Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Hillary's Undoing

Hillary Clinton is worried, as she should be, regarding the unraveling of what exactly her private e-mail server contained. I don't doubt that she doesn't remember half of what her staff sent to her. Still she knew that those e-mails contained information that could blow her campaign for president wide open.

When asked about the possibility of forthcoming indictments she bristled and announced that it was all a big misunderstanding over the retroactive classification of documents found on her server. That she would be cleared of any wrongdoing. That none of those documents needed to be classified in the first place.

To understand better what really happened one must appreciate how classification systems work. One of the biggest complaints of intelligence gathering from the cold war onward is that by the time it got to the users, it was often out of date and unusable. This has been a chronic and ongoing problem that intelligence gathering agencies have struggled with for years. I suspect that what is currently going on is that a gathering agency forwards a copy of their product into a common file and the classification shows who will have a need to know and the ability to access the contents. The higher the government official the more they are able to see. There is also probably a classification code attached that routes and authorizes the different government agencies to read the contents. With such a system there is an up to the minute record of what is going on in the world, accessible to different governmental agencies. Mrs. Clinton certainly had a need to Know everything the State Department was privy to. She could sit behind her desk, type in her password and code, and receive up to the minute updates of the highest and most sensitive secrets the government had.

It doesn't take a politician long to figure out that some of this information is extremely valuable and foreign governments were willing to pay a premium for what we know about them. This was no doubt, an opportunity not lost on Hillary. The problem was that using the Government Server left a record of who was calling up the documents and how they were being responded to. This could not have been a good thing in Mrs. Clinton's mind. It would have really constrained her ability to wheel and deal. What she needed was a means by which this information could be passed to those willing to pay top dollar, without leaving a document trail to her office at the State Department. Hence, the need for a private server.

The next problem was how to get marketable information from the State Department Server to her private server. How she managed that I'll leave to Brian Pagliano. Somehow he jerry-rigged her secure State Department Workstation and allowed a clone server to be connected at her private residence providing her with the same access she had a work. The FBI went to her residence and got the server, and I hope also the devices located in her operations center. There must have been a room in her home that allowed staffers to "Print Screen" which was where the security markings were removed. Once this was in place she could give her access code to a minion who would fax her anything her password/code gave access to. This gave Hillary the information from the classified files she was interested in as well as deniability... as she could say, as she has, over and over that nothing on her server was marked classified. She never dreamed that the FBI would one day be in possession of all her emails; not just the ones she got from her private staff but those she sent to foreign governments, giving them a head's up and opportunity to pander for the Clinton Library.

Thus, one needs to understand, that what is going on now, is both a classification and corruption issue.

First regarding the classification issue. This is easy enough to prove. It is statistically possible to be almost one-hundred percent certain that given the text of one of Hillary's e-mails that it is an exact duplicate of a memo or update from an intelligence gathering agency. It is the same way that pledgerism can be proven if there is plenty of text and it matches 100% with the suspected source document. Further that source document had a date-time-group as a part of it and the classification of the altered copy can be determined by matching it with the original. So the explanation that the documents were classified in retrospect won't hold water long.

I suppose the next line will be "It was all a big mistake. I never intended for my staff to send me that material and they must have found where I hid the password." Putting that dodge to rest is going to require witnesses. Keep in mind that this process required a conscious stream of wrong dong. First was accessing the classified material, next printing it off on a screen -save, next cutting off (Deleting) the classification markings and finally sending it out on an unsecured internet.

The Influence Pedaling part will be much more damning. It won't take much to incriminate Mrs. Clinton. The emails should show who she was talking to, the information she was providing and possibly the quid pro quo.

So where does this leave things? The FBI will be in no hurry to forward their findings to the Department of Justice. I have read between June and July. Whenever it gets eventually provided the recommends will show overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing. When the Department of Justice gets the report, the question will be what they intend to do with it.

If they wait to indite Mrs Clinton that does not bode well for her. If it gets deferred until the new President takes office, it could be a Republican, in which case the matter will be decided on its own merit and there will be no possibility of an Obama Pardon. The question now becomes, is Hillary electable or will she see the handwriting on the wall? Judging from the crossover votes I would say that neither she nor Bernie Sanders are likely to get voted into the White House.

If she does somehow manage to get elected, I suppose she could pardon herself. A more likely scenario is that the material is so over the top, the Justice Department will offer her a plea deal. It will be a bitter pill if she has to accept it. If she does, she pleads guilty to a misdemeanor or felony, and as Obama walks out the door, he pardons her. If this plays out then the Obama Administration is free of its obligation to support the Clinton's. Bernie Sanders will be seen as unelectable. The only reason he's in the race is to serve as a foil... to dupe the Democratic voters into thinking this was ever a primary to begin with. Doesn't everybody know the Hillary nomination was a done deal eight years ago? My guess is that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee.

Note: Computers are good at keeping records. Regardless if the query came from a clone or an authorized workstation there should have been a record that someone accessed a classified file. Somewhere along the line a red flag should have gone up. If a supervisor or IT chief sees the Secretary's Work Station being used and he/she knows they are in Timbucktu don't you suppose this would have an intelligent person scratching their heads? Further If Mrs. clinton was abroad and a highly classified file was accessed then the FBI should be able to prove that whoever accessed it had Mrs. Clinton's password/access code, and that it wasn't the Secretary but somebody else sitting behind the CRT.