The number of persons in government agencies known to have lied to protect Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from public knowledge of their wrong-doing, mounts up continually. The full count may never be known.

The very fact they needed to lie is a glaring indication that the cause they supported was a bad one. But if any of them realized this, it apparently didn’t trouble them.

Judicial Watch reports:

Judicial Watch [has] obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system.

That 2012 request had been made by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). They did not get what they asked for.

Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded … falsely stating that no such records existed.

CREW’s general counsel, Anne Weismann, submitted a FOIA request to the State Department on December 6, 2012, seeking “records sufficient to show the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton.”

On May 10, 2013, [Information Programs and Services] replied to CREW, stating that “no records responsive to your request were located.”

So Judicial Watch made a court application to obtain the information that CREW had been denied.

Judicial Watch’s discovery is centered upon whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system and whether the State Department acted in bad faith in processing Judicial Watch’s FOIA request for communications from Clinton’s office.

They were lucky that their case came before a nonpartisan judge.

U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as E.W. Priestap [assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division], to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. …

So certain agency records have fallen into the hands of Judicial Watch at last, recording the intention to lie, and proving that lying and evasion were what Obama required. 

They “include a January 2013 email exchange discussing Clinton’s departure from the State Department in which Agency Records Officer Tasha M. Thian specifically stated that Secretary Clinton ‘does not use email’.”

But also include this, directly contradicting that statement:

The State Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report in January 2016 saying “At the time the [2012] request was received, dozens of senior officials throughout the Department, including members of Secretary Clinton’s immediate staff, exchanged emails with the Secretary using the personal accounts she used to conduct official business.” Also, the IG “found evidence that [Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills] was informed of the request at the time it was received …”

On whose orders – in addition to Secretary Clinton’s – were the lies told and the CREW request not complied with?

Several documents answer that question: the Obama White House.

The State Department produced records in response to court-ordered document requests that detail Obama White House involvement in the Clinton email FOIA request [and the refusal to grant it]. 

In a December 20, 2012, email with the subject line “Need to track down a FOIA request from CREW”, Sheryl L. Walter, director of the State Department’s Office of Information Programs and Services (A/GIS/IPS), writes to IPS officials Rosemary D. Reid and Patrick D. Scholl and their assistants:

WH called – have we received a FOIA request from CREW (Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington) on the topic of personal use of email by senior officials? Apparently other agencies have. If we have it, can you give me the details so I can call the WH back? I think they’d like it on quick turnaround. Thanks! Sheryl

In the same email chain, Walter on December 20, 2012 also emailed Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s White House liaison, describing the CREW FOIA request:

Hi Heather – Copy attached, it was in our significant weekly FOIA report that we send to L and S/ES also. Do you want us to add you to that list? It’s a subset of things like this that we think likely to be of broader Department interest. More detail below re this request. As a practical matter given our workload, it won’t be processed for some months. Let me know if there are any particular sensitivities. If we don’t talk later, happy holidays! All the best, Sheryl

Sheryl: The request is assigned Case #F-2012-40981. It was received on 12/6/2012 and acknowledged on 12/10/2012. The request is assigned for processing.

On January 10, 2013, Walter writes to Samuelson that she is not including “personal” accounts in the FOIA request search:

Hi Heather – did you ever get any intell re what other agencies are doing re this FOIA request that seeks records about the number of email accounts associated with the Secretary (but isn’t specifying “personal” email accounts so we are interpreting as official accounts only). We are considering contacting the requester to find out exactly what it is they are looking for. Do you have any-concerns about that approach?

Soon afterward, Samuelson responds, “White House Counsel was looking into this for me. I will circle back with them now to see if they have further guidance.” …

The White House counsel found that Clinton had no email accounts.

Which was exactly what Secretary Clinton wanted them to find.

She was very pleased with Heather Samuelson.

Samuelson became Secretary Clinton’s personal lawyer and in 2014 led the review of Clinton’s emails to determine which ones were work-related and which were personal. She was also one of five close Clinton associates granted immunity by the Department of Justice in the Clinton email investigation. …

Further proof that President Obama was involved in the deception – can be said to have presided over it – is found in the sworn testimony of  Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division:

[He] admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically the Executive Office of the President.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch concludes:

“These documents suggest [prove – ed] the Obama White House knew about the Clinton email lies being told to the public at least as early as December 2012,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “A federal court granted Judicial Watch discovery into the Clinton emails because the court wanted answers about a government cover-up of the Clinton emails. And now we have answers because it looks like the Obama White House orchestrated the Clinton email cover-up.”

And Judge Lamberth is taking the matter as seriously as it needs to be taken. He added a comment to his order: “The Clinton email system” he said, was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency”.

It remains to be seen if there will be any consequences for the officials who cheated and lied for Obama and Clinton. To expect that Obama himself will be so much as mildly reproached for “orchestrating” the cover-up, or Clinton punished for breaking the law, is probably, tragically, to expect too much.

Will the crimes and corruption of the Democratic Party at last be investigated, exposed, prosecuted and punished?

Seems that some may be.

From Breitbart, by Ian Mason:

Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee [have] drafted a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein … asking them to appoint a second special counsel to investigate the 2016 elections. …

(Robert Mueller being the first “Special Counsel, appointed  to look into the non-existent crime, alleged by the Democrats, of “collusion” between President Trump and President Putin.)

The letter lists 14 specific inquiries the congressmen would like this potential second special counsel to look into:

1. Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch directing Mr. Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the Clinton investigation;
2. The shadow cast over our system of justice concerning Secretary Clinton and her involvement in mishandling classified information;
3. FBI and DOJ’s investigative decisions related to former Secretary Clinton’s email investigation, including the propriety and consequence of immunity deals given to potential Clinton co-conspirators Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, John Bentel and possibly others;
4. The apparent failure of DOJ to empanel a grand jury to investigate allegations of mishandling of classified information by Hillary Clinton and her associates;
5. The Department of State and its employees’ involvement in determining which communications of Secretary Clinton’s and her associates to turn over for public scrutiny;
6. WikiLeaks disclosures concerning the Clinton Foundation and its potentially unlawful international dealings;
7. Connections between the Clinton campaign, or the Clinton Foundation, and foreign entities, including those from Russia and Ukraine;
8. Mr. Comey’s knowledge of the purchase of Uranium One by the company Rosatom, whether the approval of the sale was connected to any donations made to the Clinton Foundation, and what role Secretary Clinton played in the approval of that sale that had national security ramifications;
9. Disclosures arising from unlawful access to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computer systems, including inappropriate collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign;
10. Post-election accusations by the President that he was wiretapped by the previous Administration, and whether Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch had any knowledge of efforts made by any federal agency to unlawfully monitor communications of then-candidate Trump or his associates;
11. Selected leaks of classified information related to the unmasking of U.S. person identities incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community, including an assessment of whether anyone in the Obama Administration, including Mr. Comey, Ms. Lynch, Ms. Susan Rice, Ms. Samantha Power, or others, had any knowledge about the “unmasking” of individuals on then candidate-Trump’s campaign team, transition team, or both;
12. Admitted leaks by Mr. Comey to Columbia University law professor, Daniel Richman, regarding conversations between Mr. Comey and President Trump, how the leaked information was purposefully released to lead to the appointment of a special counsel, and whether any classified information was included in the now infamous “Comey memos”;
13. Mr. Comey’s and the FBI’s apparent reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, including the company’s creation of a “dossier” of information about Mr. Trump, that dossier’s commission and dissemination in the months before and after the 2016 election, whether the FBI paid anyone connected to the dossier, and the intelligence sources of Fusion GPS or any person or company working for Fusion GPS and its affiliates; and
14. Any and all potential leaks originated by Mr. Comey and provided to author [and NYT reporter – ed] Michael Schmidt dating back to 1993.

The letter is signed by all 20 Republican members of the committee.

Will John Koskinen, head of the IRS, and his underling Lois Lerner also be investigated soon for crimes and corruption? (See here and here.)

And former DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s involvement with a gang of Pakistani crooks and supporters of Islamic terrorism, who, as IT experts, were given access by Democrats on congressional committees to highly sensitive information?  (See our post, A huge political scandal, July 27, 2017.)

Will it be revealed that the Democratic Party is essentially a criminal organization?

The Clintons’ corruption is like an infectious disease. Everything they touch becomes as rotten as they are.

Hillary Clinton corrupted the State Department – as well as the FBI and the Department of Justice. And the press.

The Washington Examiner gives a summary account of how the State Department became frantically preoccupied with devising ways to cheat and deceive, in order to support Hillary Clinton’s lies which she concocted to conceal her criminal activity:

High-level State Department officials worked behind the scenes last year in several key ways to ensure the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails inflicted as little damage as possible on the Democratic nominee, according to notes made public by the FBI on Monday.

Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management, was at the center of efforts to prevent the FBI from upgrading Benghazi-related emails to a classified level.

Although the State Department quickly denied wrongdoing on the part of Kennedy and dismissed GOP calls for his removal on Monday, themFBI notes prompted fresh scrutiny of the administration’s approach to the Clinton email probe.

The 100 pages of “302s”, or summaries of interviews conducted by theFBI, that were released this week shed light on the quiet push to manipulate the handling of Clinton’s emails amid multiple investigations into her record-keeping.

Outsiders tampered with document reviews

Unnamed people who were given “special appointments” in order to assist career State Department officials with the review of Clinton’s emails raised suspicions among some observers, who called their involvement in the process “abnormal”.

Their employment histories “appeared to create a conflict of interest”, the FBI said. The Freedom of Information Act review process is typically confined to career officials in order to prevent political bias from affecting decisions about which records are withheld or redacted.

Officials manipulated redactions

At least one of the people brought in to work on Clinton’s emails “was possibly involved in the Lois Lerner, Internal Revenue Service situation”, referring to the tax agency’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups ahead of the 2012 election.

Multiple witnesses told the FBI they felt agency leadership circumvented normal procedures when preparing emails, particularly those mentioning Benghazi and Libya, for release to Congress and the public. At least one of the 296 Benghazi-related emails made public last summer was released in full despite the fact that it contained classified information, the FBI said. In other emails, the names of public officials were redacted even though FOIA requirements stipulate that those names should have been released.

Some record-keeping officials said they felt “intimidated” each time they proposed upgrading and redacting part of an email because it was classified. Those officials described the “immense pressure” they felt to avoid classifying anything within the 296 Benghazi documents.

After reviewing the Benghazi-related emails last year, career officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs suggested classifying “four or five” of the documents.

However, an unnamed State Department official said he was “frustrated” with the move and instead lobbied the bureau to redact the classified portions of those emails under a different exemption, which is typically used to withhold internal conversations about government decision-making.

Kennedy tried to block classifications

The State Department’s undersecretary for management [Patrick Kennedy] made repeated attempts to convince the FBI not to classify a Benghazi-related email as his agency prepared to hand over hundreds of documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Kennedy offered a “quid pro quo” to the FBI if agents ruled against upgrading one email to the “secret” level.

Actually, that’s badly expressed. Kennedy wanted the FBI agents to downgrade it from the secret level – as the the following makes clear.

An unnamed witness told investigators that Kennedy attempted “to influence the FBI to change its markings” and asked FBI agents if they could “see their way to marking the email unclassified.”

Later, an FBI agent who has since retired offered to “look into the e-mail matter” if Kennedy would agree to approving the FBI’s request to send additional personnel to posts in Iraq.

The FBI said the deal never came to fruition and said in a statement Sunday that the FBI agent who responded favorably to Kennedy’s overtures was no longer with the bureau.

So he or she was fired. Scapegoated. But Patrick Kennedy retains his job!

Some emails disappeared

Clinton’s legal team at first informed the State Department that it had prepared 14 banker boxes of printed emails for production to the government. However, when officials arrived at her lawyer’s office to retrieve the emails, they found only 12 boxes.

“Officials were unsure what happened to the other two boxes,” the FBI wrote.

The 12 boxes that did end up in State Department custody contained 52,455 pages of emails, packed into the boxes “with no folders or known method of organization.”

The idea was, plainly, to make it as difficult, arduous, and time-consuming a task as possible to get them into useful order.

Clinton’s lawyers knew emails contained “Top Secret” intel

Katherine Turner, an attorney at the law firm representing Clinton, told FBI agents in August of last year that she had obtained six laptops from Clinton’s staff, each of which likely contained “Top Secret classified information”.

But at a meeting with agents in her office, Turner “declined to provide consent to search the laptops” and pushed for her clients’ protection of what they considered “privileged communication”.

Ultimately, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two of the aides involved in sorting Clinton’s work-related emails, received immunity deals to turn over their laptops. Those agreements provided for the destruction of those laptops after agents reviewed their contents.

A promise to destroy evidence so there can be no future review of it!  Could the criminality of the Obama administration be demonstrated more strikingly?

‘Shadow Government’ tried to stop email releases

A group of high-ranking State Department officials, dubbed the “Shadow Government” by witnesses who spoke to the FBI, pushed to release all 30,000 of Clinton’s emails at the same time, in Jan. 2016, rather than over the course of several months starting in summer 2015. The powerful group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss how to handle FOIA requests for Clinton’s emails. Regular attendees included Secretary John Kerry’s chief of staff and Kennedy.

“Shadow Government” members argued the release of Clinton’s emails should happen all at once to facilitate “coordination”. The move would have overwhelmed reporters with thousands of email chains and prevented the controversy from lingering over the course of the proposed rolling releases.

Ultimately, the career record-keeping officials won out, and the emails were released in batches stretching from May 2015 to Feb. 2016.

As if “reporters” would have actually reported any wrong-doing! As if they would have done anything voluntarily to spark “controversy”!

President Obama and the Clintons have taken the government of the United States into deep criminality.  

It is not unreasonable for immunity from prosecution to be granted to a lesser offender if that person’s testimony – though self-incriminating – can lead to the successful prosecution of a greater offender.

But in the case of Hillary’ Clinton’s multiple and extremely serious crimes, the granting of immunity to all the most important potential witnesses against her was plainly done IN ORDER TO SAVE HER FROM PROSECUTION.

And the intricate plan was also designed to save her from prosecution IN THE FUTURE. The proof of this is that the offender-witnesses who were granted immunity were also permitted to DESTROY EVIDENCE.

Breitbart reports:

The FBI agreed to destroy two Clinton aides’ laptops after granting them immunity as part of a “side agreement”, according to a letter from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Goodlatte alleges that the FBI promised to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Heather Samuelson, an ex-campaign staffer and deputy to Mills, after conducting its search.

Fox News cites unnamed sources in a report saying that the FBI’s search was also limited in scope, in order to “[prevent] the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice.” Investigators could not review documents created after January 31, 2015:

The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aides told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.

Committee aides also asked why the FBI and DOJ would enter into a voluntary negotiation to begin with, when the laptops could be obtained condition-free via a subpoena.

The letter also asked why the DOJ agreed to limit their search of the laptops to files before Jan. 31, 2015, which would “give up any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State”.

Aides expressed shock at the parameter, saying it is especially troubling as Mills and Samuelson already had immunity from the consequences of whatever might be on the laptop.

Goodlatte wrote a scathing series of questions to Lynch on the subject:

Like many things about this case, these new materials raise more questions than answers …

Why did the FBI agree to destroy both Cheryl Mills’s and Heather Samuelson’s laptops after concluding its search? [Emphasis in original.]

Doesn’t the willingness of Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to have their laptops destroyed by the FBI contradict their claim that the laptops could have been withheld because they contained non-relevant, privileged information? If so, doesn’t that undermine the claim that the side agreements were necessary?

Have these laptops, or the contents of these laptops, in fact been destroyed, thereby making follow-up investigations by the FBI, or Congressional oversight, impossible? …

Why was this time limit necessary when both Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were granted immunity for any potential destruction of evidence charges?

Goodlatte also demanded to know how many classified documents were found on Mills’ and Samuelson’s laptops.

Beth Wilkinson, a D.C.-based lawyer who is married to former Meet The Press host and Clinton donor David Gregory, reportedly negotiated the “side agreements” for the two former aides. Wilkinson has represented four of Clinton’s aides.

Greater self-abasement is no law-enforcement officer capable of than to lay down his honor and self-respect for a powerful criminal. 

James Comey will be forever remembered as a man who used his position of trust to do just that.

Loretta Lynch is equally compromised, of course. But who expected anything better of her?

In the case of James Comey, who had a reputation as a man of probity, there is something classically tragic about his fall.