Hillary Clinton - Transparent Like a Brick Wall

Originally published by Voices of Liberty

[On May 10,] the Washington Post reported that a federal judge re-opened a case to go after some of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Reggie B. Walton, U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia, agreed to a 2012 request for records. This request was filed jointly by the State Department and Judicial Watch.

Judge Walton has an impressive, balanced record of political neutrality. Though appointed by George W. Bush, the Judge didn’t spare the Bush Administration from justice. He even presided over the trial of Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. Now the Judge is helping Judicial Watch go after Hillary Clinton.

According to Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, “It’s a significant development. It points to the fraud by this administration and Mrs. Clinton.” South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy said, “The State Department… cannot certify that it has turned over all documents responsive to the committee’s request regarding the former secretary’s emails.” Congressman Gowdy is still investigating other missing emails regarding Clinton’s colossal leadership failure which got U.S. diplomats killed in Libya.

In a nutshell, the great Clinton email scandal of 2015 is that Hillary, while serving as Secretary of State, knowingly used her private email account and private server to send and receive emails regarding official U.S. government business. Using her private account instead of her .gov account kept her untouchable by open-source and Freedom-of-Information-Act requests. This is simply another case of crooked career politicians acting like the Wizard of Oz, telling We the People to ignore the man behind the curtain.

The great irony is that Hillary Clinton has been campaigning and calling for more transparency. She seems to believe that We the People are too stupid to fact check her words against her actions. She said last month in Iowa, “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all.”

This call to get rid of “unaccountable money” comes from the person whose Foundation received millions from foreign governments while they were trying to lobby the State Department during her tenure. The pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA, continues to receive millions in “unaccountable money” to promote Clinton and tear other candidates down.

Now, while gallivanting around the country and blowing smoke of “transparency” in people’s ears, the self-appointed champion of transparency continues to hide her activities. She made a show of turning over 30,000 private emails to the federal investigation, but also deleted 32,000 other emails and wiped the server clean. She refuses to turn over the server for analysis.

Let readers consider this: After the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon was taken to federal court over 18 minutes of erased audio tape. Today, a current presidential candidate refuses to allow federal investigators to find 32,000 emails from an account used for official government business. That’s all that We the People need to know. The self-appointed champion of transparency is really as transparent as a brick wall.

* * *

Both Hillary Clinton images courtesy of Voices of Liberty.

CitizenFour (Edward Snowden) film review

Last night was an incredible experience which included me getting together with some great libertarian friends in Los Angeles, where we saw the documentary film CitizenFour at the Landmark Theater.

CitizenFour is Laura Poitras’ third documentary film about civil liberties and human rights in the post-9/11 world.  It also features journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was credited for bold investigative journalism when the NSA scandal hit the fan in 2013.

However, the main attraction is the famous—or infamous—whistleblower, Edward Snowden.  When I say this film is about Snowden and his shocking revelations to the world, I don’t mean it simply talks about him.  The film features an eight-day marathon of interviews with Snowden in his hotel room in Hong Kong (filmed in April 2013).  For nearly two hours, Edward Snowden tells Poitras and Greenwald his story, motives, and objectives.

Says the film’s official website,

“Poitras had already been working on a film about surveillance for two years when Snowden contacted her, using the name ‘CITIZENFOUR,’ in January 2013.  He reached out to her because he knew she had long been a target of government surveillance, stopped at airports numerous times, and had refused to be intimidated. When Snowden revealed he was a high-level analyst driven to expose the massive surveillance of Americans by the NSA, Poitras persuaded him to let her film.”

The viewer gets an up-close look at Snowden’s personality and quirks—not just the one photograph and video clip the world has seen—is how the documentary is filmed like a thriller, with drawn out shots of concerned faces, suspenseful music, etc.  It definitely helps suck the viewer deeper into the story and message.  I won’t spoil some of the big surprises Snowden reveals on camera; I will share a personal testimony.  Before seeing this film, I’d spent over a year sitting on the fence as to whether Snowden was a patriot or had sold out and used the whistleblower story to cover his tracks.  After seeing the film, I’m convinced that Snowden was right to do what he did.

Snowden was, and is, a patriot for whom the Fourth Amendment and the Constitution are NOT negotiable.  The framers of American government meant for those first ten Constitutional amendments—the Bill of Rights—to be non-negotiable.

It’s just not right to spy on—so heavily invading the privacy of—American citizens (nor foreign citizens) who have done nothing wrong.  It’s also a slap in the face to all the troops in the armed forces, the police officers, firefighters, medics, and emergency workers who died to protect the lives, liberty, and property of their fellow Americans.  It does these fallen heroes the ultimate dishonor, having died for freedom and then their own government dissolving that freedom with a click of a button and a line of code.

This film is highly recommended for any libertarians, and anyone else interested in learning more about civil liberties, mass surveillance, and the idea of police states.  Even for those who disagree with and oppose Snowden, it’s important to see this film.  Anyone who possesses the ability to have an intellectual conversation—a comparison and exchange of ideas—and who can take an ideological position, has a responsibility to get their opponent’s arguments in his own words.  One must be familiar with their opponent’s arguments if they ever hope to deconstruct and refute them.  Otherwise, ideology becomes not an informed decision, but a blind “us-versus-them” mentality, and such a mentality has driven men to kill each other over thousands of years for the pettiest of reasons.

* * *

Movie poster image courtesy of Hollywood Reporter.