The release of the State Department Inspector Generals’s report on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State has blasted several of her talking points from the discussion. One can hear the new, pared down version in the video below of the MSNBC interview during which she evades the question whether the FBI has contacted her for an interview. “No, we do not have an interview scheduled,” she says. Why so shy?
And why so shy with the Inspector General himself? I thought she agreed to cooperate with authorized investigations, and to have her staff do likewise. There must be a silent Fifth Amendment proviso in there somewhere.
On MSNBC she then volunteers that the IG report establishes her use of a private server consistent with past practice. At NR Shannen Coffin breaks down her current talking points in “Clinton’s simple, two-step George Constanza defense.” The woman is a remorseless and stubborn and inveterate liar.
Now comes former NSA officer John Schindler to report:
[T]the FBI has been in possession of said server for months, and they have uncovered several successful hacking efforts into it when it resided in an upstairs bathroom of the Clinton residence in Chappaqua, New York.
“We know it was hacked numerous times, it’s that simple,” explained a senior U.S. counterintelligence official who is privy [to] some of the FBI’s findings. “If I were Vladimir Putin I’d fire the head of the SVR [Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service] if he didn’t get a good look at Hillary’s emails when they were sitting in plain sight online,” he added with a laugh.
By a rhetorical question Schindler also asserts that Guccifer has pleaded guilty to hacking Clinton’s server. Guccifer claimed to FOX News that he had hacked Clinton’s server, but his plea agreement and appended statement of facts do not comport with Schindler’s assertion that Guccifer has pleaded guilty to it.
Guccifer admits to having hacked “a former U.S. cabinet member who resided in the Eastern District of Virginia” (referred to as Victim 3), among others. The identity of the former cabinet member is unidentified, but the reference is to an AOL email account. I don’t think the residence or the email account or any of the other allegations regarding “Victim 3” fit Clinton. Schindler appears to be mistaken about Guccifer’s plea. (“Victim 5,” incidentally, is clearly Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal. “Victim” is the nicest thing that can be said of him.)
About the hacking of her server, I assume the FBI knows the answer and that we shall see. In the meantime, Schindler’s column provides an educated assessment of the damage Clinton has done to America national security by the use of a private server, not to mention her official acts as Secretary of State.
Video via Jenna Lifhits/Weekly Standard.
UPDATE: Let’s go to Camille Paglia for this quotable quote: “If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.”
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