Breathtaking arrogance

Rick Moran writes at American Thinker,

The attorney for a top aide to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state has informed a federal judge presiding over FOIA requests from Judicial Watch related to Huma Abedin's employment status that she will destroy electronic communications not already handed over.

“Ms. Mills does not believe that she has paper copies of potential records in her possession. Following our production on August 10, 2015 [of the defense counsel’s version of the electronic records], we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic records in her possession,” said the attorney.

Breathtaking arrogance.

...Ignoring court orders, refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, threatening to destroy potential evidence – these are not the actions of faithful public servants, but rather a criminal gang conspiring to hide wrongdoing. The federal judge in the case, Emmett Sullivan, has shown he's got some iron in his spine in the past, as he is also presiding over Judicial Watch's FOIA requests relating to the IRS scandal and has threatened to hold IRS officials in contempt if Lois Lerner's emails are not produced in a timely manner.

Sullivan is likely to grant Judicial Watch's emergency stay – and will no doubt have a few choice words for Mills and her attorney. It is up to the court to decide what is relevant to the issue and what isn't. Mills doesn't get to make that determination – nor does Hillary Clinton, who continues to slow-walk her compliance with both State Department and judicial orders regarding evidence in the case.

Thomas Lifson adds:

Hillary and Cheryl and Huma ought to have one of those séances Hillary used to have with Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost, only this time contact Richard Nixon's ghost and ask about the wisdom of getting in a urination match with a federal judge.

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Hillary's two races

John Fund writes at National Review,

Hillary Clinton is running two races: one for president and one to keep information about her private e-mail server and activities as secretary of state from public view as long as possible, preferably until she is back in the White House in 2017.

Last week, we learned more about the extent of the Clinton cover-up. Acting on a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, cracked down on the delay tactics exercised in the effort to build a moat around her e-mails. He ordered Clinton and two of her closest aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.” He also ordered them to confirm that that “they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.” And if “all such information has not yet been produced,” they are ordered to produce it “forthwith.”

The answers are important. The inspector general for the government’s intelligence community, I. Charles McCullough III, has found that some of the 30,000 Clinton e-mails turned over to the State Department contain classified material. Taking a random sample of 40 e-mails, he found four with classified information — material that was classified at the time it was sent and that was extremely vulnerable to hackers and foreign intelligence agencies. A fifth e-mail concerning the 2012 Benghazi attack that left an ambassador and three other Americans dead is already public and appears to have contained classified information. In all likelihood, there are many more.

All this led McCullough to refer the matter to the Justice Department as a “potential compromise of classified information.” Not so long ago, the government took that sort of thing seriously. The U.S. Criminal Code states, with regard to documents or materials containing classified information: “It is a crime to knowingly remove such documents without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.” David Petraeus, the former CIA director and Army general, pled guilty just this year to mishandling classified information after storing sensitive CIA data in an unlocked desk drawer at his home in Arlington, Va. If a desk in a house in Virginia is an unauthorized location, a server in a house in Hillary Clinton’s New York home is one, too.

...Team Clinton is asserting that “any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted.” But that is flatly contradicted by the State Department. Hillary can plead ignorance as to what was sent to her on her private e-mail account, but, as the liberal Cleveland Plain Dealer editorialized this week: “Clinton seeks to become president and commander in chief, but if McCullough’s findings are correct, she was at best inattentive about her handling of intelligence secrets when she was secretary of state even as she worked to shield her activities from public view. If that’s not a disqualification from the White House, it’s hard to imagine what is.”

Even reporters are now openly stating the obvious. Dan Balz of the Washington Post told CBS News this Sunday: It’s a fact that the Clintons, especially Hillary, are very guarded, very secretive people, and this has erupted into multiple controversies, including the e-mail scandal. And so they realize that’s hurting them, and they’re trying to present a sort of charade of transparency.

If the charade doesn’t work and Hillary loses the race to keep her e-mails and past mistakes buried, her race for the White House could be in real jeopardy. It’s the growing understanding among both political elites and voters that she’s unapologetically slippery that is her biggest obstacle in her other race — the one for the White House.

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"Loathsome"

Cheryl Mills, left, was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff and former White House counsel who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. (Photo: Newscom)
Sharyl Attkisson writes at Daily Signal,

To Sonya Gilliam, a recent account of improper sorting of Benghazi-related documents at the State Department brought back vivid memories of her own encounters with high-level government officials who withheld, deleted or destroyed public records.

And one name stood out for its familiarity: Cheryl Mills.

A former deputy assistant secretary of state had told The Daily Signal that Mills was present during an after-hours document operation in a basement room of the State Department in October 2012. Mills was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The purpose of the session, former State Department official Raymond Maxwell said, was to “separate” documents damaging to Clinton before records were turned over to an independent review board probing the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Two years into the investigations, on April 3, 1996, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others were killed in a plane crash while on an official trade mission in Croatia. Brown recently had been served with a deposition notice regarding the alleged sale of trade mission seats.

Evidence revealed a “flurry of document shredding in the [Commerce] secretary’s office” following his death. The document obstruction, which continued for years, is detailed in a 1998 federal court ruling.

Judge Calls Mills’ Behavior ‘Loathsome’ in Other Case

In a separate case involving missing documents that was brought against the FBI in 1997, Lamberth found no obstruction or conspiracy but referred to Mills’ conduct as a White House official as “loathsome.”

Lamberth faulted Mills for making “the most critical error in this entire fiasco”: learning of missing White House emails but not taking proper steps to resolve the situation.

“Mills’ actions were totally inadequate to address the problem,” Lamberth concluded.

And she gives Maxwell a great deal of credit for speaking up about what he saw in the State Department basement in October 2012.

“I never met Ray Maxwell,” Gilliam told The Daily Signal. “I don’t know Ray Maxwell. But I am Ray Maxwell because I lived Ray Maxwell’s story. And I felt compelled to say something.”

The account of Cheryl Mills told by Raymond Maxwell, former assistant deputy secretary of state, sounds familiar to Sonya Gilliam. (Photo: Sharyl Attkisson)
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The State Department believed Benghazi was a terrorist attack

Bryan Preston reveals that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) sought and obtained permission from the state Department to release the contents of a memo Congress has had since. The email is entitled "Libya update from Beth Jones."

Jones was then-Assistant Secretary of State to Hillary Clinton. According to the email, Jones spoke to Libya’s Ambassador at 9:45am on Sept. 12, 2012 following the attacks.

“When [the Libyan Ambassador] said his government suspected that former Qaddafi regime elements carried out the attacks, I told him the group that conducted the attacks—Ansar Al Sharia—is affiliated with Islamic extremists,” Jones reports in the email.

ones leaves no room for doubt in her email, which was copied to a number of officials including Victoria Nuland and Cheryl Mills. At that time, Mills was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff. Mills has spent much of her career working closely with Clinton, and is often described as a loyalist to her.

Jones’ assessment runs counter to the State Department’s statement on Benghazi, which was issued at 10:08 pm on September 11. That statement floated “inflammatory material posted on the Internet” as the cause of the attack. It was issued just a few minutes after President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Clinton spoke together by phone.

Please read more here.