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Top Clinton aide Mills reportedly walks out of FBI interview about emails

Erod

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Top Clinton aide Mills reportedly walks out of FBI interview about emails | Fox News

Senior Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and her lawyer walked out of a recent interview with the FBI about Clinton's private email system after an investigator asked a question Mills believed to be off limits, according to a published report.

The Washington Post said that Mills and her lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, returned to the interview room after a brief absence. However, the Post reported that Mills and Wilkinson asked for breaks during the interview to confer more than once.

According to the paper, the FBI investigator's questions that caused Mills and Wilkinson to walk out were related to the procedure used to produce emails for possible public release by the State Department. Mills ultimately did not answer questions about it because her attorney and Justice Department prosecutors deemed it confidential under attorney-client privilege.

Why would Mills need to claim attorney-client privilege over simple e-mails?
 
Attorney-client privilege isn't about what anybody needs.

Its an interesting approach. "I cannot discuss how I determined to comply with the order because that would violate attorney-client privilege" How does one prove you actually complied if you say you can't talk about it?
 
How is the FBI or anyone supposed to get the the bottom of anything when "questions are off limits"???

This isn't some dateline interview ffs!

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
 
Obviously an FBI question that hit awfully close to drawing blood or something.

She's got to be damn careful. Perjury in an FBI investigation is no joke.

She may be offered immunity.
 
She's got to be damn careful. Perjury in an FBI investigation is no joke.

She may be offered immunity.

Very true. Even Martha Stewart found that out.

You think it would be fair to assume that the higher the up the organization the immunity offers are made the more intent and condemning the case will be against those that don't get immunity offers? The most damaging information coming from those closest to you, on the inside of the organization.

Given the assumed slow and steady progress of the FBI in their investigation, seems that they are going to build an iron clad case against someone.
 
How is the FBI or anyone supposed to get the the bottom of anything when "questions are off limits"???

This isn't some dateline interview ffs!

That's right...it's a potential criminal investigation...where the things like "privilege" and the "fifth amendment" are even more important.
 
Its an interesting approach. "I cannot discuss how I determined to comply with the order because that would violate attorney-client privilege" How does one prove you actually complied if you say you can't talk about it?

The law requires the prosecution to prove that you did not comply. There is no legal requirement that you, or anyone, prove that you did.
 
The sheer definition of an evil, dirty politician is Hillary Clinton.

Her staff is scared out of their minds. Not of the FBI, but of the Clintons.
 
I don't get why you would even bother to imply that you consider these emails to be "simple."

If they're perfectly legal, what's to hide?
 
Very true. Even Martha Stewart found that out.

You think it would be fair to assume that the higher the up the organization the immunity offers are made the more intent and condemning the case will be against those that don't get immunity offers? The most damaging information coming from those closest to you, on the inside of the organization.

Given the assumed slow and steady progress of the FBI in their investigation, seems that they are going to build an iron clad case against someone.

What is certain is that after this is all done there can be no question that the FBI left no stone unturned and when no indictments are made on Hillary we can be sure that it is because there was no case against her and she is innocent. I'm sure you will agree.

So far, investigators have found scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing, though they are still probing the case aggressively and charges have not been ruled out. In recent weeks, they have been interviewing Mills and other aides. One former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Bryan Pagliano, was granted immunity so he would cooperate as part of the probe.

There is no indication a grand jury has been convened in the case.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-aide-leaves-interview-once-the-fbi-broaches-an-off-limits-topic/2016/05/10/cce5e0e8-161c-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_clintonaide-255pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
 
The law requires the prosecution to prove that you did not comply. There is no legal requirement that you, or anyone, prove that you did.

Very true. Most people forget that fact, especially when someone "pleads the 5th." But, no matter how true that is, the political optics are not good here.
 
If they're perfectly legal, what's to hide?

I could ask the same about you and allowing police to come look through your house.
 
I could ask the same about you and allowing police to come look through your house.

Seriously?

I'm not the Secretary of State working in public service in representation of the American people. I'm not privileged to top secret information. I don't speak on behalf of my country to foreign ambassadors and statesman.

And the police wouldn't find anything in my house anyway.
 
What is certain is that after this is all done there can be no question that the FBI left no stone unturned and when no indictments are made on Hillary we can be sure that it is because there was no case against her and she is innocent. I'm sure you will agree.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-aide-leaves-interview-once-the-fbi-broaches-an-off-limits-topic/2016/05/10/cce5e0e8-161c-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_clintonaide-255pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

It depends on how it's handled, and what results after. It's not going to be dependent on what all the politicians, pundits, and talk radio are going to be wailing and screaming about, it's going to depend on what the administration, DOJ, and FBI says and / or leaks.

It may very well be that the FBI had an iron clad case that's being politically subverted or suppressed. In which case, I'd expect a torrent of leaks from the FBI, and every possible action from Hillary and her clan to deny and suppress further leaks through court action. It'd be just grand if the entire set of files ended up on WikiLeaks, IMHO.

If there really is no case to be made, and no charges to be filed, then I'd expect no leaks, or leaks which prove that there was no case to be made.

Yeah, never mind what all the wailers are going to be doing. They are going to wail one way or another. What's the 'real' truth here?
 
Very true. Most people forget that fact, especially when someone "pleads the 5th." But, no matter how true that is, the political optics are not good here.

This does not relate to your job, and certainly not to a public governmental position like Secretary of State.
 
Seriously?

I'm not the Secretary of State working in public service in representation of the American people. I'm not privileged to top secret information. I don't speak on behalf of my country to foreign ambassadors and statesman.

And the police wouldn't find anything in my house anyway.

I'm illustrating the reasonable conclusion of your logic. And none of the distinguishing factors that you point out are reason for the aide (not the secretary of state by the way) to relinquish her legal rights.
 
HC had better hope that no charge is recommended here...if if that happens, she may be too damaged from this to win.

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
 
So far... an atom's worth of substance, and a pint's worth of speculation & hyperbole. Might become interesting as it plays out, but why waste time with it at the Tempers/Teapot stage?
 
I'm illustrating the reasonable conclusion of your logic. And none of the distinguishing factors that you point out are reason for the aide (not the secretary of state by the way) to relinquish her legal rights.

If your employer wants to ask you specific questions about emails on their server, guess what? They can.
 
It's happened before that the FBI had the goods on people, arrested them, showed their evidence to Justice Dept. prosecutors who agreed they had an airtight case and should indict these people--and then saw the whole thing fixed by higher officials. Read about the Amerasia affair of 1945. A foreign service officer named Robert Service had been living in Chungking with two housemates, one another U.S. official and the other a Chinese, who were both Soviet agents. When Service returned to the U.S. for several months in late 1944, he contacted two more senior officials in the State and Treasury Depts., both later proven to be Soviet moles.

Go-betweens also arranged for Service to meet a man named Philip Jaffe. Jaffe was an ardent Marxist with plenty of money who had a longtime interest in China. In the late 1930's, he had gone there with several other U.S. comrades and met with Mao Tse-Tung. Jaffe was the publisher of an obscure journal of Far East affairs called Amerasia. The OSS had discovered in early 1945 that the contents of one of its secret documents had appeared in this journal almost verbatim. When it searched Jaffe's offices, it found evidence implicating several other people, some private and some connected with the State Dept. State then called in the FBI, which started closely watching and listening in on Jaffe. And so when Service met Jaffe in a D.C. hotel room, their conversation was recorded. The two met several more times, and Service went to New York, where he hobnobbed with the people the OSS suspected were subversives.

FBI agents observed a five-hour meeting at Jaffe's house, attended by the head of the Communist Party USA and a known Chinese Communist agent. And they observed and heard Jaffe refer to meeting a known Soviet spy at the Soviet Embassy. The FBI then searched Jaffe's New York offices, where it found about fifty secret military documents it had overheard Service offering to provide. It then arrested Jaffe, Service, and four others its observations had implicated. But the fix was in. Conversations involving senior State Department officials and Truman's Attorney General himself were recorded, in which they arranged to fix things to get Service off.

A grand jury was convened, but the prosecutors rigged the game by presenting only the most innocuous parts of the evidence and downplaying them. They portrayed Service and the others as having, at the worst, used poor judgment in an attempt to help a journalist. And all six of the people arrested were no-billed. Years later, when this scandal began to come out, administration officials then lied through their teeth to cover up the earlier cover-up.
 
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Its an interesting approach. "I cannot discuss how I determined to comply with the order because that would violate attorney-client privilege" How does one prove you actually complied if you say you can't talk about it?

The reason you hire a lawyer is because the lawyer is smart enough to know how dumb this line of thinking is, legally speaking.
 
This does not relate to your job, and certainly not to a public governmental position like Secretary of State.

I'm not sure what you mean.

What I' saying in that post is that everyone has the 5th Amendment right to remain silent and the right to legal counsel. Using that right can have adverse political optics and impact the person negatively in public opinion, but not legally.

Look, I feel that they are all (except for maybe the guy that was granted immunity) hiding the facts that the law was broken. However, the burden is on the state to prove they broke the law, not on the people being investigated (including Hillary Clinton) to prove they did not.
 
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