Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton
In July 2009, just two days after Goldman Sachs told the FBI that Sergey Aleynikov, a computer programmer at the firm, had removed source code containing trade secrets, Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI. Aleynikov was then prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department and spent 51 months in prison before the Second Circuit Appeals Court threw out the case against him. The Appellate judges found the case against Aleynikov so unfounded that it ordered him released from jail immediately at oral arguments.
The Second Circuit opinion in the Aleynikov case was handed down on April 11, 2012, finding that the prosecutors misapplied the Federal corporate espionage laws. But Goldman Sachs and the FBI weren’t happy so they handed their evidence to Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney. Under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an individual is not permitted to be tried twice for the same crime. But notwithstanding that, Vance brought a case against Aleynikov in State Court. That case was also thrown out on appeal.
Aleynikov had the good fortune of being represented by a courageous attorney, Kevin Marino of Marino, Tortorella & Boyle of Chatham, New Jersey. Not only did Marino win on appeal both the Federal and State cases against Aleynikov but he sued the FBI on behalf of Aleynikov for simply “parroting representations” made to it by Goldman Sachs “without meaningfully investigating or testing the veracity of those representations and for the wholly improper purpose of achieving Goldman Sachs’s goal of procuring an indictment against Aleynikov and sending a message to its present and future employees about its ability to influence federal law enforcement authorities to bring criminal charges to further its private interests.”
If you are at all familiar with Goldman Sachs, you know that what Marino is saying may well be an understatement.
Now compare the FBI’s hounds of hell pursuit of Aleynikov over high frequency trading code, versus what didn’t happen to Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, her longtime aide, when they transmitted national security secrets over a non-secure private computer server in the basement of Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York; when Clinton and Abedin failed to immediately turn over the emails and documents to the State Department as required under law when they left the State Department in 2013; and when they casually handed over the classified emails and documents to their attorneys for review, with no regard for the fact that those attorneys lacked the proper security clearances to handle the material. (It’s a felony to remove classified material from government premises without authorization or to share it with persons lacking the requisite level of security clearance.)
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