The roles of Mills 90

The corrupt Department of Justice (is there a federal agency that has not  been corrupted by the Obama administration?) allowed Cheryl Mills, who was an accessory to the criminal acts of Hillary Clinton and was herself therefore under investigation, to act as Hillary Clinton’s lawyer when that infamous liar was questioned by the FBI.

The Clinton gangsters are always up to dirty tricks. And the great machinery of state that is supposed to administer the law lets them get away with it time after time.

The questioning of Crooked Hillary by the FBI, it turns out, was a charade. The fix was in from the start. A little pretense of investigation, a couple of hours chatting, and an announcement would then be made that there was nothing she had done that was criminally wrong.

Shannen Coffin writes at the Weekly Standard:

The FBI’s notes confirm that her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was among the several lawyers representing Clinton in her FBI interview. Mills was hip-deep in the events at the heart of the FBI’s criminal investigation and was herself a material witness who had previously sat for her own interview. Yet not only was she allowed by the Department of Justice to participate as counsel in Clinton’s interview, her communications with Clinton and other material witnesses also were actively protected by the Department of Justice throughout the criminal and civil investigations.

Typically, the DOJ would look askance where a material witness sought to act as a lawyer for the subject of a federal criminal investigation. In Mills’s case, Justice lawyers went out of their way to accommodate this highly unusual dual-hat role. For those who wonder whether Clinton’s FBI interview was all for show, Mills’s participation as a lawyer should be Exhibit A. …

Mills’s dual role as fact witness and lawyer posed considerable obstacles to uncovering the truth about Clinton’s email scheme. In a civil deposition ordered by a federal judge, Mills frequently invoked the attorney-client privilege to avoid answering questions about Clinton’s email setup. When asked about the email setup and in particular conversations that she might have had with Clinton’s IT specialist, Bryan Pagliano — who invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to avoid testifying — Mills refused to answer, claiming those conversations were privileged attorney-client communication.

Mills’s knowledge of facts learned while serving in a non-legal capacity at the State Department could not possibly be protected by an attorney-client privilege.

To fix that problem, Mills conveniently claimed that she did not know anything about Clinton’s email setup during her tenure at the State Department and only learned of relevant facts in her later capacity as Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer. Mills’s implausible claim she was unaware of the nature of Clinton’s email setup during her tenure at State is undermined by documents showing that Mills was deeply involved as chief of staff in resolving questions regarding Clinton’s email use.

So Mills told one whopper of a lie after another, and everyone involved knew she was lying, and the FBI and the DOJ supported the deception.  

Even more specious is Mills’s assertion that certain facts she became aware of as Clinton’s chief of staff — such as why she knew that Clinton had transitioned her email to a clintonemail.com address very early in her tenure — were off-limits because she had “refreshed her recollection” as to those facts during her time representing Clinton in the private sector. Mills could only “refresh” her recollection because she had knowledge of those facts during her tenure as Clinton’s chief of staff, putting those facts well beyond the protection of any privilege.

In fact, she was committing a crime even as she was speaking:

Especially given its criminal investigation into Clinton’s email use, the Department of Justice had every reason to challenge an overbroad assertion of attorney-client privilege by a critical fact witness such as Mills. Indeed, Mills’s very representation of Clinton in the criminal investigation raises question under both legal ethics standards and federal criminal law. 18 U.S.C. 207(a) makes it a crime for any former government employee to communicate with the government on certain matters “in which the person participated personally and substantially while in government”. 

But –

Rather than contest Mills’s questionable privilege claims, the Justice Department actually supported them.

One FBI agent made a timid effort to ask a pertinent question:

… When the FBI interviewers broached the question in her May interview of how the email server was set up, Mills and her lawyer walked out. Clinton and her lawyers had demanded that that topic be off-limits to the FBI because of Mills’s more recent role as Clinton’s lawyer.

Clinton demanded. Mills walked out. Because whatever Mills had done before she was Clinton’s lawyer, now she was Clinton’s lawyer so she had attorney-client privilege. So there!

The FBI gave in. And –

The Justice Department apparently agreed. Department lawyers were reportedly taken aback that their FBI colleague had ventured beyond what was anticipated.

The Department of Justice agreement to limit the scope of a criminal interview based on untested claims of attorney-client privilege is, at the very least, unusual. For the more conspiracy minded, it’s downright outrageous.

Yet it pales in comparison to the conduct of a Department of Justice lawyer in Mills’s civil FOIA deposition. On two occasions in that deposition, a lawyer from the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, which represents the State Department in the FOIA cases, invoked Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney-client privilege to object to questions about Mills’s knowledge of the email setup. When Mills was asked what Brian Pagliano had told her about the setup of the server, a Department of Justice lawyer objected that those conversations had taken place “during the time that [Mills] was representing Secretary Clinton”.

If such a privilege existed, it certainly was not the place of the Department of Justice to invoke it to protect Mills from testifying.

On the whole, the Department of Justice’s accommodating of Cheryl Mills’s dual-hat role as lawyer and witness is mystifying, and it raises significant conflict of interest issues for the department.

On one hand, DOJ was purportedly investigating Clinton, and perhaps even Mills, for the mishandling of government information, including over 2,000 classified emails. On the other, the same Department of Justice was shielding Mills from accounting for her role in the email scandal. Is it any wonder that the FBI and Department of Justice came to the conclusion that they did?

Hillary’s FBI. Hillary’s Department of Justice. They were allowed to put on a little show to bamboozle the stupid public, but there wasn’t the remotest chance that Hillary herself or Cheryl Mills or Bryan Pagliano or any member of the Clinton gang would be brought to trial or found guilty of anything.

The Clinton gang can imperil national security, put the lives of secret agents at risk, plan and prosecute war in Libya, ignore messages from an ambassador and let him be suffocated to death, sell favors to foreign potentates and tycoons in return for vast sums of money paid to a phony charity for the personal enrichment of the Clintons – and the Obama government will protect them from having to answer for any of it.

And what is more, half the voters of America want to put them in charge of the government and give them supreme command of US military power.

Posted under corruption, United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, September 8, 2016

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