
The recent barrage of negative stories about Hillary Clinton are a frightening reminder – and a reliable road map – of what we can expect from another Clinton Administration: secrecy, paranoia, a total lack of transparency, blindly loyal lieutenants, corporatism, cronyism, and an arrogant policy of “the rules don’t apply to us.”
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
In the nineties there were the Chinese donors, missing – or more likely hidden – billing records, pardons sold for donations to the Clinton Library, policy decisions influenced by gifts to the Library, White House furniture shipped off to Chappaqua, commodity futures windfalls, stonewalling by aides, personal loans to the Clintons by Terry McAuliffe, pardons sold by Hillary and Bill’s brothers. Etc., etc., etc.
Now, in anticipation of a new Clinton Administration, there are foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, partnering with questionable business entities, endless promoting of corporate donors at the Clinton Global Initiative, exorbitant speaking fees to Hillary and Bill from corporations who will be seeking favors from the next President, and lots of nepotistic opportunities for Chelsea Clinton to make money. The big money grab is on.
Then there’s Hillary’s use of personal emails for official State Department business – in violation of statutory requirements.
Some things never change.
Hillary’s secrecy and paranoia is clearly behind the decision to use a private e-mail carrier for official business when she was Secretary of State. That’s vintage Clinton. It also may have been illegal. But Hillary didn’t care – she wouldn’t take the chance of the public release of all of her emails. She’s got too many deals up in the air. Deals that she doesn’t want us to know about. Conflicts of interest deals. So, she took care of it by making sure that all of her records were safely in her own pocket outside the reach of a subpoena. What’s srult amazing is that she didn’t even have a single official state department email
And she had lots of blind loyalists who covered her back. Think about all of the hundreds of State Department employees who received or sent emails to Hillary and never said a word about the absence of Starting at the top with her pit bull guard dog Cheryl Mills. And did the President of the United States not notice that there was no @state.gov on her emails?
Federal law requires that public officials maintain copies of letter and emails because they are the property of the federal government, not the public official. But Hillary decided otherwise. That rule just didn’t work for her.
What’s the difference between Hillary taking home her emails about State Department business, which undoubtedly included classified information, and former CIA Director Deutch who took home his laptop with highly classified information? Bill Clinton pardoned Deutch on his last day in office as he was in the middle of a plea negotiation.
Or is it any different from Clinton lieutenant and yes man Sandy Berger, who pled guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material from the National Archives. Berger was reviewing White House memos to prepare for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission on behalf of Bill Clinton. He, too, didn’t think that the rules applied to him. He preferred to prepare at home. So, he simply took the documents and hid them in his socks and his pants and took them out of the National Archives Building. Once outside, he left them behind a construction trailer and returned at a later time to get them. He was fined $50,000, and lost his security clearance for
If the Banghazi Committee hadn’t requested her personal emails, we would never have learned what Hillary secretly did. And make no mistake about it – what she did was deliberate and purposeful. It was designed to keep Hillary’s work outside the jurisdiction of the Freedom of Information Act and to limit any inspection of her work. Even now that she has been outed, it was she and her staff who decided what emails to give back to the State Department. Showing her enormous hubris and arrogance, Hillary Clinton did not even have a single State Department email account during the entire time that she was Secretary of State.
That was a clear statement of Hillary’s fundamental belief that rules don’t apply to the Clintons. They don’t need rules. They know better. No way she was going to leave her work and her records for future enemies to sift through.
Remember Hillary’s famous photo on a military plane pointedly looking at her Blackberry? What happened to those emails?
And it’s business at the Clinton Foundation continued to accept multi-million dollar donations from foreign countries and multinational corporations who want to curry favor with the next President. Add to that the obscene speaking fees of over $200,000 per speech for each of her boring speeches. Its a giant money grab. The Clintons are grabbing every last penny . What’s the rush? They need to cash in before there are restrictions because she is a candidate or no interest in her because she’s not.
That’s what the Clintons do and that’s what they’ll continue to do if she becomes President.
Stay tuned.