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So the repubs are pretty much on track to selecting The Donald as their nominee, with Cruz as a possible alternate. Neither of them are people I want in charge. The only difference is one will concentrate on wrecking domestic policies, and the other will just be a loose cannon smashing things at random. Ugh.
The Dems have the annointed one cruising with a comfortable lead in delegates, and Bernie nipping at her heels as she tries to ignore him into obscurity.
Just read a news article giving some background on the IT guy the justice department gave the immunity deal on the clinton private e-mail server. This is way slimier than I thought it was, if the assertions in the articles are true. I never heard of the guy before, but not surpising. Bryan Pagliano was Hillary's webmaster who setup and ran the now infamous private E-mail server.
News reports assert he never held a security clearance, nor a federal government job until she brought him into the state department at the GS-15 paygrade when she was appointed Secretary of State. Prior to that he was the IT director of her presidential campaign, and before that worked for an IT consulting firm Community IT Innovators, which specialized in servicing various liberal lefty non-profit groups and causes. While he was a state department employee, he enjoyed the unusual privilege for someone at that executive level, of continuing to be employed by the clintons directly, to do all the IT stuff for both Bill and Hillery, and was apparently the guy who approved locating the server in a webhosting company based in Colorado that did not hold any sort of security clearance.
The articles further assert that Hillery refused to use the state.gov e-mail system, which all state department employees at that time were required to use for any official business. Another article says that when Hillery demanded that the NSA provide her with a personal electronic device which she could use for all of her electronic communications, both classified and not, the NSA told her that such a device didn't exist. When they offered her a Blackberry device that had been certified for classified traffic, but could not be used with unsecured networks, she refused it in rather insulting terms.
The things described break all the rules for communications security. Not to mention that violating these rules to compromise* classified info is a criminal offense to any government employee short of the president. The president can unilaterally declare something to be declassified. Everyone below him has to follow the procedures to formally declassifiy something.
Justice would not offer an immunity deal unless they have someone bigger they want to catch and convict. This could be the coterie of political operatives that Hillery brought with her and installed at the top level of the State Department while she was there. (A common practice of many secretaries of state over the years) But I think they seriously have a shot of convicting Hillery on this. The questions are how good Hillery was at maintaining plausible deniability that she actually ordered the bad acts to be committed, and how many of the group of top aides are willing to fall on their swords and go to jail to protect Hillery.
* Compromise is a specific term of art in this context. It does not have to be actually disclosed to anyone to be compromised, simply being in a situation where an uncleared person could have access to the secret thing constitutes compromise. For instance: Dropping a classified message into the ordinary trash, which goes into ordinary trash system. At some later time, some former military person employed by the trash company sees the red TOP SECRET stamp on the cover folder, fishes it out and calls the local representative of the FBI to come and take it off his hands. Even if nobody actually opened that folder and viewed the document, it is still compromised.
The Dems have the annointed one cruising with a comfortable lead in delegates, and Bernie nipping at her heels as she tries to ignore him into obscurity.
Just read a news article giving some background on the IT guy the justice department gave the immunity deal on the clinton private e-mail server. This is way slimier than I thought it was, if the assertions in the articles are true. I never heard of the guy before, but not surpising. Bryan Pagliano was Hillary's webmaster who setup and ran the now infamous private E-mail server.
News reports assert he never held a security clearance, nor a federal government job until she brought him into the state department at the GS-15 paygrade when she was appointed Secretary of State. Prior to that he was the IT director of her presidential campaign, and before that worked for an IT consulting firm Community IT Innovators, which specialized in servicing various liberal lefty non-profit groups and causes. While he was a state department employee, he enjoyed the unusual privilege for someone at that executive level, of continuing to be employed by the clintons directly, to do all the IT stuff for both Bill and Hillery, and was apparently the guy who approved locating the server in a webhosting company based in Colorado that did not hold any sort of security clearance.
The articles further assert that Hillery refused to use the state.gov e-mail system, which all state department employees at that time were required to use for any official business. Another article says that when Hillery demanded that the NSA provide her with a personal electronic device which she could use for all of her electronic communications, both classified and not, the NSA told her that such a device didn't exist. When they offered her a Blackberry device that had been certified for classified traffic, but could not be used with unsecured networks, she refused it in rather insulting terms.
The things described break all the rules for communications security. Not to mention that violating these rules to compromise* classified info is a criminal offense to any government employee short of the president. The president can unilaterally declare something to be declassified. Everyone below him has to follow the procedures to formally declassifiy something.
Justice would not offer an immunity deal unless they have someone bigger they want to catch and convict. This could be the coterie of political operatives that Hillery brought with her and installed at the top level of the State Department while she was there. (A common practice of many secretaries of state over the years) But I think they seriously have a shot of convicting Hillery on this. The questions are how good Hillery was at maintaining plausible deniability that she actually ordered the bad acts to be committed, and how many of the group of top aides are willing to fall on their swords and go to jail to protect Hillery.
* Compromise is a specific term of art in this context. It does not have to be actually disclosed to anyone to be compromised, simply being in a situation where an uncleared person could have access to the secret thing constitutes compromise. For instance: Dropping a classified message into the ordinary trash, which goes into ordinary trash system. At some later time, some former military person employed by the trash company sees the red TOP SECRET stamp on the cover folder, fishes it out and calls the local representative of the FBI to come and take it off his hands. Even if nobody actually opened that folder and viewed the document, it is still compromised.
