The Clintons' War on Women

by Roger Stone

  Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the judiciary committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary to maintain the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone thirty-four years later.

  Zeifman’s diary details Hillary’s dastardly attempt to cover up the Douglas precedent for legal counsel during an investigation, as well as other deceitful actions. She even tried to have the rules of committee changed to deny the president legal counsel, to not hold any hearings, take any live depositions, or conduct any of its own investigation of the Watergate incident or any other potentially impeachable offenses on Nixon’s part but to rely solely on evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Department’s special Watergate prosecutor. This would have, Zeifman explains, allowed Hillary and the few far Leftist cohorts on the impeachment committee staff and in Congress who supported such underhanded tactics to go after Nixon without worrying about someone like Hunt spilling the beans on the covert actions of the Kennedy White House. It would also have prevented Gerald Ford from recovering the morale of the GOP and pave the way for a liberal Democrat, like Senator Ted Kennedy, to be elected in 1976.

  Hillary, at twenty-seven years old, drafted memoranda and advocated for these rule changes despite Zeifman (her boss, to whom she lied about drafting them) telling her not to because most Congressional leaders were firmly against changing any of the rules at the time of a major national scandal. Hillary’s unauthorized, fraudulent proposals were voted down in the House.

  Zeifman’s diary also tells of an unauthorized study of Nixon’s wrongdoings and set of standards against which to judge them, conducted by Hillary, liberal professors, and some of her impeachment committee pals. The study was kept secret from Congress and later published and made available for sale in bookstores. It was never found whether Hillary or anyone involved with the unauthorized study received royalties for the publication.514

  The New York Post conversely explored the dichotomy between the email deletion of Clinton and the taped conversations held by the notoriously paranoid Nixon. As the Post comments, Clinton at least learned something from Watergate: destroy potentially threatening evidence whenever you can. Nixon never burned his White House Tapes, though he could have. Clinton had her private email server wiped clean after Congress and the State Department issued subpoenas for her emails. Only selected emails were handed over, so her attorneys could try to claim compliance. The hacking of longtime Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal’s email points to intelligence information about Benghazi being sent from Blumenthal to Clinton, several weeks before the attacks. But with Clinton’s email server cleaned out, the nation will never know what happened. If only it had been so easy for Nixon. As the Post says, he’d be jealous.515

  The National Review examined further the parallels between Hillary and “Tricky Dick,” also pointing out that Nixon never erased his tapes while Clinton had her entire email server wiped. They also point out that many in the GOP had concerns about Nixon but they were ignored because of what seemed like a sure victory. The victory was short lived and did tremendous, extensive damage to the Republican Party brand for many years. Democrats seem to have reached the same moment with Hillary. Many Democrats have their doubts but are being told she is the inevitable candidate.516

  The end result of Nixon’s presidency was to stain the Republican Party as untrustworthy. It would take years to clean up the damage.

  Standard operating procedure for State Department officials is to use high-security government-run servers to send electronic communications such as emails. By this method all electronic correspondence is automatically protected and saved in high-security government files. There are several reasons for this.

  First is security. As secretary of state, the bulk of Clinton’s emails would pertain to classified, sensitive but unclassified, and non-personal correspondence related to the State Department. We don’t want anyone hacking in on what could be classified or sensitive communications. Many of the government’s foreign policy strategies are configured and communicated within other government agencies. Those communications are not for general public scrutiny.

  A second important issue related to using government servers falls into what is called “transparency.” This means that in the future, these protected emails can potentially be accessed by anyone, in the government or citizenry, if those emails are part of an investigation or request under the Freedom of Information Act. The concern over Hillary’s sidestep of these two issues is troubling at the least, and may constitute the worst breach of Federal Records Act regulations as well as State Department policy. The Foreign Affairs Manual was codified by the State Department, which ruled in 2005 that employees could only use private email accounts for non-governmental correspondence except in emergencies and then only if they were turned over to be entered into government computers. That ruling also forbade State Department employees from including “sensitive but unclassified” information on private emails except for some very narrow exceptions.517

  According to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, if an agency allows its employees to use a personal email account, it must ensure that the emails are preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system.

  The beginning of the disclosure that Secretary of State Clinton was bypassing federal regulations came during the Benghazi hearings when the Congressional committee investigating the Benghazi attack asked the State Department for all relevant emails. In turn, the State Department asked for Clinton to turn over all of her non-personal emails from her time as secretary. In late 2014, she handed over 55,000 pages of emails. This initiated a landslide of questions that pertained to why Hillary would violate existing rules and protocols by sending official State Department business over her private email.

  The idea that Hillary Clinton was innocent of violating federal regulations can be answered by a quote from Hillary herself. In the midst of the 2008 presidential race, she took a jab at the Bush administration’s use of non-governmental email accounts by stating that “Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps. We know about secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts.” There is another fascinating recording of Hillary’s understanding of emails and their potential use as evidence. In 2000, Hillary was recorded telling a donor that she didn’t like using email. Home video footage from 2000, shot at a fundraiser by a donor, Peter Paul, showed then Senator Clinton talking about how she had chosen to avoid email for fear of leaving a paper trail. “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I?—I don’t even want—Why would I ever want to do email?” she said. “Can you imagine?” she then asked.

  Hillary Clinton, in her own defense, has stated that her use of personal emails stemmed from the fact that she didn’t want to carry two cell phones, yet in March 2015, she admitted that she had carried four devices. She has also stated in her defense that because her emails were sent to people with “.state” and “.gov” addresses, she was in the clear because those addresses would have been saved on government servers. This, however, is not true. The State Department disclosed that it had no way of routinely preserving senior officials’ emails. Instead, the department relied on individual employees to decide if certain emails should be considered public records, and if so, to move them onto a special record-keeping server, or print them out and manually file them for preservation. Since then, the State Department began using a system that automatically keeps the emails of the department’s highest-ranking officials—like the deputy secretary of state, and under assistant secretaries.518

  ABC News has now identified at least two ways in which Clinton may have broken federal rules. During her tenure at the State Department she appears to have violated an
existing 2005 rule. And after her tenure, it appears that she did not heed a 2013 rule change that may have put her in violation.

  Let’s review the timeline of Clinton’s history with email.

  2000

  Hillary Clinton was recorded telling a donor that she didn’t like using email.

  Home video footage from 2000, shot at a fundraiser by a donor, Peter Paul, showed then Senator Clinton talking about how she had chosen to avoid email for fear of leaving a paper trail.

  “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I?—I don’t even want—Why would I ever want to do email?” Clinton said.

  “Can you imagine?” she asked.

  2005

  The Foreign Affairs Manual was codified by the State Department, which ruled in 2005 that employees could only use private email accounts for official business if they turned those emails over to be entered into government computers.

  That ruling also forbade State Department employees from including “sensitive but unclassified” information on private email, except for some very narrow exceptions.

  2007

  In the midst of the 2008 presidential race, Clinton took a jab at the Bush administration’s use of non-governmental email accounts.

  “Our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps. We know about secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts,” Clinton said in a 2007 campaign speech.

  2008

  Much of the mystery surrounding Clinton’s emails came from the fact that an IP address associated with the clintonemail.com domain she is believed to have used was registered to a person named Eric Hoteham on Feb. 1, 2008. No public records matching that individual can be found and it is possible that it was simply a misspelling of the name Eric Hothem, a former aide to Clinton while she was first lady. An Eric Hothem is now listed as an employee at JP Morgan in Washington, DC. The IP address for clintonemail.com, along with others registered in Hoteham’s name, are all connected to the Clintons’ address in Chappaqua, New York.

  2009

  Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to former president Bill Clinton, registered the clintonemail.com domain on Jan. 13, a little more than a week before Hillary Clinton took office as secretary of state on Jan. 21.

  Questions remain about what the National Archives considers an “appropriate agency record keeping system” and if they believe Clinton, who did not hand over any emails until last year, was in compliance with it.

  2012

  Clinton was not the only one in the diplomatic service to use a personal email account, but it appears that someone else got in trouble for their habit.

  As part of a 2012 report by the Office of the Inspector General, the then ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration was reprimanded for using private email and other issues.

  The report suggested his “use of commercial email for official government business” amounted to a failure to “adhere to department regulations and government information security standards.”

  2013

  Clinton stepped down from the State Department on Feb. 1.

  Later that year, the National Archives updated their guidelines to say that agency employees should generally only use personal email accounts in “emergency situations.” If an employee does use a personal account, all of the emails must be preserved in “accordance with agency record-keeping practices.”

  2014

  In late November, President Obama signed the Federal Records Act into law, requiring the head of each agency to “make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures and essential transactions of the agency.”

  The realization that Clinton’s emails were not recorded at the State Department appears to have been made in two steps. According to a timeline from the New York Times, first, the Congressional Committee investigating the Benghazi attack asked the State Department for all relevant emails. At that point, the State Department asked for Clinton to turn over all of her non-personal emails from her time as secretary.

  She handed over 55,000 pages of emails late in 2014.

  The State Department also asked other former secretaries of state to turn over government-related emails for preservation.

  2015

  The New York Times reported that, in mid-February, Clinton handed over more than 300 emails to the House committee investigating the Benghazi consulate attack.

  Clinton’s use of a private email address did not become public knowledge until the New York Times reported on it Tuesday, March 3. Clinton’s team insisted she acted in the spirit of the laws governing email use. Citing the labor required to review the emails, the State Department said the emails would not be released for “several months.”519

  Hillary’s complete disregard of protocol was enabled by the fact that there seemed to have been no one in charge of monitoring Hillary’s use of a private email account. According to existing rules, that job fell upon the office of a permanent, independent inspector general. The problem is that for five years, including all of Clinton’s time as secretary, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General never had a confirmed inspector.520

  The Inspector General Act of 1978 established independent watchdog offices for every major federal agency, led by an official nominated either by the president or the agency. There are currently eleven inspector general positions open.521 It could be that either President Obama or the agency have yet to nominate, or because a presidential nominee has yet to be confirmed by Congress. The Office of Inspector General has had its own problems. In 2007, the State Department’s Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard, resigned over allegations that he’d impeded investigations into Blackwater and corruption in Iraq. By September 2013, several months after Clinton left State, the department finally had a permanent inspector.522 A little too late? In view of Hillary’s blatant disregard for the law, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

  Longtime Clinton retainer James Carville openly boasted about Hillary’s intent to maintain a private server to avoid congressional oversight. “I suspect,” Carville said, “she didn’t want [Republican Congressman] Louis Gohmert rifling through her emails, which seems to me to be a kinda reasonable position to take.”523

  The erasure of Hillary’s emails of course buried the roadmap of the nexus between the secretary of state’s office and the Clinton Foundation, leading Bill Clinton to claim that there was not one shred of evidence proving specific quid pro quos between contributions to the foundation and State Department decisions and policies.

  “There’s just no evidence,” the former president said to reporter Christiane Amanpour when asked about Clinton Cash, an exposé on the shady connection between the Hillary’s office and the foundation. “Even the guy that wrote the book apparently had to admit under questioning that, ‘We didn’t have a shred of evidence for this, we just sort of thought we would throw it out there and see if it flies.’ And it won’t fly.”

  This is a common Clinton tactic, turn a credible allegation into an incredible attack. “This is not the fault of a vast right-wing conspiracy, sexism, or unfair media coverage,” wrote journalist Ron Fournier. “It’s the result of actions taken by an experienced and important public servant whose better angels are often outrun by her demons—paranoia, greed, entitlement, and an ends-justify-the-means sense of righteousness.”524

  Clinton knows that, unlike Nixon, Hillary has erased the evidence of her crimes, but the avalanche of money speaks for itself.

  “The gusher of money flowing their way also offers an explanation for the email scandal, in which Hillary claimed to have deleted more than 30,000 emails from her private server,” Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post. “What did she know about money coming into the foundation? What did she know about who was paying her husband to speak? How much coordination was there? She claims the emails she deleted were purely personal, and her lawyer says the server was
‘wiped clean.’ That’s not something that can ever be said about their reputation.”

  “It is Tammany without the charm,” Goodwin concluded.

  viiSee Amazon: The Benghazi Report: Review of the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012.

  CHAPTER 23

  CONFLICT OF INTEREST

  “I’ve got to pay our bills.”

  —Bill Clinton, who has earned an estimated $300 million since leaving the presidency525

  Benghazi was a sideshow, but it led to the government’s demands for Hillary’s emails. This turned a focus on a money-making machine designed to line the Clintons’ pockets, underwrite their luxury travel, pay a coterie of aides and courtiers, and in a few places, pay also for the silence of those who know too much about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

  Former president Nixon declined to sit on corporate boards or take any honoraria for speeches, living on the proceeds of six New York Times bestsellers. Not since the days of Lyndon Johnson has any U.S. president cashed in the way the Clintons have.

  The media had long struggled with document requests from Hillary’s State Department, which now all made sense. “If there wasn’t something to hide, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have deleted tens of thousands of emails from her secret email server and the State Department wouldn’t be dragging its feet on virtually every public records request that comes their way,” said one Capitol Hill staffer who worked on the Gowdy Committee.526

  Did she realize when she conducted official business through her private emails that she was in violation of the Freedom of Information Act? Daniel Metcalf, the former top FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) official, says that Hillary was well acquainted with those issues. “I have no doubt whatsoever based upon firsthand knowledge that she is quite familiar with the requirements and potential disclosure risks of the FOIA. I happen to know this from the work I did during the Clinton administration on the more than two dozen scandals that erupted then, and the records controversies and information policy issues that arose in connection with them. I daresay that her familiarity with the FOIA is what animated this unique arrangement. In other words, she knew what she was getting out of.”527 Clinton’s statement that she set up her own private email system and server for convenience didn’t persuade Metcalf. “What she did blatantly circumvented the Freedom of Information Act,” he said. “By managing to obtain what truly was an unprecedented arrangement with the State Department’s administrative officials, she effectively insulated her emails from FOIA’s reach, categorically so, from 2009 until now. And she relegated to herself unilateral control over the process, unlike anything that any other department head has managed to do in recent memory.”528