"the Pentagon acknowledges they get attacked about 100,000 times a day, I think the odds are pretty high."

alternate blog post title:

"Which is the way you know whether something is...is"

The primary blog post title is what former Defense Secretary/former Director of the CIA Robert Gates [who served under both Presidents Obama and Bush] said, when asked if he thought it possible that "Russians, Chinese and Iranians had compromised the home brew server of the former Secretary of State [Hillar Clinton]."

The alternate blog post title is explained further below. Here now, some light background reading:

"Clinton's Emails: A Criminal Charge Is Justified: Hillary’s explanations look increasingly contrived as evidence of malfeasance mounts day by day."

"As Clinton email scandal moves to new level, former AG Mukasey predicts a criminal charge" (you remember the Powerline Blog? The lawyers who helped expose the Dan Rather-reported but forged "proof" of Bush's disappearance from service in the Texas Air National Guard over 10 years ago, that was then confirmed by others in the mainstream media?)

In "How Bad Is Hillary's Email Problem?", the IWF (Independent Women's Forum) picks out select quotes like these:

"Yet—from her direction that classification rules be disregarded, to the presence on her personal email server of information at the highest level of classification, to her repeated falsehoods of a sort that juries are told every day may be treated as evidence of guilty knowledge—it is nearly impossible to draw any conclusion other than that she knew enough to support a conviction at the least for mishandling classified information.

"This is the same charge brought against Gen. David Petraeus for disclosing classified information in his personal notebooks to his biographer and mistress, who was herself an Army Reserve military intelligence officer cleared to see top secret information."

Powerline's also just now quoted two others among the ranks of former federal prosecutors, both of whom have worked with FBI Director Jim Comey, and one whose "experience encompasses years at Main Justice, years as an assistant U.S. Attorney, and a stint in the White House Counsel’s office," in their answers to the question "Will Hillary Be Indicted?"

1. Andy McCarthy: "Of course, making the case would not mean the FBI could force attorney general Loretta Lynch — and the president to whom she answers — to pursue the case. The FBI cannot convene a grand jury and present an indictment...But you’d best believe the FBI can make the Obama administration look very bad if it shrinks from doing so. Then it will be a matter of how far Barack Obama is willing to stick his neck out for Hillary Clinton."
2. Bill Otis:

   "First, the case on the merits seems strong from what I can gather, and, if standard practice holds true, is stronger than public sources have yet disclosed.

   "Second, while Lynch is capable of bending to pressure — I know of one case in which she caved to a district judge she knew was up to some very questionable behavior — she likes to think of herself as rule-bound, virtuous and “speaking truth to power,” as the Left never tires of lecturing. She is in some ways an old-fashioned person.

   "I thus think she will go along with a recommendation to indict. I doubt this will get over-ruled at the White House, since (1) Obama seemingly doesn’t care for Hillary, although I don’t know that from any first-hand sources; and (2) Obama, being no dummy as a Democratic politician, probably thinks that Hillary will lose the general election, and would prefer a different candidate.

   "I don’t think that, even in a culture as degraded as this one has become, a major party can nominate a Presidential candidate under credible indictment." [emphases mine]

It's true that David Petraeus's career and reputation are being ruined, for similar or lesser security breaches than Hillary has done.

Why do you think the FBI has hundreds of agents working on the Hillary case? They want to uncover the truth, either way, to cross all the t's and dot the i's.

After what they're finding, including items that look like NSA intercepts, if the law doesn't apply equally to Hillary as it does to Petraeus and anyone else, then the FBI becomes the biggest laughingstock joke of all time.

At the very least, it's felony material: over 1,300 disclosed classified messages mishandled...Hillary directed a staff member to erase the heading on a classified document and send it anyway on a nonsecure device: in this instance, "Clinton’s 'gross negligence' may have violated the federal Espionage Act, 18 U.S. Code § 793."

And it's more than just mishandling classified information; it's now also about Clinton Foundation donors getting cushy State Department contracts.

Google it. Liberal Mainstream media does an almost virtual blackout on all this, except NBC News saying it's merely "innocuous", NPR quoting her as saying this new news "changes nothing" and surprisingly, CNN aired an interview with someone saying "As Secretary of State, Hillary should've known better [than to mishandle top secret and classified information even if it didn't have the official stamp on the header]."

As Secretary of State, she should have known better:

"If Clinton were a lifelong academic in her first big federal job (visualize a Jeane Kirkpatrick of the Left), she might deserve a little slack. But Clinton spent eight years as first lady and eight more as a U.S. senator. Even more inconveniently for Clinton, she served six years on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Even if Clinton had not spent a half-dozen years handling secret documents on America’s military plans and capabilities, she surely knew that classified materials are a secretary of state’s stock in trade. Regardless, Clinton claimed that her server never harbored classified e-mails."

And she has the further audacity to also claim that the way for her to have known something was classified, Top Secret or the even more sensitive SAP, was that it had to have that stamped as a header on it?

“I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified — which is the way you know whether something is,” Mrs. Clinton said Tuesday. - from The Wall Street Journal Aug. 19, 2015 article. [emphasis mine]

Note that the New York Times and just about every other major news publication completely withheld from you, the adoring public, that conspicuous tail end of her quote. But the UK's Daily Mail got it right too. Funny how US Mainstream Media covers and scrubs up Clinton's stupidity for you all, isn't it?

Watch the video of it yourselves, here. I'm not the first to note how she had to glance down repeatedly at her notes to be sure she spoke the precise scripted words she'd written down ahead of time, to make sure she kept on script. WGN-TV also has the full transcript here.

And as a lawyer and as a Secretary of State, she is supposed to know that whether or not anything was marked classified, Top Secret, SAP, etc., "isn't legally relevant":

"It is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than a year to keep 'documents or materials containing classified information . . . at an unauthorized location.' Note that it is the information that is protected; the issue doesn’t turn on whether the document or materials bear a classified marking. [also quoted here]
...
"Mrs. Clinton’s holding of classified information on a personal server was a violation of that law. So is transferring that information on a thumb drive to David Kendall, her lawyer. "Moving up the scale, the law relating to public records generally makes it a felony for anyone having custody of a 'record or other thing' that is 'deposited with . . . a public officer' to 'remove' or 'destroy' it, with a maximum penalty of three years. Emails are records, and the secretary of state is a public officer and by statute their custodian.

"The Espionage Act defines as a felony, punishable by up to 10 years, the grossly negligent loss or destruction of 'information relating to the national defense.' Note that at least one of the emails from the small random sample taken by the inspector general for the intelligence community contained signals intelligence and was classified top secret."

For Hillary then to "play dumb, blond, woman"? Really? To play that card by pretending she didn't know what "to wipe a server" actually means? To actually stoop so low as to say, even jokingly, "What, like with a cloth or something?"

Are you kidding me? She was Secretary of STATE, one of a handful of deciders of what is classified, and heading a department charged with the utmost in national security. She has long been savvy enough to use multiple Blackberries and emails and servers, and you expect me to believe she didn't have the basic technical knowledge of high tech? You don't have to be a high tech worker, especially in the last several years, to know about "deleting" and "erasing" data from computers, and she's been around and (ab)using computers since at least 1993, as reported in 1997:

1. "When [Bill and I] arrived [in the White House]," she said, "there was no computer system, and you can't run any kind of modern enterprise without a modern computer system."

2. A highly regarded (female, I might add) White House computer expert sued Hillary over her and other high ranking officials' harassing and railroading her out of her job because she objected to their turning that White House database into a political fundraising/favor-paying-back tool:

   "...the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight investigated, and held hearings. In a report issued last October [1998], that panel found that WhoDB 'was used not just for official purposes; senior White House staff planned and, in fact, used it to advance the campaign fund raising objectives of the Democratic National Committee. This conversion of government property to the use of the DNC constitutes a theft of government property.'

   "That House committee concluded 'persons at the highest level of the White House, including the First Lady, knew of, and approved the planned use of the White House database for partisan political purposes, or the use of governmental personnel and resources to work on outside partisan political databases. Either scenario is simply unlawful.

3. That abuse-of-database story is confirmed in the LA Times, not known for being a conservative paper in the least:

   "Let my team work with the DNC to help them design a system that will meet our needs and technical specifications," aide Marsha Scott wrote on White House stationery in a memo copied to the first lady. "We can show them what to do."

   Mrs. Clinton, in a notation scrawled on top of the letter, responded: "This sounds promising. Please advise. HRC."

   The document, along with other memos, suggests that the first lady personally directed Scott to oversee the development of a computer system--paid for by government funds--to keep records on as many as 350,000 people and help the Democrats solicit large donations during last year's election.

4. Not to mention Hillary's numerous other incidents of hiding documents.

That's twenty-three years of knowing exactly what she wanted from computers, databases, and electronic documents, and how to get it herself and to manipulate all the people involved in getting her what she wanted.

Are we really to understand that Mrs. Clinton really isn't smart enough, intelligent enough, to recognize classified information when she sees it unless it's stamped with big bold letters? And that she's so dumb she doesn't understand how computers basically work, how data is stored, secured, or eliminated? That she wasn't fit to be Secretary of State?

I may be blond and I may be a woman, but I am not as dumb as Hillary likes to pretend, when it suits her. If she's that dumb or innocent, how in the world, then, is she fit or smart enough to be POTUS?

Can you imagine the injustice if Richard Nixon had had the vast majority of the media in his pocket, as the Clintons and Democrats do? Imagine if this were a Republican former Secretary of State? The Republican would already be indicted. And I would say that even if it had been Ronald Reagan himself.

"...there should be ... no individual too powerful to jail. We agree on that." Oh, yes, on that one point we do agree.