I’ve got ever so many reasons why I can’t bear listening to Trump but when he launches himself, without any prompt, into his thing about Hillary’s emails, I start to growl. Because it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Someone programmed “Hillary’s emails” into his mouth and he opens and out it comes.<\/p>\n
So let’s go back to the facts.<\/a><\/p>\n The above link is long, so I’m going to extract the part that seems most likely to correspond to the “30,000 Hillary’s emails” nonsense. Here it is. And it, too, is long. But less long than the entire link:<\/p>\n Fourth<\/strong>: Emails Hillary retained (along with personal email correspondence) on her private server. Half of these emails related to her work as Secretary of State. It\u2019s my understanding that a majority, if not all, of the State emails were also on the State computer system.<\/p>\n Those emails were the subject and object of the FBI investigation. The FBI mandate was to review whether any government emails were marked \u201cClassified\u201d and, thus, should not have been transferred to or from a private server, i.e., Hillary\u2019s.<\/p>\n Despite Comey\u2019s propensity for inappropriate church-y theatrics, the FBI did not<\/em> discover any classified emails.<\/p>\n There.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the problem?<\/p>\n There isn\u2019t one, except in the minds of conspiracy lunatics.<\/p>\n Let me delve into the times I was at least peripherally involved with the discovery of massive numbers of documents in lawsuits, during which I came to understand the general intra-party procedures for reviewing and turning over such documents.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to apply what I experienced to what I believe must have happened during the Hillary email FBI investigation.<\/p>\n A person who is charged with upholding the law and administering the judicial system. Typically, officer of the court refers to a judge, clerk, bailiff, sheriff, or the like but the term also applies to a lawyer, who is obliged to obey court rules and who owes a duty of candor to the court.<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n 5. Which means that the FBI lawyers and Hillary\u2019s lawyers shared an implicit trust. So when Hillary\u2019s lawyers said, \u201cLet us separate the State Department stuff from the personal stuff,\u201d the FBI lawyers said, \u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n 6. If at any stage of this process the FBI lawyers felt anything was being withheld from them, they would have gone to court and asked that a judge get involved. I\u2019m not sure there was a judge; if the FBI was getting along smoothly with Hillary\u2019s lawyers, they wouldn\u2019t have requested that a judge get involved.<\/p>\n (7. If either the FBI or Hillary\u2019s lawyers asked that a judge be involved, the questioned emails could have been turned over to the judge under seal, i.e., to be read only by the judge and her staff. Which means the judge\u2019s staff would have had to go through all of them to determine which, if any, could be excluded. 60,000 emails. Irritated sigh from judge and even bigger sigh from her small staff. Long delay in investigation.)<\/p>\n 8. More likely, all the lawyers came to an agreement: Hillary\u2019s lawyers would read every email, make a log separating relevant from personal emails, and turn over the relevant emails (and log) to the FBI.<\/p>\n 9. The \u201c30,000 missing emails\u201d? They were never missing \u2014 not by the FBI, at least. The FBI had full access to all the emails they needed to review in order to come to the conclusion they did: our security had not been compromised by Hillary Clinton and her private server. Which, by the way, is the only server I\u2019ve heard of that did not get hacked by the Russians.<\/p>\n 10. Once those 30,000 emails were bilaterally determined to be personal and irrelevant to the FBI investigation, Hillary\u2019s lawyers could do whatever they wanted with them. Make a big collage or paper planes or zillions of origami swans, or a bonfire\u2026<\/p>\n They were Hillary\u2019s emails, not the government\u2019s. Unlike the emails Trump\u2019s people are in an uproar over\u2013emails which were<\/em> government owned and therefore openly available to Mueller and his team.<\/p>\n Yes, that last was a gratuitous swipe.<\/p>\n This is what I believe happened with the FBI investigation of Hillary\u2019s emails. I\u2019m not a lawyer, though, so if any lawyer wants to comment \u2014 confirm or critique \u2014 I\u2019d be pleased to publish it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve got ever so many reasons why I can’t bear listening to Trump but when he launches himself, without any prompt, into his thing about Hillary’s emails, I start to growl. Because it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking … Continue reading \n