Following Clinton's resignation from the State Department in February 2013, as Zero Hedge reports, one of her closest aides, Monica Hanley, set about archiving emails which had resided on the personal server created by IT staffer Bryan Pagliano with assistance from Bill Clinton's aide, Justin Cooper.
Hanley — working "from her personal residence" — and Cooper managed to successfully transfer the email archive from that server to an Apple MacBook with a copy saved to a thumb drive, according to documents from the FBI investigation, which were released Friday.
From there, the already makeshift plan began to fall apart in perhaps the worst display of incompetence from State Department employees.
"The two copies of the Clinton e-mail archive (one on the Archive laptop and one on the thumb drive) were intended to be stored in Clinton's Chappaqua and Whitehaven residences; however Hanley explained this did not occur as Hanley forgot to provide the Archive laptop and the thumb drive to Clinton's staff following the creation of the archive," FBI documents state, with all emphasis added.
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Why, exactly, no one from Clinton's staff checked with Hanley on the status of the archive Mac and thumb drive remains unclear — nevertheless, the two devices simply sat around in the aide's residence for a year, unprotected, until she arbitrarily decided that wasn't the best idea.
In February 2014, Hanley finally got around to transferring the archived emails to Clinton's new server hosted by Platte River Networks (PRN) in Denver, Colorado, but couldn't complete the remote transfer — so she shipped the laptop to a PRN staff member whose name is redacted in the investigation documents.
But this staff member had similar issues transferring the files to the PRN server since the Apple MacMail format was incompatible with Microsoft Exchange. For reasons also unknown, this tech employee — tasked with the transfer of information potentially pertaining to matters of national security — felt a workaround uploading the information to Gmail in order to transfer it to the new server would be perfectly acceptable.
Because everyone knows Gmail is safe from prying eyes and countless hackers, of course.
Hanley "recommended" the PRN staff member "wipe" the archive laptop after completing the transfer to the server; however, the unnamed staffer "forgot" to wipe the laptop and just deleted the emails from the personal Gmail account he or she had created to work around the incompatibility issue.
At this point, either the incompetence reaches new levels of absurdity, or a few people are being less than honest with the sequence of events.
Although the PRN staff member stated the laptop was shipped to someone on Clinton's staff (both name and position are redacted in documents), that person claims they never received it — but, it's possible that because "Clinton's staff was moving offices at the time, it would have been easy for the package to get lost during the transition period."
Either way, "Neither Hanley nor [PRN staff member X] could identify the current whereabouts of the Archive Laptop or thumb drive containing the archive, and the FBI does not have either item in its possession."
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© FBI
In December 2014, without explicitly telling any of her staff members to delete files, when "asked what she wanted to do with her remaining personal e-mails, Clinton instructed her staff she no longer needed the e-mails."
© FBI
PRN staff member X had a "conference call with President Clinton's staff" on March 25, 2015, after which — sometime between March 25th and 31st — "he had an 'oh shit' moment," when he realized he had forgotten to wipe clean the PRN server as he had been instructed to do by Mills in December 2014.
© FBI
In fact, PRN staff member X admitted to deleting the remaining emails despite being "aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's e-mail data on the PRN server."
Hillary Clinton, President Clinton's staff, and Cheryl Mills, of course, stated they were "unaware" of PRN's moves to wipe the server after the subpoena had been received.
This utter incompetence by PRN staff member X, Hillary, and her staff seem more than a little suspicious considering, in the end, one errant IT staffer from Denver — personally removed from the Clinton inner circle by every degree — will conveniently take the fall for the deleted emails likely directly pertaining to Benghazi and an untold number of other issues.
Clinton's unstated but unmistakable direction to get rid of old emails and the missing laptop and thumb drive thus all can be chalked up to mishandling, miscommunication, and some guy from Denver — not Clinton, herself.
A skeptic might say the whole matter had been oh-so conveniently planned this way.
Or, perhaps, this can all be credited to the concussion Hillary now claims prevented her from remembering the briefings about handling sensitive information as she began the role of secretary of state in 2012.
I came across the term "Legal Standing" recently and had to go get the scoop on that, as it seemed to be necessary for any trial proceedings.
An article about a Rand Paul lawsuit was the focal point of the initial reading of the term.
In the article, Paul was suing in a case in which he was found to have "no legal standing", referring to the fact that Paul was arguing that a particular condition brought possibly brought about by the defendant "may take place" in the future if the case wasn't presented.
It was then determined that 'the likelihood of a future event occurring based simply on present circumstances' had no standing for a clearly defined court case.
I know little about the Judicial system; but, I fear that if the above is the case, there will come a time when all suits against the Clintons will be quashed by the "No Legal Standing" rule.
Can someone help me on this?
Interesting that all involved in all this political intrigue we're now seeing...are lawyers.
What fun they must have in their fraternity gatherings.