Emails show close Clinton allies in dark, shocked over ‘insane’ server setup
Some of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers were in the dark about the scope and depth of her controversial email system as the scandal broke in March 2015, with even her now-campaign manager professing ignorance about the private system at the time, according to emails released Thursday by WikiLeaks.
One close ally, Center for American Progress leader Neera Tanden, was still fuming months later, pressing now-Campaign Chairman John Podesta on who gave Clinton permission to use the system.
“Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?” Tanden wrote in July. “Like whole thing is f—ing insane.”
The tenor of the emails belies the assuring tone Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and her campaign took as they publicly downplayed the controversy in the months after it broke. The emails showing Hillaryland’s initial reaction to the news were discovered in a batch of more than 33,000 hacked from Podesta’s account and subsequently posted to anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.
While some of Clinton’s closest aides, particularly those who worked with her at the State Department, such as Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, appeared to be well aware and deeply involved in her email setup, others apparently were not.
Salty tongued Neera Tanden has seemed, to me, to be the only person associated with Clinton that has been even slightly honest in this whole sordid mess.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has his take on this as well, a portion of which is below (mainly for the way he expressed it), but make sure you read the whole thing.
Tanden called the scandal a “Cheryl [Mills] special,” and wondered why the Clintons didn’t air all of this out themselves after leaving the State Department. She then answered her own question. “I guess I know the answer,” she wrote to Podesta, “they wanted to get away with it.”
For the most part, though, they did. The FBI mysteriously discovered a need to find intent in a statute (18 USC 793f) that specifically does not require it, and the Department of Justice happily concurred. The same people who called Hillary’s e-mail “f****** insane) and had no idea how deep the rabbit hole actually was spent the last 19 months insisting that there was no rabbit hole at all. They continue to insist that Hillary Clinton has been the most transparent Secretary of State in the history of Secretaries, in the history of States, and in the history of “ofs” even after ripping their fellow Clintonistas for hiding the scandal until it exploded in their faces. That worked, too, at least with the media and voters, who picked up on their transparency arguments and in many cases downplayed the significance of the classified-information spillage — and hardly mentioned the corruption of important checks and balances on executive-branch agencies.
If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that this was a big dea, it was “f****** insane,” and that no one at all got “drawn and quartered” or even reprimanded for it.
Closing thought to chew on. When this entire Emailgate scandal first erupted, we were all told that Hillary had turned over “all” of her work related emails (which we later found out was not true — surprise!), after having her lawyers go through all of them, and then deleting the remaining 33,000 emails, as they were “not work related” (which we, again, later found out was not true — surprise!). Fast forward to this month, and from stage left, enters a new actor in this sad, sordid national melodrama, WikiLeaks who “gifts” us with what is purported to be the hacked emails of John Podesta (who has yet to state that these aren’t genuine), head of the Clinton campaign. And, just how many of Podest’s email has WikiLeaks said they’ve “acquired”? 33,000?
Coincidence, or were the wrong 33,000 emails deleted?
Right Thinking Brothers 