Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

You didn't honestly think the most corrupt regime in American history, led by a man whose entire life revolves around getting revenge on those who have wronged him, was simply going to let impeachment happen, did you?

The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email, reviving a politically toxic matter that overshadowed the 2016 election, current and former officials said. 

As many as 130 officials have been contacted in recent weeks by State Department investigators — a list that includes senior officials who reported directly to Clinton as well as others in lower-level jobs whose emails were at some point relayed to her inbox, said current and former State Department officials. Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post. 

State Department investigators began contacting the former officials about 18 months ago, after President Trump’s election, and then seemed to drop the effort before picking it up in August, officials said. 

Senior State Department officials said that they are following standard protocol in an investigation that began during the latter days of the Obama administration and is nearing completion. 

“This has nothing to do with who is in the White House,” said a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing probe. “This is about the time it took to go through millions of emails, which is about 3 1/2 years.” 

To many of those under scrutiny, including some of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy experts, the recent flurry of activity surrounding the Clinton email case represents a new front on which the Trump administration could be accused of employing the powers of the executive branch against perceived political adversaries. 

The existence of the probe follows revelations that the president used multiple levers of his office to pressure the leader of Ukraine to pursue investigations that Trump hoped would produce damaging information about Democrats, including potential presidential rival Joe Biden.

This "everyone but Hillary's e-mails!", along with the long-rumored completion of the Justice Department IG report investigating Mueller and the investigators, apparently due out next month, was always going to be the 2020 strategy.

Impeachment kicked this plan B into overdrive.  The story makes it clear that this effort was brought back to the table about the same time as when the White House originally got word of the whistleblower complaint, which was last month.  It also goes on to say that the State Department really isn't happy doing this, and morale is basically worse than under Rex Tillerson.

Those targeted began receiving letters in August, saying, “You have been identified as possibly bearing some culpability” in supposedly newly uncovered “security incidents,” according to a copy of one letter obtained by The Washington Post. 

In many cases, the incidents appear to center on the sending of information attributed to foreign officials, including summaries of phone conversations with foreign diplomats — a routine occurrence among State Department employees. 

There is no indication in any of the materials reviewed by The Post that the emails under scrutiny contained sensitive information about classified U.S. initiatives or programs. In one case, a former official was asked to explain dozens of messages dating back to 2009 that contained messages that foreign officials wanted relayed rapidly to Washington at a time when U.S. Foreign Service officers were equipped with BlackBerrys and other devices that were not capable of sending classified transmissions. The messages came in through “regular email” and then were forwarded through official — though unclassified — State Department channels.

In other wods, this is a massive effort to make the whistleblower look like part of a huge conspiracy against Trump, while making it very clear what will happen to anyone who might be thinking of joining the whistleblower in ratting out Trump.

And on top of that, it gets Hillary Clinton's emails back into the news along with dozens of targets to harass and maybe even arrest. Impeachment then becomes "the corrupt Democrat effort to end the investigation into evil Hillary and her flunkies!"

Now the real fight begins...