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Since the beginning of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal a year and a half ago, her defense has been to consistently deny that any classified material had passed through her private server.
Most Americans knew that was a lie from the get-go and an FBI investigation eventually proved it.
But new details uncovered by Fox News are showing the cover-up – and the lies around it – are even worse than it has appeared.
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Boxes of Clinton emails that were supposed to have been picked up by federal agents from Clinton’s lawyer appear to have disappeared without explanation.
‘It’s another one of these loose threads in this investigation,” Fox News’ intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge told “On the Record with Brit Hume” Thursday.
Not only have boxes of email evidence disappeared, but one of Clinton’s aides might have tried to botch up the investigation by tampering with the evidence that was available, ordering subordinates to change classification codes on Clinton’s emails after the investigation was launched in a deliberate effort to throw off the FBI from finding out the truth.
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According to the report by Fox News’ Herridge and executive producer Pamela Browne, sensitive emails Clinton had on her unsecured server received a new — even higher — security designation after the FBI investigation started, making them too classified even for FBI agents to see.
In an August, 2015 interview, according to the report, an unnamed State Department employee told FBI agents that a top official in Hillary Clinton’s State Department had ordered underlings to change classification codes on material Clinton had received to shield those communications from prying eyes.
The changes, the source told the FBI, were ordered by the State Department’s undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, a known Clinton loyalist.
… the State Department witness also told the FBI there was a deliberate effort to change sensitive Clinton emails bearing the “B(1)” code — used in the Freedom of Information Act review process to identify classified information — to the category of “B-5.” That category covers Executive Branch deliberations, “interagency or intra-agency communications including attorney client privileges,” and makes material exempt from public release.
Stripping away the bureaucratic jargon, the newly designated information basically disappears from view, Herridge told show host Brit Hume.
“No one in the public, no one in Congress” can see it, she said. “It’s like putting it down the ultimate black hole.”
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Check out the interview here:
According to the report, Kennedy denied tampering with the email security classifications during his own interview with the FBI. In the same interview, though, he vouched for the integrity of the witness who made the accusation, according to the Fox News report. So, one of them is lying to the FBI — which in itself is a crime.
Add to this revelation the report in The Wall Street Journal that “top Obama administration officials were in close contact with Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private email server.”
In essence, according to emails reviewed by the Journal, Team Obama realized that its political interests as well as those of Team Clinton were in jeopardy because of the secretary’s careless disregard for rules and regulations — and the law.
The latest discoveries about Hillary’s reckless behavior and willingness to do anything to cover her tracks bring up two points that should unsettle any voter, especially the anti-Donald Trump conservatives who have somehow made peace with the idea that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States.
The first is that Clinton and her cronies will try any explanation that comes to mind to keep her self-serving maneuvers from being brought to light. Clinton’s initial explanation for the presence of “classified” information on her server was that the emails had been marked classified by other bureaucracies after she handled them. Then, she claimed not to have known the distinguishing mark that would have alerted any reasonable bureaucrat to the sensitive nature of the communications.
If the unnamed subordinate is telling the truth, Clinton’s version is almost the opposite of reality. The emails in Clinton’s possession did have their classified markings changed, but it was apparently on the secretary’s behalf, on the orders of one of her key aides – and to make them deliberately more inaccessible to the agents investigating her.
(Of course, there’s always the chance that the unnamed employee has simply made the whole thing up, in which case Hillary is Scout’s-honor clean, and we’ve all just been imagining what a poisonous viper she’s been for going on three decades.)
The second is that the story shows, once again, the deeply corrupting nature of Clinton’s presence in a position of authority.
Not only was she careless with the nation’s security with her own incredibly selfish decision to conduct her State Department business on a personal server (and hide God knows what deals she was really up to), but she managed to infect a career bureaucracy with the same disregard for the law that she and her husband have shown throughout their time on the public stage.
And she has pulled the reputation of the FBI down into the swamp of conniving and corruption where she and her ex-president husband have established their own kingdom of excess.
This has been the Clinton effect on the American government — and society — since Bill’s Oval Office antics made “oral sex” and “semen-stained dress” an acceptable part of American political — and social — conversation.
A Hillary restoration – aided by a cover-up that gets worse with each passing day, and each additional revelation – is only going to infect the rest.
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