Why is State Department staffer Bryan Pagliano going to plead the Fifth over Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal?

 Although Hillary Clinton used taxpayer money to set up the homebrew email server she used to conduct ALL State Department business from it was recently reported that she personally paid one of her State Department staffers, Bryan Pagliano, for the maintenance of the server.

  When this story first broke I failed to see the significance in it, while some of the right-wing blogs saw this as a sign of malfeasance I did not see it that way. While using taxpayer money to set up a personal email server was obviously an abuse of taxpayer money it seemed only natural that she should pay someone out of pocket to maintain her homebrew server so I wrote nothing about it.

  If the name Bryan Pagliano rings a bell it might be because he has decided to plead the Fifth rather than testify before the Congress about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. While this is his right as protected by the Constitution of the United States, and while I hold no animosity toward him for exercising a right guaranteed to us all under said Constitution, it does open up the door to speculation as to why he would not use the opportunity of testifying in order to clear his name–if in fact he has not committed a crime or is being unjustly targeted.

  I speculated on his reasoning thusly: it is possible that he understood Hillary Clinton was actively seeking to make somebody a fall guy for her alleged illegality and he understood the likelihood that anything he said could be twisted around by the former Secretary of State to make him that fall guy.

  However, upon rereading the Washington Post story in which we learned Hillary Clinton paid him personally for his services we might have found the real reason why he decided to plead the Fifth:

The Clintons paid Pagliano $5,000 for “computer services” prior to his joining the State Department, according to a financial disclosure form he filed in April 2009.

But even after arriving at State in May 2009, Pagliano continued to be paid by the Clintons to maintain the server, which was in their Chappaqua, N.Y., home, according to the campaign official and another person familiar with the arrangement.

Pagliano did not list the outside income in the required personal financial disclosures he filed each year. The State Department has said Pagliano concluded his full-time service in February 2013, which coincides with Clinton’s departure as secretary.

  So while he disclosed the income for “computer services” rendered before he joined the State Department he failed to disclose the outside income he made from Hillary Clinton while he was employed at the State Department. This left the State Department unawares of his involvement in maintaining Hillary Clinton’s email server, and might have contributed to the State Department being unawares of the fact Hillary Clinton was using a homebrew email server:

 The private pay arrangement has not previously been reported. The State Department has declined to answer questions about whether the private system was widely known within the agency or officially approved.

 Asked in early August about whether Pagliano had been paid privately to maintain the server, a State Department official said that the agency had “found no evidence that he ever informed the department that he had outside income.”