Tag Archives: political parties

Why is this even a Question?

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Republicans officially petitioned the administration Thursday to deny Hillary Clinton access to secret information as Democrats’ presidential nominee, and some GOP lawmakers said if the intelligence community won’t do it, they’ll pass a bill to do it themselves.

Oh, wait—it’s a question because

The White House has said it won’t deny Mrs Clinton access….

On the excuse of tradition, don’t you know.

Never mind the tradition, and the requirement in most serious security régimes—like in a government—of revoking existing security clearances and denying further access to those who’ve committed security violations as egregious as even FBI Director James Comey has documented Clinton having done.

Some rules, some traditions, just don’t apply.  Not when they’re inconvenient.

Need More Regulation

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That’s the meme of Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Turillo, the Fed’s reputed point man for regulation.  Turillo is claiming that

the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis won’t be complete without better regulation of short-term funding both inside and outside the banking system.

Naturally, the regulatory point man is going to see everything as a regulatory need.

OK, since more regulations are the solution, here’s a suggestion.

How about some regulations prohibiting the Federal government and the Federal Reserve Bank from using credit and lending as social engineering tools?

Climate and Lawless Democrats

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Recall that Democratic Party State Attorneys General and the Virgin Islands territorial Attorney General have subpoenaed private enterprises for all correspondence related to objections to political agendas touting climate warming and the need to redistribute wealth to “green” energy crony companies.  These subpoenas are intended to gain access to correspondence with anyone at all, and the companies have been threatened by these AGs with RICO proceedings if the victim target companies don’t comply.

In response to that, several of those target companies have countersued, demanding the AGs’ documents related to the AG cases, among other things under FOIA.  The AGs have refused to supply the requested documents, citing…secrecy.

Democratic attorneys general led by New York’s Eric Schneiderman are seeking to block efforts to obtain documents about their efforts by invoking an overbroad claim to secrecy in ongoing legal proceedings, according to the Energy and Environment (E&E) Legal Institute.

According to Chris Horner of E&E,

These activist AGs are trying to write themselves out from freedom of information laws their legislatures have written them into.  …they are hiding behavior that seems to be precisely the sort of abuse lawmakers sought to expose to sunlight when deciding to cover their States’ chief law enforcement officers under FOIA laws….

In fact, these AGs appear to have preemptively colluded in their secrecy.  The AGs involved

circulated a common interest agreement in March that detailed their cooperation in the Exxon matter.  It explicitly prohibited signatories from sharing information about the legal campaign.

The agreement stipulated that if any relevant information “is demanded under a public records law, the party receiving the request shall … refuse to disclose any shared information unless otherwise required by law.”

Oddly, that agreement was discovered in the course of a prior E&E FOIA request; hence the apparent effort to ignore current FOIAs.

Because facts upset their predetermined narrative and undermine their political standing.

That’s Our Client State

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Leave them alone.  That’s the People’s Republic of China’s reaction to the US/Republic of Korea agreement to station an anti-missile defense system in the RoK, a setup explicitly designed for defense and deployed in response to northern Korea’s missile and nuclear warhead buildup.

PRC’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang:

We demand the US and South Korea change their attitude.  By agreeing with the US side to deploy this system, South Korea has gotten itself involved in a situation that damages the current balance on the peninsula.

Yeah—the balance the PRC and their client were trying to develop, from which the better to intimidate the RoK and other regional nations.  Because defensive systems are threats, but PRC/northern Korea offensive systems cannot be.

Lu also refused to rule out economic retaliatory measures against the impertinent RoK.  Roughly 25% of the RoK’s exports go to the PRC.  This comes, also, with the PRC’s history of economic retaliation, as it did against Japan when the Japanese successfully disputed the PRC’s attempt to seize Japan’s Senkaku Island group.

Clinton, Comey, and the Law

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Jacob Gershman wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal Law Blog,

[FBI Director] Comey also referenced a more obscure provision of the Espionage Act that has little to do with intent or state of mind, but rather makes it a crime to disclose classified information through “gross negligence.”

That provision of the Espionage Act, the primary law governing the handling of classified information, could require at least proof that the offender knew the classified information disclosed could harm the United States or benefit a foreign power if it got into the wrong hands.

But the crime of “gross negligence” in the Espionage Act doesn’t appear to require proof of any intentional mishandling of documents….

But what behavior would rise to the level of gross negligence that is a felony under the Espionage Act?

Perhaps the setup, maintenance, and use of an unsecured email on which State Department official business was, by design, conducted.

Perhaps the receipt and relay of emails containing Top Secret Special Access information without sequestering those emails and pointing out the failures to State’s security facility.

Perhaps the receipt and relay of emails with classification markings in them without sequestering those emails and….

Perhaps receipt and relay of 1,000+ emails originating as classified because of their content without sequestering….

Those sorts of behaviors also would seem to aggregate to the guilty knowledge that is intent.  Yet Comey said of some of the cases the FBI had previously prosecuted that they involved

…some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.

And then he said

We do not see those things here.

Unfortunately, Admiral Nelson-like, Comey put his spyglass to his bad eye, albeit with a far different purpose.  And chose not even to recommend a gross negligence prosecution, apparently because his bad eye didn’t reveal any of that to him, either.

His decision to not see is made manifest with his own words in that same statement:

This is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.