Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Too Big For Their Breaches



Peaches and Hill: Reunited And It Feels So Good


Hillary Clinton probably knew the vast right wing conspiracy would be gunning for her official State Department e-correspondence sooner or later. She probably knew that mixing the business of diplomacy with the pleasure of her family's slush fund would inevitably turn up a couple of smoking guns or toxic nuggets once she started running for president. She knew that despite her vaunted position in life, the Freedom of Information law might eventually apply, even to her. Therefore, she never bothered to avail herself of an official government email account, choosing instead to conduct all business, public and private, from her personal email address. The New York Times has the scoop:
Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.
It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.
Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.
And then there's Hillary's former colleague, David Petraeus, late of the Pentagon and the CIA. The general didn't have the Hillary-sense to privatize or encrypt his email correspondence before dumping state secrets on his paramour. He did, however, have the Hillary-sense to cash in royally upon leaving government. Therefore, as a Too Big To Fail, he is making a misdemeanor plea deal with the Department of Justice without ever being publicly indicted on espionage or other charges. The Breaches of "Peaches" (his high school nickname) will resemble those of a money-laundering bank. Any fines or legal fees will be ripe for claiming as deductions on his taxable income. And his powerful government friends will have the chutzpah to brag that this is proof positive that the law applies to rich people too. The Times also scored this scoop: 
 David H. Petraeus, the best-known military commander of his generation, has reached a plea deal with the Justice Department that will allow him to avoid an embarrassing trial over whether he provided classified information to a mistress when he was the director of the C.I.A.
Mr. Petraeus will plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. Mr. Petraeus has signed the agreement, said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman.
 The plea deal completes a spectacular fall for Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who was once discussed as a possible candidate for vice president or even president. He led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the architect of a counterinsurgency strategy that at one time seemed a model for future warfare.
It should be noted that when powerful people like Petraeus fall, they fall all the way to the top. Peaches is currently raking in the mega-bucks as an international mover and shaker for a hedge fund, despite having no financial experience. He also commands Hillary-level fees for his public speaking gigs. He is still esteemed enough to forcibly silence critics having the effrontery to call him out for war crimes and worse. One critic, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, was roughed up and arrested and charged with criminal trespass for buying a ticket to hear Petraeus speak in New York City last fall. McGovern compared his punishment to what Petraeus and CIA torturers have been forced to endure. He recently wrote an open letter to Petraeus:
You may not be surprised to know that, try as I might to feel some empathy for you, Schadenfreude at your misfortune is winning out, since I am convinced that you had a lot to do with other far-more-serious offenses, including aiding and abetting illegal “aggressive war.” And, I suspect you also many have aided and abetted the circumstances that gave rise to the bizarre charges against me.
I refer, of course, to my violent arrest, causing pain of my fractured shoulder, and my jailing in The Tombs, simply because I wanted to hear you speak last fall at New York’s 92nd Street Y and possibly pose a question from the audience.
 You can rest assured that Petraeus is being "punished" (two years' probation) only for embarrassing his elite friends, not for the deaths of innocents in misbegotten wars. He is helping President Obama to avoid looking like a hypocrite for his unprecedented assault on low-level whistle-blowers and journalists. As a protected member of The Club, Petraeus is taking one for the team, helping both his former boss and departing AG Eric Holder to burnish their legacies as statesmen.

Petraeus is not only too big to fail and jail, he is too big to embarrass. The Times:
A plea deal would spare Mr. Petraeus a high-profile trial where embarrassing details about the affair would have been presented to the jury and made public. Mr. Petraeus is still married to Holly Petraeus.
Mr. Petraeus received most of his accolades for his service in Iraq. He was credited with directing the so-called surge of American forces in 2006 that pushed militants of Al Qaeda, who had taken control of several major cities and provinces, out of the country, stabilizing Iraq and allowing the withdrawal of all American forces about five years later.
Petraeus will not be charged with war crimes, nor does he stand accused by either the two-tiered justice system or the corporate media-war complex of destabilizing the entire Middle East and helping fuel the rise of ISIS. As a matter of fact, he is still  slavishly revered by both political parties. Like fellow hawk Hillary, he was even once considered Presidential material. Maybe he will once again be considered presidential material.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen an inch and will rise again, and again, and again.


19 comments:

Zee said...

Wen Ho Lee got nine months in solitary confinement before he was cleared of any and all espionage charges except for mishandling of classified information--the same charge for which Petraeus is getting only probation.

In the interests of fairness and equality in sentencing, I suggest that Petraeus experience nine months in solitary, too.

Zee said...

I see that there are already some 2000+ comments on the NYT article about Hillbillary's use of her private e-mail account for State Department business. Way too much for me to try to follow as I nurse Mrs. Zee through her second total knee replacment.

If any of you are following said comments in any detail, are the Hillbillary-bots in full, cornered-rat defensive spin mode? As in, "What difference at this point does it make?"

Will said...

Zee,

Maybe he was credited for time served spent sleeping alone on the couch every night after Holly found out about Paula. :)

Zee said...

@Will--

ROTFLMAO! As always, your humor is deadly sharp and oh-so-very-much on target!

annengima said...

Conniving, calculating Hillary got away with hiding her emails from FOIA requests for 4 years, but she didn't hide them from the Romanian hacker Gufficer who discovered her personal email address and accompanying State Dept emails in 2013. The NYT always leaves out the important parts! Wow, as I read this in edit, I noticed that her email address that I included was left out. I'll try again. It's HDR22@clintonemail.com if anyone wants to write and if it's still active.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/hillary-clinton-private-e-mail-account-897531

Yes, the Obamabots are saying "what difference does it make at this point" and that she didn't do anything illegal per se, and also they say that the NSA can retrieve this stuff anyway.

I've got news for them though. According to the NSA, they only store metadata, not content. So if anyone wants the CONTENT of Hillary's emails unfiltered by her personal aides, they'll have to ask Israel. Israel is the repository for all the raw, unfiltered digital communications of everyone, no exceptions.

That's another thing that the NYT hasn't covered because, as they told the Public Editor, they didn't find it 'surprising enough'. They don't even find it interesting that the U.S. Gov't hands it all over, unfiltered, without any legal restrictions on how they can use it. Israel knows more about what is going on in our government than our own government does.

Bibi said today: “And some of what the president has done for Israel might never be known, because it touches on some of the most sensitive and strategic issues that arise between an American president and an Israeli prime minister. But I know it!"

I bet he does. I bet he even knows stuff that Obama wished he didn't.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414739/netanyahu-lavishes-praise-obama-speech-i-called-president-and-he-was-there-brendan

As far as Hillary's use of her personal email goes, she was probably doing personal business most of her time in office anyway, so naturally she would use her own email to line up speaking gigs at Goldman Sachs, research cattle futures, fund-raise for the Clinton Global Initiative, and check up on Bill - that alone is a full-time job.

annenigma said...

Allow me to play my favorite parlor game - What If.

What if... Obama himself suggested that Hillary use a personal instead of a government email, ostensibly to help her escape the scrutiny of Republicans. She did set it up during her confirmation hearings, and he must have known about it since the beginning since they exchanged emails. She continued using it exclusively during her entire State Dept. tenure but Mr. Security Conscious Obama never made her use the official encrypted system? Hmmm. I'm thinking something Machiavellian.

Hillary might have thought she was hiding stuff from Obama too and she would like that. Ha ha. Maybe she wasn't aware of the NSA/Israeli intelligence agreement where everyone's email contents are sent to Israel. How hard would it be for Bibi to help Barry out with a little intel on his SOS? It would actually work to Obama's advantage to secretly keep tabs on her communications without anyone in the U.S. Intelligence Community knowing about it. It's a form of power, after all. He could do that by relying on Bibi and Bibi knows power when he sees it.

There had to be a compelling reason and a benefit to the US to leave out any legal restrictions on what Israel could do with that raw, unfiltered content and who they could share it with. Perhaps, like corporations, Presidents offshore some politically sensitive intelligence work. So if Bibi feeds Obama what he wants to know, Bibi has the President by the balls and he twists them when he needs something. (I think Barack's balls are getting really irritated and sore by now.) Wouldn't it be just like all these Power Players to be secretly playing each other?

Think about it. Didn't everyone wonder how Obama could actually trust Hillary? And then he actually let her circumvent official, encrypted government email for her entire 4 years? That's seems to be so inconsistent with his obsession with security. Perhaps he really didn't trust her but couldn't use a domestic intelligence agencies to spy on his own SOS, so he got a little help from his special friends with the special intelligence arrangements - the ones whose DNA he says he $hare$.

Could it be that Hillary got punked or pwned by the Master himself? It would be ironic if it led to the end of her lifelong Presidential aspirations.

Zee said...

@annenigma--

"As far as Hillary's use of her personal email goes, she was probably doing personal business most of her time in office anyway, so naturally she would use her own email to line up speaking gigs at Goldman Sachs, research cattle futures, fund-raise for the Clinton Global Initiative, and check up on Bill - that alone is a full-time job."

Again, I'm ROTFLMAO!

I can't comment on your theory that perhaps Hillbillary is cleverly being "done in" by BHO, but you've prompted me to wonder if perhaps Bill doesn't have an electronic tracking/chastity device now attached to some sensitive part of his anatomy as Hillbillary seeks to protect her coronation.

(Hope it fries his you-know-whats off.)

Still, I can't help but hope/pray that Hillbillary's exclusive use of her private e-mail for State Dept. business--no matter what the "cause"--will quickly "do in" her quest for the presidency.

Surely the Hillbillary-bots can't be so stupid as to ignore this most recent proof that she is as corrupt as they come?

Oops! I think that I just answered my own question. "Yes, they can."

Denis Neville said...

“When ordinary Americans come in contact with the justice system, everything changes…In the United States, the lack of accountability for elites goes hand-in-hand with a lack of mercy for everyone else.”

A Justice Department report will criticize Ferguson, Mo. for disproportionately ticketing and arresting African-Africans and relying on the fines to balance the city’s budget.

“In lieu of the rule of law - the equal application of rules to everyone - what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized, while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.”

The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit over whether the city of Clanton, Ala., is running a debtor’s prison. The lawsuit says city officials there keep poor people in jail simply because of their inability to pay fines.

“Many Americans acquiesce to the prison state because neither they nor their families nor their friends are at risk. That’s what allows the population to largely tolerate and even cheer for a system that imposes extreme punishments for the pettiest offenses.”

Quotations, Glenn Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful

Cirze said...


Like Jesus Christ?

Ah, I sense the perfect candidate coming back.

Again.

And again.

Great reporting, K!

and will rise again, and again, and again.

annenigma said...

Too big for their breaches indeed. Love the title.

The New York Times usually leaves out a lot of context and they're still doing it while throwing us a few crumbs without threatening Hillary's prospects too much. Today they discuss the connection to FOIA requests but they don't connect that to the resulting hacking of her personal email account and subsequent disclosure of official government business contained within.

Instead of admitting that Hillary's personal account was HACKED, the NYT simply says "Some of those emails had already spilled into public view and been reported in the news media." SPILLED? How did that happen? Gee, was there a hacker involved? (Other media already covered that - nothing to see here). You'd think by their account that her email box was too full and some fell out. Talk about soft pedaling it and avoiding the implications to national security. So did the hacker get charged with spilling the beans?

As a direct result of Hillary's deliberate subversion of the FOIA law to thwart requests and keep her work product secret from the public, a breach of national security occurred that is still being hushed up by the Gray Lady. Wittingly or unwittingly (what difference at this point does it make!), Hillary gave aid and comfort to The Enemy, specially Republicans, at least according to how the Obama regime interpreted the Espionage Act for Chelsea Manning.

It's a digital fine line between what Hillary did and David Petraeus leaving 8 black notebooks full of handwritten classified information and Top Secret code words in an unlocked desk drawer. Marcy Wheeler details this at:

https://exposefacts.org/david-petraeus-gets-hand-slap-for-leaking-two-point-enhancement-for-obstruction-of-justice/

When Obama refers to American Exceptionalism, I guess this is it.

Pearl said...

Annenigma: Is there an article in the nyTIMES that allows comments that would allow your latest comment on Sardonicky to be printed or shortened with the basics included? These are really important details that most people are unaware of. All of it is beyond shocking and should be available somewhere (Truthout?)

Pearl said...

David Petraeus Gets Hand-Slap for Leaking, Two Point Enhancement for Obstruction of Justice http://shar.es/1WSk46 via @sharethis

annenigma said...

@Pearl

After I wrote this one I did decide to submit something similar to an article that I have linked below. It normally takes 3-5 hours for any of my comments to be published and it just appeared so I'm copying it here. It's about 300 comments in.

Here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/using-private-email-hillary-clinton-thwarted-record-requests.html

And here's my comment to the NYT:

"Instead of admitting that Hillary's personal account was HACKED, this article says "Some of those emails had already spilled into public view and been reported in the news media." SPILLED? Was there an amateur hacker involved by any chance? Sorry, other media already covered that - nothing to see here. Move along.

It sounds more like her email box was too full and some fell out. Did the hacker get charged with spilling the beans?

It was a direct result of Hillary's deliberate subversion of the FOIA law in order to thwart requests and keep her work product secret from the public that a breach of national security occurred. Wittingly or unwittingly (what difference at this point does it make!), Hillary gave aid and comfort to The Enemy, specially Republicans, at least according to how the Obama administration interpreted the Espionage Act for Chelsea Manning. Frankly, if an amateur hacker discovered her account and got into the contents, it stands to reason the pros did too. Did the risk of using a personal account ever dawn on anyone?

David Petraeus left 8 black notebooks full of handwritten classified information and Top Secret code words in an unlocked desk drawer, and Hillary left official government business in a personal unlocked digital desk drawer for 4 years. If National Security weren't an expensive Big Busine$$, it would be a Big Joke."

DW2000 said...

Denis,

Your contributions are always great supplements to Karen's writing.
Regarding the Greenwald quotes...
"As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.”

This is hopelessly romantic. "by now" ??

It has always been thus.

"Slavery by another Name" by Douglas Blackmon is a devastating portrait of the history of justice in the USA.

Thanks for all the great source material.

voice-in-wilderness said...

I think the Obama connection in this is going to prove most interesting, if the corporate media can stir themselves to pursue that. As others have asked, how can he not have known and did he in fact encourage her action?

The one thing we can be sure of, is that copies of all of Hillary's e-mails are sitting in the NSA server farm at Bluffdale, Utah!

Pearl said...

From Hillary:

"I want the public to see my email. I asked the State Department to release them. They said THEY WILL REVIEW them for release as soon as possible."

Yes, they need some time to "review" (hide) the incriminating ones. Hope this scandal accelerates.

annenigma said...

This is going to be interesting. What if the State Dept decides to redact items in Hillary's emails? I heard that she has granted the State Dept permission to release them. So nice of her.

If anything ends up being redacted by the State Dept after her personal staff has already combed through it, I hope someone charges her with compromising/violating national security.

She's tainted. She's dirty. She stinks. Journalists who had their FOIA requests thwarted for the past few years and going to be scenting those emails like bloodhounds. I bet they'll notice what's missing too.

The Democratic loyalists will stick with Hillary like flies to shit.

annenigma said...

'On Tuesday, Harf [State Dept deputy spokesperson] told Al Jazeera America that the department has “no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal email account for anything but unclassified purposes.” She declined to explain Wednesday how that could be known given that the State Department has never been in control of Clinton’s emails.'

The fix is in. They just won't release anything with redactions!

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/4/house-committee-launches-probe-into-hillary-clinton-email-scandal.html

Pearl said...

Terror fixation draws attention from failing economy: Walkom http://on.thestar.com/1wMLyPR via @torontostar


A report from Canada. Sound familiar? At least we have an election coming up to possibly have a change of leadership shortly.