by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
September 14, 2016

In yet another sign that the establishment media has completely lost any semblance of a grounding in reality, the Washington Post just opined that “The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control,” whining about how much attention the story of Clinton’s homebrew email system is receiving in this campaign. This despite the fact that the facts on the ground here are incontrovertible:

• Hillary Clinton used a private (and unsecured) email server for official State Department communications during her time as Secretary of State.
• She asked aides to “wipe her servers” after the State Department finally got around to asking her for emails related to her public record; they responded by smashing her 13 blackberries with hammers.
• She withheld 17,500 work related emails from FBI agents.
• She lied about receiving classified material over the server.
• The best the FBI could do in deciding not to prosecute her (after the mysterious tarmac meeting between Loretta and Bill) was to say she was too stupid to know that “c” meant classified and that her actions were extremely careless.
• If she had been anyone else, Hillary Clinton would have been in jail by now.

But never mind all of that; the Washington Post has decided that the public is too concerned about the issue so I guess it’s time to move on, right?

Wrong. Thankfully this is 2016 not 1966, and the dinosaur media no longer dictates the news cycle like they used to. CNN and the NYT can call it a “stumble” all they want, but we’ve seen the video; we know that Clinton’s feet didn’t move at all and she was literally dragged into that van. Similarly, we don’t have to take the talking heads word for it; we know that Clinton broke the law with the emails, tried to lie her way out of it, and has only gotten away with it because of her political connections (and the body count, of course; let’s not forget the body count).

But as it turns out, there’s an even bigger story here than Clinton’s illegal activities or the establishment media’s willingness to cover it up.

A new email exchange between Clinton and former Secretary of State Colin Powell has just been released. In it, Powell is remarkably frank about how he defied CIA/NSA and State Department orders not to use personal computers and how to avoid leaving a data trail that could become part of the public record (and thus subject to FOIA):

“I didn’t have a BlackBerry. What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts.”

He goes on to explain:

“However, there is a real danger. If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it is government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law. Reading about the President’s BB rules this morning, it sounds like it won’t be as useful as it used to be. Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”

Shocking, right? Well, it’s much worse. It’s not just Secretaries of State pulling these kinds of shenanigans to evade potential FOIAs and cover up whatever they’re trying to cover up when “do[ing] business with some foreign leaders.” It’s all of government trying to do this.

As TechDirt points out, it wasn’t until 2014 that the DC Circuit Court finally ruled that city officials couldn’t use private servers to hide information from the public record anymore.

And as long-time Corbett Reporteers will remember, the FBI goes to remarkable lengths to create separate storage devices for investigatory material that they use to keep information from being FOIA-ed.

The point here is not in any way to exonerate Clinton, of course. She is vile, corrupt, a criminal, a neocon warmonger, and, oh yeah, a threat to all of humanity.

The point is that if the powers-that-shouldn’t-be truly don’t want you to know about a piece of sensitive information then it isn’t going to be available via FOIA.

But if you’re reading this, then you probably already knew that. And if you didn’t know it, maybe it’s time to put down The Washington Post and spend more time with the alt media.