Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul says that Hillary Clinton “ought to be indicted” and that Bill Clinton also engaged in illegal activity.
Paul made the statements during a town hall event Monday hosted by Breitbart News Daily host Stephen K. Bannon.
“I don’t know if she will be indicted. I think what she did is not that much different than what Petraeus did, and probably a lot worse than what Petraeus did,” Paul said of the disgraced former general.
Petraeus revealed some private or classified information to his mistress, one person. Hillary Clinton revealed thousands of potentially classified emails to hundreds of different people. And so I think if they [standards] consistently apply, yeah, she ought to be indicted.
I think also, even bigger than that question, is the whole idea of Bill Clinton getting these tens of millions of dollars in speeches to people who had issues before the Secretary of State. I mean, he got paid nearly a million dollars by [Swedish tech company] Ericsson who was petitioning to sell stuff to Iran, and it had to be approved by Hillary Clinton. How is that not a conflict of interest? How was that not illegal? He tried to get money form North Korea and they actually turned that one down as unethical. It is the only one they turned down.
Former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay recently cited friends in the FBI who are apparently “ready to indict” Clinton for her private email scandal, and the FBI is also reportedly investigating issues pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and potential public corruption.
The FBI case hinges on whether Clinton violated a provision of the Espionage Act of 1913.
The law (18 U.S. Code & 793 subsection f) makes clear that anyone who has materials “relating to the national defense” cannot lose or give them away. The law is broken if “through gross negligence permits [materials] to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.”
The penalty? A fine, a prison term of up to ten years, or “both.”
Since the FBI seized Clinton’s emails in August, the scandal has haunted her campaign.
Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett threw Clinton under the bus, saying that the White House provided guidance to the State Department telling employees to use official government email accounts.
Breitbart News first reported, based on high-level government sources, that of seven emails originally being analyzed by investigators to determine their classification status, two were deemed “Top Secret” and at least two were already classified when they were sent. Meaning: Clinton was sending and receiving classified information that she knew to be classified. The classifications were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Our exclusive report galvanized our readers and other media outlets, quickly picking up more than 12,000 social media shares and 5,000 comments. The Clinton campaign could not find a suitable talking point on the issue. The campaign tried to claim that Clinton did not send emails that were classified “when originated.”
But Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCollough, now under attack by Team Clinton, confirmed, “IC classification officials reviewed two additional emails and judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated.”
The inspector general went on to make a comprehensive report, filed earlier this month. He found that “several dozen” emails had classified information in them. “These declarations cover several dozen emails containing classified information determined … to be at the confidential, secret and top secret/sap levels,” McCollough wrote in a letter to Congress. That’s right. A “sap” level is an even higher classification status than “top secret.”
Clinton’s server was highly vulnerable to attack, like the kind that occurred to multiple of her email contractors and could have happened to her when she opened a virus-infected email from her friend.
Breitbart News reported that Clinton’s server was operating on the same email network, and was housed in the same exact physical space, as the server for the Clinton Foundation, indicating that they were sharing a server. Additionally, that space was in New York City, not in the basement of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York home, as she claimed. Daughter Chelsea Clinton’s office was also using the email network.
Numerous Clinton Foundation employees used the presidentclinton.com server for their own email addresses, which means that they were using email accounts that, if hacked, would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, as well.
Clinton’s server had an open webmail portal that gave potential hackers unrestricted access to Clinton’s personal information.
In fact, Clinton’s server went down at least three times during her tenure as Secretary of State, including weeks after the Benghazi terrorist attack. Clinton never even told her own IT Help Desk at the State Department that she was using a private server, keeping them in the dark about her secret activities.
Clinton even went so far as to hide the identity of the people running her private server, paying a company called Perfect Privacy, LLC. That company, based in Jacksonville, enters its own meaningless contact information into official Internet databases so that its clients’ identities will not be exposed.
As for Paul, his comments on the email scandal could help him bolster his quiet but still surprisingly viable campaign.
Breitbart News reported from the ground that Paul is setting up a sophisticated operation in Iowa on the backs of libertarian-minded college students at schools including the University of Iowa, where Paul has a presence on each campus.
“Seventeen to twenty-seven thousand votes is win, place, or show” said Rand PAC official Steve Grubbs, who previously worked in Iowa for Bob Dole and Steve Forbes. “For the first time since 2000, the caucus will occur while college is in session.”
“He’s peaking at just the right time,” Grubbs said of Paul.