Let's put our heads together on the Clinton e-mail scandal

[paulthompson]

16. Good point

I've heard that too. But I worry that these things take time and there might not be time for the FBI to put together a case on that, since the Clinton Foundation is such a very complicated entity. I heard the main non-partisan group that rates foundations for their effectiveness refused to rate the Clinton Foundation because they couldn't even understand it.

However, it seems likely to me that the two scandals could dovetail. I believe the Clinton Foundation was not a charity in the usual sense. Instead, it was a way for the Clintons to gain more power and money and get around the usual donation limits. Time and time again, we see evidence of some person, company, or government wanting to curry favor with either or both of the Clintons and then giving big donations to the Clinton Foundation right around that time.

This is pure speculation, but what if in some of those deleted e-mails, Clinton and/or her aides talk in an open way about the quid pro quo that was obviously going on? Say, the Saudis want some policy change to benefit them while she's Secretary of State, and at the same time, the Saudis donate $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. I'll bet there's a lot of that sort of thing in the deleted e-mails in particular. But will it come to public light in time to influence the election?

By the way, one thing I find VERY interesting is that the intelligene agencies didn't want Clinton to bring her personal electronic devices into secure rooms, because those devices could actually be hijacked and used to spy. So instead they gave her computers and wanted her to log in to her e-mail account on them in those secure rooms. But Clinton refused.

Why? My logical guess is that if she ever logged in to her private account in a secure government room, that could open the possibility of government security people being able to learn about the contents of her private e-mails. Which would mean there were things she was discussng there that she didn't want anyone in government to know about.

And there's already one good example of this. Reporter, Clinton Foundation employee, and Clinton's close friend Sid Blumenthal apparently was e-mailing her intelligence information on a daily basis. And in one case, one e-mail he sent to her was based on four classified NSA reports about Libya released mere hours earlier! The wording was exactly the same, with one paragraph identical. And at the time, Blumenthal had no security clearance whatsoever (and Obama had deemed Blumenthal persona non grata for his anti-Obama reporting in the 2008 campaign, preventing Clinton from giving him a State Department job). So it seems Blumenthal had a mole or two in the NSA, and was reguarly passing that info on to Clinton.

No wonder Clinton had a private server and refused to even check her e-mail account on a government computer. She was playing with fire, dealing with classified information gained through clearly illegal means! (Perhaps to get a leg up when it came to inter-agency rivalries and stovepiping, which is when each agency hoards its own intel.)

I tell you, this scandal is going to blow up in a big way. I think Clinton has been playing fast and loose with the law for years, figuring she was too powerful to ever get punished. We just need to firmly document everything and spread the word.