Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   3/10/2015

The Clintons’ traveling circus

Even though Hillary’s self-induced travails have rightfully dominated headlines and Sunday talk shows (likewise on cable news outlets), Bill Clinton has recently garnered his share of salacious attention. Were you aware that he is documented traveling with a convicted pedophile? “Bill Clinton took repeated trips on the ‘Lolita Express’—the private passenger jet owned by billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—with an actress in softcore porn movies whose name appears in Epstein’s address book under an entry for ‘massages,’ according to flight logbooks obtained by Gawker and published today for the first time (January 23).

"The logs also show that Clinton shared more than a dozen flights with a woman who federal prosecutors believe procured under age girls to sexually service Epstein and his friends…” Read more, if you can take the slimy implications, at “Will Bill Clinton’s Past Doom Hillary’s Future” (Powerlineblog.com); also, look up “Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet” (Gawker.com). Hence, I call it the “Clintons’ traveling circus” of horrors, no less.

The article titles alone paint what I think are accurate, and very serious, implications to the indisputable facts admitted to by even her defenders: Hillary Clinton set up a so-called “homebrew” server and email domain in her private residence to facilitate completely private—as in hidden from public scrutiny—communications for her and her staff. “Issa: Clinton could face criminal charges” (thehill.com), “Yes, Hillary Clinton Broke the Law” (nationalreview.com), “The Clintons: Still slippery after all these years” (S.D. Union-Tribune).

Also worth considering are “Bolton: A Hillary Presidency Would Be ‘Third Obama Term’” (Andrew Johnson), “The Hillary Cover-Up and the End of Democracy” (Ben Shapiro), and “Next! Can we finally—finally!—be done with the Clintons?” (Kevin D. Williamson). Overstated, perhaps? These are searchable by title, most are posted at DonPolson.blogspot.com and all are worth your time to be fully informed beyond what the two-minute coverage and sound bite shout-fests provide.

Interestingly, a press that has assumed a virtual supine position in front of Obama’s administration (notable exception being Sheryl Attkisson for her dogged pursuit of Obama scandals and corruption)—that same press seems to have rediscovered its collective nose for news regarding Hillary’s email problems. Something happened and I think it stems from being deceived in over Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests predicated on decades of law and rule-making intended to create and keep records as open as humanly possible.

Hillary Clinton’s private, secret email activities violated “clear cut rules from the State Department that require all emails to be stored on official government servers. The reason for this is simple: These types of communications are subject to [FOIA requests], and without clear protocol for preserving them, there is no way to guarantee that certain emails are not being concealed from the public. Transparency is important, so that government officials can be held accountable for their conduct in office. If emails can be hidden on private servers or deleted, there is no effective check against corruption at the highest levels of government” (Logan Albright).

Advocates and partisans of all stripes should universally agree with that summary by Mr. Albright of Freedomworks.org. The Federal Records Act of 1950 (44 U.S. Code, 3101) states “The head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization…” Long before Hillary Clinton took over, the State Department pronounced, in 1995, “the messages being exchanged on E-mail are important to the Department and must be preserved…(and) are considered Federal records under the law.” (5 FAM 443.1)

Republican Trey Gowdy issued a subpoena “so that in fact it will be a crime if she knowingly withholds documents pursuant to subpoena,” said the former House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa. It turns out that Issa issued three subpoenas related to the 2012 Benghazi attacks and it is indisputable that Clinton failed to completely comply with those legal demands. There are many aspects to Hillary’s involvement, actions and communications before, during and after the terrorist attacks that killed 4 Americans, including our Ambassador Chris Stevens, that are still unknown to this day.

It also turns out that there was tremendous vulnerability of Clinton’s email server to hackers, as a Wired magazine article pointed out, “Why Clinton’s Private Email Server Was Such A Security Fail.” Writer Andy Greenberg noted that “the security community is focused…on the possibility that an unofficial, unprotected server held the communications of America’s top foreign affairs official for four years, leaving all of it potentially vulnerable to state-sponsored hackers.”

Hugh Hewitt put it best: “Hillary put her own desire for secrecy ahead of the country’s need for security. That’s the bottom line. Who knows whose lives were put in danger if sensitive sources were discussed via this server and a hostile state was watching and reading every word?” Hillary is the only first lady to be fingerprinted by the FBI, which found her prints on missing documents in her White House quarters. This is not a carnival sideshow; it’s a big tent scandal.