Hillary's Train Wreck Press Conference: The Gender Card, The Spin, The Lies & The Many Unanswered Questions (Update 6)

In response to the brewing scandal regarding her use of a private e-mail account to conduct all of her business while serving as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Hillary Clinton held a carefully stage-managed 'press conference' for twenty minutes at the United Nations today.



As I wrote in a post below, Hillary faces five potential land mines over her use of private e-mail while Secretary of State. To sum up:

1. The optics: The only rational reason for her to use a private e-mail address set up on a private server soley under her control was to skirt oversight. It was Nixonian.

2. Legal: Her sole use of a private account likely violated government record - keeping regulations.

3. Legal: If she discussed classified material over her private e-mails, then she will have violated several very strict criminal laws governing the handling such material.

4. National Security: Her private security measures were inadequate. We don't yet know the potential damage to our national security.

5. Legal: Has Hillary turned over all responsive e-mails to lawful requests for discovery?

With those areas in mind, here was Hillary spinning at the press conference:

1. Hillary throws the "gender equality" card right at the start. What does that have to do with her private e-mail account? Could she be any less subtle? SEXISM . . . all these questions are nothing but SEXISM!!! And if you didn't get the hint, at another point in the presser, a Turkish reporter -- and we all know that Muslims are so concerned with women's rights that the question could not have been a plant -- kindly asked whether such a fuss would be made over these e-mails if Hillary "were a man?" Hillary, staying above the fray, said she'd leave that for "others" to decide.

2. The reason she used only a private e-mail account was solely for convienience. She did not want to have to carry around two devices, one for work, one for private use.

3. Her use of the private e-mail account accorded with all government regulations.

4. The vast majority of her work e-mails went to other government employees at their government addresses, and thus should be captured for archiving.

5. She claims to have provided all of her e-mails to the State Dept. that "could possibly be work related." And, in her own personal desire to insure transparency, she wants the State Dept. to release all of the e-mails she has provided them.

6. In reviewing her e-mails, Hillary decided to scrub the system of all of her personal e-mails. Everyone understands that was all about privacy, right?

7. Sixty thousand e-mails were sent and received over her private account. After a "thorough" investigation, she decided that half of them were personal and deleted them from her server. The official e-mails she provided to the State Dept. in hard copy, not on electronic media.

8. The server contains communications from she and her husband. It is her private property and she will not allow it to be inspected by a third party.

9. There were no "security breeches."

10. According to Hillary, it is up to the individual federal employee to determine for themselves what is to work related and thus required to be archived.

11. She claims she did not discuss any classified information or send classified material on her private e-mail account.

12. She ended the press conference as soon as someone asked about the diplomat who was fired during her tenure in part for using a private e-mail account to conduct State Dept. business. She directed the reporter to go review the record, then left the podium.

Analysis:

1. The optics: Hillary did herself no favors by claiming that the private e-mail account was strictly about convienience, that she did not want to have to use more than one device. She certainly has not had that problem since leaving the State Department. According to Legal Insurrection, Hillary appeared at Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women less than two weeks ago and ostentatiously made note that she "had both an iPhone and . . . a Blackberry." In addition, there's this from Hot Air regarding her time at the State Department: "Judicial Watch claims that not only did she operate multiple devices, she insisted on using Apple products even though State’s IT people told her that their enhanced security is designed for Blackberry only."

Moreover, the reason she gives for refusing to allow a neutral third party to inspect her server is even more obviously a lie (thanks, Bill). Hillary says that she won't allow such an inspection because the server contains private communications between her and her wayward husband, former President Bill Clinton. But according to Bill's spokesperson, Bill has sent all of two e-mails in his entire life, both when he was President.

The optics here cannot possibly help Hillary. When even the MSNBC anchors are gobsmacked at Hillary's decisions, no amount of hitting America over the head with the gender card is going to make this go away.

2. Government Record-keeping Regulations: According to Hillary, she has complied with all applicable regulations. This one is still murky, and I am not expert on these regulations. According to John Hinderaker at Powerline, she violated the spirit of State Department policy that allows for occasional use of private e-mail in exigent circumstances, but otherwise require the use of offical e-mail. Meh. She probably won't take a hit for this.

Update: According to the Washington Examiner:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, like all departing federal employees, was required to fill out and sign a separation statement affirming that she had turned over all classified and other government documents, including all emails dealing with official business.

Fox News Megyn Kelly reported Wednesday evening on the requirement and that a spokesman for Clinton had not responded to a request for comment, including an explanation of when the former chief U.S. diplomat signed the mandatory separation agreement or, if she didn't, why didn't she. . . .

Kelly also reported that State Department regulations in place when Clinton resigned as secretary required all departing employees to return all official documents, including emails, to ensure that the department would be able to respond to Freedom of Information Act and congressional requests, as well as subpoenas in litigation.

Failure to do so carries with it both fines and possible jail time.

Clinton, in December, 2014, turned over a portion of her e-mails to the State Dept. It would seem this bears watching also.

[Update: Powerline discusses the requirements for determining what is and is not a public record, noting that Hillary is giving a patently false impression of how such determination is to be made at law, and notes that she may well be guilty of a felony.]

Update: Hillary makes the point that, since most of her e-mails were to and from people within the State Dept., they would have been caught in the official e-mail tranche and archived. Stephen Hayes appeared on Fox today to point out that at least two of Hillary's top aides, her advisor Huma Abadein and her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, had private e-mail accounts. So to them at least, and probably many others, there is a real question whether those e-mails have ever been archived and whether any of them appear in the Clinton hard copy document release.

3. Discussing Classified Material: Knowing the low standard for classifying information as well as the rules for handling classified information, to believe that Hillary, as Secretary of State, didn't discuss classified information in over 30,000 e-mails over four years is simply impossible. [Update: And today, the NYT runs a story largely agreeing with that assessment.] [Update: Andrew McCarthy has much more to say on this at NRO.] Moreover, there is this from Powerline:

Hillary’s private email account came to light when a hacker called Guccifer broke into the email account of Democratic political operative Sid Blumenthal, and found a trove of emails between Blumenthal and Hillary. The emails related in part to Benghazi; you can read a couple of them here. Blumenthal passed along detailed information he had gotten from confidential sources about the terrorist attack. These emails obviously relate to Hillary’s duties as Secretary of State, not funerals or family vacations, . . .

All we have is Hillary's word that she didn't discuss classified materials over non-official channels, and what little information we have suggests otherwise. This isn't just a landmine for her, it's a nuclear landmine. No, Obama will no more see her prosecuted than he'll see Al Sharpton prosecuted for perrenial tax fraud. But the above alone should be more than enough to justify a judge to order sequestration and forensic examination of the private server. And if it appears she has committed criminal acts, even she won't be able to brazen her way out of that one between now and the 2016 election. It will be her "I didn't have sex with that woman" moment.

4. National Security: Hillary's blanket claim that there were no "security breaches" is as paper thin as her justifications for using the private e-mail and, now, for keeping from inspection. Professionals who have examined the security of Hillary private e-mail account have said that the question is not whether the account was hacked, but to what degree. We won't know the extent of any security breaches until we have had a forensic examination of her server.

5. Hillary's Compliance With Lawful Requests For Information: I am sure that we will soon see numerous instances where lawful and legally binding requests were made for discovery, whether under FOIA or other subpoena, and which requests would have covered her e-mails. And we'll see that Hillary did not comply with those requests. We already know that the documents referenced in paragraph 3 above, the trough of Hillary e-mails she sent to Sid Blumenthal and that were made public by Guccifer, were not among those "55,000" pages of documents she provided to the State Dept. and, a subset of which was provided to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Moreover, Trey Gowdy, the chairman, is already on record stating that there are numerous gaps -- month or more gaps -- on the e-mails Hillary has provided to his committee.

Summary:

There is no question that Hillary used a private e-mail account on a server she personally controlled in order to skate lawful oversight. There are very serious questions regarding whether she violated laws governing the handling of classified material, whether she has endangered national security, and whether she has complied with lawful requests for information. What information we have available, beyond her bald and, indeed, laughable denials, suggests she has violated our laws, that she has put our nation at risk, and that she is refusing to honor lawful requests for full and complete information. There is more than sufficient information here to justify a judge sequestering her server and ordering a forensic examination.

Hillary, for her part, will try to brazen this out. She has already begun by providing "55,000" pages of hard copy, but no digital media record of her e-mails, thus slowing down analysis of what she has provided to a complete crawl. She has already announced that she will fight any attempt to examine her server -- quite literally the only thing that might give us answers to the many questions. And even then, it may well be that the thing was accidentally degaussed by a giant magnet some foolish people were marching through the Clinton home recently. And, of course, you know that this will all be played as a war on women and a vast right wing conspiracy. The more things change, . . .

Updates:

AP's Brutal Fact Check

Additional questions raised by Hillary's presser

Politico Headline For Hillary Presser: "Go To Hell"

Ace On Hillary's Lies

Mark Steyn on the Audacity of Hill

Victor Davis Hanson: Shameless

And via Powerline:

Will Hillary Try To Make Trey Gowdy The Next Ken Starr?

And a massive rollup of Hillary e-mail article here.

And here is the cover of the next issue of Time:

Love the horns.

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Preparing To Answer The Left's DNC Mantras

According to WaPo, next week's DNC will be a blame-Bush-apalooza, at least in between updates on the war on women (i.e., the wholly irrational and unfair refusal of people to willingly and fully fund Sandra Fluke's sex life).

At any rate, expect to hear the following mindless mantras repeated ad infinitum next week:

- Do we "want to return to the very same policies that brought on the crisis in the first place?".

and

- "Wall Street greed"

and

- "Deregulation"

The Romney response to them should be simple - if Obama and the left are right about the causes of our economic problems, then their solutions should have righted our economy by now, or at least have us on a clear path to recovery, just like in every other recession we have had in the past 65 years. Yet, instead of recovery, we are circling the drain.

And of course, if Romney feels the need to elaborate any more, he can point to any of the following. IBD opined yesterday, "the Obama recovery can only be graded as a tremendous failure — as it has produced the worst rate of economic growth of any recovery in the past 65 years." And as the Economist noted this week, "three million more Americans are out of work than four years ago, and [our] national debt is $5 trillion bigger." And there is no relief in sight. On the horizon are hundreds of billions in tax increases to fund Obamacare, an explosion in regulations between Dodd Frank and an EPA at war with our energy sector. Then there is the biggie, the combination of Medicare and Social Security that will swallow our economy in a decade or so if not reformed.

Just keep the responses simple and loud. Let no repetition of the mantras go unanswered. Do that and by any measure, this should be Republicans election to lose.

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Abortion, Sonograms & The War On Women

Carolyn Jones has written a column in the Texas Observer about her experience under the new Texas law requiring a sonogram prior to having an abortion. She clearly considers the law a part of the "war on women."

Ms. Jones decided to abort a pregnancy after she found that the child had birth defects that would have, she tells us, required "life time medical care" and left the child "in pain." Curiously, precisely what the child's condition was, Ms. Jones seemingly takes pains not to specify. Irrespective, Ms. Jones does have my sympathy for finding that her unborn child had birth defects.

What is utterly ludicrous and disgusting is Ms. Jones's melodramatic recounting of the "ordeal" of having to undergo a sonogram and see the life she held in her womb prior to having the abortion. This short, non-invasive procedure, designed to make apparent the moral implications of abortion, is, according to Ms. Jones, nothing less than "torment." Fortunately, her "ordeal" was somewhat ameliorated by the good people at Planned Parenthood, whom she describes with a varying list of positive adjectives, from 'compassionate' and 'warm' to 'sympathetic' and 'professional.'

When told by the Planned Parenthood staff that she would have to have the sonogram per Texas law prior to the abortion, Ms. Jones tells us that she replied:

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.”

How much of a narcissistic, amoral if not immoral individual do you have to be to near hysterically center on 'your pain' and not the life that you are about to extinguish. But the extremes of melodrama were not done.

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart...”

I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident. . . .

What it all boils down to is this - the far left, and most definitely Ms. Jones - do not want any moral considerations associated with abortion. This is part of the reason why the left is an implacable enemy of religion and any continuing role for Christian morality in the public square. They want an omnipotent government to be the sole moral arbiter, and abortion is one of the tools through which they are trying to accomplish that goal. And indeed, Ms. Jones goes so far as to cast her freedom from morality as a right. Ms. Jones does not believe that the state has any role in furthering the sanctity of life.

It is important to note that the Texas law, as currently interpreted, does not require a woman carrying a child with significant birth defects to undergo a sonogram prior to the decision to abort. The rule was so new at the time that Ms. Jones went for her abortion that Planned Parenthood went ahead with the sonogram out of an abundance of caution. But Ms. Jones makes absolutely clear that it is the sonogram for any woman seeking an abortion to which she objects. And as she says in conclusion to her screed:

[W]hat good is the view of someone who has never had to make your terrible choice? What good is a law that adds only pain and difficulty to perhaps the most painful and difficult decision a woman can make? Shouldn’t women have a right to protect themselves from strangers’ opinions on their most personal matters? Shouldn’t we have the right not to know?

What immoral arrogance. Countless people have been faced with pregnancies of children that they knew had birth defects. But Ms. Jones's point goes far beyond that, to every woman who is pregnant and considers abortion.

Abortion snuffs out a human life. Shouldn't the people of our nation, acting through the state, have the right to insure that the woman who makes the decision to abort at least understands the moral implications of that decision? Ms. Jones casts this as heinous. What is truly heinous is the belief of Ms. Jones and her ilk, who devalue human life and see in abortion no moral issue at all. A 10 minute sonogram under the Texas law is not part of a "war on women." It is Ms. Jones and her ilk who are in the midst of a war on religion and morality in the U.S. And that war goes beyond abortion. It is for the heart and soul of our nation. Pick your side.

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Gov. Granholm Goes Wild With Her Claims Of A War On Women

What an utterly disgusting and intellectually dishonest person Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is. She has taken to Politico to decry the "war on women" being carried out by evil Republicans. Granholm claims that Virginia's decision to require pre-abortion ultra-sounds, the defunding by some states of Planned Parenthood, and Rush's crass description of Sandra Fluke add up to an all out Republican War on "women's rights." Her arguments are disingenuous at best - and she omits any mention of the elephant in the room, Obama's HHS mandate that all employers fund free contraception and abortion plan B pills for all female employees.

Granholm first attacks Virginia's recent passage of a law requiring women to view an abdominal ultrasound before undergoing abortions. The sole purpose of the law is to insure that the women opting to undergo an abortion understand that they will be destroying a human life. For Granholm, this is exhibit one in the evil Republican "war on women." A 10 minute ultrasound hardly seems to be a "war on women," but to Granholm, who is apparently an advocate of abortion on demand without any moral considerations, any state action that would require nothing more than a woman face the morality of her actions is both "demeaning" and "unnecessary."

Granholm's next argument is that any state that acts to defund Planned Parenthood of our tax dollars is likewise conducting a war on "women's health." Granholm neglects to mention the fact that Planned Parenthood is a radical left wing organization pushing a far left social agenda of sex without physical consequence or moral considerations. Granholm likewise neglects to mention that Planned Parenthood, even though it receives vast tax dollars, is also our nation's largest provider of abortion services. They do so under the canard that the money used to provide abortions is separate and apart from taxpayer funding.

What is really going on is that the Obama administration shares the goals of Planned Parenthood and is intent on that organization receiving our tax dollars funneled through the states via Title X. Two recent examples paint this clearly. When New Hampshire voted to remove Planned Parenthood from the list of eligible recipients for Title X funds, the Obama Administration actually stepped in and gave a $1 million dollar no-bid contract with Planned Parenthood of New England. When Texas voted to provide Title X funds only to organizations that do not provide abortions, the Obama administration took the step of withholding all Title X funds for women's health from the state. What this dust up is about is not a war on women's health, it is a war being waged by the left to insure that one of their most sacred cows, one that fully pushes their social agenda, Planned Parenthood, continues to get fat on tax payer dollars. Yet Granholm, ignoring all of this, claims that this focus on Planned Parenthood amounts to "sexual McCarthyism." The reality is that this is Granholm and the Obama administration Komenizing the states that refuse to fund Planned Parenthood.

Lastly, Granholm claims:

Rush Limbaugh did more than insult a law student with his diatribe about Sandra Fluke; his words revealed a mind-set about women. Republicans have been chanting that they want to “take our country back.” Sure they do … back in time. Back to the good old days when women didn’t have the opportunities for personal and professional advancement that they do now.

What a disingenous ass this woman is. Not a single word has been mentioned by any Republican of reducing women's opportunities in any profession in any way. Not a single Republican has advanced the proposition that contraception should not be available to women under Title X. So how can Granholm make this outrageous charge?

Republicans are doing this by waging a war against contraceptive choice. Not just abortion, but birth control in general — the very thing that set women free to pursue equality in the first place. Studies have shown that since women have had access to the pill and family planning measures, they have made huge gains in both wages and in careers that were dominated by men. Which is why we’re seeing an outpouring of outrage from women. The legislation being advanced threatens those gains.

Granholm's last argument is cause and effect - that only access to the pill has made women able to succeed in the job market. That is ridiculous. The great societal change that began with "first wave feminism," then WWII with women working outside the home and finally the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, are what have allowed women to achieve parity with men in the workforce. Without those changes, every pill in the world would be meaningless. Granholm's argument is akin to saying that because dew forms on the grass at about the time the sun rises, that one causes the other.

As to her other argument, how can Granholm possibly portray anything that anyone on the right has done as an attack on "contraceptive choice." If her problem is with limiting funding of Planned Parenthood, which it implicitly is, the only way that argument could be valid is if there were no other organizations that could meet the requirements of Title X - and that is an absurdity.

Granholm, like virtually all on the left, is an intellectually dishonest person. The only war going on here is the HHS mandate, which is a war on the First Amendment religious rights of all Americans, not merely the Catholic Church. It is a deeply cynical, election year war being waged by Obama to reduce religion in the public square and to create the illusion that he is championing "women's rights" against evil Republicans. Yet the HHS mandate is the one issue Granholm manages to ignore. That alone tells you all you need to know about this piece of partisan excreta.

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