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Seems like the Clintons, Bill & Hillary, are armed with Teflon-coating round-the-clock. The muck their individual and combined shenanigans have produced ever since they entered the political arena way back in the late-1970’s has somehow never really stuck, at least not long enough to seriously damage the political futures of the duo. Bill has won an eight-year term in the White House, and Hillary is confidently lining up to do her first four-year stint come November.
Their continued political successes, the muck notwithstanding, underlines the reality. But that reality may be about to change with a devastating suddenness.
Because, from all accounts, the year-long FBI’s criminal investigation now drawing to a close into Hillary’s ‘private’ email fiasco which reportedly compromised national security while she was Secretary of State in Barack Obama’s first four-year term could lead to possible indictments and prosecution in court by the US Department of Justice.
James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said in May that he would not be rushed into finishing his agency’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails “on an election timetable”. And he would not say whether the inquiry would be wrapped up by the November presidential election.
“We want to do it well and we want to do it promptly, so I feel pressure to do both of those things,” Comey said, adding, during a round-table discussion with reporters, “I don’t tether to any particular external deadline, so I do feel the pressure to do it well and promptly, but as between the two, I always choose ‘well’.”
While Mrs. Clinton has characterized the investigation as a mere ‘security inquiry’, Mr. Comey’s comment was brusque and dismissive, saying he was “not familiar with the term.”
Mr. Comey confirmed he had been receiving regular briefings on the status of the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails, which included interviews with some of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides at the State Department on her decision to use a private server for all of her government business as Secretary of State, adding that “some emails that went through her server appear to have been classified at various security levels because of sensitive information.”
The FBI’s case began as a ‘referral’ from the Inspector-General of the US State Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies, who were concerned that classified information might have been stored outside a secure government network. But multiple law enforcement officials said the matter quickly became an investigation into whether anyone had committed a crime in mis-handling ‘classified’ information.
Wrote columnist H. A. Goodman on the Salon website: “Millions of Democrats are voting for a presidential candidate linked to an FBI criminal investigation. Potentially our next Commander-in-Chief will be interviewed by the FBI soon, as will her top aides. This state of affairs would never take place in any other leading democracy, but American politics is unique.”
In a Wall Street Journal Op-ed, former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey states the case for Clinton’s prosecution:
“When asked whether she had her server ‘wiped’, she assumed an air of grandmotherly befuddlement: “What, like with a cloth or something?” she asked. “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
“The simple proposition that everyone is equal before the law suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s state of mind – whether mere knowledge of what she was doing as to mishandling classified information; or gross negligence in the case of the mishandling of information relating to national defense; or bad intent as to actual or attempted destruction of email messages; or corrupt intent as to State Department business – justifies a criminal charge of one sort or another.”
Added Goodman: “In the best case scenario, Clinton doesn’t face indictments, but the FBI confirms that she jeopardized national security. Even without any FBI ‘revelations’, Trump kept calling her simply ‘Crooked Hillary’ So one can expect her to be very much on the defensive during every televised debate against Trump.”
What happens if Clinton wins the nomination, and the FBI recommends indictments after July 25, 2016, the date of the Democrtic Convention? In that event, Trump doesn’t have to do a thing, because the Democratic Party would have, by default as it were, handed Donald the Presidency!
Obama’s former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, interviewed on CNN by Jake Tapper on Hillary’s use of a private, unsecured server as Secretary of State, noted:
“If it were me, I would probably be in jail This ‘over-classification’ claim is not an excuse. If it’s classified, it’s classified.”
Andrew Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, writing on the reason.com website after the release of the Inspector-General’s report, noted that “Clinton and her former aides declined to cooperate with the IG, notwithstanding her oft-stated claim that she ‘can’t wait’ to meet with officials and clear the air about her emails.”
Napolitano noted that the investigation was launched when officials at the State Department under Secretary of State John Kerry learned that Clinton paid an aide to migrate her public and secret State Department email streams away from their secured government venues and onto her own, non-secure server, stored in her home. “The migration of the secret email stream most likely constituted the crime of espionage – the failure to secure and preserve the secrecy of confidential, secret or top-secret material.”
The Inspector General’s report is damning to Clinton, says Napolitano. “It refutes every defense she has offered to the allegation that she mishandled state secrets. It revealed an email that hadn’t been publicly made known showing Clinton’s state of mind. And it paints a picture of a self-isolated Secretary of State stubbornly refusing to comply with federal law for venal reasons; she simply did not want to be held accountable for her official behaviour.
“Here’s what is new publicly: When her private server was down and her BlackBerry immobilized for days at a time, she refused to use a government-issued BlackBerry because of her fear of the Freedom of Information Act. She preferred to go dark, or back to the 19th-century technology of having documents read aloud to her.
“The State Department she once headed has rejected all of her arguments. Two federal judges have ordered her aides to testify about a conspiracy in her office to evade federal laws. Her legal status can only be described as grave or worse than grave.
“Clinton diverted all of her email traffic to her private server – some 66,000 emails, about 2,200 of which contained state secrets. Moreover, Secretary of State Colin Powell never used his own server, nor is he presently seeking to become the chief federal law enforcement officer in the land.
“If you are curious why the Inspector General of the State Department during Hillary’s years as Secretary of State did not discover all of Clinton’s lawbreaking while she was doing it, the answer will alarm but probably not surprise you: There was no Inspector General at the State Department during Clinton’s tenure as Secretary! – a state of affairs unique in modern history; and she knew that. How much more knowledge of her manipulations will the Justice Department tolerate before enforcing the law?”
[Source:- The island]
