If you don't already read Kim Strassel's Potomac Watch column on Friday's in the Wall Street Journal, you need to start. What's so good about Strassel is that she understands the workings of Washington inside and out, but she hasn't been assimilated. When most of the media is feeding you the view of events that's approved by the political class, Strassel will give you the details that that help you understand the real reasons and real ramifications for events in the capital.
And she's not shrill or sensationalistic about it. She just explains it, so clearly that it sort of teed you off to realize that the rest of the media blow off these details.
At any rate, I say all that because Strassel's column today about the Hillary e-mail debacle is a wonderful example of all this, especially as it demonstrates the power of the Freedom of Information Act in threatening the very elaborate system of obstructions and deceptions the Clintons set up in the hope they could hide their real activities with respect to Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation and other questionable dealings during Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State. However much the State Department and the Justice Department may want to help Hillary in covering all this up, FOIA is making it virtually impossible for them to do so, as Strassel explains:
Congressional investigators can subpoena documents, but even if after long delays they get them, the investigators must trust that the agency handed over everything. The agency usually doesn’t. Under FOIA, by contrast, the agency is required by law to provide plaintiffs with a complete inventory and broad description of every document it has that pertains to the request—but is withholding. This is known as a Vaughn index. The State Department on Monday handed over its Vaughn index to Citizens United and, boy, are these email descriptions revealing.
We find that the State Department has—but is not releasing—an email chain between then-Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and a Clinton Foundation board member about the secretary of state’s planned trip to Africa. We find that the State Department has—but is not releasing—emails between Ms. Mills and foundation staff discussing “invitations to foreign business executives to attend the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.” We find many undisclosed email chains in which State Department officials talk with Clinton Foundation officials about Bill Clinton speeches and Bill Clinton travel, including to events in North Korea and Congo.
Huma Abedin, a longtime confidante of Mrs. Clinton’s, was somehow allowed to work, simultaneously, at the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and as a consultant to Teneo—a consulting firm run by Clinton loyalist Doug Band. All three of Ms. Abedin’s hats come into play in an undisclosed email exchange regarding a 2012 dinner in Ireland. As the Washington Examiner reported in May, Mrs. Clinton received an award at the dinner from a Clinton Foundation donor. The ceremony was promoted by Teneo. Mrs. Clinton attended in her official capacity as secretary of state. Sort through that.
We already know that the Clinton Foundation continued to take foreign money even while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state. We now know this was only the start of the entwining. These email summaries show that the Clinton Foundation was the State Department and the State Department was the Clinton Foundation. All one, big, seamless, Clinton-promoting entity. We would know far more if State released the full emails. It is citing personal privacy as one reason not to make some public. In others, it claims the emails “shed no light on the conduct of U.S. Government business.”
Separately, we learn that the State Department is withholding from Citizens United and congressional investigators 14 separate exchanges between department employees regarding Benghazi. Most of these involve discussions of the State Department’s statement about the attack, or its responses to congressional inquiries about the attack. In short, those documents go directly to the focus of Congress’s probe: whether the administration covered up what it knew about the attack or the risks to the four American diplomats who were killed. The State Department is claiming attorney-client privilege for its withholding, since most of the exchanges involve Ms. Mills—who we now find also served as an attorney at the department. The Clintons think of everything.
I've probably excerpted too much already, but the whole thing is so good. You really need to just click over to the WSJ and read it all.
The Justice Department is now asking the courts to "consolidate" all these cases in the hope that they can get a friendly judge who will slow down the process. As it stands right now, Hillary's got a world of trouble on her hands because there are 35 different FOIA requests, which means six different judges ordering information released on a continual basis. That's the worst possible scenario for Hillary, whose very political survival depends on the content of her e-mails remaining hidden.
What we can already glean, though, is that Hillary and close confidantes like Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills did some consolidating of their own - essentially turning the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and ad hoc outfits like Teneo into one big network of operators whose main purpose was to do the political bidding of Hillary Clinton. We've also learned from other releases that Clinton loyalist Sid Blumenthal - banned from employment at the State Department by the Obama Administration - was simply put on the Clinton Foundation payroll (which of course was bankrolled in large part by foreign governments) and permitted to perform essentially the same functions without any oversight at the federal level. So much the better for Hillary, who wants people looking out for her interests, not those of the American people.
And one more time to those of you who claim no one cares about Hillary's e-mail server: It's not the technical details that matter here. It's what she was trying to hide about how she really operates, and the extent to which she was willing to go to keep these things hidden. The more everyone finds out, the less plausible she is as a presidential candidate. And apparently, as Strassel explains so well, FOIA was the one political enemy the Clintons couldn't figure out a way to neutralize.
If you don't already read Kim Strassel's Potomac Watch column on Friday's in the Wall Street Journal, you need to start. What's so good about Strassel is that she understands the workings of Washington inside and out, but she hasn't been assimilated. When most of the media is feeding you the view of events that's approved by the political class, Strassel will give you the details that that help you understand the real reasons and real ramifications for events in the capital.
And she's not shrill or sensationalistic about it. She just explains it, so clearly that it sort of teed you off to realize that the rest of the media blow off these details.
