Hillary’s E-mail and the Desire for Secrecy

In the last few days Hillary Clinton was cleared of prosecution by the FBI, in an investigation that involved 147 agents, with regards to hosting her own e-mail server at the State Department while she served as Secretary of State. Then the Obama administration declassified what had become known as the “28 pages” related to the possible Saudi connection to 911. The documents remained classified for 13 year, citing reasons of national security, until Obama came under great pressure to declassify them.

Hillary defense, in part, was that it was standard practise to have a separate e-mail. Unsaid was the obvious reason she did it was to control the negative material in the e-mail, otherwise known as controlling the message. It is an often used practise inside the United States government.

This explanation is a reality in that every government employee, including the president, has an e-mail separate from their official government e-mail address. Is there a chance that any or all of these government employees at one time took a call on their private cell phone that dealt with official business? In the case of Obama he actually fought, and won the battle to keep his Canadian built Blackberry for correspondence with family friends and some of his senior administrators. Part of the compromise involved the statement that all the e-mail from the phone would be subject to FOIA once Obama’s files open to researchers in 2022.

Although the government position on paper would be that there is complete transparency on records and that everything is recorded for history, even a cursory review will show that this is not true. The more accurate assessment of the situation is that secrecy is power, and unless forced those in government will not voluntarily hand their dirty laundry out for all to see. The game is to get elected and the rules are simple. Talk about the good things and avoid talking about the bad things at all costs.

Even Trump who is trying to use the e-mail story to cast doubt on Hillary’s trustworthiness, has played the secrecy game many times Examples include:

·         Using his lawyers to block the release video depositions that he did from him Trump University court case. Like Hillary’s e-mail defense he has issued a raft of explanations why the videos must be kept from the voters.

·         Trump has broken with standard practise in releasing his taxes going back many years. Like the Hillary e-mail controversy Trump has issued explanations explaining why the tax records must be kept secret.

·         Trump has a policy that requires nearly everyone in his campaign and businesses to sign legally binding nondisclosure agreements. This prohibits them from releasing any information whatsoever about the Trump, his family or his companies. Trump has proposed using such agreements in the White House. In a recent lawsuit Trump filed a 10-million-dollar lawsuit against former senior campaign consultant Sam Nunberg for violating the agreement.

Here are a couple of clear examples of how secrecy had been used and the defenses given for keeping the people in the dark. There are thousands of examples that could be cited but I will stick to a couple that have a connection to the UFO story.

1.       According to an oral history interview that was done by Truman’s Air Force Adviser General Robert Landry, Truman used an of-the-record system to deal with UFOs. Landry reported that when he got the job in February 1948 one of the first things that he was tasked with by Truman was to brief him every three months on the subject of UFOs. What is important about the order was that the briefing was to be done orally.This is a clear indication that Truman considered the subject so sensitive that he did not want any paper trail associated with it. It was a paperless process established already in 1948 that helps to explain why there are so few documents to declassify. 

There may have been no documents to start with. In reality the entire UFO subject might be on a separate Clinton style e-mail server. If you believe the conspiracy theories associated with the UFO phenomena none of the 13 administrations that have dealt with the UFO phenomena even have the password to the server, and are completely shut out.

2.       In the case of the UFO crash at Kecksburg in December 1965 a review of President Johnson’s files for the period showed many off the record meetings. This indicated that a lot of the Johnson administration may have been conducted off-the-record.

Interesting meeting with Buford Ellington on the day Johnson returned to the White House after the Keckburg crash. One of Ellington's top officials was noted as sending messages about recovered hardware as the crash recovery was taking place.

3.       Vice President Dan Quayle spoke of the intelligence briefing that he received just before taking office. He stated, “The most probably the most interesting were the ones where they said, 'Let me just tell you some other things that we know.' They really didn’t want to put that down on paper."

4.       A request for a video and 83 photos from the 50^th birthday party for John Podesta (then Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton) held in the White House was rejected under an exemption of privacy and then the appeal was denied under the same exemption. The event involved public officials in a public building paid for by American tax dollars, but was probably refused because Bill and Hillary Clinton dressed up like the two main characters of the TV show X-files.

Even the entire security system used in the United States, set up by the president through a series of executive orders, is a system designed to keep certain information in the dark. Like Hillary’s private e-mail server, the good material ends up getting released and the material that is bad, or may show violations of the laws in other countries, is withheld for “national security concerns” or “protection of sources and methods.”