Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …

The details about the boxes are contained in five pages of the FBI file – with a staggering 111 redactions – that summarize the statements of a State Department witness who worked in the “Office of Information Programs and Services (IPS).” The employee told the FBI that, “Initially, IPS officials were told there were 14 bankers boxes of former Secretary of State Hillary CLINTON’s emails at CLINTON’s Friendship Heights office.” Friendship Heights is a neighborhood that straddles the Northwest neighborhood of the District of Columbia and Maryland. The State Department witness further explained to the FBI that “on or about December 5, 2014, IPS personnel picked up only 12 bankers boxes of CLINTON’s emails from Williams & Connolly.” The officials were not sure if the boxes “were consolidated or what could have happened to the two other boxes. “

Now why does this sound familiar? More than twenty years ago, during another investigation into potential corruption and wrongdoing in the Whitewater affair, records went missing, too — and stayed that way for two years. At that point, Hillary Clinton’s records of her work at the Rose Law firm mysteriously reappeared in the White House, as the New York Times reported at the time:

After nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House said this evening that it had unexpectedly discovered copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm that describe her work for a failing savings and loan association in the 1980’s. Federal and Congressional investigators have issued subpoenas for the documents since 1994, and the White House has said it did not have them. The originals disappeared from the Rose Law Firm, in which Mrs. Clinton was a partner, shortly before Mr. Clinton took office. The newly discovered documents are copies of billing records from the Rose firm, where Mrs. Clinton helped represent Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan run by James B. McDougal, the Clintons’ business partner in the Whitewater land venture. The originals are still missing. Investigators have been seeking the documents to determine the role Mrs. Clinton played in the firm’s representation of the savings and loan.

That’s not the only point of déjà vu in this story, either. The man who handled the printed e-mail records for Hillary is David Kendall, one of the partners at Williams and Connolly. Guess who was handling Hillary’s Rose Law records back in the day? Better yet, see if you can guess which story this next excerpt describes:

The Clintons’ personal lawyer, David E. Kendall, said tonight that the documents show that the work Mrs. Clinton performed was limited both in time and scope, as she has repeatedly said.

It’s not too easy to tell, but that was Kendall in 1996, after the White House finally admitted it had copies of the subpoenaed records during the entire two years Congress had subpoenaed them. Looks like Kendall has had a lot of practice on this point, eh?

Remember that Hillary and Kendall did not turn over her e-mails in electronic form, but went to the trouble of printing out all the non-deleted e-mails instead. Why? For one thing, Hillary clearly wanted to prevent anyone from restoring the deletions. It’s also a lot easier to “lose” paper records, as the Clintons figured out in 1994-96, only to “find” them when it’s more or less moot. In this case, the missing records might well relate to the first three months of Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, a period of time when almost no e-mails have been recovered, but which would have been critical to the question of intent at the time Hillary set up the unauthorized and non-secure server for her official business.

I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Catherine Herridge and Pamela Brown uncover another interesting development regarding another very familiar figure, too. One witness told the FBI that Patrick Kennedy tried playing games with classifications in order to get Hillary off the hook:

“(Redacted) believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process. Specifically, STATE’s Near East Affairs Bureau upgraded several of CLINTON’s emails to a classified level with a B(1) release exemption. (Redacted) along with (redacted) attorney, Office of Legal Counsel called STATE’s Near East Affairs Bureau and told them they could use a B(5) exemption on an upgraded email to protect it instead of the B(1) exemption.” In early May 2015, the witness reported, “… KENNEDY held a closed-door meeting with (redacted) and (redacted) DOJ’s Office of Information Programs where KENNEDY pointedly asked (redacted) to change the FBI’s classification determination regarding one of CLINTON’s emails, which the FBI considered classified. The email was related to FBI counter-terrorism operations.”

Kennedy is also a familiar figure in all sorts of questionable Clinton conduct. The Accountability Review Board ignored Kennedy despite his executive role in determining security for the consulate in Benghazi as it attempted to lay blame on four low-level career State Department personnel, but subsequent Congressional investigations have put him front and center in the debacle. He also allegedly spiked an investigation into a politically connected US ambassador to Belgium, who had been accused of soliciting underage prostitutes.

In short, we’re seeing the same patterns of corruption and cover-up from all the same old folks. Get ready for four more years of the same if Hillary wins this election.