Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,69
steal President Trump’s thunder by solving the problems he will campaign on. In doing so, they could demonstrate competence, discretion, and the ability to enact substantive reform. So far, they have shown little interest in such a strategy. The missed opportunities are piling up.
Preserving Government Records and Accountability
The problem of government employees using off-the-record communication to bypass federal records laws, though heavily exploited by the Obama administration, is not unique to Democratic administrations. It’s a proliferating problem that legitimately needs to be addressed. Yet Democrats have not only failed to address solutions, they have mocked the problem and ignored the bias that prevented the FBI from prosecuting it.
In June 2018, Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz released an OIG report on his review of fired FBI director James Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. Horowitz determined that the FBI director’s actions were “extraordinary and insubordinate” in violating the department’s norms.
The OIG report’s overall findings were damning to the credibility of the FBI. The report documented preferential treatment of Hillary Clinton and her lawyers, widespread leaking throughout the agency, and potential bias. In particular, the report called out Peter Strzok, who would play prominently in the early Mueller investigation.
“We did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias,” the report said, referring to sensitive materials found on the laptop computer of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner was married at the time to Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
More critically, the report addressed the use of private email accounts and cell phones to conduct official government business. This problem went all the way to the top of the executive branch. Even President Obama had used Secretary Clinton’s private email address to communicate with her. The revelation that even the highest level of leadership in federal law enforcement was bypassing government records laws indicated a serious accountability problem with implications far beyond one candidate or one presidential election.
Instead of using the opportunity the OIG report presented to address the widespread use of private email communication, many high-ranking Democrats actually mocked the allegations. A popular meme developed on the left to undermine any legitimate concerns about public records abuses. “But her emails” became a rallying cry by the resist crowd to minimize the significance of Deep State secrecy. Even Hillary Clinton herself, in response to the OIG report’s finding that Comey had used his personal email account for government business, tweeted the finding with her own comment: “But my emails.”
There was no acknowledgment of a problem—much less any attempt to find a solution. This wasn’t just about Hillary Clinton’s yoga emails. In her case, we were talking about information so sensitive that only a handful of people in the world were allowed to see it. Information that put lives at risk—that, if made public, could get people killed and operations compromised. Keep in mind, you can’t just forward classified emails from one account to another. You use different hardware, different software, and you usually view it only in secured facilities. It is not easily transmitted.
I had this discussion over the phone with Director Comey at the time. I remember it clearly. He explained it to me like this. He said: You can go and read hundreds of pages of communiqués that are classified. You can’t then simply take that information in your own words and retype it. It’s still classified. The content is still classified content.
If you’ve never had a security clearance, you may not realize how difficult it is to expose classified material. It’s not as if you’re sitting at your computer and some emails are classified and others are not. The emails are on two different systems, physically separated from one another. For the ease and convenience of senior officials, it is possible to access classified information from home.
Taxpayers had to pay to refit a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in Clinton’s home so she could review documents day and night. But she had to view them from that separate room in her home. The only way for classified emails to migrate from that secure setting was for Clinton to deliberately remove them from there—or ask someone on her staff to do so. She was so sloppy and cavalier that she created a real danger. The target of that investigation was not so much Clinton as it was the process by which she evaded critical national security protections.
The OIG report clearly concluded that Hillary