Maid in America

Vincent J. Curtis

7 Nov 2016

The stock markets on Wall Street are booming today on the news that FBI Director James Comey declared that Hillary Clinton would not be charged with a felony following the discovery of another trove of emails last week.  The joy in the media is palpable.  Investors evidently believe that Hillary’s election is now assured, and Wall Street looks forward to the governance of she who accepted so much Wall Street cash both before and during the campaign.

The statement by Director Comey was that the review of 650,000 emails found on the laptop of disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner, some 10,000 of which were archived emails between Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife, and Hillary Clinton, determined him not to change his conclusion of July, 2016 in respect of Secretary Clinton.  Most took this cryptic statement to mean that Hillary is in the clear, and they may be right.  If she is elected president.

The fact is that a trove of emails classified at birth (whether marked or not) were discovered at an entirely unexpected place: the laptop of someone not related at all to the Clinton State Department.  Since Hillary Clinton accepted responsibility for the care and custody of the communications sent to her and from her, this duplicate set of emails represents yet another consequence of her setting up a private email server system, through which passed highly classified secrets of the United States government.  This is another breach of the duty of care she owed to America as Secretary of State, and is a direct consequence of her decisions.

Huma Abedin may not be in the clear.  She told the FBI that she had turned over all the devices that contained her emails.  This discovery proves that statement was false.  Both Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton deserve to lose their security clearances over this unexpected discovery alone, but Clinton’s election as president would make that latter event impossible.

Additional evidence of Hillary’s casual disregard of security protocols was revealed on the weekend by the New York Post. The Post reported that while secretary of state, “Hillary Clinton routinely asked her maid to print out sensitive government emails and documents — including ones containing classified information — from her house in Washington, DC, emails and FBI memos show. But the housekeeper lacked the security clearance to handle such material.  In fact, Marina Santos was called on so frequently to receive emails that she may hold the secrets to emailgate — if only the FBI and Congress would subpoena her and the equipment she used.  Clinton entrusted far more than the care of her DC residence, known as Whitehaven, to Santos. She expected the Filipino immigrant to handle state secrets…Clinton would first receive highly sensitive emails from top aides at the State Department and then request that they, in turn, forward the messages and any attached documents to Santos to print out for her at the home.  Among other things, Clinton requested that Santos print out drafts of her speeches, confidential memos and “call sheets” — background information and talking points prepared for the secretary of state in advance of a phone call with a foreign head of state.”

“Pls ask Marina to print for me in am,” Clinton emailed top aide Huma Abedin regarding a redacted 2011 message marked sensitive but unclassified.  In a classified 2012 email dealing with the new president of Malawi, another Clinton aide, Monica Hanley, advised Clinton, “We can ask Marina to print this.”  “Revisions to the Iran points” was the subject line of a classified April 2012 email to Clinton from Hanley.  In it, the text reads, “Marina is trying to print for you.”

Both classified emails were marked “confidential,” the tier below “secret” or “top secret.”

Santos also had access to a highly secure room called an SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) that diplomatic security agents set up at Whitehaven, according to FBI notes from an interview with Abedin.  From within the SCIF, Santos — who had no clearance — “collected documents from the secure facsimile machine for Clinton,” the FBI notes revealed.  Just how sensitive were the papers Santos presumably handled? The FBI noted Clinton periodically received the Presidential Daily Brief — a top-secret document prepared by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies — via the secure fax.

A 2012 “sensitive” but unclassified email from Hanley to Clinton refers to a fax the staff wanted Clinton “to see before your Netanyahu mtg. Marina will grab for you.”  Yet it appears Clinton was never asked by the FBI in its yearlong investigation to turn over the iMac that Santos used to receive the emails, or the printer she used to print out the documents, or the printouts themselves.”

Marina Santos is a poor Filipino immigrant who is responsible for cleaning Hillary’s Washington, D.C. residence, “White Haven” (vice “White House”).  Hillary used her as a go-fer.  Printing out emails was too demeaning to ask of Huma Abedin, and so Huma was instructed to ask Marina to do it.

Marina’s access to a SCIF is mind-blowing.  What is the point of a SCIF if unsecured cleaning staff can go in, unsupervised, at any time?  A Presidential Daily Brief is born classified at the Top Secret level, and Hillary’s cleaning lady was tasked with printing out the faxed copy and collating it.

Hillary’s high-handed attitude towards inconvenient protocols is consistent with her “above-the-law” attitude.  Testing how this attitude would work in a president would be a dangerous experiment to embark upon.  Hillary Clinton as president is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen.

All this and much else could be avoided were Donald Trump elected president.

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