing all public records of anything the public might not like to see - I present to you, your inevitable Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton:
The AP review of Clinton's calendar - her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term - identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show. The missing entries raise new questions about how Clinton and her inner circle handled government records documenting her State Department tenure - in this case, why the official chronology of her four-year term does not closely mirror other more detailed records of her daily meetings. At a time when Clinton's private email system is under scrutiny by an FBI criminal investigation, the calendar omissions reinforce concerns that she sought to eliminate the "risk of the personal being accessible" - as she wrote in an email exchange that she failed to turn over to the government but was subsequently uncovered elsewhere. No known federal laws were violated and some omissions could be blamed on Clinton's highly fluid schedule, which sometimes forced late cancellations. But only seven meetings in Clinton's planning schedules were replaced by substitute events on her official calendar. More than 60 other events listed in Clinton's planners were omitted entirely in her calendar, tersely noted or described only as "private meetings" - all without naming those who met with her.
The most interesting part to me is the scrubbing of the identifying details. The AP had to wait more than two years between when it first requested these records and when the State Department finally agreed, under a Freedom of Information Act order, to release them. When do you suppose all that scrubbing took place? Probably in between the receipt of the request and State's ultimate compliance with it, which would explain the delay. If Hillary had met with an important political donor, and she had marked that this meeting might result in a serious cash windfall for the Clinton Foundation - provided, of course, the State Department would bend a policy to favor the donor - that's the sort of thing you can be damn sure she wouldn't want even hinted in the identifying notes. But Hillary is not a very smart individual, regardless of what you've been told, so it's entirely possible that she did indeed make such a note only to need her cronies to go back later and scrub it before the AP could be allowed to see it. By the way, one of the people whose names was scrubbed from the calendar was Sid Blumenthal - the guy she was trading e-mails with about Libyan intelligence in spite of the fact that the Obama Administration refused to let her hire him at State. What might that meeting have been about? Perhaps a favor desired by a foreign governmenet official who was prepared to come up with some cash for the cherished Foundation? I don't know and neither do you, because Hillary scrubbed the details, so I have no choice but to speculate. That's what happens when people hide the truth. Elect Hillary and expect a lot of that.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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