Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Hillary’s Email Contained Operational Intel/Detail

Posted on by

Official: Withheld Clinton emails contain ‘operational’ intel, put lives at risk

Herridge/FNC: EXCLUSIVE: Highly classified Hillary Clinton emails that the intelligence community and State Department recently deemed too damaging to national security to release contain “operational intelligence” – and their presence on the unsecure, personal email system jeopardized “sources, methods and lives,” a U.S. government official who has reviewed the documents told Fox News.

 From Observer: (  CIA Officers names (including NOCs) in Hillary emails. Discussions with Intelligence Community officials have revealed that Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included Holy Grail items of American espionage such as the true names of Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers serving overseas under cover. Worse, some of those exposed are serving under non-official cover. NOCs (see this for an explanation of their important role in espionage) are the pointy end of the CIA spear and they are always at risk of exposure – which is what Ms. Clinton’s emails have done.Not only have these spies had their lives put in serious risk by this, it’s a clear violation of Federal law. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, enacted due to the murder of the CIA’s station chief in Athens after his cover was blown by the left-wing media, makes it a Federal crime to divulge the true identity of any covert operative serving U.S. intelligence if that person has not previous been publicly acknowledged to be working for our spy agencies.)

The official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and was limited in discussing the contents because of their highly classified nature, was referring to the 22 “TOP SECRET” emails that the State Department announced Friday it could not release in any form, even with entire sections redacted.

The announcement fueled criticism of Clinton’s handling of highly sensitive information while secretary of state, even as the Clinton campaign continued to downplay the matter as the product of an interagency dispute over classification. But the U.S. government official’s description provides confirmation that the emails contained closely held government secrets. “Operational intelligence” can be real-time information about intelligence collection, sources and the movement of assets.

The official emphasized that the “TOP SECRET” documents were sent over an extended period of time — from shortly after the server’s 2009 installation until early 2013 when Clinton stepped down as secretary of state.

Separately, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., who sits on the House intelligence committee, said the former secretary of state, senator, and Yale-trained lawyer had to know what she was dealing with.

“There is no way that someone, a senior government official who has been handling classified information for a good chunk of their adult life, could not have known that this information ought to be classified, whether it was marked or not,” he said. “Anyone with the capacity to read and an understanding of American national security, an 8th grade reading level or above, would understand that the release of this information or the potential breach of a non-secure system presented risk to American national security.”

Pompeo also suggested the military and intelligence communities have had to change operations, because the Clinton server could have been compromised by a third party.

“Anytime our national security team determines that there’s a potential breach, that is information that might potentially have fallen into the hands of the Iranians, or the Russians, or the Chinese, or just hackers, that they begin to operate in a manner that assumes that information has in fact gotten out,” Pompeo said.

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, one day before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton claimed ignorance on the sensitivity of the materials and stressed that they weren’t marked.

“There is no classified marked information on those emails sent or received by me,” she said.

Clinton was pressed in the same ABC interview on her signed 2009 non-disclosure agreement which acknowledged that markings are irrelevant, undercutting her central explanation. The agreement states “classified information is marked or unmarked … including oral communications.”

Clinton pointed to her aides, saying: “When you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain had thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”

But according to national security legal experts, security clearance holders are required to speak up when classified information is not in secure channels.

“Everybody who has a security clearance has an individual obligation to protect the information,” said national security attorney Edward MacMahon Jr., who represented former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling in the high-profile leak investigation regarding a New York Times reporter. “Just because somebody sends it to you … you can’t just turn a blind eye and pretend it never happened and pretend it’s unclassified information.”

These rules, known as the Code of Federal Regulations, apply to U.S. government employees with security clearances and state there is an obligation to report any possible breach by both the sender and the receiver of the information. The rules state: “Any person who has knowledge that classified information has been or may have been lost, possibly compromised or disclosed to an unauthorized person shall immediately report the circumstances to an official designated for this purpose.”

The Clinton campaign is now calling for the 22 “TOP SECRET” emails to be released, but this is not entirely the State Department’s call since the intelligence came from other agencies, which have final say on classification and handling.

“The State Department has no authority to release those emails and I do think that Secretary Clinton most assuredly knows that,” Pompeo said.

Meanwhile, the release of other emails has revealed more about the high-level exchange of classified information on personal accounts. Among the latest batch of emails released by the State Department is an exchange between Clinton and then-Sen. John Kerry, now secretary of state. Sections are fully redacted, citing classified information – and both Kerry and Clinton were using unsecured, personal accounts.

Further, a 2009 email released to Judicial Watch after a federal lawsuit — and first reported by Fox News — suggests the State Department ‘s senior manager Patrick Kennedy was trying to make it easier for Clinton to check her personal email at work, writing to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills a “stand-alone separate network PC is … [one] great idea.”

“The emails show that the top administrator at the State Department, Patrick Kennedy, who is still there overseeing the response to all the inquiries about Hillary Clinton, was in on Hillary Clinton’s separate email network and system from the get-go,”  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.

Kennedy is expected to testify this month before the Republican-led Benghazi Select Committee.

*** What is additionally terrifying is John Kerry not only emailed Hillary on his unprotected iPad but Kerry further admits that foreign espionage and intelligence services also likely hack and or found a way to intrude on Hillary’s server and emails along with any of those inside the State Department. Even Germany tapped John Kerry’s cell phone.

Obama Greased the System for Big Lobby/Money

Posted on by

Government Drags Us Back in Time – Because Cronies and Ideology Tell It To

Motley/RS: Government by ideological fantasy – at the expense of actual facts – is a terrible idea. So too is government of, by and for the donors. Far too often government regulators and bureaucrats ignore Reality – to tilt at ideological windmills. And WAY too often government becomes one giant stenographer for contributors – writing laws and regulations to accommodate their check-cutters’ every whim and wildest dream.

Thus does equal protection before the law – become special treatment for Friends of Government (FOG, if you will). Donors and dumb ideas are favored – at inordinate expense to the rest of us.

To wit: “green” “energy” (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ethanol) is neither green nor energy. It’s far worse for the environment than traditional energy sources – that actually produce, you know, affordable energy. Governments here and all around the world have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this phony energy. It’s been a titanic failure – for decades.

Why has government continued to throw this copious coin out the window – to keep us locked into an uber-failed yesterday? Because their ideological fantasies trump Reality. Why else? Because donors get government money at dollars-on-the-pennies they donated. To wit: President Barack Obama and his Democrats threw $80 billion more at the fake “green energy” industry in the 2009 “Stimulus.” 80% of that money – went to Obama donors.

The more government gets involved – the less the private sector can advance. The more rapidly a sector is advancing – the bigger an impediment government is. Likely no sector is advancing more quickly than the Tech sector. Enter government.

The Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already done egregious damage there. To appease their ridiculous fantasies – and huge donors. About a year ago the Commission’s three unelected Democrat bureaucrats decided to go all the way back in time to1934 landline telephone law – and unilaterally impose it on the Internet. Behold Internet Reclassification – so as to impose the ridiculous Network Neutrality.

The Obama Administration did it – because donors asked for it. Donors like Google. No one did more to get President Obama elected and reelected – than Google. Just about no company swapped staff with the Obama Administration at such prodigious numbers – than did Google.

And after Google greased the skids for Obama – Obama greased the skids for Google. Google spent nearly the entirety of the 2000s trying and failing to get Net Neutrality passed in Congress. Because it is government forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to give uber-bandwidth-hogs like Google – unlimited free bandwidth. We the People didn’t want it – Congress couldn’t pass it. So Obama just issued a fiat – and gave it to them.

But the problem with buying support – is that the “supporters” rarely stay bought. Google is now channeling West Wing President Josiah Bartlet – “What’s next?” And most unfortunately, President Obama’s government stenographers have many, many responses to that request.

Here’s one: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has penned a defense of the next backwards-looking power grab – huge new backdoor mandates via television set-top-boxes. Which they have attempted to obfuscate – as a deregulation of set-top-boxes.

Set-top-boxes are the devices we lease from cable companies – to watch their television packages. Which we are doing to a lesser and lesser degree – as the marketplace has already created myriad ways for us to “cut the cord.” Meaning give up cable television – and the set-top-boxes – altogether.

The future (and increasingly the present) of television – isn’t boxes. It’s apps (and alternate hardware like Apple TV and Amazon Firestick). Netflix, Amazon Prime, Roku, Hulu and a host of other companies deliver you (via their apps) unlimited streaming TV and movie content – using only an Internet connection. No cable TV subscription required. And unlike programmed TV, you can watch whenever you want, wherever you want. So more and more people are cutting their cords.

Meanwhile, the government is yet again stuck in the past. The FCC is dubiously invoking a twenty-year-old law (and seriously, how unbelievably different was how we watched TV twenty-years ago?) – to “open” to competitors the collapsing set-top-box market. This is a terrible idea for a number of reasons.

It is just stupid from an evolutionary standpoint. This is like the government issuing mandates to “open” the horse-buggy industry – as Model T Fords are rolling with ever increasing frequency into our driveways and hearts. If you’re “helping” prop up yesterday’s technology – you aren’t helping.

This mandate forces cable companies to spend a LOT of money totally reconfiguring their networks – to accommodate the new boxes. A new configuration for each new box, most likely – because each box will most likely connect uniquely to each network. And cable companies have a LOT of proprietary information and content to protect – so they will have to spend EVEN MORE time and money reconfiguring so as to ensure its protection. For which we will inexorably pay in higher fees – on TV, and the other services cable companies provide (like Internet). All to make room for more devices – of which people want less.

And you will be trading the box lease – for the box purchase. Which requires more coin upfront. And unlike with the lease, when the next upgraded model comes out – you won’t get it for free. You will pay all over again. And given the rapid technological advancement – how often will that purchase have to happen again, and again, and…?

Think how quick is the smart phone tech turnover (which is a MUCH more intensive product). Where you just purchased the “latest” Google Android – only to almost immediately watch Google roll out the next Android. Does Google give you that next version for free? Of course not. Google won’t give you their latest set-top-box either.

Wait – Google wants to get into the going-out-of-business set-top-box business? You bet they do. So the Obama Administration is prepping to issue yet another fiat – to make Google’s wishes come true. Again.

Crony-infested and ideologically-blinded is no way to go through life, Son. It is also absolutely no way to run a government.

Obama Lies, has Jack Lew Doing the Same on Debt Crisis

Posted on by

Ted Cruz is right, but there is a caveat, a White House cartel inside the Washington cartel.

EXCLUSIVE: Secret Fed Docs Show Obama Misled Congress, Public During Debt Limit Crises

 Pollock/DCNF: Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials secretly conducted real-time exercises during the 2011 and 2013 debt-limit crisis that demonstrated the federal government could function during a temporary shutdown by prioritizing spending, even as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew publicly claimed many times that such efforts were “unworkable,” according to a new report by the House Financial Services Committee obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The staff report, to be released Tuesday, charges that Lew and other Obama administration officials deliberately misled Congress and the public during the federal budget and debt limit showdowns in both years. The committee will convene a public hearing on the report Feb. 2.

The report also states that the Obama administration crafted actual contingency plans to pay for Social Security and veterans benefits, as well as principal and interest on the national debt if the government was temporarily unable to borrow more money. The Committee concludes that over the last two years the Treasury Department has “obstructed” congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the administration’s real-time policy during the two showdowns.

The Constitution stipulates that only Congress can determine how much money the federal government can borrow. Presidents thus cannot unilaterally spend beyond congressional debt ceiling limits set. The committee — chaired by Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas — charged that during both confrontations, the Obama administration held the country’s creditworthiness “hostage” by claiming default was the only possibility if the debit ceiling was not raised.

“These internal documents show the Obama Administration took the nation’s creditworthiness and economy hostage in a cynical attempt to create a crisis so the president could get what he wanted during negotiations over the debt ceiling,” Hensarling said in a statement to be released with the report Tuesday.

 

The report also revealed that the Treasury Department did not publicly divulge its plans to prioritize payments “for the express purpose of creating market uncertainty in an effort to pressure Congress to acquiesce in the administration’s ‘no negotiation’ posture on the debt ceiling.”

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, the financial services panel’s oversight subcommittee chairman, said the administration “manufactured a crisis to put politics ahead of economic stability.”

The massive, 322-page report chronicles frank, behind-the-scenes discussions among Federal Reserve Board and Federal Bank of New York officials as Congress debated whether to keep existing debt limits or allow Treasury to borrow more money. The House committee and the Treasury Department have been fighting a bitter, two-year battle over Federal Reserve documents.

The report states that “Treasury apparently directed the New York Fed not to answer valid congressional oversight inquiries because Treasury knew the answers would expose the dishonesty of the administration’s public statements.”

A Treasury Department spokesman told TheDCNF, “Treasury has been committed to working cooperatively with the Committee to provide it with the information it needs,” including providing it with the New York Fed documents. The report is based on 3,878 pages of internal documents the committee eventually acquired despite Treasury’s opposition. The panel finally obtained the documents by subpoena. The report contains 41 separate appendices.

The revelations will likely add new intensity to the long-running public debate on the proper level of federal spending as the 2016 election campaign accelerates with Monday’s Iowa presidential caucus and next week’s New Hampshire presidential primary. Obama administration officials repeatedly declared that a complete government shutdown with no partial or interim payments was the only alternative to congressional approval of an increased debt ceiling.

In testimony Oct. 13, 2013, before the Senate Finance Committee, for example, Lew said the government could not “pick and choose” the funding of individual government programs once the debt limit ceiling was reached.

“I do not believe there is a way to pick and choose on a broad basis. The system was not designed to be turned off selectively,” Lew said.

The Federal Reserve documents revealed in the report show the Obama administration was in fact prepared to pick and choose which payments to make “in order to protect the creditworthiness of the United States.”

An internal e-mail from an official in the New York Fed’s Financial Institution Supervision Group states that regardless of the congressional outcome, “Treasury is adamant they will make [Principal and Interest] payments. Not considering possibility of missing debt payments.”  The P&I payments are made to Treasury bond holders.

“At the same time that Treasury was insisting to Congress and the American people that prioritization is unworkable, Treasury and New York Fed officials were working behind the scenes on a prioritization plan,” the report charges.

In private, Federal Reserve Board Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials vigorously denounced the administration’s secrecy over its contingency planning, one calling it “crazy, counter-productive, and add[ing] risk to an already risky situation.”

Federal Reserve Governor Jerome H. Powell, for example, complained that the administration tactics were part of political brinkmanship. “Treasury wants to maximize pressure on Congress by limiting communications on contingency planning,” he said in an email.

The report noted that both the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Bank of New York had “grave concerns with Treasury’s political decision not to inform the public of the administration’s debt ceiling contingency plans.”

The Federal Reserve Board staff “strongly encouraged Treasury to reveal its plan in advance” so that the private sector could prepare properly for a debt ceiling event but Treasury officials were “very reluctant to do so,” according to the report.

The Federal Reserve documents also depict officials at the Federal Bank of New York twice engaging in intense “tabletop exercises” about how government agencies could operate under a spending limit.

A March 16, 2011, table-top exercise included an hour-by-hour simulation of how 29 governmental agencies and market players would react when the federal government reached its debt limit.

At the time, the federal government would be within $25 million of its $14.3 trillion budget limit. The Secretary of the Treasury would invoke the Federal Reserve Debt Ceiling Crisis procedures, which provide that the “The President and the Secretary of the Treasury meet with the Fed Chairman at noon and agree that the Federal Reserve should pursue actions to honor and settle SSI, veterans benefits and P&I payments.”  SSI refers to Social Security and disability payments.

A similar April 9, 2013, debt ceiling table-top exercise focused on a “scenario” in which “Treasury begins controlling the flow of payments” and in which ”SSI, veterans benefits and P&I payments [would] be prioritized over all other governmental obligations.” The debt ceiling was $16.3 trillion at the time of the second exercise.

The procedures also state that “based on direction from the President, Treasury will pay only selected type of payments and withhold other government payments.”

Both Moody’s and Goldman Sachs publicly suggested during the 2013 crisis that it was possible the government could assure markets by pledging to pay principal and interest, Social Social and veterans benefits.

When contacted by TheDCNF, the Treasury Department did not directly address the issue of prioritizing payments but forwarded an October 16, 2015 blog, which stated in part, “The New York Fed’s system would be technologically capable of continuing to make principal and interest payment,” but added, “this approach would be entirely experimental and create unacceptable risk to both domestic and global financial markets.”

Multiple think tanks, including the Mercatus Center, have released reports suggesting numerous alternatives to default if the debt limit ceiling is not increased.

The national debt limit has tripled under Obama and now stands at $18.9 trillion.

Where Have all the Refugee Children Gone

Posted on by

Government does not do anything well, that includes Europe as well as America. In Italy there is the mafia, in the United States there is the mafia…not in the historical sense but quite the same disgusting operational crimes.

Both nations lie, make terrifying decisions and people suffer.

10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol

It’s another tragic aspect of the migrants’ crisis: at least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared over the past two years after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency.

Many of these children are feared to have fallen into the hands of criminal groups.

In an interview with the Observer, the sister publication of the Guardian, Europol’s chief of staff, Brian Donald, said half of the missing children disappeared in Italy.

According to the agency, minors accounted for 27 percent of the refugees who arrived in Europe last year.

Europol warns that unaccompanied children are especially vulnerable to traffickers who exploit them for sex work and slavery.

Obama administration placed children with human traffickers, report says 

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.


“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said in a written statement. “What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”

The report concluded that administration “policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”

HHS spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement that the agency would “review the committee’s findings carefully and continue to work to ensure the best care for the children we serve.”

The report was released ahead of a hearing Thursday before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Portman co-chairs with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). It detailed nearly 30 cases where unaccompanied children had been trafficked after federal officials released them to sponsors or where there were “serious trafficking indicators.”
“HHS places children with individuals about whom it knows relatively little and without verifying the limited information provided by sponsors about their alleged relationship with the child,” the report said.

For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.

The Senate investigation began in July after federal prosecutors indicted six people in connection with the Marion labor-trafficking scheme, which involved at least eight minors and two adults from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.

One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay. Castillo-Serrano has pleaded guilty to labor-trafficking charges and awaits sentencing in the Northern District of Ohio in Toledo.

The FBI raided the trailer park in December 2014, rescuing the boys, but the Senate investigation says federal officials could have discovered the scheme far sooner.

In August 2014, a child-welfare caseworker attempted to visit one of the children, who had been approved for post-release services because of reported mental-health problems, according to the report.

The caseworker went to the address listed for the child, but the person who answered the door said the child didn’t live there, the report added. When the caseworker finally found the child’s sponsor, the sponsor blocked the caseworker from talking to the child.
Instead of investigating further, the caseworker closed the child’s case file, the report said, citing “ORR policy which states that the Post Release Services are voluntary and sponsor refused services.”

That child was found months later, living 50 miles away from the sponsor’s home and working at the egg farm, according to the report. The child’s sponsor was later indicted.

***

EU officials find that most of the ‘refugees’ are not refugees. What a mess

Even EU officials are now finally admitting that a lot – or, rather, most – of the people we have been calling ‘refugees’ are not refugees. They are economic migrants with no more right to be called European citizens than anybody else in the world. Even Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, made this point this week. In his accounting, at least 60pc of the people who are here are economic migrants who should not be here –  are from North African states such as Morocco and Tunisia. As he told Dutch television:-

“These are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status.”
Swedish officials are coming to a similar conclusion, saying that as many as 80,000 of the mainly young men who have gone to Sweden as ‘refugees’ in the past year alone are no such thing.

Now there are the usual attempts to crowd-please from certain politicians and officials who are talking about how they might have to deport these people. But they won’t, will they? Does anybody honestly believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?

Or let us assume that the 60pc figure is correct for Germany and that 60pc of the people who have arrived in Germany in the past year alone should not be there. Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe knows that.

Everybody on earth now knows that Europe’s present leaders lack either the will or the means to enforce their own laws. So more people will come next year, and the year after that and the year after that. All in the knowledge that once you’re in, you’re in. If the facts were otherwise then Sweden, Germany and other countries across the continent would currently be preparing to ship hundreds of thousands of people out of Europe and back to their countries of origin. But they’re not.

And so the numbers coming in will increase, and the politicians will keep posing, and the European peoples will rightly get more and more enraged at the fact that their continent is being taken away from them. Eventually perhaps even the constant bogeyman warnings about the ‘far-right’ will lose their capacity to scare. Not good times ahead, I’d say.

Still, at least we all listened to Benedict Cumberbatch.

 

CNN: Hillary, Republicans are not her Problem, the FBI is

Posted on by

NYT Reporter: Clinton’s Problem is the FBI, Not Republicans

FreeBeacon: New York Times reporter Peter Baker rebuked Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric over the weekend about Republicans politicizing her private email scandal, suggesting on CNN Sunday that it was the FBI that should be really on Clinton’s mind.

The Obama administration announced Friday it could not release 22 of Clinton’s emails from her private server because they were top-secret, while Clinton maintained her line that those emails were not marked classified when they were sent or received, a statement columnist Ron Fournier remarked was “irrelevant.” The Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton signed a non-disclosure agreement laying out criminal penalties for any mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

“I take classified information really seriously,” Clinton said on Saturday. “I just think that if the Republicans want to use this for political purposes, that’s their decision.”

King pointed out this was an Obama administration decision, and MSNBC legal correspondent Ari Melber noted on Friday that the administration has prosecuted people for mishandling classified material. Also, the Inspector General of the intelligence community is not a Republican appointee.

“Her problem at this point is not the Republicans,” Baker said. “Her problem is the FBI and the Obama Justice Department. What Democrats are quietly, absolutely petrified about is that come summer, you find an indictment of people around her, of her, a request for a special prosecutor, something that just basically turns this into a complete disaster for the Democrats in which it’s too late to change horses.”

***

Those who came before Hillary and her willful decisions on classified material and lying about it, in part from the WashingtonTimes:

JOHN DEUTCH

Deutch was CIA director from May 1995 until December 1996. He came under Justice Department investigation after his resignation when classified material was found on his home computer in Maryland.

An internal CIA investigation found that he stored and processed hundreds of files of highly classified material on unprotected home computers that he and family members also used to connect to the Internet, making the information potentially vulnerable to hackers.

A report by the Defense Department inspector general found that Deutch had failed to follow “the most basic security precautions” and faulted him for rejecting Pentagon requests that security systems be installed on his home computers.

Deutch apologized for his actions and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton before the Justice Department could file a misdemeanor plea deal for mishandling government secrets.

SANDY BERGER

Berger was the national security adviser during Bill Clinton’s second term. After leaving office, he found himself in trouble for destroying classified documents.

Berger, who died in December at age 70, pleaded guilty in 2005 to illegally sneaking classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing papers in his suit. He later destroyed some of them in his office and lied about it. The materials related to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, and though he avoided prison time, he lost access to classified material for three years.

A judge fined him $50,000, higher than the amount recommended by prosecutors.

Berger called his actions a lapse in judgment that came as he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission that examined the events leading up to the 2001 attacks.

“I let considerations of personal convenience override clear rules of handling classified material,” he said at the time.

BRYAN NISHIMURA

Nishimura, a former Naval reservist in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 and a regional engineer for the U.S. military, was investigated for downloading and storing classified information on his personal electronic devices.

Prosecutors say he carried the materials with him off-base in Afghanistan and took classified Army records to his home in Folsom, California, after his deployment ended.

His lawyer, William Portanova, said Nishimura never intended to break the law but was a “pack rat” who thought nothing of warehousing Army records at home alongside personal belongings.

FBI agents who searched his home found classified military records, both in hard copy and digital form. Nishimura also admitted to investigators that he had destroyed some of the information.

Nishimura pleaded guilty in July to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. A judge fined him $7,500, and he was ordered to surrender his security clearance.

The violation was a technical and unintentional one, Portanova said, but one that the Justice Department nonetheless thought it needed to punish “to make its point.”

DAVID PETRAEUS

The best-known recent prosecution involves the former CIA director who pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanor count of unlawful removal and retention of classified materials. He was spared prison as part of his plea and was given two years’ probation by a judge who faulted him for a “serious lapse in judgment.”

The retired four-star Army general admitted that he loaned his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom he was having an affair, eight binders containing highly classified information regarding war strategy, intelligence capabilities and identities of covert officers. FBI agents seized the binders from an unlocked desk drawer at his home, instead of a secure facility that’s required for handling classified material.

One critical distinction is that while Clinton has repeatedly said she didn’t send or receive anything that was classified at the time – something the State Department now says it’s investigating – the Petraeus plea deal makes clear that he knew the information he provided was classified. He told Broadwell in a recording revealed by prosecutors that the binders had “code-word stuff in there.”

When questioned by the FBI, he denied having given Broadwell classified information, though he avoided being charged with making a false statement.