Following legal action by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, the State Department on Friday released more emails related to the Hillary Clinton private server scandal. The emails, sent by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, were discovered on a laptop belonging to her former husband, Anthony Weiner, a Democratic Congressman now serving a prison sentence for exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a minor. Some of the heavily-redacted emails contained sensitive classified information, including passwords to federal government systems.
The release prompted President Donald Trump to renew his calls for the Department of Justice to take action over the Clinton email scandal and subsequent FBI investigation. That investigation seems to have been either mishandled or not conducted with any serious intent to uncover wrongdoing.
Cavalier Attitude Towards Security
Abedin used at least three email accounts; one of which was a clintonmail.com account, one a state.gov account and the other a Yahoo email account. According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, “Abedin routed sensitive information through Yahoo multiple times, such as notes on a call with the U.N. secretary-general…” In July of 2012, identifying information for some 450,000 Yahoo email accounts were posted online. Just days later, Abedin forwarded sensitive information to her Yahoo account.
This same email account was set up on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The cavalier attitude towards security displayed by Hillary Clinton and her aides while she was Secretary of State seems nothing short of staggering. Former FBI Director James Comey, who decided to exonerate Clinton of any wrongdoing well before the FBI’s investigation concluded, described Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless.” That language had been modified from “grossly negligent,” which could have triggered federal charges.
Operating Outside The Law
Early Tuesday, President Trump addressed the latest revelations via his Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948174033882927104
The sailor to whom Trump was referring is 29-year-old Kristian Saucier, who was jailed for one year in 2016 when he was found to have photographs of the interior of a nuclear submarine on his personal cellphone. Saucier’s conviction and imprisonment, while the Clinton investigation resulted in no charges or penalties of any kind for anyone involved, certainly supports the perception that the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate has been allowed to operate outside the law.
Trump’s frustration is, to any reasonable observer, understandable. He and his campaign team have been the subject of numerous investigations that have been ongoing for more than a year and continue even now. None of those inquiries have yielded any firm evidence that anyone connected to the president was guilty of any unlawful activity, beyond one count of lying to the FBI.
Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin
By contrast, Clinton and her associates have been embroiled in three major scandals, including the sharing of classified information over private, unsecured email servers – something which Clinton denied – as well as her campaign’s financing of unverified opposition research on President Trump. The sale of American uranium reserves to a government-connected Russian company, amid bribery, extortion and money-laundering claims, is yet another scandal. It is impossible to deny that Clinton and her people have escaped serious scrutiny, despite an abundance of evidence that crimes have been committed.
In wondering whether Clinton’s people will ever be held to account, Trump is not alone. Many ordinary Americans share his suspicion that a powerful core of ‘deep state’ bureaucrats is, and has been, shielding her from proper investigation. The most recent revelations about rampant political bias plaguing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation have only added more fuel to that fire.
