State Dept. Finally Admits: No Record Hillary Clinton Signed Standard Exit Form
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place in Hillary Clinton’s ever-deepening email scandal, as the State Department – following days of absolutely absurd foot-dragging – finally admitted it can’t seem to find any record of her signed Form OF-109.
This is a crucial document signed by departing State Department employees, testifying that all official records have been turned over, including – but not limited to – classified materials and emails. Since it is manifestly obvious that Hillary Clinton didn’t turn over all such materials, her signature on the OF-109 would have constituted perjury.
Ever since lawyers familiar with this document began describing it, the State Department has been asked to produce the exit paperwork for Clinton (and her top aides Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Philippe Reines, who also had accounts on Clinton’s secret email server.) The Republican National Committee filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents. Even Clinton-friendly reporters have been asking about it.
Somehow our titanic $3.5 trillion mega government – the same government that just took over the Internet, the brilliant bureaucratic machine that understands health care better than any doctor and investment better than any capitalist – couldn’t seem to find that important piece of paper. Excuses that the government wouldn’t accept from the smallest private enterprise in America were proffered for State’s golly-gee-whiz-aw-shucks inability to produce a crucial form. The same people who love to bury citizens beneath towering piles of paperwork, demanding requests in triplicate for permission to do virtually anything, claimed they had no idea what happened to the Secretary of State’s termination papers.
This agonizing pretense finally ended on Tuesday, as State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki finally admitted there seems to be no record of Clinton following the OF-109 requirements.
She tried to downplay this as no big deal, another long-standing requirement that turns out to be more of a breezy suggestion when applied to Madame Hillary: “It’s not clear that this form is used as a part of a standard part of checkout across the federal government or even at the State Department. We’re looking into how standard this is across the federal government and certainly at the State Department… I don’t want to characterize how common practice it is.”
Allow me to make that characterization for you, Ms. Psaki: The rules do not apply to Hillary Clinton.
To sum up: after years of accumulated government experience at handling email, and the creation of standards she herself loudly championed, Hillary Clinton decided to ignore State Department policy and the Federal Records Act to set up her own private mail server, through which she routed all of her official correspondence, plus email from her top aides. She did this for four years, obviously with the full awareness of the entire State Department… and when she was finished, nobody thought to have her sign the paperwork verifying that she had given all of her official correspondence and classified material to the department for proper archiving?
She never voluntarily surrendered anything to the State Department – it came looking for the material long after she left office. The Secretary of State was allowed to work entirely on her word of honor and a few pinky swears, national security be damned. I’ve worked at fast-food restaurants with tighter security procedures and better record-keeping than Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
This is a staggering violation of the public trust, an absolute disgrace for Clinton and everyone in the Obama Administration who helped her get away with it, and an insult to the American people, who don’t get to pick and choose which of the government’s demands for information they feel like taking seriously.
