Hillary's web of lies keeps unraveling
Such is the self-absorbed arrogance of the Clintons that Hillary actually thought she could get away with the criminal activity of conducting her government business on a personal server and keeping and transmitting classified data in violation of federal law.
It was a server as vulnerable to foreign hacking as any in the private sector that has been hacked, or the servers at the foreign-hacked Office of Personnel Management. She put her country at risk, and now her personal political ambitions as well. Only the disinterested Justice Department of the administration she served and a sycophantic press will save her from the incarceration she so richly deserves.
Inspectors general of the State Department Hillary once ran said Friday that, contrary to the statements of Hillary and Team Clinton, information that was classified then and now was kept on her server – the server she refuses to turn over. So far, four emails in particular are at issue, found in a random examination of 40 sample emails. The four were discovered to have dealt with government secrets. How many in the 30,000 Hillary and her staff deleted also illegally contained government secrets?
As the New York Times reported:
“This classified information never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system,” Steve A. Linick, the State Department inspector general, said in a statement signed by him and I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the intelligence community. ...
The discovery of the four emails prompted Mr. McCullough to refer the matter to F.B.I. counterintelligence agents, who investigate crimes related to the mishandling of classified information. On Thursday night and again Friday morning, the Justice Department referred to the matter as a “criminal referral,” but later Friday dropped the word “criminal.” The inspectors general said late Friday that it was a “security referral” intended to alert authorities that “classified information may exist on at least one private server and thumb drive that are not in the government’s possession.”
Liar, liar, pantsuit on fire. “Slick” is a word that will never appear in front of Hillary’s name, as it often did in front of her husband’s. Bill Clinton was a consummate politician. Hillary is an ambitious hanger-on who ignored her husband’s indiscretions and handled his “bimbo eruptions” in order to ride his coattails to a position of prominence and power. She has blundered her way into a criminal referral, which ought to disqualify any candidate for high office, particularly when it is the presidency.
Hillary is a consummate liar, whose relationship with the truth is tenuous. She lied to the parents of the four Benghazi dead in front of their sons’ caskets, repeating the infamous video lie she arguably was the architect of. She dodged sniper fire in Bosnia; she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary years before he climbed Mt. Everest; she claimed she made $100,000 in the futures market almost literally overnight just from reading the Wall Street Journal.
As Investor’s Business Daily has opined, the lady in waiting dubbed “Hillary Rodham Nixon” refused to learn from a history she was personally involved in and may be condemned to repeat. But, unlike Hillary and her emails, Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes that would doom his presidency:
Hillary Clinton should know better, know that the cover-up is often worse than any crime, foe she once worked as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff for the House Judiciary Committee investigating the “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate Hotel that doomed Richard Nixon’s presidency.
The end came when tapes of presidential conversations were found and became public knowledge with one tape containing that famous 18 1’2 gap of erased silence that spoke volumes about the cover-up of the break-in at DNC headquarters.
As RNC Chair Reince Preibus notes, as Richard Nixon’s claim, “I am not a crook,” unraveled it was due to the fact that he did destroy those tapes when he could have. Maybe it was vanity, stubbornness or just garden variety stupid arrogance, but he didn’t burn them or wipe them clean, even if it might have saved his presidency.
As Shannen W. Coffinn points out in National Review, the Federal Records Act and the State Department’s own rules prohibit Hillary from keeping official government emails on her personal server, and destruction of records under subpoena also constitutes obstruction of justice. And if she signed form OF-109, which she should have done or been asked to do, she committed perjury:
As Shannen W. Coffin, a contributing editor at National Review and senior lawyer at both the White House and Justice Department under President George W. Bush, points out, a provision titled "Removal Procedures" requires departing federal employees to relinquish any classified materials at the time of departure and to clear the removal through records-management officials. ...
She doesn't get to return 55,000 pages of documents nearly impossible to search years later. That she returned these materials in paper form, not an electronically searchable form, is a deliberate attempt to slow down and obstruct any investigation.
If an employee violates the terms of the Form OF-109 she or he has signed, that act is punishable by Section 18 U.S.C. § 1001 of the criminal code, which makes it a crime to knowingly and willfully falsify or conceal facts made in statements to federal agencies concerning matters under their jurisdiction.
State Department inspectors general in a Democratic administration are not your usual members of the vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary was prone to blame all the Clinton troubles on. They say Hillary lied and put her country at risk to preserve her political future. She does not deserve one.
Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.