For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids…
Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department’s own ‘Classified’ stamps now identify as so-called ‘foreign government information…’
‘I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified,’ Clinton told reporters at a campaign event in Nevada on Tuesday.
(Reuters, August 21, 2015)
Trust me folks, 99 percent of what reporters and pundits are feeding you about this scandal has more to do with national politics than national security. After all, nobody in her right mind believes that Hillary intentionally compromised national security (e.g., the way General David Petraeus did).
What’s more, it hardly matters that Hillary’s private server was not as secure as it could or should have been. After all, John Kerry is on record making this sobering admission about his use of the purportedly secure government server:
Secretary of State John Kerry says ‘it is very likely’ that China and Russia are reading his emails.
‘It’s very possible … and I certainly write things with that awareness.’
(CBS News, August 11, 2015)
Yet, like every conceivable issue these days, politicians are politicizing and journalists are sensationalizing this one too. Nothing betrays the latter quite like Bob Woodward insinuating on Wednesday’s edition of Morning Joe that Hillary erasing thousands of e-mails from her private server is as incriminating as Nixon erasing minutes of recorded conversation from his White House tapes: E-mailgate? God help us.
Again, there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that Hillary used her private server as a means to any illegal end, or that she erased e-mails to cover up illegal activities of any kind. Nor is it clear that she violated the Federal Records Act, or “FRA,” 44 U.S.C. 3101 et seq., despite brazen assertions that she did.
Incidentally, bear in mind that this e-mail witch-hunt began with Hillary’s Republican nemeses in Congress. They are trying in vain to pin blame on her for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
I am all too mindful, though, that the Whitewater witch-hunt of the 1990s began with her husband Bill’s Republican nemeses in Congress too. They were trying in vain to prove that he was involved in shady land deals (among other nefarious misdeeds too wacko to mention) in Arkansas. Yet they ended up impeaching him over the completely unrelated matter of Monica’s blue dress. Remember that vast right-wing conspiracy…?
With apologies to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, just because the Clintons are paranoid doesn’t mean Republicans aren’t after them. Nor, alas, does it mean that the Clintons do not have other incriminating reasons to be paranoid. Indeed, the Clintons’ reputation for getting away with all kinds of dirty tricks and shady deals is such that the presiding judge in this case has already deemed her guilty … as accused.
For here is the extraordinary way Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, opined at a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) hearing:
We wouldn’t be here today if the employee [Hillary] had followed government policy.
(New York Times, August 21, 2015)
Media outlets filed a FOIA complaint against the State Department seeking access to the e-mails of any staff member who corresponded with Hillary during her tenure as secretary. In saying this, however, the judge unwittingly skirted the truth. Because the only reason we are here today is that Hillary decided to willfully betray President Obama.
To be fair, she and her defenders are keen to cite the precedents her predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, set by allegedly using private servers. Except that nobody can reasonably suspect either of them did so to hide official e-mail correspondence from the president they served. The same cannot be said of Hillary.
In fact, anyone who knows anything about the rivalry that defined their contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination knows that Obama had just cause to suspect she might do just that. Mind you, practically everyone goaded him into nominating Hillary as his secretary of state to emulate former President Lincoln’s “team of rivals.”
But I could see that she was bound to run the State Department like her political fiefdom. And so I duly warned Obama in “Hillary as Secretary of State? Don’t Do It Barack!” November 15, 2008.
___________________
[A]ppointing Hillary as secretary of state would be tantamount to inviting her (and her husband Bill) to set up a de facto parallel presidency predicated on the fiction that she would deal with foreign affairs, Obama with domestic affairs. This is a perfect recipe for untenable tension within his presidency, which would have Obama constantly looking over his shoulder to see what machinations Hillary is concocting to upstage him…
Obama should choose John Kerry to serve as secretary of state. After all, he has more foreign-policy experience; he is fluent in several foreign languages (whereas, she’s not in any); and he would surely be more loyal.
__________________
It speaks volumes in this context that, despite Hillary erasing tens of thousands of e-mails she deemed private, the State Department has released enough to show that she continued to take advice from one Sidney Blumenthal, despite Obama admonishing her to keep him at arm’s length. To explain why this raises all kinds of red flags would require sharing too much inside-the-beltway gossip.
Therefore, suffice it to know that Hillary taking advice from Blumenthal in these circumstances is rather like Condi taking advice from the hitman for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, despite Bush admonishing her, for obvious reasons, not to.
Blumenthal’s e-mails [offering his spin on the unrest in Libya, where his corporate clients were lying in wait to do business] were among 300 that have been turned over to the panel by the State Department…
They had been sent to Clinton via a personal e-mail address that she used while at the State Department [and while Blumenthal was working for the Clinton family foundation]. Her use of the private account violated White House guidelines at the time, which stipulated using government e-mail for official business when possible.
(Washington Post, May 21, 2015)
The point is that Hillary is being hoisted by her own petard for defying and deceiving the man who graciously positioned her to succeed him as president of the United States. The irony, of course, is that this self-inflicted wound may prove fatal to her and Bill’s “two-for-one” presidential ambitions. Especially with VP Joe Biden, who happens to be as worthy an heir to Obama as Bush Sr. was to Reagan, now hovering like a buzzard just waiting to gobble up the Democratic nomination.
In any event, it’s arguable that Hillary used her position as secretary of state as much to help endow her family’s money-grubbing foundation as to help execute Obama’s foreign-policy agenda.
This is why when voters are asked that seminal question (with respect to the 2016 presidential election): Can she be trusted?
The damning and disqualifying answer must be: No she can’t!
Yet, despite all the above, I fear the only way Hillary will lose the Democratic nomination is if Obama’s Justice Department takes the extraordinary step of indicting his former secretary of state on charges stemming from this e-mail scandal. Beyond this, whether it’s Hillary or Joe, I am as convinced that the Democratic nominee will win the 2016 presidential election as I am that Donald Trump will lose the 2016 Republican nomination. Got that?
In the meantime, enjoy the spectacle.
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