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

[paulthompson]

177. Good thinking

Your thinking is very similar to my thinking. I think those 30,000 deleted emails are key. We already know that some of them were work related, and you pointed to a couple of links I wasn't aware of that prove that more of those deleted ones were work related.

It only takes a few e-mails to see that Clinton's claim that they were ALL personal in nature is untrue. My personal theory is that a big percentage of those deleted e-mails in fact were work related, and these contained things she didn't want the rest of the world to ever know.

It's just a theory, but my working theory is that Clinton thought she was above the law. Remember how Patrick Fitzgerald wanted to indict Karl Rove? But he needed evidence, and when investigators went to look at Rove's e-mails, they were all gone. Rove got away scot-free. Clinton figured she could do the same thing. Except her people were sloppy and/or incompetent, and they didn't manage to cover their tracks by deleting those e-mails forever.

Furthermore, I'm theorizing that the reason that Clinton wanted to keep all her e-mails away from prying eyes was because her government work and her Clinton Foundation work got tangled together, and she didn't want to bother to keep a clear firewall between them. The possibility of conflict of interest was enormous, but to her, that wasn't a bug, it was a feature. Of course she knew that when, say, the State Department was negotiating a big military weapons contract with Saudi Arabia, the Saudis would done tens of millions to the Clinton Foundation to influence her. She was trying to encourage that, not discourage that.

The Clinton Foundation wasn't a real charity. It only spent 20-something percent on actual charitable works. Even then, the money for charitable work could be given to reward political allies. In the same way that some unethical people use the non-profit status of religious organizations to their advantage, Clinton was taking advantage of non-profit charity status to get hundreds of millions of dollars from overseas sources, esp. foreign governments, that otherwise wouldn't have been able to give money to her political campaigns.

Her aides she was communicating with the most were in on it too. In fact, one of her top aides, Huma Abedin, was working for the State Department and the Clinton Foundation at the exact same time for the whole four years! Clinton wanted to communicate with them frequently about this openly corrupt quid pro quo way she did business, and there was too much going on to do it all face to face. So she did it all through her private server.

That explains why she refused to even check her e-mails a single time from any government computer. She had to spend many hours a day in SCIF rooms (secure rooms) where she wasn't allowed to use her Blackberries or any other electronic devices. And they had a desktop computer all set up for her, but she refused to touch it. Because if she did, State Department security officials might get a look at her e-mails and see the vast corruption she was a part of.

That's my theory. The main question in my mind is how sloppy were they? For instance, did they openly discuss quid pro quo deals in e-mails? I think they did leave some trails. We know the FBI probe has spread to investigating the Clinton Foundation, and one thing I heard is that they're specifically looking into conflict of interest in a particular Boeing deal.

I really think she's in a world of hurt. This could be the Watergate scandal of our time.

I think hubris is going to do her in. Look at how no bankers have been prosecuted for the 2008 financial meltdown, and look how rarely other politically powerful people ever get prosecuted for anything. She saw that too and figured she was above the law. Even now, a lot of people are saying she's just too powerful to ever be indicted, no matter what the evidence is. That's what she figured all along.

So she pushed and pushed, creating what is literally the largest political money making machine the world has ever seen. She and Bill increased their own political wealth by $150 million, and they raised another two BILLION for the Clinton Foundation on top of that. No one has ever come close to raising so much money in return for political influence. But what she did was so blatant and outrageous, and she was so sloppy in covering her tracks, that the law is catching up to her.

That's my theory, anyway. We'll see.