Just in case you were under the impression Hillary's e-mail shenanigans were unnoticed by anyone in Washington until recently, consider: For as long as people have known the Clintons are corrupt, dishonest and self-serving, surely people have been noticing that they live by their own rules and really don't care if you like it or not. So the people who pay attention to things like the archiving of government documents were not exactly asleep at the switch about this.
In fact, we now know that the director of the Modern Records Program at the National Archives was alarmed about Hillary's practices five years ago - as well as his suspicions about what she might do with her records upon leaving the State Department.
And he urged some colleagues to prepare for some sort of action, although he hilariously thought it was important to do so delicately:
During Clinton’s final days in office, Paul Wester, the director of Modern Records Programs at NARA – essentially the agency’s chief records custodian – privately emailed five NARA colleagues to confide his fear that Clinton would take her official records with her when she left office, in violation of federal statutes.
Referring to a colleague whose full name is unknown, Wester wrote on December 11, 2012: “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her records from State to Little Rock." That was a reference to the possibility that Clinton might seek to house her records at the Clinton Presidential Center, which was largely funded by the Clinton Foundation.
"[W]e need to discuss what we know, and how we should delicately go about learning more about…the transition plans for Secretary Clinton’s departure from State," Wester added. He did not specify why the situation required “delicate” handling, but added that colleagues had “continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-à-vis Hilary [sic] Clinton.”
That was a reference to how the secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, preparing to leave office in January 1977, stashed large segments of his classified papers on the upstate New York estate of his friend, Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. It wasn’t until 2001 that Kissinger relented to demands from scholars and the U.S. government and made the documents available for research.
Under the Federal Records Act, NARA is entrusted with official oversight of Executive Branch agencies and their employees, aimed at ensuring that the records they generate in the discharge of their official duties are being properly preserved and stored.
The Wester email and 72 other internal documents released by NARA and the State Department earlier this month show NARA officers repeatedly expressed concerns that Clinton and her office were not observing the federal laws and regulations that govern recordkeeping – but that NARA never did much about it.
This pretty well puts the kabosh on the Obama Administration's claims that they had no idea about any of this. With Wester raising the red flag to anyone who would listen, there's no doubt the White House knew. And my guess is not so much that they didn't care - I'm sure they would have preferred she follow the rules - but rather that because she is Hillary and no one thinks it's a very good idea to raise the ire of the queen, they figured the path of least resistance was just to let her do what she wanted to do. She was only in the administration in the first place to keep her from making trouble externally. That being the case, Obama surely recognized that he would bring even more trouble on himself if he started insisting she follow the rules everyone else had to follow. Clintons don't do that, bro.
You say this is old news? I don't care. Everything Hillary cites to justify her candidacy is old news, so it's pretty nervy even for a Clinton when she claims critiques of her performance in these very same roles are somehow too dated to matter.
Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, self-serving liar - and she gets away with it mainly because people are afraid of her. If that's the type of person you want as president, go ahead, but don't say you didn't know.
Just in case you were under the impression Hillary's e-mail shenanigans were unnoticed by anyone in Washington until recently, consider: For as long as people have known the Clintons are corrupt, dishonest and self-serving, surely people have been noticing that they live by their own rules and really don't care if you like it or not. So the people who pay attention to things like the archiving of government documents were not exactly asleep at the switch about this.
