Tag Archives: ethics

Loretta Lynch Meets

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US Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton, former Democrat President and husband of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on Lynch’s plane at the Phoenix airport Tuesday.  Lynch said the meeting was unplanned, and all they talked about was grandkids.  Oh, and Brexit.

For anyone who believes this, I might know of some beachfront property north of Santa Fe in which they might be interested.

President Barack Obama (D) has already, three times publicly, instructed Lynch and through her his FBI Director to take no substantive action against Hillary Clinton: in two interviews in which he announced she’d done nothing wrong, and in his endorsement in which he said she should be President.

Bubba understands this; he didn’t go over to Lynch’s plane to shoot the breeze about inconsequentials, or to gossip about Brexit, or to tell her his terms.  He went at her invitation to hear her offered quid pro quo.

As if that’s not enough, there’s this:

Department of Justice officials filed a motion in federal court late Wednesday seeking a 27-month delay in producing correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four top aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a closely allied public relations firm that Bill Clinton helped launch.

Notice that: Wednesday—the day after Lynch met with Bubba in her private plane.  And

US District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, a President Obama-appointed judge, had previously ordered the State Department to release the requested documents by July 21.

Hmm….

Update: Lynch on Friday said she’ll “defer to career prosecutors and the FBI” on matters related to the Hillary Clinton investigation.  A DoJ official prior to her actual announcement:

Determinations as to whether to charge any individual, as well as the findings of the investigation, will be made by career prosecutors and investigators who have been handling this matter since its inception[.]

But what does “defer” mean–she’s explicitly not recusing herself from the case?  What’s the practical value of those determinations being made by career prosecutors and investigators?  Deferral doesn’t mean she’s not retaining final decision-making.  Those prosecutors and investigators will still be working for Lynch after they’ve wrapped things up.

And Lynch has already amply demonstrated her level of integrity with that meeting with Bubba and her subsequent move to try to suppress release of those Clinton Foundation emails she’s been ordered to release.

UpUpdate: At her Colorado news conference Friday, Lynch confirmed that she will defer to her career FBI investigators and prosecutors but will not recuse.

There’s also this tidbit, it turns out, from Christopher Sign of ABC 15 in Phoenix:

The former president steps into her plane. They then speak for 30 minutes privately. The FBI there on the tarmac instructing everybody around “no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.”

Is there any remaining doubt that FBI Director James Comey is as deeply in Hillary Clinton’s (and Bill Clinton’s, whose Clinton Foundation also is under criminal investigation, supposedly) back pocket as Comey’s boss, Lynch?

Look Who’s Talking

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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chastised Republican lawmakers on Sunday for a “paralyzed” Congress, saying they’ve fueled populist anger by refusing to “do their job.”

It’s Congressional Democrats and a Democratic Party President who are blocking the spending and tax cuts that would stimulate our economy and let people get back to work.

It’s a Democratic Party President whose Executive Branch creates rule after regulation that limits what people can do with their private property and that stifles innovation and economic growth, and it’s Congressional Democrats who block efforts to pull those rules and regulations back.

It’s Congressional Democrats who deliberately prevented the House from functioning at all because they couldn’t impose their minority will on the House, denying even the people’s House the ability to act democratically.

It’s Congressional Democrats who continually attack our 1st Amendment rights—every single one of them—and our 2nd Amendment rights, forcing Congress to spend valuable time protecting Americans’ individual liberties instead of positively pursuing the people’s business.

It would be good if the Democrats actually did start doing their jobs, instead of being cynically disruptive.

It would have been good had Clinton done her job as Secretary of State, instead of foisting off on us her Russian overcharge reset, with Russia now occupying Crimea and other parts of Ukraine.  It would have been good had Clinton done her job as Secretary of State, instead of napping through her 3pm call for help from our Benghazi consulate.  It would have been good had Clinton done her job as Secretary of State, instead of ignoring security strictures and running her State email communications, including classified correspondence, from her private, unsecured, unprotected email server.

It would have been good had Clinton done something positive during her stay as Secretary of State.

Criminal Negligence

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Further to the matter of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server and her State Department’s handling of them.

…revelations from new court-released documents in a lawsuit by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. They show the State Department temporarily turned off security features in 2010 so that emails from then-Secretary of State Clinton’s personal server would stop going to the department’s spam folders.

That’s not just dumb (or, in the words of Colonel with whom I once worked, the dumbest thing I ever heard), it’s got to be criminally negligent.

It’s too easy—and a very routine thing to do—to fish (as opposed to phish) out of those spam folders Clinton’s emails, both those from her and those to her.  It’s too easy—and another very routine thing to do—to adjust the spam filters to pass acceptable emails.

And: it’s too easy—and yet another very routine thing to do—to block access, any access, from an unsecured server of any purpose to State’s official business network, much less its classified network.

As Bob Gourley, former Chief Technology Officer for DIA, put it,

You’re putting not just the Clinton server at risk but the entire Department of State emails at risk.  When you turn off your defensive mechanisms, and you’re connected to the Internet, you’re almost laying out the welcome mat for anyone to intrude and attack and steal your secrets.

Of course Clinton’s State Department IT staff knew this.

Of course Clinton, who was the ultimate State Department classifying authority for this sort of thing as well as for all matters related to security, knew this.

Elections have consequences.

British Labor Party, American Democratic Party

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David Lammy (MP, Labour) doesn’t like that the British spoke, and he wants to overturn/disregard the referendum’s outcome.  He wants Parliament to overturn the referendum.

We can stop this madness and bring this nightmare to an end….

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has its own view of the relevance of democracy.  With their sit-in and its deliberate, avowed purpose of stopping the people’s House from conducting the business those Representatives’ constituents elected them to conduct, the Democratic Party is saying, loud and clear,

We get our way, or no democracy for you.

The same sort of attack on the fabric of democracy that the Democratic Party inflicted in Wisconsin and Indiana just a few years ago.

It seems the Left on both sides of the Atlantic have no respect for the people and even less for our democracies.

State Department Insecurity

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The AP headline reads State Department was forced to disable security features to receive messages from Clinton email server.

[E]mails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton’s private server.

These emails, obtained Judicial Watch pursuant to their FOIA request and enforced by court order because State kept trying to ignore that law’s requirements, occurred in 2010.  This also gives the lie to State’s claims that had those worthies known of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private and unsecured email server, on which she was conducting government and classified government business, they would have denied her permission to use it.  State knew.

In fact, Ken LaVolpe, Deputy Director for Security, Technical, and User Services Division in State’s Office of Information Resource Management sent this about disabling much of State’s own security software in a December 2010 email to his minions:

This should trump all other activities[.]

Tom Lawrence, Branch Chief for Technical and Security Teams in the OIRM and a subordinate of LaVolpe’s added

We view this [turning of security features] as a Band-Aid and fear it’s not 100 percent fully effective.

The AP’s headline gives the game away: State was not at all forced to disable any of its security features to troubleshoot problems with Clinton’s unprotected email server.  The Band-Aid was not at all necessary.  State could simply—and should have—cut all connections between the government’s classified networks and Clinton’s unprotected server or better, shut her server down altogether.  But this is the Obama administration’s and Clinton’s attitude toward national security and personal privilege.

Elections have consequences.