Politics: Top Hillary aide Cheryl Mills: I've been told to destroy my e-mails

Politics: Top Hillary aide Cheryl Mills: I've been told to destroy my e-mails

Image Credit: U.S. Department of Labor

Published by: Dan Calabrese on Monday August 10th, 2015

So a judge asks the government to kindly ask her not to.
Now this can't be, can it? A Clinton aide blatantly destroying evidence in a criminal investigation? That would never happen.
OK, I'll wait for you to stop laughing. This is the level of absurdity we've reached in the Hillary e-mail boondoggle, except that this doesn't even really quite cover it. Because not only is Cheryl Mills destroying e-mails she's supposed to be handing over, but the federal judge who issued the order is now sadly reduced to pleading with the Obama Administration to please ask her not to. How do you think that's going to go? The New York Observer reports:

In a letter sent to the U.S. State Department and just filed today with U.S. federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the counsel for Cheryl Mills wrote: “Ms. Mills does not believe that she has paper copies of potential records in her possession. Following our production on August 10, 2015 [of the defense counsel’s version of the electronic records], we have instructed her to delete any and all electronic records in her possession.”
That is a far stretch from a statement by Ms. Mills under penalty of perjury, and she and her lawyers are planning to delete the emails Judge Sullivan wants produced?
Judicial Watch has made an emergency filing in Judge Sullivan’s court to stop the further destruction of evidence of what may very well be assorted criminal conduct and violations of numerous federal laws.
This all just surfaced in State Department’s status report filed today in response to Judge Sullivan’s order. Yesterday evening, State finally produced some correspondence between it and Hillary’s right and left hands—Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills. It has not produced its correspondence with Ms. Clinton, and it is now clear that Ms. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills plan to thumb their noses at the Judge and the State Department. No one is “cooperating,” despite their empty rhetoric to the contrary.
The correspondence that has been produced verifies that the State Department itself has not been forthcoming with Judge Sullivan, with Congress, or with anyone else. Using her private server allowed Ms. Clinton to use an off-the-grid system for her entire tenure in the Department, and the State Department kept that startling fact a secret as long as possible. 

Of course they're not cooperating. Did anyone seriously think they would? Judge Sullivan is hoping he can get better results by putting the State Department on the case, which I'm sure will work out grandly:

Sullivan did not appear completely satisfied with the assurances in the latest round of letters, as he issued an order Friday night instructing State to ask Clinton, Mills and Abedin not to destroy any official records.
"The Court hereby directs the Government to request that Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin, and Ms. Cheryl Mills i) not delete any federal documents, electronic or otherwise, in their possession or control, and ii) provide appropriate assurances to the Government that the above-named individuals will not delete any such documents," wrote Sullivan, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. "The Government shall inform the Court of the status of its compliance with this Order no later than August 12, 2015, including a copy of any assurances provided by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills that they will not delete any federal documents in their possession or control."

So a federal judge orders Hillary and her cronies to preserve their e-mails and they blow him off and just delete them anyway. In response, the judge tells the State Department to issue an additional order for him? I'm sure that's going to terrify them.
Look, if Hillary, Abedin and Mills are blatantly violating a federal judge's order not to destroy evidence, then the only people the judge should be sending to deal with them are people who would wield handcuffs and keys to a jail cell. Hillary believes this will never happen to her because she is Hillary Clinton and if anyone were ever to arrest her she could spin it as a political overreach about something the voters don't care about, blah blah blah. And apparently Judge Sullivan, who was appointed by Bill Clinton by the way, fears it could go that way too. Who else can do what these people are doing and get away with it to this extent?
It's interesting how man parallels are developing between this situation and Bill's impeachment. Supposedly the core mischief - an affair with a White House intern - was not worth impeaching him over, but the coverup crimes like perjury and obstruction of justice were. Sort of the way everyone always talked about Watergate, remember? The coverup was supposed to be the bigger problem than the crime itself?
Of course, Democrats would not agree that an affair with an intern wasn't sufficiently serious if we were talking about a Republican president, but leave that aside. In Hillary's case, both the initial crime and the obvious coverup are more than sufficiently serious to disqualify her from office. Using a private e-mail server to conduct all her business as Secretary of State - in violation of department policy and with full knowledge that you'd be putting classified information in jeopardy of exposure - is the height of irresponsibility. The deplorable obfuscations we're seeing now only drive the point home further. These people are neither competent nor trustworthy, and anyone who doesn't see that simply doesn't want to see it.