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WHAT'S THAT FISHY SMELL? Published in LDR 03.07.15

We were having some problems with our television earlier this week. When I turned it on, I could detect a faint odor. After checking the obvious - wiring, electrical plug-ins, and so on, I conducted a more in-depth investigation because the odor was getting stronger and more offensive every time I turned it on. Then I noticed something really interesting. I was only smelling it when the news came on and it dawned on me that the odor became more obnoxious when Hillary Clinton appeared on my screen. Kind of a fishy smell, you know? So I guess you know by now where I”m coming from.

Have you all been keeping up with this story? It’s only the latest in a series of Clinton scandals over the past thirty years, but this one is really big. And no, I’m not talking about the painting of Bill Clinton hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington and depicting a shadow of Monica Lewinsky’s famous blue dress on the mantel against which Bill is leaning. But that’s another story this week.

What I’m talking about in this column is the revelation that Hillary has flouted all the guidelines and ethical standards dictated by custom and law which govern the communications of politicians in high places. And I use that word “ethical” rather loosely and in a bi-partisan manner. Be that as it may, these are lines which should never be crossed when it comes to our national security.

What this all boils down to is the fact that Hillary conducted all her State Department business matters as well as the financial records for the multi-million dollar donations to the Hillary Foundation for the Preservation of the Clinton Legacy, as well as all personal and family correspondence and photos on a home-made private server located at her residence. The server had multiple email addresses built in, all of which were known to only a few people. None of them were encrypted nor secured, even though she used them to discuss confidential State Department matters with world leaders.

This means that the attack against our Embassy at Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and photos of the burning of the Embassy in real time could have traveled the same electronic transmission lines and even been stored in the same folders as Clinton family reunions and reservations for Hillary’s next dinner date with “the girls”.

Reports have come in that Hillary had been warned about not using the secure government server. An employee of the State Department’s Cybersecurity staff said he warned her office but nobody paid any attention to him. A hacker who is currently in prison admitted that he had hacked into her account in addition to those of other prominent people. He specifically gave authorities a screen shot of an email exchange between Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary about the Benghazi attack in Libya.

The president himself put out a memo that everyone who worked with him at that level of security clearance was mandated to use the State Department email. Hillary actually passed that memo on to some workers on her staff, while ignoring it herself and continuing to let her close circle of staff members use the secret email system.

It’s interesting to note that she had a habit of using the Comic Sans font which appears as No 11 on “The Worst 10 Fonts to Use” according to Mark Batty’s Typographic Papers Series because it mimics cursive writing somewhat and is considered by computer experts to indicate an infantile mentality, normally used by teenagers, certainly not the type of font a professional would use in business emails.

On Wednesday of this week, Marie Harf, the blonde comedienne we conservatives love to hate, made an elaborate announcement that Hillary had 55,000 emails, for heaven’s sake, and no one should expect her to be able to account for an impressive collection of this size.

Perhaps this is not the place to embarrass myself, but I have at this writing 102,000 emails on just one of my servers. And I”m not the Secretary of anything, just a researcher and archiver of information. I think we can safely assume that Hillary has probably at least a million emails on her homebound server, so for her or Harf to brag that she has turned all 55,000 emails over to the State Department is ridiculous and meant only to deceive.

Besides, this is not the way it works. All emails and other forms of communication sent and received by an elected official especially at the national level are considered by law to belong to the public archives. When that official leaves office, the agency goes through them, removes anything not pertinent to the office, and gives them back to the official, while retaining ownership of the government documents for preservation in the U.S. archives. You can read regulations providing for such collection and preservation in the National Records Act.

Hillary considers herself to be outside this law, and she has said she and her staff have gone through all her emails and picked out the ones that belong to the public records, based solely on her evaluation, then she has kept the rest.

Do any of you believe anything Hillary Clinton says? I tend to agree with one of my favorite wordsmiths, William Safire, who wrote in an essay for The Atlantic in 1996 that Hillary Clinton, who was our First Lady at the time, “is a congenital liar”. Later he said that might not be fair to her mother, so he said if not congenital then she certainly had acquired the ability through practice.

Now, about that subpoena issued this week by the Select Committee on Benghazi chaired by Trey Gowdy. He wants Hillary’s emails pertaining to the terrorist attack that night. I think the chickens have finally come home to roost and instead of that fishy smell, I’m going to be smelling delicious fried chicken when I turn my TV on.

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