Clinton.com Promises Answers - After Election

Hillary Clinton to Address Foundation Concerns at 'Appropriate Time'

John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the former Secretary of State's future with the foundation that bears her name will be defined after she wins the Democratic nomination and if she's elected president.

"If she is successful and we get the nomination — which we're fighting for every vote for — and she's elected president, then we'll put in an appropriate separation," Podesta said Sunday.

Could there be a plainer way to say "We'll let you in on it after it can't hurt us any more"?

Senior State Department Officials Under Hillary Clinton Quashed Investigations into Alleged Misconduct

The Washington Examiner has followed up on a previous report exposing the Clinton State Department’s efforts to cover up alleged misconduct with new details about some of the “most egregious” examples of investigations thwarted by agency staff, and the frustration felt by investigators:

The eight cases mentioned in the memo included an incident in which at least five members of Clinton’s security detail allegedly solicited prostitutes in a number of countries while on official travel, including on trips to Russia and Colombia. A diplomatic security guard was permitted to continue overseeing Clinton’s security operations at a Moscow hotel after allegedly soliciting prostitutes “despite obvious counterintelligence questions,” the memo said.
A top official in the bureau of diplomatic security “reportedly told [an investigator] to shut down the four investigations” into the accused security guards, three of whom received one-day suspensions before being transferred to other assignments.

Another case involved a regional security officer in Lebanon who was alleged to have sexually assaulted local embassy staff, and who had a “long history of misconduct allegations” at his other posting in North Africa and the Middle East. Officials looking into the matter were given just three days to investigate, after a State Department official described the inquiry as a “witch hunt.” An inspector general’s report published in 2014 noted that investigators “encountered resistance” from senior State Department officials, who exhibited “undue influence and favoritism” in the case.

Perhaps the most egregious of the episodes involved “an ambassador in Belgium” who in May 2011 was accused of “ditch[ing] his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” according to an inspector general’s memo.
. . .
Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, told the inspector general’s office that he declined to pursue the Belgian matter further because “solicitation of a prostitute … was not a crime in the host country.”

Well, it's not like we have any secrets left to extort, although we might have in 2011.

NYT: Blumenthal documents show State or Hillary held back e-mails from Congress

Sidney Blumenthal has complied with the document requirements of the subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi — and now it’s clear that others have not been as forthcoming. Blumenthal’s submission of memos and correspondence regarding Libya to Hillary Clinton includes documents not provided by the State Department or the former Secretary of State. Now the question is: whodidn’tdunit? The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt lays out the mystery:

Emails that a longtime confidant to Hillary Rodham Clinton recently handed over to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton have complied with a series of requests from the panel.
The emails, provided by Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to Mrs. Clinton, include information about weapons that were circulating in Libya and about the security situation in Benghazi in the year and a half before the attacks. The committee has asked the State Department and Mrs. Clinton several times in the past year for emails from her and other department officials about “weapons located or found in” Libya and about the decision to open and maintain a diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

The early lead on the Sherlock Holmes reveal is State. The select committee has demanded documents from State about Libya in general, including the issue of arms sales and US involvement in them. Under John Kerry, the State Department has refused to comply on the basis of being too broad a demand, and has instead narrowly complied by releasing documents only related to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi in September 2012.

However, that is a problem in two ways. First, the scope of the select committee includes US policy in Libya and the entire arc of the failures that led to our lack of security and response in the attack, and not just the attack itself. Second, Congress has a legitimate oversight function on all of State’s activities, and it has assigned those oversight responsibilities to the select committee in regard to their performance on Libya. They have a requirement to comply with this demand.

And we know how punctilious the whole Obama administration has been regarding promptly answering FOIA requests, and requests from Congress for information.

As Schmidt notes, though, it might be that State simply doesn’t have the material Blumenthal gave the committee:

It is not clear whether the State Department possesses the emails between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Blumenthal and did not hand them over. It is also possible that Mrs. Clinton never provided them to the department and deleted them off the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state.

Mr. Gerlach said that the committee had not told the department which emails Mr. Blumenthal handed over and that it would take some time for officials to determine whether the department had the emails.

If State doesn’t have Blumenthal’s memos, then the culprit will be Hillary. She claimed to have turned over all e-mails relevant to her work to the State Department and then deleted more than 30,000 e-mails that she characterized as “Chelsea’s wedding plans” and other personal correspondence. (Worth noting: 30,000 e-mails in a four-year period equals more than 20 e-mails a day for four years about wedding dresses and Bill Clinton’s travel schedule, which sounds entirely nonsensical.) If State can’t find these, this would be solid evidence that she lied — and that she destroyed public records that were under subpoena from Congress.

Answer, both can be at fault; Hillary for not providing the emails to State for archiving (and then screening them for content before a subsequent release), and State for not insisting on having them. It's quite clear they knew she was using private email all along, and chose not to make an issue out of it.

My guess is that if push comes to shove (and it probably won't) Hillary will claim that emails between herself and Sid "Vicious" Blumenthal were "private" emails, despite their being about the situation in Libya.

I confess I'm a little surprised that Sid didn't coordinate better with Hillary regarding which emails to release. He may fear being "Scooter Libbyed."