White House scrambles to answer when they learned of Clinton email habits

Clinton damage control task force dubbed 'Benghazi group' 

What did the White House know and when did they know it? 

That timeline got murkier on Friday as the White House struggled to respond to mounting questions over Hillary Clinton's private email use. The heat was turned up after Politico reported that top White House officials knew back in August that Clinton was conducting official business on personal email.  

White House spokesman Josh Earnest, when asked about what the White House knew, said senior officials were emailing Clinton while she was secretary of state and a few noticed she wasn't using a .gov email address. However, he did not say when they noticed it and whether red flags were raised. 

He also said he had no idea when President Obama first found out and claimed he wouldn't be surprised if Obama only learned about it from "newspapers." 

Meanwhile, in an interview with Bloomberg News Friday morning, Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said she never received email from Clinton's private address, and didn't know whether anyone at the White House, including the president, had either. 

"That I do not know," she said when pressed by the reporters. 

As for herself, "I did not receive email from Secretary Clinton," she said, adding that "the president has a very firm policy that emails should be kept on government systems, he believes in transparency and I know that the State Department is working with the National Archives to make sure that Secretary Hillary Clinton's emails are captured." 

According to Politico, the White House, State Department and Clinton's personal office knew in August that the former secretary of state had used a private email to conduct official business. The State Department became aware while the agency was preparing a batch of 15,000 emails requested by House Republicans in the Benghazi investigation. 

"State Department officials noticed that some of the 15,000 pages of documents included a personal email address for Clinton, and State and White House officials conferred on how to handle the revelation," Politico wrote. "But those involved deferred to Clinton's aides, and they decided not to respond." 

While it is not clear who in the White House did the conferring, Jamal Ware, spokesman for the Republican-led Select Committee on Benghazi, confirmed that committee staff first noticed Clinton was included on messages at the address hdr22@clintonemail.com when going through the State Department documents in "late summer," and then on more documents supplied by the agency in February. 

However, Ware told The Associated Press on Thursday that it wasn't until Feb. 28, just days before the scandal broke, that the State Department acknowledged Clinton only used personal email while in office. After that, the committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., announced it has subpoenaed all of Clinton's emails relating to Benghazi – including any communications from her personal email and server, as well as texts, attachments and pictures. 

The Associated Press earlier this week quoted an anonymous source saying the White House counsel's office was also not aware of Clinton's exclusive use of personal email during her tenure, and only found out as part of the congressional investigation. 

Observers say the White House is in the difficult position of defending the former Cabinet secretary and likely Democratic 2016 presidential candidate, while being careful not to get caught up in the mess itself. According to the AP, top White House aides have been "in contact" Clinton's people "to clarify specific facts that the White House is likely to be asked about" and have advised them about what the White House had planned to say. 

"It's almost impossible for the White House to give firm answers because there's just too much you don't know," said Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush's former press secretary. "It's an extraordinarily delicate dance they have to do to not throw someone overboard, but not get anyone in the White House in deeper trouble." 

White House scrambles to answer when they learned of Clinton email habits

A heart to heart conversation

On a tip from my brother Gary

It's like Rush said...Netanyahu is everything Obama isn't.

A heart to heart conversation

What if Obama were president in 1941

On a tip from Ed Kilbane

(Click to enlarge) 

What if Obama were president in 1941

Time for another concussion?

Hillary Clinton's email server traced to Internet service registered to NY home 

Would you expect anything less from a Clinton? In an attempt to whitewash yet another scandal she now states she wants to make the emails public. 

Sure…after she sent them to the “dry cleaners”. 

Thesaurus

Liars:

deceivers, fibbers, perjurers, false witnesses, fabricators, equivocators, the Clintons 

When the book comes out a good title would be the The Hoteham Personality.

Say what you will but you can't whitewash this.

Hillary's 2008 campaign would come in handy in 2016.

If I were the GOP candidate I would be playing the hell out of this!

Video 105

Oh...and this is Hillary's take on secret email accounts in 2007 when Bush was president.

Video 106

WASHINGTON – The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton's emails -- on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state -- traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press. 

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton's secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. 

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work. 

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. 

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account -- hdr22(at)clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym -- for official State Department business. 

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking. 

But homebrew email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines. 

A spokesman for Clinton did not respond to requests seeking comment from the AP on Tuesday. Clinton ignored the issue during a speech Tuesday night at the 30th anniversary gala of EMILY's List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. 

It was unclear whom Clinton hired to set up or maintain her private email server, which the AP traced to a mysterious identity, Eric Hoteham. That name does not appear in public records databases, campaign contribution records or Internet background searches. Hoteham was listed as the customer at Clinton's $1.7 million home on Old House Lane in Chappaqua in records registering the Internet address for her email server since August 2010. 

The Hoteham personality also is associated with a separate email server, presidentclinton.com, and a non-functioning website, wjcoffice.com, all linked to the same residential Internet account as Mrs. Clinton's email server. The former president's full name is William Jefferson Clinton. 

In November 2012, without explanation, Clinton's private email account was reconfigured to use Google's servers as a backup in case her own personal email server failed, according to Internet records. That is significant because Clinton publicly supported Google's accusations in June 2011 that China's government had tried to break into the Google mail accounts of senior U.S. government officials. It was one of the first instances of a major American corporation openly accusing a foreign government of hacking. 

Then, in July 2013, five months after she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton's private email server was reconfigured again to use a Denver-based commercial email provider, MX Logic, which is now owned by McAfee Inc., a top Internet security company. 

The New York Times reported Monday that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account it did not specify to conduct State Department business. The disclosure raised questions about whether she took actions to preserve copies of her old work-related emails, as required by the Federal Records Act. A Clinton spokesman, Nick Merrill, told the newspaper that Clinton complied with the letter and spirit of the law because her advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails to decide which ones to turn over to the State Department after the agency asked for them. 

In theory but not in practice, Clinton's official emails would be accessible to anyone who requested copies under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Since Clinton effectively retained control over emails in her private account even after she resigned in 2013, the government would have to negotiate with Clinton to turn over messages it can't already retrieve from the inboxes of federal employees she emailed. 

The AP has waited more than a year under the open records law for the State Department to turn over some emails covering Clinton's tenure as the nation's top diplomat, although the agency has never suggested that it didn't possess all her emails. 

Clinton's private email account surfaced publicly in March 2013 after a convicted Romanian hacker known as Guccifer published emails stolen from former White House adviser Sidney Blumenthal. The Internet domain was registered around the time of her secretary of state nomination. 

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the special House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, said the committee learned last summer -- when agency documents were turned over to the committee -- that Clinton had used a private email account while secretary of state. More recently the committee learned that she used private email accounts exclusively and had more than one, Gowdy said.

Time for another concussion?

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

Only Congress can vote on whether or not to raise taxes. This is a clear, clear, clear, violation of the Constitution! 

He got the ball rolling with Obamacare becoming worse when they allowed him to set another precedent by decreeing amnesty. 

People... we are now officially on the slippery slope.

Breaking News Megyn Kelly

One nice thing about a de facto dictatorship is that it is easy to raise revenue, since you don’t have to fuss with getting tax bills through Congress. You can simply jack up taxes by executive decree. If people complain that they are already overtaxed and that the money confiscated by the government is mostly being wasted, you can smirk, “What are you going to do about it?” Watch Obama to see how it’s done:

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest confirmed Monday that President Obama is “very interested” in the idea of raising taxes through unilateral executive action.

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

“The president certainly has not indicated any reticence in using his executive authority to try and advance an agenda that benefits middle class Americans,” Earnest said in response to a question about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calling on Obama to raise more than $100 billion in taxes through IRS executive action.

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree

Even by Josh Earnest’s standards, the lie that this would benefit the middle class is insolent in the extreme. Modern liberalism is an alliance of the liberal elite and the welfare class, who have teamed up to enslave the middle class, if not loot it out of existence.

Raising taxes will typically be spun as closing loopholes for rich corporations. But in the end corporations don’t pay any taxes. They pass on this expense to largely middle class consumers.

Adding extra salt to the wounds, here’s why the government needs even more money, despite its record revenues:

[Obama’s unilateral and unconstitutional] immigration actions, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will raise federal deficits by $8.8 billion over the next ten years.

These “immigration actions” consist of illegally importing millions from the Third World to take our jobs and displace us from our country. Obama will fund this treason by raising our taxes, in direct violation of the Constitution, which leaves this power to Congress.

White House Announces It Will Probably Raise Taxes by Executive Decree