While Democrats were busy distracting America with their gun-control temper tantrum, Hillary Clinton’s server technician, Bryan Pagliano, was invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid giving testimony in federal court… one hundred and twenty-five times.
Luckily for Pagliano, Democrats want the Second Amendment wiped out with secret government lists, not the Fifth. In fact, while Democrats are eager to get those secret lists rolling for American citizens, they were pretty upset by the suggestion that government employees shouldn’t be allowed to invoke the Fifth to avoid giving testimony related to their job duties.
We’ll never have “watch lists” of government elites suspected of involvement in corruption. The Fifth Amendment is the only part of the Bill of Rights Democrats still seem to care about, but they’re really in love with it.
Evidently Democrats do think there should be lists of dissident Americans who aren’t allowed to bring Freedom of Information Act cases because they have anti-regime political agendas, because CNN reports “Pagliano’s attorneys have said their client is ‘caught up in a lawsuit with an undisputed political agenda,’ and that he would not cooperate with Judicial Watch.”
“The fact Hillary Clinton’s former IT staffer pleaded the Fifth an astounding 125 times is another reminder of how much she has to hide and how serious the FBI’s criminal investigation really is,” Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus accurately observed, prompting CNN to turn this into a “Republicans Pounce” story.
While Clinton and her henchmen do their best to obstruct the investigation, highly inconvenient facts keep slipping out, such as yesterday’s stunning revelation that Clinton’s homebrew server was pulled offline in 2011 because a hacking attempt was detected. Given that the server was packed with classified material – contrary to Clinton’s endless false denials – that’s a wee bit disturbing.
CNN also notes an amusing email chain from 2010 in which top Clinton aide Huma Abedin “expresses frustration over the fact that emails from the server aren’t reaching people on the State Department’s email server.”
“We should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you’re not going to spam,” Abedin told Clinton.
Clinton wasn’t just a horrible Secretary of State, she was anti-competent. Her shady email system demonstrably compromised the ability of other State Department officials to do their jobs, and her own aides knew it.
Abedin is scheduled to testify before the same court next week. Perhaps there will be some follow-up questions about these emails. Most likely, we’ll get to hear the Fifth Amendment recited another hundred times by another Clinton aide.
The Washington Examiner notes that U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan demanded the details of Pagliano’s immunity deal from the FBI, which has been trying to keep the deal under wraps while it pursues the Clinton criminal investigation.
The judge also denied a motion from Pagliano’s attorneys to keep plaintiffs Judicial Watch from filming his deposition, “for fear that the tape could be used as fodder against Clinton in the presidential race.” However, the footage of Pagliano’s testimony will remain under seal.
In another blow to the Clinton machine, Judicial Watch announced on Tuesday that it has obtained the State Department records referenced in the Inspector General’s report criticizing Clinton’s email practices. The records themselves have never been released to the public before, although the OIG report was.
One of those records refers to the same hacking incident Abedin described in her email… but the technical adviser quoted in that record spoke of multiple attacks on Clinton’s server, and the State Department actually instructed officials not to email “anything sensitive” to Clinton until the situation was brought under control.
“The new Hillary Clinton email records show she had zero interest in disclosing her emails to the public as the law requires. And the emails show the Obama State Department gave special accommodations to Clinton’s email system, which the agency knew was unsecure, was likely hacked, and was not transparent under FOIA,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.