By John Merline at Investor’s Business Daily
Hillary Clinton’s email troubles just keep getting weirder and weirder — and harder for anyone but the most die-hard Clinton fans to ignore.
The latest twist is news that four years’ worth of State Department emails from Clinton’s top IT staffer, Bryan Pagliano, can’t be found.
“The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” said State’s Elizabeth Trudeau.
State was, however, able to find Pagliano emails for his “recent work at the Department as a contractor, but the files are from after Secretary Clinton left the Department.”
In other words, only those emails he sent after Clinton left State can be found. How convenient.
Pagliano, for those following the story, has been granted immunity for his testimony about how he set up Clinton’s private email server in her home, which she used exclusively to conduct State Department business. He is, in other words, a key witness in what could end up being a criminal case.
The missing emails came to light as the result of a Republican National Committee Freedom of Information Act request — not, it’s worth noting, from any mainstream media outlet — which asked for Pagliano’s emails along with Clinton’ Blackberry Messenger communication.
“It’s hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton’s reckless email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at the State Department,” RNC spokesman Raj Shah told The Daily Beast. “Such records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton’s server, and why he was granted immunity by the FBI.”
If this were some lone bureaucratic hiccup, it would be highly suspicious, given the nature of the investigation. But this fits into a broader pattern by Clinton and the Obama administration of stonewalling investigations, to say nothing of emails central to an investigation mysteriously disappearing. (Remember Lois Lerner’s “lost” IRS emails, which she claimed were destroyed when her hard drive suddenly crashed?)
This kind of behavior would normally light a fire under law enforcement — and the press — since these things usually smack of a cover-up.
But the mainstream press is asleep at the switch — just check out the softball questions John Dickerson lobbed at Clinton on “Face the Nation.” Everyone seems to expect the FBI and/or Justice Department to dismiss the Clinton email scandal as much ado about nothing.
And we’re supposed to wonder why people are cynical about government and don’t trust the press?
