Clinton’s Emailgate Intensifies: Experts Say Staffer’s Testimony is Dangerous

It’s been over a year since Hillary Clinton’s “EmailGate” scandal began, and the presidential candidate has yet to be charged with a crime.

In January, it was reported that many of the emails on Clinton’s private home email server were top secret, and that some are “too damaging” to national security to be released under any circumstances.

About a month ago, the Justice Department granted immunity to Bryan Pagliano, a former State Department staffer who set up Hillary’s private email server in 2009. After he set it up, Hillary then paid him personally to maintain it for her.

Pagliano had previously invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before a Congressional committee last fall; now he has immunity and will testify.

In the article The Clinton Investigation Enters a Dangerous Phase, Judge Andrew Napolitano explains why Pagliano’s testimony is so dangerous to Clinton’s case:

Pagliano has explained to federal prosecutors the who, what, when, how and why he migrated an open State Department email stream and a secret State Department email stream from government computers to Clinton’s secret server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. He has told them that Clinton paid him $5,000 to commit that likely criminal activity.

He has also told some of the 147 FBI agents assigned to this case that Clinton herself was repeatedly told by her own State Department information technology experts and their colleagues at the National Security Agency that her persistent use of her off-the-shelf BlackBerry was neither an effective nor an acceptable means of receiving, transmitting or safeguarding state secrets. Little did they know how reckless she was with government secrets, as none was apparently then aware of her use of her non-secure secret server in Chappaqua for all of her email uses.

Now, prosecutors have begun to ask Clinton’s top aides during her time as secretary of state to come in for interviews.

Judge Napolitano explains that these former aides will be going in blind, because the DOJ will not reveal what they already know about each of them. Those aides run the risk of getting caught in a “perjury trap,” as lying to or misleading prosecutors and FBI agents is a crime.

After that phase, things get even more risky for Clinton, Judge Napolitano says:

After interviewing any Clinton aides who choose to be interviewed, the DOJ personnel on the case will move their investigation into its final phase, in which they will ask Clinton herself whether she wishes to speak with them. The prosecutors will basically tell her lawyers that they have evidence of the criminal behavior of their client and that before they present it to a grand jury, they want to afford Clinton an opportunity blindly to challenge it.

This will be a moment she must devoutly wish would pass from her as she will face a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma.

Clinton will be faced with a tough dilemma, as she has lied – publicly and repeatedly – about the private server. She claimed she used the private server so she could use one mobile device for all of her emails – but the FBI knows she actually had four mobile devices. She also claimed (publicly and under oath) that she neither sent nor received anything “marked classified” – but the FBI knows that nothing is marked classified, and that her emails contained secret information.

If Clinton declines an interview with the FBI, she will look bad in the eyes of the public – after all, she has said publicly that she’d be happy to talk to agents.

Earlier today, it was reported that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey have been meeting frequently to discuss the progress and handling of the case.

From Fox News:

“In a case like this you get one shot at the queen,” the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said referring to Clinton, the former secretary of state and current front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. “The pressures are enormous on the agents, as the case has to be airtight and perfect.”

Of Pagliano, a source told Fox News “His importance as a witness cannot be underestimated.”

Pagliano has first-hand knowledge of who held and used accounts on the server from Clinton’s dealings in politics, philanthropy and private enterprise. Understanding how these worlds intersected is “causing rats to leave the ship and others to sweat blood,” said the source.

On March 16, 2016, WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive of 30,322 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State:

The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016.

It appears that the FBI is getting closer to wrapping up their investigation of Emailgate. Will anything come of it, or is this just more political theater?