"Clinton IT aide pleads Fifth, skips hearing"

The Hill: The former State Department employee who set up Hillary Clinton's private email server did not appear before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday morning despite a subpoena to testify on the deletion of some of Clinton’s emails.

Bryan Pagliano exercised his Fifth Amendment right not to testify against himself before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in 2015. He was also reportedly awarded an immunity deal during the FBI’s now-closed investigation into Clinton’s use of the server while secretary of State.

“It’s a serious matter. Mr. Pagliano has chosen to evade a subpoena duly issued by the committee. I will consult with counsel and my colleagues to consider a full range of options available to address Mr. Pagliano’s failure to appear,” Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said.

“He should be here. When you are served a subpoena by the United States Congress, that is not optional,” he said.

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.”

"Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account"

"Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday."

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management...

The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests. (read more)

Are these poll driven? Are the Democrats panicking? I'm not defending Hillary, but, they could have opened an investigation when the revelations first came up.

Also, from Twitter there is this... "NY Times reporter also admitting that Clintons came down hard on him and forced him to change the lead of his story. Unreal." and from Politico

The IRS subjected conservative groups already granted tax-exempt status to additional scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle

thehill via Instapundit

Elijah Cummings is trying everything he can to push back and hold the tide, here is what he says about Darrell Issa expanding the probe into IRS treatment of organizations already recognized as tax-exempt by the IRS  that appear to have faced questionable treatment by the IRS:

* Issa is pushing a political narrative by picking choice quotes and disregarding contrary evidence.

* not conducting a responsible investigation focused on implementing real reforms

* urges to focus on obtaining the full set of facts rather than making unsubstantiated allegations. 

Cummings said that in a letter to Issa on Monday

The Leadership Institute was audited in 2011 and 2012 for activites in 2008 election year, even though it had functioned as tax-exempt since 1979. It faced invasive questions including questions about intern, where they went to work. Ultimately turning over to IRS more than 23,000 pages of documents at a cost of $50,000 (jeeze, that's $2.00 a page) 

Organizations already tax exempt appear to have faced questionable treatment by the IRS, Issa wrote to Treasury Inspector general 

Cummings countered bravely

* groups were referred to the special unit on a case-by-case basis

* unit did not automatically mean an audit would occur

* referrals to the group were actually meant to facilitate an approval, not burden the organization with additional inquiries.

* liberal groups cam under the same scrutiny

Jack Lew reiterated progressive groups were improperly targeted alongside conservative ones, adding there is no evidence of political pressure

More details at the Hill.