Leaked Clinton email shows Google wanted to help overthrow Syrian President

Last week WikiLeaks launched the Hillary Clinton email archive; it’s described as “a searchable archive for 30,322 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton.”

The Washington Examiner honed in on an email from 2012 that was forwarded to Clinton after her deputy chief of staff noted that it was a “pretty good idea.” It is supposedly proof that Google wanted to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. It seems like the State Department, Google and Al Jazeera were all in cahoots.

The email originated from Jared Cohen, who was top dog at Google Ideas at the time but previously had been a “low-level staffer at the State Department.” The email, with the subject line of “Syria” and a PDF attachment titled “Defection Tracker,” explained that Google planned to launch a tool to “publicly track and map the defections in Syria.”

Regarding the Clinton email scandal, John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, described it as “far more serious than what happened to General Petraeus.” And if politics win over legalities, and Clinton is not indicted, then “the FBI will explode.”

Last week it was revealed that Clinton’s IT specialist Bryan Pagliano received an immunity deal and was happily singing about the details of how her email system was set up. An unnamed “intelligence source” told Fox News, “Bryan Pagliano is a devastating witness and, as the webmaster, knows exactly who had access to [Clinton’s] computer and devices at specific times. His importance to this case cannot be over-emphasized.”

Clinton reportedly paid Pagliano $140,000 on the side to manage her private server. If that is true, then it blows her claim out of the water that the server was installed in her home as “a matter of convenience.” Clinton has claimed the whole mess is a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but as former Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein pointed out on CNN, “The vast right-wing conspiracy didn’t put the server in her damn closet.”

San Francisco officials using ISIS’ favorite Telegram app to evade public record laws

Destroy the evidence is the flipside to public officials having their correspondence leaked or even having to be accountable for what is said. If there’s no record of communications, then it’s a handy way to evade public record laws.

Several San Francisco city-council members have allegedly resorted to using Telegram which is supposedly ISIS’s favorite self-destructing messaging app to spread propaganda. The Information reported (paywall) that five “supervisors” who help make some of the laws are using Telegram to circumvent open record laws. When questioned, some of those supervisors denied using the app at all or using it to evade public record requests as they fully expect their communications to be subject to Sunshine laws.

Nonetheless, The Information cited a city hall source as claiming the public officials were encouraged to use the app. In fact, San Francisco officials allegedly love Telegram because it “self-destructs,” according to April Veneracion, a top aide to Supervisor Jane Kim. Veneracion also told The Information that she wasn’t sure if using the app broke public records laws, but added, “I should find out though!”

Despite other officials’ denials of using the app, The Information reported, “A view of the app showed several supervisors and their aides had been ‘active.’ In many cases, the app was used daily or hourly by those officials, aides and advisers.” The texts, according to California law, are supposed to be part of the public record if they are work-related to public business.