No Comparison between Hillary Clinton and Ivanka's private Emails

Big huffing and puffing in liberal media today. It's been discovered that Ivanka Trump used private email - you know just like Hillary Clinton! Well, not so much.

White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.

The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s practices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign. Trump attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her “Crooked Hillary” for using a personal email account as secretary of state.

Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.

In a statement, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Lowell, acknowledged that the president’s daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her messages contained classified information.

“While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” he said in a statement.

...

Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose record requests sparked the White House discovery, said it strained credulity that Trump’s daughter did not know that government officials should not use private emails for official business.

“There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” Evers said. “There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal email use.”

Ivanka Trump and her husband set up personal emails with the domain “ijkfamily.com” through a Microsoft system in December 2016, as they were preparing to move to Washington so Kushner could join the White House, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

The couple’s emails are prescreened by the Trump Organization for security problems such as viruses but are stored by Microsoft, the people said.

A few problems with this story.

1. Ivanka wasn't a Secretary of State, running an undeclosed email server from her basement, in a highly classified position.

2. The White House discovered this and corrected the issue - more of training than of something nefarious as Clinton was.

3 Ivanka wasn't a first lady, former Senator on the Arms Services Committee, and four other committees, and Secretary of State who knew full well of what classified and unclassified meant.

Ignorance isn't an excuse for violating law, but there is no evidence any law was violated. Ivanka's email was more of a personal family nature. Not state secrets, and most important Ivanka's emails are present and accounted for. Not like the 33,000 missing from Hillary's server.

Insider Details Comey Meeting with Lynch over her meeting with Clinton on Tarmarc

Via Conservative Tribune:

Shortly before the FBI shut down its investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, former FBI Director James Comey had a frosty confrontation with Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch — so frosty that what he showed her got him kicked out of her office. 

In a report published by the news website Circa, Comey reportedly privately told a few insiders about the exchange that he had with Lynch.  He presented her with evidence that he had regarding her meeting with former President Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in June 2016, prompting his suspicions of her interference with an ongoing investigation.
The evidence Comey had shown  Lynch may have involved a “communication between two political figures” that indicated the Justice Department was going to cover for Hillary Clinton, or evidence, as Circa put it: “that suggested Lynch had agreed to put the kibosh on any prosecution of Clinton.” 

According to Circa, Comey said Lynch’s response to the evidence was right out of a Hollywood movie about backroom dealings in Washington. 

“Comey said ‘the attorney general looked at the document, then looked up with a steely silence that lasted for some time, then asked him if he had any other business with her and if not that he should leave her office,’ said one source who was briefed,” Circa reported. 

She acted in a way that suggests her guilt and instead of owning up to her fault; she kicked Comey out of her office because she knew she had been caught.

Suspicions of this meeting were sparked by Comey's testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.  In fact, Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat, called for a further investigation into whether Lynch's involvement was, in fact, an effort to save Hillary's sagging campaign efforts.

This would, of course, provide a REAL scandal that would dwarf the made up Russian/Trump collusion scandal by a million miles.  In fact, it brings to the front whether or not President Obama had any knowledge of this meeting, and whether or not if he had ordered it.

That would have been - if discovered earlier - a high crime and misdemeanor which is an impeachable offense.

Since Obama is out of office now he could still be subject to prosecution should this prove true.

Comey's Investigation had nothing to do with Trump's rise in the polls

Analysis of Trump's rise in the polls shows that the Comey announcement on October 28th, had little or nothing to do with it. According to Nate Silver, 528 and other polling prognosticators that Trump's rise began before that. One, a poll taken before Comey's announcement showed that more than 42% of Clinton supporters considered her dishonest, but would still vote for her. Trump's rise is due mostly to anti-establishment fever, independents breaking his way 3-1, along with more support from blacks (34%), than previous elections. All told that the numbers would be as tight even if Comey never mentioned any results, or even if Clinton was under investigation.

The news that Comey still won't bring jobs hurts Clinton more than Trump because it verifies his, "The system is rigged", which a majority of Americans already believe, as well as the public belief that Clinton is above the law.

So while not the news people wanted it nonetheless is better for Trump than Clinton at this point, who's Foundation is still under investigation.

It isn't over for Trump by a Long Shot - The Race is still Winnable for Him

If you follow the media you would think that it's all over for Truth. That he should just pack it up and go home.

Not so...

Most polling making up the Real Clear Poltics average were done before Trump 2.0, and especially before he beat both Obama and Hillary to Louisiana to view the damage from the catastrophic flooding. People notice, as a new poll from the La Times suggests.

Fact is that Clinton has retained a small but too close to call lead since the conventions. We'll have to see if there is a change after last weeks events. As I noted on Twitter, Hillary didn't do herself any favors by dogging going to Louisianna, or fueling more rumors of her health by taking four days off the trail to rest. Plus there is still the email scandal, and now long overdue investigation into her pay for play foundation.

Stay tuned folks, ain't over by a long shot. If Trump stays on message, and more bad news in the form of Wikileaks (which have been promised), and/or revelations from the investigations - ongoing - things for Trump could change drastically.

Top IT official: Disabling security for Clinton server laid out 'welcome mat' for hackers

Just as I had said before, it was a "Rats Nest" of infection.

A 2010 decision temporarily disabling State Department security features to accommodate Hillary Clinton’s private server effectively laid out a "welcome mat" for hackers and foreign intelligence services, a leading IT official who oversaw computer security at the Defense Intelligence Agency told Fox News.

"You're putting not just the Clinton server at risk but the entire Department of State emails at risk," said Bob Gourley, former chief technology officer (CTO) for the DIA. "When you turn off your defensive mechanisms and you're connected to the Internet, you're almost laying out the welcome mat for anyone to intrude and attack and steal your secrets."

He was referring to revelations from new court-released documents in a lawsuit by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch. They show the State Department temporarily turned off security features in 2010 so that emails from then-Secretary of State Clinton's personal server would stop going to the department's spam folders.

Gourley, who has more than two decades of cybersecurity experience and is now a partner with strategic consulting and engineering firm Cognitio, noted the Russians did breach the State Department system at some point – though it’s unclear when, and whether disabling the security functions in 2010 played a role.

He said, though, that when the Russian presence was detected in 2014, there were indications “they had been there for quite a while … [and] also hacked into unclassified systems in the White House.” He said the Russians would have tried “everything possible to get in.”

The question is "Did they?" Again, when you have to shut off access to a remote server - especially one with the incredible name of "clintonemail.com" - it means it's not a secure system and by security protocol it should have never been allowed to be used as a secure system for the SOC.

Hillary Clinton Failed to Turn over a Key Email in Investigation

Keeps getting better, and worse for Hillary Clinton.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The email was included within messages exchanged Nov. 13, 2010, between Clinton and one of her closest aides, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin. At the time, emails sent from Clinton's BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department's spam filter. A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.

"Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible," Clinton responded to Abedin.

Seriously, "clintonemail.com"? As I said I worked for a time as a Network Analyst, and that's the type of domain you put on an internal intranet email system, not external and certainly not on the server - private as it was - of the US Secretary of State. Secondarily, as a government worker there is no such thing as "personal email" when you are using a system bought and paid for by taxpayers and certainly not when those emails are related to work.

There were multitudes of issues with that server, a "rats nest" of spam, likely malware and possibly even viruses. We already know that there were many unreported attempts to hack the server, and the State Department said the dang thing was a Spam-A-Lot, to the point they had to shut it's access to the mainframe system. Then there is this:

On Wednesday, lawyers from Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization, questioned under oath Bryan Pagliano, the computer technician who set up Clinton's private server. A transcript released Thursday shows Pagliano repeatedly responded to detailed questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as he did last year before a congressional committee.

Dozens of questions Pagiliano declined to answer included who paid for the system, whether there was technical help to support its users and who else at the State Department used email accounts on it. Pagliano also would not answer whether he discussed setting up a home server with Clinton prior to her tenure as secretary of state, according to the transcript.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the November 2010 email cited in the inspector general audit was one of more than a dozen work-related emails that his group identified that Clinton sent or received but later failed to turn over the State Department.

"Contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Mrs. Clinton did not return all her government emails to the State Department," Fitton said. "Our goal is to find out what other emails Mrs. Clinton and the State Department are hiding."

Flicker, flicker...flame, flameout....