THE FBI COVERUP OF HILLARY CLINTON

If you left a little early for the Labor Day weekend, you may not have heard about the FBI’s data dump  Friday (9/02) about its interview with Hillary Clinton on her handling on classified information.

It was remarkable for the new information contained in it, for Hillary’s excuse for violating security rules, for what the FBI didn’t ask her – and for the timing of its release.

Politicians release bad news late on Friday afternoon, because it’s sure to receive less attention. But the FBI is supposed to be non-partisan.

“To release this on a Friday as if (FBI Director James Comey) is an arm of the Clinton campaign, I’m just stunned, because there’s a lot of information in here that’s of great public interest,” said Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News.

Comey “has called his own impartiality into question by what he’s done,” Mr. Halperin said Tuesday (9/06) on MSNBC, where he is a political analyst. “There are a lot of questions that the FBI didn’t follow up on.”

Hillary used 13 mobile devices, not just one as she claimed, the heavily redacted FBI report indicates. Most of them were destroyed or lost, Ms. Clinton told the FBI. She hid 17,448 work-related documents from the State Department, contrary to her claim of having turned all of them over. She wiped her email with Bleachbit after the New York Times reported she was using a private server.

Eight email chains sent and received on these insecure devices were classified “Top Secret,” 37 were classified “Secret,” and 36 were classified “Confidential,” the FBI said. The Bureau also confirmed that Ms. Clinton’s private servers had indeed been hacked.

“Seven email chains included Special Access Program information, which is tightly protected by the Intelligence Community and shared on a restricted, need-to-know basis only,” noted former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer John Schindler.

The FBI didn’t mention that Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton political operative who had no security clearance, was given access to an NSA report classified GAMMA, the most tightly restricted classification above Top Secret, Schindler noted. He wonders why not.

“It behooves the FBI to let the public know the full extent of classified information that was compromised,” Mr. Schindler said.

“Any normal citizen who put compartmented SIGINT on the open internet would be frog-walked into federal custody without delay,” he said. “Why has the FBI let (Hillary Clinton) off the hook for her role in the compromise of extraordinarily classified American intelligence?

Hillary was “extremely careless” in handling classified information, but he didn’t recommend she be prosecuted because she didn’t intend to divulge America’s secrets, Director Comey said.

“That was a bit iffy, since the statute governing mishandling of classified information doesn’t require intent,” said University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, a columnist for USA Today. “But the new information indicates that Hillary is either criminal, or criminally incompetent.”

The destruction of records makes clear Hillary tried to hide her transmission of classified documents, Reynolds said.

A blood clot in her brain (from a concussion suffered in 2012 made her forget crucial information and allowed her to work only a few hours a day, Hillary told the FBI. There were more than three dozen things she could not recall, including ever having been briefed on handling classified information. (She signed a State Department form in 2009 saying she had been.)

Every presidential candidate should disclose his/her income tax returns (Hillary has, Donald Trump hasn’t), and a report on the state of their health. Trump has, but questions about Hillary’s health are off limits, say Team Clinton and her acolytes in the news media.

“You don’t have to be an Ivy League lawyer to recognize a coverup when you see one,” Prof. Reynolds said. “This goes far beyond anything Richard Nixon did after Watergate. If the coverup is this big, what’s being covered up must be pretty bad, bad enough that they’re willing to blow lots of smoke rather than let us see the fire.”

No wonder the Wall Street Journal (9/07) is condemning The FBI’s Blind Clinton Trust.

It is for good reason that Roger Simon, also yesterday ((/07) is saying, James Comey Should Resign Now for the Good of the Country.

And for the FBI, for under Comey it has sold out to the Clintons.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  He is the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.