Leaked Clinton Emails: Illegal Coordination with SuperPACs

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

This should come as no surprise since everyone with half a brain realizes Democrats coordinate with the media on messaging all the time.

Via Law Newz:

Federal campaign finance laws generally prohibit a candidate’s election campaign from coordinating with the candidate’s super PAC. However, the law on what constitutes coordination is somewhat fuzzy, or open to wide interpretation, to say the least. The latest email dump from Wikileaks includes a legal memorandum that provides a perfect example of how far Clinton campaign lawyers are willing to go in interpreting what may be considered illegal coordination with a super PAC.

The April 2015 memorandum outlines a strategy for the Clinton campaign to work with the Priorities USA Action Fund super PAC (Priorities) in a manner that campaign lawyers argue does not rise to the level of coordination under campaign finance law. One particular focus of the memo is in the area of fundraising and the sharing donor information between the campaign and the super PAC.

The memo interprets the law as allowing the Clinton campaign to “identify donor prospects for Priorities and provide Priorities with the donors’ contact information using a specific template form approved by the legal team.” A footnote then explains why using the template form is so important:

Merely completing [the template form] likely would not be an in-kind contribution from [the campaign] to Priorities. However, sending over a substantial portion of HFA’s donor list likely would have to be valued and reported as an in-kind contribution.

In other words, it appears the campaign may be able to avoid a potential coordination violation by simply breaking up the donor list and sending it to the super PAC in small increments.

Hillary - A private email server in the face of Chinese hacking?

Why?  Did you not know any better or just not care?  In case you hadn't heard, Hillary Clinton ran a private email server during her tenure at State. What she did is possibly outside of government rules governing such activity.  Perhaps it's even outside the law.

Firstly if you listen to the explanations of how the emails were set up, handled and managed, it seems convoluted and inefficient.  Either she's okay with inefficiency, or else she had specific reasons to do this despite the unnecessary complexity.  Please note - I am specifically implying nefarious reasons. If she had good reasons, we'd already know about it.

But beyond that, with the repeated evidence of Chinese hacking doesn't it just seem like a dangerous and unnecessary national security risk?

It seems kinda risky to me. It seems kinda not-ready-for-prime-time.  It seems kinda self-before-country. Frankly it seems illegal, dishonest and disgusting.

Since when, Hillary?

Big Brother style image for an above the law candidate.

Democrats want equality for all, just maybe a little bit extra for the ruling class (i.e. them).  Since when does someone have the option to agree to turn something over to the FBI?

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attorney has agreed to provide the FBI with the private server that housed her e-mail during her four years as secretary of state, Clinton’s presidential campaign said Tuesday.

Her attorney also has agreed to give agents a thumb drive containing copies of thousands of e-mails that Clinton had previously turned over to the State Department.

Must be nice to have the power to decide what you feel like sharing with authorities. Just like it must be nice to be able to operate rogue, outside of rules that had, say Condoleeza Rice, done this you'd have had a meltdown Hillary. There's no evidence that equal means equal to Democrats

And was the delay purposeful and just enough to get some privately contracted experts in there to delete anything incriminating?

Exit question for Hillary supporters: How do you sleep at night? Or, have you just been so hoodwinked you can't even tell anymore? The latter question actually, is aimed at Democratic voters in general.

Exit Question II: Is the term "agreed" just the Washington Post's way of minimizing the problem and making Hillary look magnanimous in the face of unreasonable doubt?

Don't get too excited too quickly

My first thought was YES!  But lets don't get too excited too quickly by this news. 

As pressure builds on Hillary Clinton to explain her official use of personal email while serving as secretary of state, she faced new complications Tuesday. It was disclosed her top aides are being drawn into a burgeoning federal inquiry and that two emails on her private account have been classified as “Top Secret.”

The inspector general for the Intelligence Community notified senior members of Congress that two of four classified emails discovered on the server Clinton maintained at her New York home contained material deemed to be in one of the highest security classifications - more sensitive than previously known.

 This is a federal probe.  The underlying motivation may be to clear Hillary Clinton in a suspiciously timely manner, adding fuel to her presidential run.

Another possible outcome is for Hillary to downplay the outcome. One or two classified emails out of literally thousands was just an oversight. The media will eat that up, and it suddenly won't matter that she was operating outside of legal parameters to begin with. All that will matter is that it was minor and this is clearly a witch hunt by the vast right wing conspiracy.

I'm hopeful that Hillary gets her comeuppance. I'm hopeful that there really is animus between Hillary and Obama. But I'm no Pollyanna. A little skepticism will serve us well with this good news, lest we grow dependent on something to derail Hillary Clinton having to come out of this. It may be a decoy for conservatives.

Thursday Hillary Bash - flaunting email rules

I've long since given up on trying to comment on every Hillary Clinton scandal because there are just too many.  I'm just interested now in documenting them and even with that I cannot always keep up. But sidestepping email rules as Secretary of State is worth mentioning. She feels clearly that she is accountable to no one.

Via the NYT:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.