Are you dead-end Hillary Clinton supporters a bit disturbed that everything she said in her email scandal press conference was a lie?
Granted, nobody with two sparking neurons to think with believed her absurd claim that she created her insecure, illegal private mail server to save herself the inconvenience of carrying two cell phones. The problem is that loyal service to Her Imperious Majesty requires Democrats to pretend to believe it, and that’s impossible now.
It was always very difficult to accept the mandated pretense, because in previous remarks and in her book, Clinton talked about carrying multiple devices. She’s rhapsodized about her love of Apple products, but she’s been photographed ostentatiously waving a Blackberry around.
However, the loyal Democrat drone could pretend not to be aware of that evidence, or claim to believe Clinton was gently fibbing when she talked about lugging multiple Apple devices around, in an effort to curry favor with left-leaning Apple execs and their left-leaning customers.
That’s all over now, because the Associated Press has obtained documents conclusive proving that “Hillary Rodham Clinton emailed her staff on an iPad as well as a BlackBerry while secretary of state, despite her explanation she exclusively used a personal email address on a homebrew server so that she could carry a single device.”
(Is it just me, or does it seem like the media trots out “Rodham” more frequently when they’re uncomfortable with one of her scandals? Even the dismissive laughter over at MSNBC is beginning to sound strained and nervous, as Clinton-friendly media concedes there is no way to spin this as a trivial non-story.)
Furthermore, for those of you worried about Clinton’s corruption jeopardizing national security, the AP found an instance of the SecState replying to an illegally concealed work-related email as if it were one of those personal emails she claims she didn’t have to pass along to the government and public. Gee, you don’t suppose she might have made a few similar mistakes when deciding which emails were “personal” and could be safely deleted, do you?
The State Department released a total of four emails between Clinton and her top advisers as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2013 by the AP, which sought Clinton’s correspondence with senior advisers over a four-year period relating to drone strikes overseas and U.S. surveillance programs.
While limited, the emails offer one of the first looks into Clinton’s correspondence while secretary of state. The messages came from and were sent to her private email address, hosted on a server at her property in Chappaqua, New York, as opposed to a government-run email account.
They show that Clinton, on at least one occasion, accidentally mingled personal and work matters. In reply to a message sent in September 2011 by adviser Huma Abedin to Clinton’s personal email account, which contained an AP story about a drone strike in Pakistan, Clinton mistakenly replied with questions that appear to be about decorations.
“I like the idea of these,” she wrote to Abedin. “How high are they? What would the bench be made of? And I’d prefer two shelves or attractive boxes/baskets/ conmtainers (sic) on one. What do you think?”
Abedin replied, “Did u mean to send to me?” To which Clinton wrote, “No-sorry! Also, pls let me know if you got a reply from my ipad. I’m not sure replies go thru.”
One of the prominent individuals worried about how Clinton endangered national security in her zeal to avoid public and congressional oversight is Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who will likely be one of Clinton’s 2016 presidential rivals, if she gets away with the felony offense of destroying subpoenaed documents and runs as the Democrat candidate. “If you are using a private server, you make them susceptible to foreign espionage,” Rubio said of Clinton’s emails Monday on Fox News. “If there was anything in those emails that was sensitive in nature, not just classified God forbid, even sensitive, I think it puts national security at risk.”
How about if Clinton accidentally forwarded sensitive material about U.S. military operations to insecure email addresses by accident, when she thought she was chatting about yoga with one of her pals?
We might have to check with foreign intelligence services to get the Clinton emails Congress and the American people are entitled to see, because she declared herself fully in compliance with lawful subpoenas and nuked everything she didn’t feel like handing over. Don’t try that at home, kids – you’ll go to jail for doing it.
We learned this because Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) of the House Benghazi Select Committee demanded Clinton hand over her server for independent review, and her lawyer David Kendall snottily responded that she wouldn’t do that, and it wouldn’t matter if she did, because she’s wiped the server clean.
“Lawyers are not usually this bold when disclosing evidence that suggests potential breaches of criminal law,” writes Shannen Coffin at National Review. “I say ‘potential’ because it is impossible to know for sure — unless, of course, you, like most congressional Democrats, are willing to take Mr. Kendall’s (and Mrs. Clinton’s) word for it. But the destruction of any record while a person is subject to a congressional-committee investigation is a reason for humility, rather than hubris, on the part of that person’s lawyer. This is so because a number of federal laws prohibit obstruction of such investigations.”
Coffin goes on to list those laws in detail, including one that passed with then-Senator Clinton’s support to prevent Enron’s accountants from doing exactly what Hillary Clinton just did. If the targets of investigations get to unilaterally decide which documents comply with subpoenas from now on, citing the Hillary Clinton precedent, criminal law would completely disintegrate; the FBI might as well dissolve its organized-crime and corporate-crime divisions, because they’ll never secure another high-profile conviction. I can’t wait to see some mob boss take the stand and say he and his lawyers went through his correspondence, hand-picked everything they thought was relevant to a federal investigation, and destroyed the rest.
Congressional oversight will also become even more of a joke than it already is. The fallback position for Clinton defenders, beginning with ancient Clinton hatchet man James Carville but no longer ending with him, is to admit that Clinton was spinning fairy tales when she claimed she set up her secret server to save herself the trouble of carrying two tiny smart phones. You’re darn right she did it to escape congressional scrutiny, because all congressional investigations are partisan witch hunts!
Naturally, the implication is that all Republican investigations are partisan witch hunts, but we haven’t quite reached the stage of tyranny and corruption where Democrats can say that openly to their hack media.
They don’t have to – they know their friends in the press will take Democrat investigations of a Republican administration very seriously, no matter what Democrats say about Republican subpoenas today. Nothing about the lawful subpoena powers of Congress says the target can blow them off if she thinks the investigators are motivated by partisanship. Every significant congressional investigation would likely be dismissed as partisan by the targets, wouldn’t it? The political model that strips opposition politicians of their lawful powers, on the grounds that they are the opposition party, is tyranny, not democracy.
The rest of us, including – no, especially – Democrat voters, need to think long and hard about whether we’re ready to wave aside all legal restraints on the aristocracy, in favor of trial by political combat. Making polls the only courtroom aristocrats ever need to face is a dumb idea, but it’s especially dumb when their favorite crimes involve concealing their activities and misleading the public. Are we really going to make accountability the punishment for losing a game politicians are experts at cheating? What Hillary Clinton did with her email server was obviously wrong, unprecedented, dishonest, and dangerous. Loyalty to her after this obnoxious debacle is an act of submission, not support.
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