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Peter Van Buren, a former diplomat at the U.S. State Department, author of Ghosts of Tom Jode, and before that, we met, well, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and we regularly run him on antiwar.com on the blog and in the viewpoint section there.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
Not so good today, Scott.
I'm sorry to say.
The news about Hillary Clinton really caught me both by surprise and is extremely distressing.
Well, you're shocked but not really surprised, right?
Was it just because today's the day they chose?
What was surprising about it?
I'm surprised in a number of ways.
First of all, of course, today being the day of the announcement is basically a mark in the history books that an election has been stolen in the United States prior to the votes even being cast.
With Bush-Gore 2000, they at least waited until the people had voted to start manipulating things.
Here we have an election stolen, the essential elements of a coup.
Hillary Clinton, let's look at the timeline of events.
The FBI spends a year or more investigating Hillary Clinton.
Her sysadmin asks for the Fifth Amendment.
All this goes on for a long period of time.
June 28th, Bill Clinton meets with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the deciding official, in private, and they claim they simply talked about grandchildren.
Okay.
Two days after that, July 1st, Lynch announces she would accept Director Comey's recommendation on the email case.
On June 3rd, the New York Times states that Hillary Clinton is considering keeping Loretta Lynch in her administration when she wins in November.
The FBI then goes on to interview Hillary Clinton for three and a half hours.
I think that was Sunday or Monday.
I have to look that up.
And then this morning, we wake up to find out that Obama and Hillary are going to be flying together on Air Force One for their first joint campaign appearance.
And then two hours after that, the director of the FBI stands up and says, basically, there's nothing to see here, folks.
There's nothing to prosecute.
Adds to that, that Hillary and her staff acted with extreme carelessness and that she did, in fact, have 110 classified emails move over her homebrew unclassified email system and wireless.
And those last two statements count as the good news for Hillary's supporters.
Though that chain of events, we're not going to say conspiracy theory, because that just gives opponents too much of an easy target.
We're going to say that they were going to say at the minimum an extreme appearance of impropriety and raising a number of unanswered questions about what really happened here.
And then if you like, we can start to dig in a little bit to what we know of Comey's statement.
Yeah, well, so I guess here's the thing.
Like, you know, I don't know.
You're right.
It sounds to me what you're saying basically is you have all of this, you know, very conflicted interests going on with the head of the FBI, the attorney general, the president, the former secretary of state and the current administration who's running for president right now and who obviously is in a position to keep Comey and Lynch or promote them to wherever, give him her job and put her on the Supreme Court or God knows what, all these things.
And yet, come on, we all knew that this is exactly how it is because America is a corrupt, evil empire.
There's no rule of law.
There's nothing even like that.
The only reason they let you keep all the white marble stuff in D.C. is just for PR.
The CIA and the Pentagon, they run this show.
And there's no kind of law that could possibly apply to somebody like Hillary Clinton.
And so therefore, ipso facto, you already know that.
And so therefore, that means that you knew that this is exactly what was going to happen.
So what's shocking?
How is this a coup d'etat when all this is is business being done in America on a Tuesday?
Well, sure.
We've interviewed on this topic many times, and I have maintained from the very first breath that Hillary would never be indicted.
That's not what we're surprised about here.
I think what surprises me is, of course, that it actually has happened now.
I mean, up until an hour and a half ago, this was all in the Peter and Scott think category.
It's done now.
The bullet has been fired in Dealey Plaza.
But I think the other thing that remains shocking to me is, I guess, the brazenness of it.
They didn't even try a little to make it seem reasonable or okay or anything along those lines.
They literally stood up and flung shit in the face of American democracy and the American people, knowing that we would simply shrug and say, well, for the people who support Hillary, it's like, whoo, she's not indicted.
For the people that oppose Hillary, we would simply shrug our shoulders and say, yeah, we knew about it all the time.
And we would just go on about our business.
It was that raised middle finger to democracy, I think, that really shocks me and hurts me the most.
Well, and, you know, the leak to The New York Times that, yeah, we're really considering keeping her on as attorney general.
I mean, Jesus Christ, what is this, you know, Argentina or something?
One does wonder whether Bill was sent out there to meet with the attorney general in Phoenix privately, in addition to catch up on their grandchildren, whether Bill was sent out there as the messenger to let her know what was awaiting her.
Well, and then the New York Times thing is just in case Bill wasn't being clear enough or what.
I mean, holy crap.
You're just – that's why I still remain shocked.
It's like putting their airplane meeting on Periscope or something, to put it in The New York Times like that, isn't it?
You know, I expected – what I expected, and maybe I'm getting too optimistic in my old age, what I expected was a kind of wishy-washy FBI report that really didn't conclude or say anything particular other than we're not going to indict her.
You know, mistakes were made, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I expected it to be dumped on a Friday deep into August where it would have minimal impact.
I didn't expect it to come so close to Bill's meeting, the announcement about Loretta Lynch, and the fact that the conventions are coming up here.
I didn't expect it to be as brazen and shocking.
I mean, it'd be like if after the Bush-Gore election theft in 2000, you know, George W. Bush stood up and said, yeah, well, we got away with that shit, didn't we, Americans?
Watch this drive.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It would be something along those lines.
I mean, they have literally just simply said, we don't care what the American people think about any of this.
We don't care what it looks like.
We're going to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.
We really shouldn't waste everyone's time with a campaign that's going to drag on into November.
It just really is a waste of everybody's time and money.
The Trump and Clinton campaigns should donate their money to some worthy charity, and Hillary should probably just get sworn in this week, save Obama.
This last shitty four months, he's got to still drag this thing out.
Yeah, it does sort of feel like Yeltsin installing Putin right before he resigned, right before the election in 2000.
Remember that?
Oh, yeah, you were working at the State Department at the time.
Yeah.
Hey, man, boy, there's a conversation, but for a different day.
Here's a quote from Comey today.
Hey, look, this is not to suggest that an individual in similar circumstances would not face charges if they were to do the same thing that she did.
So that's your setup.
Peter Van Buren, you're the prosecutor now.
Indict Hillary Clinton.
Why should anyone in my audience think that a scandal called the e-mail scandal is anything that you ought to want to put the former Secretary of State in prison over?
Your Honor, 110 classified e-mails were transmitted and received through Hillary Clinton's e-mail server.
There is no direct connection between the classified systems in the U.S. government and that server, which meant that on 110 individual instances, someone had to rekey information from classified into a known unclassified system.
Those are crimes.
They violate the Espionage Act and all sorts of national security acts.
Hillary Clinton, as the senior classifying official, never mind her decades of experience, is well in a position to understand that e-mails talking about the identities of CIA covert officers spying on North Korea via satellite are clearly classified material.
She took no action on her own part or against any of her other people, even though she was well aware that the laws address both marked and unmarked classified material.
In addition, Your Honor, there is no precedent for the decisions that were made in the case.
We'll be addressing individual instances at great length, but I'll point to two cases in this introduction.
CIA officer John Kiriakou, who served three years in federal prison for exposing an unmarked, unclassified business card with the name of a CIA employee on it, not a covert operator, and Robert McLean, a TSA employee who was fired for exposing a text that was only classified retroactively.
I will bring up also the case of David Petraeus, who was punished, albeit a minor legal punishment, and forced to resign from his job for transmitting classified information via an unclassified system.
I'd also like, Your Honor, to raise the case of Marine Major Jason Bresler, who shared classified information on an unclassified system with his colleagues in Afghanistan to warn them of an impending Taliban attack.
He saved the lives of fellow Marines, but was forced out of the service in response to his violation of national security.
In addition, Your Honor, I would bring up in the Hillary case the question about her actions vis-à-vis the Freedom of Information Act.
During her tenure as Secretary of State and for some time afterwards, the Department of State maintained that it had no e-mail records available in response to requests and essentially blocked journalists, academics, citizens, and for a period of time, Congress, from documents they were lawfully entitled to.
That doesn't even begin to get into the potential contents of the, I think it's 33,000 e-mails that Clinton deleted without any oversight.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, these clearly are criminal acts, and they would absolutely fall under the Constitution's statements of crimes and misdemeanors, which high crimes and misdemeanors, which is the standard set for impeachment of a sitting president.
We are witnessing an embarrassment of judgment, and anyone who says they represent the U.S. government or the State Department in good conscience today should consider resignation or preferably consider leaking what are no doubt voluminous internal documents explaining more about this case.
The leaking thing, I think, would be better, and if you don't want to send them to me, I'll suggest Scott Horton as a secondary outlet.
Well, I just appointed myself her defense attorney.
Hey, Peter Van Buren, Hillary Clinton didn't have any intent to break the law or do anything wrong?
Objection, Your Honor.
I offer in rebuttal the 1917 Espionage Act, under which the guy mentioned Kiriakou was found guilty.
The Espionage Act does not mention intent.
The word does not appear in that document.
Most of the national security laws, the word intent does not appear in that.
In addition, if Clinton, in fact, set up an unclassified server and knew over a period of time, 110 classified emails, that classified information was being sent, Your Honor, I can't find a way to describe that without describing purposeful, willful action, which is what the dictionary says intent is.
All right, now let me ask you this in all seriousness.
Yeah.
If you at the State Department had done anything like this when you worked there, what would have happened to you, seriously?
And keeping in mind you're a federal government employee, you can pretty much do whatever you want, right?
Except leak secrets, is that it?
Well, see, the thing is we don't have to talk in hypotheticals, Scott, because I lost my security clearance at the State Department.
Ironically, at the same time this was all going on with Hillary Clinton, no one knew, of course.
I lost my security clearance at the State Department because on my blog, wementwell.com, I linked to a WikiLeaks document.
The WikiLeaks document was marked confidential, but at the time the State Department was refusing to confirm or deny any of the WikiLeaks documents were real.
The State Department security people claimed that as a State Department official, by linking to the document, I validated it and thus participated in exposing classified material in an unclassified forum.
So you don't have to talk in hypotheticals about the State Department.
You can look at my case and there are many, many others which have less publicity attached to them.
Yeah, no, but what if you had done what Hillary had done where you had set up your own server and had pictures of North Korean nuclear facilities taken from spy satellites on your home server, etc., etc., as we know here, as Comey explained, using her unsecured BlackBerry to participate in these communications while in, I don't know if you use the word hostile, but it was whatever, adversarial foreign countries, making it very likely that her communications were being intercepted by them.
If that had been you, what would have happened to you?
You know, just spitballing, I think that that would have been considered kind of a bad thing.
When I had participated in the course of my 24 years at the State Department in a number of overseas visits by various secretaries of state, I can't count them all up, there must have been 10, 12, 15 of them, including Hillary Clinton.
And one of the things, well, two things happened when the secretary of state would travel overseas.
First is that an entire classified network, stand-alone classified network, would be created for the use of her and her staff.
That would be the first thing that happened.
Second, the secretary, the floor of the hotel the secretary was staying on, as well as the floors above and below, were taken over by the U.S. government and secured by Marines to protect the classified information in any classified conversations.
Obviously there was physical security as well.
The third is that the Secret Service would send an extremely large team of technical experts whose job it was to be on the watch for foreign governments or foreign entities spying on us to make sure, in fact, that we, the State Department employees, respected and maintained laws of security.
And if we had, for example, left out a classified document in a place where someone might have picked it up, we would have been in trouble for that.
So the idea of anyone going as far as she did, you wouldn't have gotten that far.
You would have been pulled off the assignment, punished, and possibly even lose your clearance and pushed into termination hearings, no doubt.
There can't be.
But then, so, well, I don't know.
On one hand you seem to be saying, yeah, man, Espionage Act, these are felonies, off to the state pen with you, right?
But then you go, ah, I might have lost my security clearance if I tried it.
So it sounds like a little bit of confusion there maybe.
No.
What you have here is a couple of things.
First of all, you have a spectrum of potential violations.
And the law for it, just like the idea would be if you go into the store and steal a candy bar, the law treats that very differently than if you knock over a bank and steal a million dollars.
One is a misdemeanor.
One is a felony.
One may get you a suspended sentence and a fine.
One may put you in jail for 20 years.
Security violations fall under that same idea, but both in quantity, and trust me, 110 emails is quantity, and also severity.
A low-level classified document is considered less of a significant violation than, say, documents about satellites over North Korea that clearly expose sources and methods and would allow the North Koreans to more efficiently hide their nuclear arsenal from us.
So it's a matter of degrees.
In addition, though it's not codified, most security professionals in evaluating these cases also look to the person.
For example, if it's a new hire State Department person who dropped a low-level classified document on the floor, they might get a minor reprimand.
The Secretary of State, with decades of experience, 110 emails, wireless communications overseas, to say simply, none of that really matters, you just shake your head and say, I don't know how to respond to that.
All right, y'all, that's Peter Van Buren.
He spent 24 years at the U.S. State Department.
He's the author of We Meant Well, the book, and the blog, wemeantwell.com.
Catch him often on the antiwar.com blog as well.
Thanks very much, Steve, appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott, thank you.
And try and take it easy, bud.
All right, y'all, Peter Van Buren there again, wemeantwell.com.
Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org.
Sign up for the podcast, feed, support at scotthorton.org, slash donate, and follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
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