By Hank Beckman -
She’s back.
Every so often Hillary Clinton is out of the news for a few weeks and you start to think that she really might be gone this time.
But then you turn on the TV and there she is again.
She’s like the Tracy Flick character in the 1999 movie “Election,” a relentless high school kid running for class president, convinced she is a child of destiny and willing to do anything to fulfill that destiny.
Clinton has somehow talked Sundance/Hulu into a four-part documentary series on her life titled, what else, “Hillary.”
Not having seen any of the series, I can’t pass judgement on it, but you can be sure that it’s full of excuses, accusations against her enemies—Republicans and Democrats—and hackneyed cliches about sure-fire solutions to whatever problems she thinks she is uniquely qualified to solve for us.
If any of my readers are inclined toward being the slightest bit soft-hearted, feeling just a little sorry for her, or thinking the rough-and-tumble age of Trump might call for a little magnanimity toward the twice-failed candidate for president, you need to read Gregg Jarrett’s new book.
Witch Hunt: The Story of The Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History, checks in at 430 pages, but all one has to read is the first chapter on how people at the highest levels of the FBI and U.S. Justice Department conspired to give Clinton every benefit of the doubt when investigating her gross negligence—and that’s being extremely generous—in handling classified material as secretary of state.
In fact, you just have to read the first half of the first chapter regarding her disgraceful handling of classified material to come away with a set of facts that leaves no doubt that she should never be close to the White House again without a visitor’s pass. Facts such as:
—Clinton knew that when she set up a private server in her home for all of her email correspondence some classified material would be sent and received over the server, leaving her vulnerable to hacking.
She was trained on handling classified material when she became secretary of state and before that she served on the Senate Armed Services Committee where she had years of counseling on how to recognize classified documents and how to protect them. But she went ahead and ran the risk of our enemies hacking her emails.
-Jarrett cites then FBI Director’s James Comey’s July 5, 2016 public statement reporting on his findings from the investigation. “From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.”
—Comey again: “About 2,000 additional emails were ‘up-classified,’ meaning, as some commentators have pointed out, they were “born classified.” Comey explicitly stated that “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”
In the same press conference Comey notes “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position” should have not conducted the conversations on an unclassified system.
—Comey said at the press conference that “we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.” But as Jarrett points out, it was not only possible, it was a fact as reported in the FBI Inspector General’s report.
A Rumanian hacker named “Guccifer” gained access to her private emails through a server in Russia. Jarrett notes the classified materials, likely given to Russian intelligence, were files containing “‘targeting data’ that would constitute top secret information.”
—After being instructed by Congress to preserve her emails—even being subpoenaed—Clinton and her lawyer both admitted that she directed both personal and business emails to be deleted. If that’s not a clear case of obstruction of justice, the term has lost all meaning.
After basically admitting that she had violated the Espionage Act, Comey disgraced himself by claiming “no reasonable prosecutor” would file charges in the case—an obvious falsehood—and insisting that in order for the act to violated, there had to be intent involved—another falsehood.
The Department of Justice Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, reviewed the case and called Comey’s actions “extraordinary and insubordinate,” and that he “usurped the authority of the Attorney General” in acting as a prosecutor in the case.
No wonder he got fired.
Put aside whatever prejudice you might have about Jarrett being biased by his long-time employment at Fox News and keep in mind that what he exposes in this work is not just the opinion of a partisan conservative, but rather universally-acknowledged evidence.
His sources are impeccable and include a transcript of Comey’s press conference, actual statutes regarding the laws Hillary broke, and information straight out of FBI reports on various investigations regarding the matters involving Hillary’s mishaps.
Ponder the arrogance of Clinton feeling so entitled to realize her dream of one day making history by becoming the first female president that she would knowingly risk exposing the country’s security secrets to any malevolent actor in the world.
And consider that even thought she insists she’s not running for president in 2020, she’s recently admitted that she gets “the urge” to run; given her obsession, we can’t rule out another run.
Empathy is a fine quality; save it for someone who deserves it.
