“I think there is more wickedness than ignorance mixed in our councils. Ignorance and design are difficult to combat — to be so fallen! So lost! Virtue, I fear, has in a great degree taken its departure from our land and the want of a disposition to do justice is the source of the national embarrassments; for, whatever guise or colorings are given to them, this I apprehend is the origin of the evils we now feel.”
— George Washington
On Friday the FBI released additional documents related to Hillary Clinton’s use of personal electronic devices and servers to transmit classified documents while serving as secretary of state.
In the latest cache, while no more the “smoking gun” than any of the thousands of documents already released, there are relevant revelations concerning the Democratic presidential nominee’s ability to remember critical classified training and to keep track of the phones and computers she used to send and receive sensitive material.
Among some of the more concerning facts found in the recent FBI document dump was Clinton’s claim that she couldn’t remember receiving training in the handling of classified documents. She repeatedly told FBI investigators that she “did not have guidance” on or was not trained in the proper use of sensitive e-mails. Her self-professed ignorance included, according to the FBI, how to use the president’s e-mail address.
Given the genuine questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s health, particularly relating to her apparent seizures, it is important that the FBI documents report that Clinton’s aides blamed her inability to recall key classified training on a head injury. “However, in December of 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion and then around the New Year had a blood clot,” a summary of Clinton’s July 2nd interview with the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors reported. “Based on her doctor’s advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received.”
A person who can’t recall critical classified briefings and can work only a few hours a day is leading in most polls in the race to become the next president of the United States. One hopes she is not suffering from any significant health issues when she is being briefed on critical national security concerns.
In another curious dereliction of her digital due diligence, Clinton apparently couldn’t distinguish genuine e-mails from scams. Here’s the story as told by PBS News:
At some point, the FBI writes, Clinton received a phishing scam email from a State Department employee. She did not open the link, which was potentially malicious, but asked the employee if the email was legitimate. In another incident, Clinton wrote her aide Huma Abedin that she was worried someone “was hacking into her email” because she received an email with a link to a pornographic website. The FBI found that the link would have launched a virus that would have sent the user’s information to at least three overseas computers, including one in Russia.
It would be ironic if the Russians who allegedly hacked the Democratic National Convention computers gained access from Hillary Clinton’s own carelessness.
It isn’t just Clinton’s lack of electronic communication savvy that surfaced in the latest FBI disclosure. The FBI report indicates that she can’t account for any — as in, not a single one — of the 13 personal electronic devices she used while secretary of state. As reported by the Washington Examiner:
Hillary Clinton used 13 different personal mobile devices to either make calls or access her surreptitious email address, including eight she used while working at the State Department. But she was unable to find any of them to assist in the FBI’s investigation, according to notes the agency released Friday, and had at least some of them smashed with a hammer.
Clinton’s law firm, Williams & Connolly, said it was “unable locate any of these devices,” the FBI said. Clinton aide Justin Cooper claimed to have destroyed at least some of Clinton’s old Blackberries by breaking them in half or smashing them with a hammer.
Phones and laptops can be demolished with a hammer, but eliminating e-mails presents a thornier technological challenge — a challenge Hillary Clinton was up to attempting.
According to a story published by the news website Inquisitr:
Hillary Clinton’s emails from her private server were scrubbed away from existence in a few different ways, one of which involved the utilization of an effective program known as Bleachbit, which is a free yet advanced data erasing service.
Bleachbit was used to wipe Clinton’s private server clean, and in this context, “clean” means unretrievable, never to be found again, or in South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy’s words, Clinton’s method of deleting emails by way of Bleachbit was so successful that “even God couldn’t read them,” as reported by Politico.
In other words, Hillary Clinton was so anxious to completely erase e-mails about her daughter’s wedding plans and her yoga lessons that she ordered her people to use software designed to demolish every digital trace of e-mail.
As Representative Gowdy said, “You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids emails. When you’re using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.”
Something else that the world was not to see was the scope of the Obama administration’s use of drones to summarily execute alleged threats to national security, but that didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from sending and receiving e-mails about the timing and target of the drone strikes with the Defense Department and President Obama.
According to the FBI summary of Hillary Clinton’s testimony about the illegal exchange of e-mail regarding the drone attacks, “deliberation over a future drone strike did not give her cause for concern regarding classification.”
Finally, on page 8 of the FBI’s report, when Clinton was asked why she disregarded the “C” annotation on classified documents, the Democratic presidential hopeful told investigators she thought it was some sort of “alphabetical ordering.”
When these latest revelations are combined with the serious and as yet unaddressed allegations of the billion-dollar pay-to-play scheme in place at the Clinton Foundation, even the most ardent partisans should pause and consider whether Hillary Clinton is physically, mentally, and morally qualified to be the president of the United States.
Photo of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checking her smart phone, Oct. 18, 2011: AP Images
