Friday, May 27, 2016

Strib Editorial Board jumps all over Clinton with spurs on over the State Department IG invstigation; but did they jump on Clinton practices enough, now and as a pattern?

Strib here, with mid-item paragraphs noting:

[...] Three previous secretaries of state willingly submitted to interviews about their own practices: Colin Powell, Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice, as well as Kerry.

It’s bad enough that Clinton continually refuses news interviews on the topic, but to decline to talk with the inspector general charged with investigating her conduct, even as she is asking Americans to elevate her to this nation’s highest office, is unconscionable. [...]

It’s unclear why Clinton has dragged this out to the point that it is tainting her candidacy and feeding already rampant doubts about her trustworthiness. Clinton has been in government far too long not to know the need for properly preserving federal records. She also knows that she was supposed to surrender all department-related e-mails upon leaving office, yet it’s taken two years to obtain them. Clinton must assure voters that this is not the way she would conduct business in the White House.

Importantly, the audit also notes that the inspector general could find no evidence that Clinton received approval from the department’s legal adviser to use a private e-mail server, even though Clinton has said she had permission. Instead, a director reportedly told State Department staff members that they were to “support the Secretary” and “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal e-mail system again.”

[italics added] Clinton was in the White House when Rose Law Firm billing records were not kept at the Rose firm as would have been ordinary practice and Clinton got into that bizzare lost-and-found game with records not in the White House when the Rose billing question was fresh, but showing up substantially later; with Rose Law Firm close colleague Vince Foster's strange death situation coming between lost-and-found. It was not a cadre of Rose operatives transferring lives into the Clinton White House. It was, in particular, Vince Foster.

All the while, the Rose Law Firm's data retention locations is where those Clinton-related firm billing records belonged. They were the firm's property. To be left there, as is the ordinary practice, upon Ms. Clinton's leaving the firm. Not to be taken out and away off site and in the exclusive custody of only Clinton herself, to be disappeared at a critical time, found later.

As to records retention decency, and less, the clear and undeniable fact is that Clinton well before basement server play time was experienced. And deficient as to the decency side of the coin.

It was been there done that, doing it again.

Yogi Berra's Deja vu all over again.

Two bites at the same apple? Is that one too many to trust? Disappearing or otherwise ill-managed records is circumstantial evidence from which a fact evaluator can draw conclusions. Usually against the one having assumed custodial power along with holding preemptive levels of policy control. It was deliberate, it fits a pattern reaching back to Rose Law Firm record retention and non-production mischief, and Brian Fallon can blow all the smoke he can for as long as he can, but it's indicative of something. Something kind of ugly. Pattern-wise.

UPDATE: As to more deja vu, the question of record integrity and completeness exists. When there's been out-of-ordinary basement server hijinks, that calls into question what might have wrongly been deleted at possibly important times (State Department decisions, Foundation donation parallelism, Bill's speech fees, etc.), there earlier was uncertainty about whether in the interval between Vince Foster's last leaving the White House alive and later investigatory personnel closing off and then surveying his White House office contents, whether anyone had entered that office and removed any papers.

All over again. Similar circumstances. Similar considerations. Two bites. Same apple.

FURTHER UPDATE: There apparently was only one set of Clinton - Rose firm billings, back then? Has there been press notice of whether FBI possession includes any/all hard drive backup for the rouge server? Head of State Department, basement server, and are we told whether there was sufficient data backup and who has custody of backups?

If any reader has seen that question resolved in the press; please leave a comment with a link.

FURTHER UPDATE: A number of websites exist speculating in ways that the label "conspiracy theory" might be used in discrediting or attempting to discredit site content.

With that noted, NY Times, here, and PBS Newsline with Ted Koppel, online here. Mainstream can be wrong, but it remains mainstream; with stories about decades old questions of Clinton evidential uncertainties.

With that history, why a secret basement server for email was a deliberate choice instead of using proper State Department protocol and channels as had been the more normal practice; that is the question.

And what of that IG report's mention of official instructions to underlings that mention of the basement email kludge was off limits? What predisposition does that evidence?

Again, a present examination of past event reporting need not use uncertain sources about uncertain things. That is not the point. Not at all. The point is simple: Where's the learning curve, if the intent were not to have weasel room in today's arrangements about critical federal data and its preservation or possible wrongful destruction?

Expanding on that, the past uncertainties were reported by dependable mainstream sources. The point is not whether uncertainties from decades ago can or should now be resolved by reconsideration; but that past notice of evidence problems and questions should not in another high federal office recur. It is inexcusable in such high office practice to lack anything approaching an ordinary person's common sense level of a learning curve; and inferences of intentions can be drawn by voters over "Trust me" stonewalling when lack of a learning curve and a consequent change of habit is apparent. Especially in the context of a family's rise to multimillionaire status as career politicians twice embroiled in proper data handling uncertainty. What's to trust?

____________FURTHER UPDATE____________
"Entitled executive syndrome," this link.