Mills shredding party mastermind (via NY Post)

"The smoking gun is on page 16 of the FBI’s 47-page report. It details how Mills ultimately made the determinations about which emails should be preserved before she and Clinton decided to delete the rest as “personal.” Clinton conducted both government and personal business using a personal email account — clintonemail.com — tied to an unsecured server set up in the basement of her New York home."

The FBI makes clear the procedure Mills used to sort out the emails was suspicious.

For starters, Mills was the one who ordered the server host to move the emails from the server to a laptop where she could screen them. She told investigators she could “not recall” if emails with non-gov addresses were included in the transfer. It’s unlikely they were, because an aide who helped her search told the FBI she only screened for emails sent to or from Clinton with .gov and .mil — not .com — addresses.

That means messages involving government business between Clinton and her then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin — the only aide who had an email account on the clintonemail.com system— were not likely captured. Nor were messages sent between Clinton and Mills and other aides using personal email addresses.

Correspondence between Clinton and Abedin (who regularly emailed her boss from huma@clintonemail.com and HAbedin@hillaryclinton.com) is crucial, Fitton says, because Abedin acted as the go-between on requests for access to Clinton from shady foreign Clinton Foundation donors. He says the mushrooming “pay-for-play” scandal is the real reason the former secretary of state set up a private email system in the first place.

“The whole thing was designed to keep Clinton Foundation emails away from investigators,” he said.

And Mills may have been a key player in the game of hide-and-seek.

“It was clear they did not want non-.gov related emails picked up in their search, so they said, let’s search in a way that those emails won’t be picked up; and if they are picked up, we’ll have Mills come in and shred them,” Fitton said.

Indeed, the FBI said Mills “shredded” any copies of emails she “deemed not to be work-related” before they were turned over to State in response to requests for information from Judicial Watch, the media, Congress and the FBI. The laptop hardrive was later wiped clean using a computer program called BleachBit.

The FBI said it was “unable to obtain a complete list of keywords or named officials searched,” because Mills asserted that such information was “privileged.” In fact, when agents pressed her, Mills stormed out of the room and ended the interview. Curiously, the FBI honored her claim of privilege and did not pursue the matter.

“Mills did not do a proper search of the server,” Fitton asserted. “The evidence was just essentially shredded.”

He added that Mills and a State aide who assisted her in conducting the dubious search — Heather Samuelson, a loyal Clinton campaign worker — had a vested interest in covering up email evidence.

“They were State Department employees and were completely conflicted in conducting that search,” he said.

As participants in the activities under investigation, Mills and Samuelson should have been key FBI targets, yet both appeared at Hillary’s FBI interview with her phalanx of lawyers, allowing them insights into the investigation.

Fitton said their attendance was highly unusual, but not surprising. He said it was just one more sign the fix was in with the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s emails: “It’s the Keystone Kops approach to investigating.”

Cheryl Mill's Deposition playhouse

"I don't remember" or "I don't recall" 189 times.

(Actors acting out the recorded deposition, which apparently has not been released.)

"This deserves to be brought to a wider audience--not censored and hidden away. And we now have it on film. (You can share the film with your friends by sending them to ClintonEmailsOnFilm.com."

More Clinton appearance of conflict of interest

"CNN Debate Moderator Was Member of Clinton Global Initiative"

The Clinton Foundation later told Mediaite that none of these journalists were asked to pay the $20,000 membership fee required of  members. However, it's safe to say that access to big name journalists was a key selling point for paying Clinton Global Initiative members. In a nutshell, Anderson Cooper helped Hillary Clinton raise money, and now he's presented as an impartial moderator for tonight's debate.

Then there is this story at the Washington Post.... "While at State, Clinton chief of staff held job negotiating with Abu Dhabi"

During her first four months at the State Department, [Cheryl] Mills also held another high-profile job: She worked part time at New York University, negotiating with officials in Abu Dhabi to build a campus in that Persian Gulf city.

At the State Department, she was unpaid in those first months, officially designated as a temporary expert-consultant — a status that allowed her to continue to collect outside income while serving as chief of staff...

Mills reported her NYU income on public federal disclosure forms. She did not reference the Abu Dhabi element of her role on the forms, which ask only that employees identify the sources and amounts of their outside income....

Under ethics laws, employees are prohibited from participating in matters that would have a direct and predictable effect on themselves or an outside employer.

Mills said she didn’t “recall any issues” at the State Department that would have required her to consider recusing herself and said she would have consulted with the ethics office if one had come up....

In recent years, more than 100 State Department employees annually have typically been granted a designation that allows them to hold outside employment, including scientists, foreign affairs officers and Abedin, a senior adviser. But experts said that a dual employment arrangement is rare at the chief-of-staff level and that the nature of Mills’s non­governmental work made her situation even more atypical.

“This is exceedingly unusual, perhaps exceptional in the history of modern federal bureaucratic leadership. I’ve never seen it before,” said Paul C. Light, an NYU professor who has studied government employment in depth...

After Clinton spoke at an NYU graduation ceremony in New York in May 2009, a top university official e-mailed Mills to thank her for her “help and guidance” in getting Clinton to the event, according to correspondence recently released by the State Department.

In 2011, Mills forwarded to Clinton an e-mail she had received from a university official describing a new NYU campus planned for Shanghai.

"Hillary Clinton certifies email handover, but aides demur"

"Acting in response to a request from a federal judge, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Friday submitted her first official, formal certification under penalty of perjury that she had all her work-related email turned over to the State Department."

However, two aides to Clinton appear to have rebuffed parallel requests from U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan that they similarly certify that they'd turned over certain emails and other records in their possession relating to their work at State...

State's decision to deem classified some of the emails on Clinton's server has also created a layer of complexity some may see as a Catch-22: if aides destroy the records, they could be seen as hindering ongoing investigations, but if they deliberately hang on to classified materials without authorization, they could be breaking the law.

Sullivan did not appear completely satisfied with the assurances in the latest round of letters, as he issued an order Friday night instructing State to ask Clinton, Mills and Abedin not to destroy any official records.

"The Court hereby directs the Government to request that Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin, and Ms. Cheryl Mills i) not delete any federal documents, electronic or otherwise, in their possession or control, and ii) provide appropriate assurances to the Government that the above-named individuals will not delete any such documents," wrote Sullivan, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. "The Government shall inform the Court of the status of its compliance with this Order no later than August 12, 2015, including a copy of any assurances provided by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills that they will not delete any federal documents in their possession or control."

What a mess.

"Former State Dept. Official: Details of Maxwell’s Benghazi Document Story ‘Ring True’"

"The Daily Signal reported Monday on Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who says he observed an unusual after-hours session in a basement operations room of the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October 2012."

"Maxwell said a State Department office director told him those present were ordered to separate out any documents related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi that could prove damaging to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While he was present, Maxwell said, Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan stopped by." (read the whole thing)

Whitleblowers don't seem to have the cachet they once had. Any ideas why that might be?

“They just wanted me to go away but I wouldn’t just go away”

The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was made by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, according to three State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. On the day after the unclassified version of the ARB’s report was released in December, Mills called Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones and directed her to have Maxwell leave his job immediately.

"Cheryl Mills directed me to remove you immediately from the [deputy assistant secretary] position," Jones told Maxwell, according to Maxwell.

The decision to remove Maxwell and not Jones seems to conflict with the finding of the ARB that responsibility for the security failures leading up to the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi should fall on more senior officials.

“We fixed [the responsibility] at the assistant-secretary level, which is in our view the appropriate place to look, where the decision making in fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road," Pickering said when releasing the ARB report.

The guy they decided to throw under the bus is not going quietly.

“The crime that he is being punished for is not reading his intel. That explains why Jones and Dibble were not disciplined,” this person said.

Maxwell had no response to this allegation other than to say he has not been officially counseled on what he did wrong and has not been allowed to read the classified report. Also, he believes that Clinton’s staff, not the ARB, was in charge of the review of the attack that took place during her watch.

“The flaws in the process were perpetrated by the political leadership at State with the complicity of the senior career leadership,” he said. “They should be called to account.”

Eight months after the attack, congressional investigators and outside groups are still pressing the State Department to explain how the ARB came to the conclusion that four midlevel officials were the only ones with responsibility for the failures that led up to the attack.

The Scapegoat Raymond Maxwell wrote a poem in his personal blog...

“The web of lies they weave gets tighter and tighter in its deceit until it bottoms out -at a very low frequency – and implodes,” he wrote. “Yet all the while, the more they talk, the more they lie, and the deeper down the hole they go.”

"State Dept. whistleblower has email hacked, deleted"

The personal e-mail account of a State Department whis­tle­­blower was hacked, and four years worth of messages — some detailing alleged wrongdoing at the agency — were deleted, The Post has learned.

The computer attack targeted the Gmail account of Diplomatic Security Service criminal investigator Richard Higbie, his lawyer, Cary Schulman, confirmed.

Higbie has asked the FBI in Dallas, where he lives, to investigate the hacking, which occurred this month.

Higbie played a key role in helping fellow whistleblower Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator for the department’s inspector general, reveal in June a pattern of alleged coverups by top department officials.

The alleged coverups included keeping quiet separate IG investigations that found that members of then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s security detail had engaged hookers and that the Belgian ambassador had solicited underage prostitutes.

These were among a string of investigations by the service, responsible for protecting dignitaries and investigating crimes within the department, that were allegedly derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.

Astute observers connect the timing of the NYT Benghazi article to the possibility that something else, more sinister, is being kept under wraps. In other words, it's a "wag the dog" maneuver, made notorious by Hillary's husband Bill Clinton, back when he was president. "It's like deja vu all over again." Back to Higbie...