The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2: Fake Emails and the Failure of HIs Government Transparency Promise

We are going to spend the next week or so reviewing the performance and results of the Obama administration from a number of different perspectives. We will be covering some new ground besides reposting some previous reviews in different areas that we have done on this administration.

I will be honest upfront and tell you that I see very little positive coming out of this administration. I believe, based on the discussion that we will have over the next week or so, that this is the most inept, corrupt, illegal, and dysfunctional Presidential administration in my lifetime, worse even than the Carter administration. General categories of incompetence include the following broad categories:

• Promises not kept or that were originally never meant to be kept and were just deceptions from the start.
• Government functions that are dysfunctional, obese, inefficient, and ineffective but very expensive from a taxpayer perspective.
• Constitutional violations that are widespread and destructive.
• Law breaking by many different members of this administration that are widespread and destructive.
• Government spending that is out of control, threatening the fundamental existence of this country; economy and democracy.
• Major issues that have not been addressed in any strategic or tactical way, e.g. failing public education, leaky borders, a lots war on drugs, crumbling infrastructure, etc.
• A Presidential leadership team that would rather play golf, attend political fund raisers, appear in nonsensical videos, host athletic teams, and take worldwide and expensive vacations but not resolve ANY issue facing the country.

Now, before any readers get crazy partisan and start accusing me of a hatchet job, consider the following:

• I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life.
• Up until 2010, I had never voted for a Republican for national office in my life (I am over 60 years old). 
• Most of my votes through the decades for local, county, and state offices have not been Republican.

Thus, by no stretch of the imagination am I anti-Obama because I am a Republican. I am an American who has looked at the facts and realities of this Presidency, facts and realities that we will lay out over the next week, and have come to the conclusion that this has been the worst, most secretive, most ineffective, most destructive, and most illegal Presidential administration my lifetime and possibly in the country’s lifetime. As someone recently said, the Obama Presidency is a Presidency that Nixon aspired to from a corruption and illegality perspective, certainly not a compliment.

Yesterday, we focused on the multitude of lies, deceptions, and broken promises that President Obama has made over the first six years of his Presidency. The impact, size, and audacity of his deceptions was impressive, the good they did for the country and his integrity is negligible. Today, we will shift the focus a little and talk about the illegal activities of many members of his administration in the area of email hijinks.

Apparently, if you are working for the Federal government, you have to use official government issued, protected, and maintained email accounts and computers. It is my understanding that failure to do so is a criminal activity and a violation of existing law.

The rationale, as far as I can tell, is sound for such a policy and law:

1. The government should be accountable to the citizens of the country and their accountability and activities in this electronic age has to include their electronic communications to ensure that laws and the Constitution are being followed.
2. There is no secret that the world is full of computer hackers. Thus, by not using official government email accounts and computers, government secrets and activities are more likely to be hacked and published if not protected by government security protocols. And even this precaution is not fool proof, given that Eric Snowden was able to capture and release thousands and thousands of secret government documents. Imagine how much easier it would be to get U.S. government secrets that were not as well protected.
3. And from a policy and public relations perspective, it made super sense for the Obama administration to adhere to the letter and spirit of this law since he promised us he would run the most transparent Presidential administration ever which presumably means that government executives and employees would not be sneaking around and using secret email accounts.

Despite this sound, three part rationale, it appears that many within the administration went off the plan and ended up, and got caught, using private, unofficial email accounts to conduct secret government business. We saw the first inkling of this rogue behavior from the previous head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson several years ago. 

She got caught when it was revealed that she was using a private email account, which I think was named after a dog from her life, to conduct secret EPA business. By using a secret, unofficial email account, she could hide agreements, deals, law breaking from Congress and the American people since any audit of her official email accounts would obviously not show what she was doing in the shadows of her unofficial email communications. 

But this type of illegal behavior really hit the fan hard recently when it was revealed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also indulged herself in the use of private, non-government email accounts to conduct official State Department business. Even worse, it is now established that she used these secret email accounts via a computer server that she installed IN HER HOUSE! 

This is obviously much more dangerous behavior vs. the EPA hiding of communications. The State Department deals with the relationships of the U.S. with the rest of the world’s countries. Lord knows what kind of secret deals and communications were going on with the rest of the world that Congress and Americans might never had known about.

Plus, and probably even more important, did her use of a secret computer and secret email accounts put the security of the country at risk? Again, there are hackers all over the world, both private and government sponsored hackers, that what have loved to get access to the Secretary of State’s emails. 

Did the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or other governments hack her emails as they were sent out? If she was operating her own server, again, out of HER HOUSE, I am pretty sure it would be a safe bet that it was nowhere as secure than government maintained and protected computers and email accounts. If foreign hackers hacker her emails, did that put the strategies and interests of the country at risk? 

Did terrorist hackers know that the consulate at Benghazi was under protected since a lot of the communications from murdered ambassador Chris Stevens involved his pleas for increased security? Did that embolden the terrorists to attack and murder four Americans because they knew from Clinton’s email accounts that security was not adequate? Did Clinton cut deals with the Muslim Brotherhood or other shady organizations to help topple the Qaddafi regime, using the private emails to hide her collusion with known terrorist groups?

Did Clinton use the private emails to cut deals with foreigners and foreign governments who many obviously contributed millions and millions of dollars to the Clintons’ foundation in exchange for diplomatic favors, favors that were meant to be hidden from Congress and the American people? 

As you can see, the potential list of bad things that could have happened, either intentionally or unintentionally, by Clinton using secret email accounts and her own computer server in HER HOUSE, is long and potentially damaging to the country.

That is why such behavior was ruled illegal and punishable by a court of law. But that day may not come right away if ever. Clinton is dodging and blaming and weaving, trying to extricate herself out of this serious breach of security and law. She has admitted to deleting tens of thousands of emails that she alone deemed private and not State Department related. I am assuming this was easy to do since the emails were on a computer server IN HER HOUSE. But it certainly raises suspicions that if they were harmless, why delete them? 

She is trying to put the onus back on the State Department to give the emails to Congress. There are rumors and stories starting to circulate that Obama and his cohorts are behind the leaking of the existence of the emails since the Obamas and Clintons supposedly to not like each other. All kinds of rumors, stories, and accusations about this serious reach of national security and established law are likely to come up in the following months. However, what is not in doubt is that 1) she broke existing law and 2) she had the computer server located IN HER HOUSE.

But Ms. Clinton and Ms. Jackson are not the only Obama officials to break existing law by using private, off the books email accounts. The Huffington Post recently reported that Attorney General Eric Holder has also used secret emails and various aliases even though he was the nation’s top law enforcement officer. One of the aliases was “Henry Yearwood” in additional to at least two others.

Unlike Clinton’s secret email accounts, at least Holder’s secret accounts were Federal government email accounts which hopefully had better protection and security than Clinton’s accounts which ran through a computer server IN HER HOUSE. Of course, Holder’s office claimed that his use of secret accounts and different aliases did not interfere with the production of Holder emails demanded by Congressional committees and investigators or any other Freedom of Information requests. Right...nothing to see here, just move along.

But really, he is the top law enforcement official in the country and here he is breaking the law from a private email perspective. What does that say for the integrity of the Obama administration and Holder’s administration of the Justice Department? Not much. Pretty sure that if we as citizens destroyed and hid sensitive documents we would end up behind bars.

So the head of the EPA illegally hid communications and plans from Congress and the country with fake email accounts. 

The Associated Press reported in 2013 that the former head of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, illegally used private email accounts to hide plans and communications from Congress and the country. 

The top diplomat in the U.S. and the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, used illegal and fake email accounts to hide her dealings with worldwide leaders via a computer server IN HER HOUSE. 

And the top law enforcement official in the Obama administration also used fake email accounts and aliases to hide communications from the country.

Illegal, deceptive, suspicious, endangering national security, possibly enriching one’s self or one’s foundation, etc., are certainly not descriptors that a noble and honest Presidency wishes to be known as. But really, anyone that knows the realities of this administration is not likely to use the words noble and honest in praise of it. 

Which is especially disappointing since, as we pointed out yesterday, Obama promised the most transparent Presidency of all time. Instead, fake email accounts and rogue computer servers give the impression that this administration has more things to hide than any other administration in recent and not so recent history. A failure of historical proportions.

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