In a stunning Friday (isn’t it always?) revelation, we found out that yet another key figure from Hillary Clinton’s “rat pack” — her former chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills – was given immunity in the email server investigation.
As Ed Morrissey points out, that makes “at least five” — who knows how many there really are — who have received this treatment. So far that’s techies Bryan Pagliano and Paul Combetta (more of him in a moment), John Bentel of the Office of Information Resources Management, and Heather Samuelson, an aide to Mrs. Clinton.
How much the public knows of their immunized testimony is clear — nothing. How much is known by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Jason Chaffetz,, is less apparent, but since Chaffetz only just found out about the powerful Mills, as well as Bentel and Samuelson, we can assume the committee knows little, if anything, of what they had to say.
All this weeks after FBI Director James Comey, under what level of coercion from Loretta Lynch (and the White House) we can only guess, made his determination not to make a legal referral in the matter of Hillary Clinton.
The Combetta revelation — that the Clinton techie was querying peers on Reddit for advice on how to delete email addresses — has already caused a brouhaha that threatens to (and should) explode. As Fortune explains:
Combetta is an IT professional who helped manage Clinton’s private server and then invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than testify before a Congressional Oversight committee last week.
Ordinarily, this might have been enough to shield Combetta from accusations that he tampered with or destroyed evidence. But now Internet sleuths have unearthed a Reddit post that appears to represent Combetta asking for advice on how to hide the name of a “VERY VIP” in a batch of emails.
There’s a lot more in the incriminating exchange and Combetta is clearly in trouble. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Snopes could not dispute the uncomfortable truths about the man who scrubbed (or bleached) the emails and his unscrupulous employers:
The identity of u/stonetear [Combetta’s handle from Reddit and elsewhere] has not yet been confirmed, and an attorney for Platte River Networks [Clinton’s email tech company] has declined to comment on the claims. Combetta was earlier granted immunity by the Justice Department with respect to the Clinton e-mail investigation, and he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify during a hearing earlier in September 2016, before the Reddit controversy placed him under sharper scrutiny.
House Republicans have scheduled a hearing pertaining to preservation of state records for 22 September 2016, and Rep. Smith’s letter set a deadline of 23 September 2016 for Combetta and other Platte River Networks employees to arrange “transcribed interviews” with the Committee. Neither Combetta nor legal representatives for Platte River Networks have denied the claims.
The plot sickens, as they say. Who ordered Combetta to do the bleaching? Doesn’t the public have a right to know? Isn’t it time for the FBI — or some decent agent or agents — to fess up to save the rapidly declining reputation of their organization? That the Bureau has been under attack of late for failure to identify terrorists because of overweening political correctness has only exacerbated the public perception that all is far from well in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
This amounts to what the great Italian playwright Ugo Betti referred to as Corruption in the Palace of Justice. Besides being totalitarian in essence, the obfuscatory policies of Lynch and Comey have made certain that Hillary Clinton, should she win the presidency, will never have anything close to the consent of the governed. She will never be reliably cleared and an extremely high percentage of the public will never believe her — and will be correct in doing so.
We live under a dictatorship of the moral narcissist bourgeoisie. They think they know more than we do and can do anything they wish. Actually, they know little and couldn’t care less. All they want is power and will cling to at it any cost, even the truth and basic morality. And we are their victims.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His most recent book is—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already
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