Joe Biden's aides have discovered three batches of classified documents from his days as vice president, all stored at unsecured locations for quite a while. The unfolding scandal resembles nothing so much as the Hillary Clinton emailgate, according to Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist.
"In Hillary's case, she conducted substantially all of her secretary of state business using unsecure private servers and unvetted electronic devices," Ortel told Sputnik. "This work occurred all over the world, in many places where rivals or enemies were keenly interested in information nominally in her care. Even now, we do not know how many parties may have gotten some of this information. Then, after she left office on February 1, 2013, she and her team kept this information and only returned what they deemed to be government records starting in late 2014."
On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey revealed that from the group of 30,000 emails returned by Hillary Clinton to the State Department, 110 in 52 email chains had been determined to contain "classified" information at the time they were sent or received. Moreover, eight of those chains contained information that was "top secret" at the time they were sent, according to Comey.
Thirty-six chains contained "secret" information at the time when they were sent and eight contained "confidential" information. In addition, the FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 returned by the former secretary of state in 2014. At least three of them were "classified" at the time they were sent or received: one at the "secret level" and two at the "confidential level," as per the then-FBI director.
"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," Comey stated, adding, however, that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."
Meanwhile, an FBI Vault of documents concerning the bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server shows, in particular, that the former secretary of state and her aide on one occasion left Clinton's classified briefing book in a Russian hotel suit.
Another set of FBI files shed light on a mysterious whistleblower's complaint to FBI Director Comey in January 2016 about the mishandling of classified diplomatic materials by Hillary Clinton, her aides, and her staff working for the Clinton Foundation.
To cap it off, Hillary admitted publicly in 2015 that she deleted tens of thousands of emails from her private email server under the pretext that they were not work-related. According to Ortel, these missing documents could potentially contain information about Hillary's "pay-to-play" schemes involving the Clintons' charity and foreign players. The analyst has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation's alleged fraud for several years.
"Before, during and after her tenure as secretary of state, Bill Clinton and his Clinton Foundation minions were also traveling the world, actively fundraising in the name of charity," Ortel suggested. "As a guess, some of the missing records likely are incriminating for charity fraud, bribery and corruption crimes (at minimum), while records ultimately in the public domain were used to draft speeches and book deals."
15 January 2023, 12:46 GMT
'Nobody Knows How Many Obama-Era Docs Were Lost'
In light of Hillary Clinton's carelessness one should not be surprised by the fact that one batch of classified memos was found in Joe Biden's Delaware garage near his Corvette, according to the analyst.
Moreover, former President Barack Obama was also criticized for using a pseudonymous email account to communicate with Secretary Clinton over her unsecured email server. Ortel referred to an op-ed by former Chief Assistant Attorney in the Southern District of New York Andrew McCarthy, who suggested that these private emails "must have involved some classified information."
Given that, it is probable that the FBI opted not to charge Hillary Clinton because in that case they would have to charge Obama: classified information was mishandled on "both ends," according to the former prosecutor. Obama was well aware that they were using unsecured systems, and the prosecution could have seen it as "willful" or "grossly negligent" mishandling of sensitive government information.
According to Ortel, "these precedents only erode respect for rule of law and expectation that laws will be administered fairly and impartially."
In fact, nobody knows how many Obama-era presidential records are missing, Ortel highlighted. In 2018, the Wall Street analyst argued in his op-ed that the Obama administration's endemic negligence in handling government materials could have resulted in myriads of vital documents lost. "How many senior people in the Obama White House used personal or alias email accounts or private servers, as did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her inner circle?" he asked rhetorically.
19 September 2020, 04:00 GMT
FBI Operatives Lose Docs, Suffer From 'Amnesia'
However, it appears that not only Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden demonstrated negligence when it comes to government records and classified data: the FBI has also been spotted "losing" sensitive information on multiple occasions.
It turned out in 2018 that five months’ worth of text messages between FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, accused of political bias against Donald Trump, somehow vanished into "thin digital air." This was revealed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, who wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking information about the messages in January 2018.
Later, in September 2020, records released by the DoJ in response to Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request indicated that at least 15 mobile devices belonging to members of Mueller's Trump-Russia probe had been wiped of data before being handed over to Inspector General Michael Horowitz's team, which investigated Crossfire Hurricane's potential anti-Trump bias from March 2018 until December 2019. The documents cited forgotten passwords, irreversible screen damage or missing hardware among the reasons behind the loss of data.
Thus, Andrew Weissmann, a top member of Robert Mueller's special counsel team, abruptly forgot his password after using the device for months. Moreover, it appeared that Weissmann erased his phone twice.
"Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and many others break ostensibly strict rules using personal or alias email and other accounts to conduct government business, wage political campaigns, raise money, and concoct business deals," Ortel said. "This likely does come to the attention of the FBI and other national security organizations inside and outside America. The real questions include why Obama, Biden and Hillary were not punished long ago, and what the security organizations and the Justice Department got in return for their lenient treatment of these and other serial law-breakers?"
New Anti-Corruption Force is Needed
Messy and tricky handling of documents by top Democratic government officials and high-ranking FBI operatives raises questions about their righteous anger over Donald Trump's storing classified files in his Mar-a-Lago safe.
"The Biden administration has no moral authority left to lecture anyone about anything… and this position has been reached just under two years into a four-year first term," Ortel said.
The analyst lamented the fact that public "service" is no longer a personal financial sacrifice.
"Instead, people who never would advance in the for-profit sphere catapult into riches as they acquire, hold and then retire from public office, whether they advance American interests or impair them," Ortel said. "Meanwhile, those willing to bribe our politicians and bureaucrats likely are laughing at the paltry sums paid to family members and/or charities, compared to the vast benefits derived."
According to the Wall Street analyst, the US needs a new "anti-corruption force," independent of the FBI, with resources required to bring down politicians and donors. "Unless Obama, Hillary, Biden and others are held to account, future high level government officials will likely become ever bolder and show contempt for the law," he concluded.