Tag: james comey
A Final -- And Fully Fact-Checked -- Verdict On 'Her Emails'

A Final -- And Fully Fact-Checked -- Verdict On 'Her Emails'

The Washington Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler has delivered a conclusive verdict on the subject that gave the presidency to Donald J. Trump: What about her emails? His analysis follows a column I wrote last week examining whether any of Hillary Clinton's emails contained government secrets that would have justified her criminal prosecution, as Trump has urged for years — and has repeated with vehemence since the FBI seized top-secret documents including sensitive nuclear intelligence hidden at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Kessler has at last settled the controversy that lasted for seven years. Former Secretary of State Clinton, linking to my column in a September 6 Twitter thread, put it bluntly: "The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified."

Beginning in 2015 when "her emails" became the subject of a long and tortuous FBI investigation, Kessler scolded Clinton more than once for "legalistic parsing" of the accusations against her. But now he has closely examined the facts at issue again, done additional reporting, and found "new details" that mitigate former FBI Director James Comey's harsh, unprecedented, and decisive interventions into the 2016 election, which unquestionably swayed it for Trump.The so-called "scandal" stemming from "her emails" wildly dominated election coverage. "News reports on this topic ran 19-to-1 negative over positive," reported the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School.

As the veteran Post reporter explains in painstaking detail, "a review of the recent investigations, including new information obtained by the Fact Checker, shows Clinton has good reason for making a distinction with Trump." Quoting State Department reports and other official documents, with appropriate links, Kessler elucidates what few have understood about the disputes over classification between the State Department and other agencies, and how Comey distorted those disagreements to suggest that Clinton disclosed classified data even when the documents carried no classification markings.

A 2018 report by the Trump Justice Department's inspector general, cited by Kessler, reiterates Clinton's exoneration by the FBI two years earlier: "There was no evidence that... former Secretary Clinton believed or (was) aware at the time that the emails contained classified information," or that she intended to jeopardize classified data in any way.

Kessler also elucidates the flaw behind Comey's assertion that "110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received." This meant, as he notes, that "an intelligence agency, such as the CIA, had decided information in the email was classified, even if the email itself had not been marked classified."

How could Clinton — or anyone else — know that a document was deemed secret or even confidential if it carried no such markings? Comey stated that she or any reasonable person simply "should have known." If that sounds absurd, it's because it is absurd. Comey was playing a word game, suppressing essential information about the process of classification, and, after the damage was done to the Clinton candidacy, assumed a sanctimonious pose that his motive was above politics — all the while violating basic protocols of the Justice Department in making his public statements up to nine days before the election.

The absurdity of Comey's criticism is highlighted in one of several communications between a State Department security official and Clinton's attorney David Kendall. The official concedes that certain disputed information "was likely not classified at the time of sending, but the (department's) Senior Classification Review Panel (SCRP) later determined that it was." Such retroactive determinations are analogous to ex post facto laws, which are unconstitutional because they are so manifestly unfair and subject to abuse.

To maintain a semblance of order, the U.S. government has explicit rules and manuals controlling the classification of its files. Not a single one of the documents that appeared on Clinton's server was marked in accordance with those regulations, not even the three that Comey claimed had such markings. Eventually, he backed away from that claim in congressional testimony. Now the self-righteous Comey has declined to be interviewed by Kessler.

Finally, Kessler reports the conclusions of the two Trump State Department investigations of "her emails," both of which stated that beyond using a private server for State Department communications, a practice continued from her predecessor Colin Powell, she had done nothing wrong. "There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information," according to the Diplomatic Security Service, which conducted the department's final probe in 2019. And again: "None of the emails at issue in this review were marked as classified."

No longer should anyone — not any reputable reporter, not any credible news organization — report other than that irrefutable conclusion.

The facts laid out first in my column and now in fully documented detail by The Washington Post will not, of course, discourage Trump from his endless smears against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and all his enemies who should be in prison, or how the FBI and the "deep state" are persecuting him.

Going forward the national media should avoid promoting any false equivalence between "her emails" and Trump's dangerous stashing of national defense secrets, and instead consult the now established facts. As the truth about his grotesque and felonious misconduct emerges in full, the contrast will become starker than ever.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

How Many Of 'Her Emails' Were Classified? Actually, Zero

How Many Of 'Her Emails' Were Classified? Actually, Zero

Nearly every day fresh revelations emerge in the federal investigation of the national security and presidential records that Donald Trump purloined from the White House. So far, his alibis have been exposed one after another as empty, and we have seen no adequate public reckoning of why he took those papers, what he meant to do with them, how some went missing, or even exactly how many documents he hijacked to his Florida estate.

As more and more evidence of the former president’s reckless and potentially criminal misconduct comes to light, he and his defenders keep pointing to “her emails.” They insist that because the Justice Department declined prosecution of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after a long and thorough probe of how she handled allegedly classified information, there should be no investigation, let alone indictment or conviction of Trump.

But while we don’t yet know the extent or nature of Trump’s abuse of classified documents, we can determine how many were found by investigators, after exhaustive searches, among Clinton’s thousands of State Department emails.

The accurate and definitive answer is zero – although few if any news outlets have informed the public of that startling fact. Moreover, it is a fact that the Trump administration itself confirmed three years ago.

In the recent coverage that references her emails, former FBI Director James Comey is sometimes quoted as saying that of the 33,000 Clinton emails examined by bureau investigators, three had classification markings. That’s less than one-hundredth of one percent, and not worth comparing to Trump’s malfeasance anyway, but it’s still false -- apparently meant to bolster Comey’s absurd claim that other Clinton emails were “classified” although never marked as such.

Those three State Department documents were “call sheets,” innocuous memos reminding Clinton to make scheduled phone calls. During her FBI interview, investigators showed her one of those memos, reminding her to place a condolence call to the president of Malawi--not exactly a top secret matter. As Comey himself later admitted, any classification marking on that sheet had been wrongly applied.

In short, the three supposedly classified documents attributed to her emails were barely even confidential, let alone secret or subject to the sanctions of the Espionage Act.

Still, the hunting of Hillary never ends and – amid regular threats to her by Trump when he was president -- inevitably resumed after the FBI investigation concluded. What has been overlooked is that “her emails” and those of her State Department aides became the target of not one but two departmental probes that picked up where her exoneration by the Justice Department left off.

The first round, which began under Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, opened with an inquiry into a claim of 41 “security incidents” attributed to Clinton and concluded, after months of argument and appeals by her attorneys at Williams & Connolly, that none of those alleged incidents was valid, though she shouldn’t have used a private email server. In that respect her conduct was no different from her Republican predecessor, the late Colin Powell, who advised her to use private email, or many officials in the Bush White House, including Karl Rove.

The second State Department review commenced with more fanfare in 2019 under Tillerson’s unscrupulous successor Mike Pompeo, who, it is worth noting, soon came under official scrutiny himself for gross and self-serving misuse of State Department resources. By then, the hypocrisy behind Republican indignation over “her emails” had been highlighted by massive, repeated security breaches in the Trump White House, where numerous officials , including Ivanka Trump, unlawfully used private email accounts and normal protective protocols were routinely flouted.

No doubt Pompeo, a veteran of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, hoped to find something, anything to arraign Clinton. But again, in the end, there was zero, zilch, nada. Although the second review began with a July 31, 2019 notice from State Department officials that they “suspected” Clinton might be responsible for 12 classified “spillages,” this investigation concluded nine weeks later that she did not “bear any individual culpability” for those incidents.

Again, the overarching absurdity of the State Department and FBI investigations lay in the fact that nearly all of the documents at issue had been classified retroactively – meaning they had carried no markings identifying them as such when Clinton handled them. Comey's assertion that documents can somehow be deemed inherently secret, without proper markings or any classification history whatsoever, is extremely dangerous and hostile to the concept of open democratic governance. It is an idea that should never have been entertained by a free press.

Nobody in their right mind would hold Clinton, or any official, to be culpable under those circumstances.

The same cannot be said for Trump in the current documents scandal, as must be obvious to anyone who has seen that photograph of the folders, clearly marked “TOP SECRET,” strewn around his office floor at Mar-a-Lago, or the folders emptied of their contents, who knows where.

Despite the hysterical accusations that persist to this day, Hillary Clinton was repeatedly judged to be innocent of jeopardizing national security, including twice by the Trump administration. It now appears frighteningly obvious that Donald Trump is not nearly so innocent.

Inspector General To Probe IRS Audits Of Trump Critics Who Led FBI

Inspector General To Probe IRS Audits Of Trump Critics Who Led FBI

Washington (AFP) - The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it had asked for an independent investigation into rare, intrusive audits of two ex-FBI heads who were prominent adversaries of former president Donald Trump.

James Comey, the FBI director until he was sacked by Trump in 2017, and Andrew McCabe, Comey's deputy and temporary replacement, were both subjected to the Internal Revenue Service reviews while the Republican billionaire was in office.

Individuals are supposed to be picked at random for the IRS's National Research Program audits, making the chances of Comey being singled out in 2017 about one in 30,000, while McCabe's odds in 2019 were about one in 20,000.

The revelation, first reported by The New York Times, raised questions over how two men who ran the nation's premier domestic police agency and were seen by Trump as among his most high-profile foes could both have been selected.

Trump sacked Comey in 2017 and then called on him to be arrested for treason, angered by his investigation of the then-president's extensive ties to Russia.

McCabe, who became acting FBI director after Comey's dismissal, was fired by Trump's Justice Department over accusations of lying to investigators that were never followed up with charges.

Trump smeared McCabe, too, again with unfounded treason allegations, and relentlessly pushed for his prosecution.

"I don't know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out," Comey said in a statement to the Times.

"Maybe it's a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the IRS to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question."

'Political Targeting'

The IRS confirmed in a statement that its head Chuck Rettig -- appointed by Trump in 2018 -- had personally asked a Treasury Inspector General for a review.

"Audits are handled by career civil servants, and the IRS has strong safeguards in place to protect the exam process -- and against politically motivated audits," IRS spokeswoman Jodie Reynolds told AFP.

"It's ludicrous and untrue to suggest that senior IRS officials somehow targeted specific individuals for National Research Program audits."

The referral earned support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Rep. Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement the "political targeting" of Comey and McCabe marked "a crack in IRS's fragile credibility."

His Republican counterpart Rep. Kevin Brady said he supported "investigating all allegations of political targeting," adding that the IRS should never be used as a weapon against political opponents.

Trump's representatives did not respond immediately to a request for comment, although the Times reported that a spokesman said the ex-president had "no knowledge of this."

Comey's audit lasted more than a year, and he and his wife were found to have overpaid their 2017 federal income taxes and got a $347 refund.

McCabe told the Times he and his wife had paid a small amount they were found to be owing.

"I have significant questions about how or why I was selected for this," he said.

Michael Flynn

Release Of Flynn’s Official Pardon Reveals Its Corrupt Purpose

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

President Donald Trump's pardon of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, released on Monday evening by the Justice Department, revealed just how sweeping — and fundamentally corrupt — the act of clemency was.

It didn't simply cover the charge of lying to the FBI about his interactions with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 transition, which Flynn had pleaded guilty to before trying to withdraw his plea. Instead, it offered a pardon:

Read NowShow less