January 2, 2018
GOOD CATCH!:
The Hunt for Clinton's 33,000 Deleted Emails (Martin Longman January 2, 2018, Washington Monthly)
On July 2nd, 2016, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested that the Russians should be asked to obtain the 33,000 emails. On July 27th, Trump followed Cotton's advice and made a direct appeal to the Russians for the 33,000 emails. This past May, GOP operative Peter W. Smith committed suicide not long after the Wall Street Journal questioned him about his efforts to obtain the 33,000 emails from the Russians.The Journal stories said that on Labor Day weekend last year Smith assembled a team to acquire emails the team theorized might have been stolen from the private server Clinton had used while secretary of state. Smith's focus was the more than 30,000 emails Clinton said she deleted because they related to personal matters. A huge cache of other Clinton emails were made public.Smith told the Journal he believed the missing emails might have been obtained by Russian hackers. He also said he thought the correspondence related to Clinton's official duties. He told the Journal he worked independently and was not part of the Trump campaign.Smith let it be known that he was working in tandem with Michael Flynn and his son, Michael Jr.I couldn't understand why there was this widespread belief that the 33,000 emails were not only other than what Hillary Clinton had claimed (non work-related, private correspondence), but that they were already in the Russians' possession, or easily obtainable to them. There is, after all, no indication that Clinton's server was ever compromised.New revelations about George Papadopoulos may solve the mystery:During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia's top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.About three weeks earlier [April 26, 2016], Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.Let's look at an article that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano wrote for Fox News on May 12th, 2016. This is a period of time in between April 26th, when Papadopoulos was told about stolen emails, and the incident three weeks later in the Kensington Wine Rooms where an inebriated Papadopoulos blabbed about the theft to the Australian ambassador. See if you can figure out why I'm citing this piece.While all of this has been going on, intelligence community sources have reported about a below the radar screen, yet largely known debate in the Kremlin between the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Intelligence Services. They are trying to come to a meeting of the minds to determine whether the Russian government should release some 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton's emails that it obtained either by hacking her directly or by hacking into the email of her confidante, Sid Blumenthal.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2018 6:45 PM
