Vincent J. Curtis
12 Oct 2016
Now that Donald Trump has been completely written off in the
media and by the Republican establishment, we can, or should, focus all our attention
on Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton
deserves the full attention of the media as she campaigns onward to victory on November
8th. Since Hillary is rarely
seen on the campaign trail, we are fortunate to have WikiLeaks to fill us in on
what Hillary might say if she were actually out on the hustings making speeches.
The WikiLeaks document dump began on Friday of last week,
and is expected to continue for a while.
The volume of material is massive, and it is going to take some time to
go through it, sift out the relevant material, and then present the significant
bits. Already media outlets are
releasing extracts, and it makes analysis a little easier.
We know that the WikiLeaks material is accurate because the
Hillary campaign is saying that the Russians were the hackers. Vlad Putin got the material, and is giving it
to WikiLeaks in order to throw the election to Donald Trump. Hillary’s people then engage in a typical
Clintonian straddle by suggesting that the material could be fake. Compliant media never bother to observe that
if the material is fake, then it wouldn’t be hacked because hacked material is
authentic that has been illicitly obtained.
Indirectly, Hillary’s people admit that it is authentic.
The material was taken from emails from and to John Podesta,
chairman of Hillary’s campaign. One especially
delicious group of extracts came from a policy analyst Tony Carrk, who reviewed
Hillary’s speeches to various banks and drew attention to a number of
problematic areas that would require a “policy scrub” and that could become
embarrassing should they become public.
Bernie Sanders often remarked that for the $675,000 in
speaking fees she received from Wall Street banks, Hillary’s speeches ought to
be nearly Shakespearian in quality, and that he would like to read them simply
for the sterling prose. If the first
batch of leaks is a true indication, Hillary, for all the money she was paid,
hadn’t prepared remarks at all. Her
contract required that the client, at its own expense, prepare a verbatim
transcript of Hillary’s remarks, give to it Hillary after the event, and retain
no copies. The transcripts read like
Hillary’s speeches were given entirely off the cuff. They are full of “you knows” and all the
rhetorical diversions one would expect of a stream-of-consciousness
experience. For all that money, it
appears that Hillary simply showed up, talked off the top of her head for a
while, took questions, and that was it for the formal event. It all seems so pro-forma. The speech was pretty much a charade for the
purpose of justifying paying Hillary $225,000.
But even in going through the motions, Hillary said things
that today strike one as remarkable.
Before it was known that she used a private email server throughout her
tenure as Secretary of State Hillary said this:
CLINTON: But, at the State Department we were
attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate
everything we had. And that was true across the U.S. government. And we knew it
was going on.
If Hillary knew the savagery of the hacking attacks against
the U.S. government, why on earth would she place national secrets at risk by
putting them on an unsecured private server?
Or even running one that ostensibly had no secrets on it, since her
private server could become an access point to more secure government
systems? No one in the audience could
put that question to her because no one outside her circle then knew of
Hillary’s email arrangements.
One could forgive Hillary for her lack of technical sophistication,
but she ran a private server through her whole tenure at State for the purpose
of engaging in embarrassing behavior and keeping it private. And she lied to the American people about her
emails. Bald-faced lies. Blasted lies.
And she lied about her lying. She
continues to lie about it. The fact
remains that her private concerns were of greater importance to her than the
security needs of the United States government.
Never mind the hacking of Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails, her
claims of lack of proof of any hack of her
system means nothing in the face of her massive destruction of evidence, to
wit: the bleach-bitting of one server, and the physical and electronic
destruction of her several other servers and hand-held devices. She destroyed that evidence. Even now, the whereabouts of eleven of
Hillary’s thirteen Blackberries, and one lap-top with a full email archive on
it are unknown. Two of fourteen boxes of
subpoenaed documents are missing from her lawyer’s office (shades of Rose Law
Firm billing records!).
Hillary was fully aware of the dangers to U.S. secrets from
hostile hacking attacks, yet she continued to use her own unsecured and secret
server in order to protect herself and her activities from scrutiny. They would be highly embarrassing, and potentially
criminal, should they become known.
Russia may indeed have clean copies of her 33,000 emails, and are
holding on to them for blackmail, or to disrupt the U.S. political system at an
opportune time. Russia releases proof of
Hillary’s criminal behavior, creates a domestic uproar, forces consideration of
impeachment, and while the U.S. is embroiled in a domestic dispute makes a move
abroad.
Does the United States want to elect a known security risk as
president?
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