
Once again,Hillary Clinton is hiding behind Attorney/Client privilege that she deliberately created to keep us from knowing about why she deleted certain emails.
She’s got something to hide. That’s nothing new with Hillary.
Tallleyrand once said of the Bourbon Kings of Fance: “They learn nothing and forget nothing.” The same could be said of Hillary. For decades now, she has deliberately used attorney/client privilege to shield her more nefarious activities from public view. She never forgets. Yet each time she does it, there’s a public outrage.Like the kings, she never learns. Here she goes again.
Hillary is apparently now claiming attorney/client privilege about her covert decision to delete certain emails from her server and retain others. She doesn’t want us to know what criteria she used to determine which emails disappeared and which ones she decided to make public. She clearly doesn’t want us to see those emails that she deemed to be personal – if they are personal. How do we know that? Because Cheryl Mills walked out of her FBI interview last week after an FBI agent had the nerve to ask about how the decision was made about deleting the emails. Mills claimed that there was an agreement not to ask her about it because of the attorney/client privilege. She came back, but was not required to testify about the deletions.
It’s important to remember that only the client can invoke attorney/client privilege – and that’s clearly what Hillary has done.
Think about it: If there was a straight forward decision to simply separate out purely personal emails, why would there be any need to cloak it in privilege? That shouldn’t have been too hard to do- or to explain. Sounds like it was a much more complicated formula for designating emails to be deleted. A process Hillary is determined to keep secret.
Attorney-Client privilege prohibits a lawyer from revealing anything learned during the representation of a client and protects any documents prepared under the attorney’s supervision in anticipation of litigation. So Mills can’t talk about the process and any memos or investigative reports can remain secret. But the emails themselves are not work product.
Hillary learned the importance of creating this shield of privilege during the impeachment process from full-time Clinton criminal defense lawyer David Kendall, whose blueprint for criminal defense is to create layers of attorney privilege. Throughout the Starr investigation and impeachment trial, Bill was instructed not to talk to anyone except his lawyers – and Hillary, who could claim a spousal privilege.
So she is always erecting a wall of privilege. That’s why Cheryl Mills was given two titles when she worked for Hillary in the State Department. She was the Chief of Staff and also Counselor to the Secretary. That last title was solely to provide an excuse for testifying on certain issues. Mills was never part of the State Department legal team. The title was just to cover any embarrassing matters that might arise by cloaking them in privilege.
When the State Department told Hillary that she had to return her hidden emails, she immediately lawyered up. First, Kendall was in charge, along with other lawyers in his office. Then Cheryl Mills got involved, of course. She oversaw the process of sorting out the emails, while a more junior lawyer, who was a former Hillary campaign staffer, actually went through the emails. That created a triple layer of lawyers and a triple layer of privilege. Something very important to protect was involved there!
So now all of the reasons, criteria, and circumstances surrounding Hillary’s decision as to which emails were released and why each one was deleted are not open to public scrutiny. Hillary is claiming an attorney/client privilege. Any discussions about how the decisions were made will not be made public – unless things proceed much further on and a challenge is made to the calim. Don;t count on the Justice Department to do that.
Keep in mind that these were emails created to conduct government business – at taxpayer’s expense.
We don’t know if the FBI has succeeded in un-deleting any of Hillary’s e-mails. There are conflicting indications of whether they have been able to do so. But the door to understanding Hillary’s decision-making has been slammed shut in our faces.
But that leaves one unanswered question: Who actually pushed the delete button or set the system to automatically delete Hillary’s emails? Was it a lawyer or was it a tech person? Was it her IT guru, Bryan Pagliano? She said she kept paying him after he left the State Department. If he did it, his actions are not covered by attorney/client privilege and can be revealed. Maybe that’s why the FBI gave him immunity.
There’s no question that Hillary used a private server because she wanted to hide some of her e-mails from the government and from nosy FOI requesters. But without knowing what was in the half of her e-mails that she did not want us to see, we won’t ever know what it was so important for her to hide that she incurred all this blow back and scandal.
Some have suggested that it was to cover up the specifics of the quid-pro-quos that flowed from the State Department through Hillary through Bill to those who paid for his speeches or donated to his foundation. Since both Clintons knew they were skirting close to the edges of the law, it is logical that they sought to cover their tracks by deleting the evidence. We may never know.
But, again, Corrupt Hillary deserves our skepticism for using her layers of attorneys to make the deletions. She could have used someone else, but then the investigators would be entitled to ask what was in the e mails she deleted. But with an attorney doing the editing, they cannot ask.
This is the same M.O. that Hillary used in the 1992 campaign — and since — to dig up dirt to silence the women Bill either sexually abused or engaged in consensual relations . By hiring skilled detectives to find compromising evidence to cow these women into silence, she assured that the cordon sanitaire would not be breeched. And, to keep this seamy business from public view, she did not hire the detectives directly, but hired them through her attorney’s. That meant that their dirty deeds would be work product from her attorneys — just like the e-mail deletion criteria.
Of course, each time Hillary tries to pull the wool over our eyes, she just succeeds in destroying what little faith the naive still have in her integrity. That’s how two-thirds of Americans have come to believe that she is not “honest or trustworthy.” But she keeps on doing it. She learns nothing and she forgets nothing.