Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to get this close to becoming president of the United States. Aaron Burr was corrupt, but his treason didn’t occur until after his presidential possibilities had dried up. Ulysses Grant was a great man whose administration was riddled with corruption, but he wasn't personally involved. Warren Harding wasn't a great man, but he wasn't party to the corruption in his administration either. Hillary Clinton stands alone.
Her corruption has many dimensions. It encompasses her personal, professional, and political life. There are lots of overlaps. Her use of a private email server engulfs all three aspects. With Clinton, one never has to exaggerate. Her malfeasance speaks for itself, loudly. She lies to get out of trouble and fool the press and voters. But she also lies gratuitously—when it's not required to avoid trouble. Face to face with the parents of CIA commandos who were killed in Benghazi while protecting Ambassador Chris Stevens, Clinton lied. She said an anti-Islam video had prompted the fatal attack, which she knew wasn't true, when she could have simply expressed her condolences. Clinton has a masochistic relationship with the media. She spurns them. They protect her.
Is there any public figure who lies as routinely as Clinton? Not in my lifetime in Washington. Not Richard Nixon. Not LBJ. Not Donald Trump. Not even Bill Clinton. She skillfully, though probably unconsciously, spreads out her lies to lessen the impact. But when you pack them together, as Rep. Trey Gowdy did while questioning FBI director James Comey at a House hearing, they're shocking. The Gowdy-Comey exchange went like this:
Gowdy: Clinton said she never sent or received any classified information over her private email. Not true?
Comey: Right.
Gowdy: Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails. . . . Was that true?
Comey: That's not true.
Gowdy: Clinton said [she] didn't email any classified material to anyone. . . . True?
Comey: There was classified material emailed.
Gowdy: [She] said that she used just one device. True?
Comey: She used multiple devices.
Gowdy: [She] said all work-related emails were returned to the State Department. True?
Comey: No.
Gowdy: [She] said neither she nor anyone else deleted work-related emails. . . . True?
Comey: That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work-related emails. . . . Whether they were deleted . . . or something happened to them, there's no doubt that there were work-related emails . . . removed electronically from the email system. [Translation: not true.]
Gowdy: [She] said her lawyers read every one of the emails [individually before deleting any of them]. True?
Comey: No.
Gowdy: False, exculpatory statements—they are used for what?
Comey: Either for the substantive prosecution or for evidence of intent in a criminal prosecution?
Gowdy: Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?
Comey: Right.
As pernicious as Clinton's lies have been—and continue to be—there's a far more serious problem with her as president. It's twofold: her indifference to protecting national security secrets and her exploitation of the foreign policy and diplomatic process for personal gain. Together, these make her unfit to be president, both morally and professionally.
Comey spared Clinton the criminal prosecution a lesser State Department official would surely have faced for treating classified emails so cavalierly. But he was unforgiving in discussing her lackadaisical approach to "very sensitive, highly classified information." It was the equivalent of an indictment, only one not to be prosecuted. Comey said Clinton emails with "Top Secret/Special Access" information—the truly sensitive stuff—were less protected than they would have been "with a commercial service like Gmail." In other words, one's email chats with friends, lovers, and relatives are more secure than were those of the secretary of state.
Though the FBI found no "direct evidence" of "computer intrusion by hostile actors," it's obvious Comey believes there was plenty of it. He said adversaries had hacked into the email of those with whom Clinton was in "regular contact from her personal account." Worse, her email "domain" was widely known and "readily apparent." Worse still, she used her unsecure email outside the United States, even in the "territory of sophisticated adversaries." We know who they are.
Since a Romanian hacker named "Guccifer" had no trouble accessing her emails, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would have to have been asleep at the wheel not to have tapped in from the start of the Obama administration. David Sanger of the New York Times reported the absence of clear evidence of hacking was a signal to experts and government investigators that her email likely "had been breached, but the intruders were far too skilled to leave evidence of their work." Such intruders are the most frightening kind. They tend to work for America's enemies.
Sloppy security alone doesn't make Clinton unfit for the presidency. But the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons' methods of enriching themselves do. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions such as the New York Times, have failed to see the foundation as a target for investigative reporting. But Peter Schweizer, in his 2015 book Clinton Cash, examined the foundation and discovered how it allowed the Clintons to make foreign policy pay. Donate to the foundation or give Bill Clinton an exorbitant fee for a speech and good things often happened. According to Forbes, Bill and Hillary Clinton made $229,319,855 between 2001 and 2014.
The Clintons created a structure whereby foreign governments, businesses, and financiers could buy access to American politicians, Schweizer says. "Foreign entities are prohibited by federal law from giving to political campaigns and super-PACs. But with the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees, foreign entities can sidestep what has been a longtime consensus point in American politics." That point: American foreign policy isn't like politics, where campaign donations buy access and favors. With the Clintons, foreign policy is politics by other means.
When his wife became secretary of state, Bill Clinton's speaking fees skyrocketed. He gave two speeches in Nigeria at $700,000 apiece. He was paid $750,000 by Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company, for a speech in Hong Kong. He gave 13 speeches for more than $500,000 a pop from the time he stepped down as president in 2001 to the day his wife left as secretary of state in 2013. Eleven of them occurred while she was in office, Schweizer found. PolitiFact confirmed his numbers and speech dates.
The examples of the Clintons' remunerating themselves with help from holding high office are numerous. He got $16.5 million from Laureate International Universities, the parent company of an online diploma mill, as honorary chancellor for five years. Laureate Education Inc. got $55 million in State Department grants. The Clintons benefited from deals in Russia, India, Colombia, and Africa. At least Bill Clinton did.
Meanwhile, they've broken all the rules. The Clinton Foundation, more a slush fund to finance the family's living expenses than a charity, signed a document promising to disclose any donations from foreign entities during Hillary's tenure as secretary of state. At the time, John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wondered aloud why the foundation needed to take in any foreign money at all: "If you're traveling to some country and you meet with the foreign leadership and a week later or two weeks later or three weeks later the president [Bill Clinton] travels there and solicits a donation and they pledge to give at some point in the future but nobody knows, is there an appearance of a conflict?" Now, as secretary of state himself, Kerry must know the answer. The foundation violated the agreement at least five times.
They got away with it, largely unscathed. Hillary Clinton was stung by the email case. But she's sticking with the family formula when you're caught red-handed: Stonewall and confess to nothing and eventually the problem will go away. This has worked since her $100,000 gain betting on cattle futures in 1978. An academic study calculated the chance of such a windfall happening legitimately at 1 in 13 trillion. Yet the sham was soon forgotten. This time, in this presidential race, voters have no excuse. We know who Hillary Clinton really is."
www.weeklystandard.com/yup-shes-crooked/article/2003312
Her corruption has many dimensions. It encompasses her personal, professional, and political life. There are lots of overlaps. Her use of a private email server engulfs all three aspects. With Clinton, one never has to exaggerate. Her malfeasance speaks for itself, loudly. She lies to get out of trouble and fool the press and voters. But she also lies gratuitously—when it's not required to avoid trouble. Face to face with the parents of CIA commandos who were killed in Benghazi while protecting Ambassador Chris Stevens, Clinton lied. She said an anti-Islam video had prompted the fatal attack, which she knew wasn't true, when she could have simply expressed her condolences. Clinton has a masochistic relationship with the media. She spurns them. They protect her.
Is there any public figure who lies as routinely as Clinton? Not in my lifetime in Washington. Not Richard Nixon. Not LBJ. Not Donald Trump. Not even Bill Clinton. She skillfully, though probably unconsciously, spreads out her lies to lessen the impact. But when you pack them together, as Rep. Trey Gowdy did while questioning FBI director James Comey at a House hearing, they're shocking. The Gowdy-Comey exchange went like this:
Gowdy: Clinton said she never sent or received any classified information over her private email. Not true?
Comey: Right.
Gowdy: Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails. . . . Was that true?
Comey: That's not true.
Gowdy: Clinton said [she] didn't email any classified material to anyone. . . . True?
Comey: There was classified material emailed.
Gowdy: [She] said that she used just one device. True?
Comey: She used multiple devices.
Gowdy: [She] said all work-related emails were returned to the State Department. True?
Comey: No.
Gowdy: [She] said neither she nor anyone else deleted work-related emails. . . . True?
Comey: That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work-related emails. . . . Whether they were deleted . . . or something happened to them, there's no doubt that there were work-related emails . . . removed electronically from the email system. [Translation: not true.]
Gowdy: [She] said her lawyers read every one of the emails [individually before deleting any of them]. True?
Comey: No.
Gowdy: False, exculpatory statements—they are used for what?
Comey: Either for the substantive prosecution or for evidence of intent in a criminal prosecution?
Gowdy: Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?
Comey: Right.
As pernicious as Clinton's lies have been—and continue to be—there's a far more serious problem with her as president. It's twofold: her indifference to protecting national security secrets and her exploitation of the foreign policy and diplomatic process for personal gain. Together, these make her unfit to be president, both morally and professionally.
Comey spared Clinton the criminal prosecution a lesser State Department official would surely have faced for treating classified emails so cavalierly. But he was unforgiving in discussing her lackadaisical approach to "very sensitive, highly classified information." It was the equivalent of an indictment, only one not to be prosecuted. Comey said Clinton emails with "Top Secret/Special Access" information—the truly sensitive stuff—were less protected than they would have been "with a commercial service like Gmail." In other words, one's email chats with friends, lovers, and relatives are more secure than were those of the secretary of state.
Though the FBI found no "direct evidence" of "computer intrusion by hostile actors," it's obvious Comey believes there was plenty of it. He said adversaries had hacked into the email of those with whom Clinton was in "regular contact from her personal account." Worse, her email "domain" was widely known and "readily apparent." Worse still, she used her unsecure email outside the United States, even in the "territory of sophisticated adversaries." We know who they are.
Since a Romanian hacker named "Guccifer" had no trouble accessing her emails, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would have to have been asleep at the wheel not to have tapped in from the start of the Obama administration. David Sanger of the New York Times reported the absence of clear evidence of hacking was a signal to experts and government investigators that her email likely "had been breached, but the intruders were far too skilled to leave evidence of their work." Such intruders are the most frightening kind. They tend to work for America's enemies.
Sloppy security alone doesn't make Clinton unfit for the presidency. But the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons' methods of enriching themselves do. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions such as the New York Times, have failed to see the foundation as a target for investigative reporting. But Peter Schweizer, in his 2015 book Clinton Cash, examined the foundation and discovered how it allowed the Clintons to make foreign policy pay. Donate to the foundation or give Bill Clinton an exorbitant fee for a speech and good things often happened. According to Forbes, Bill and Hillary Clinton made $229,319,855 between 2001 and 2014.
The Clintons created a structure whereby foreign governments, businesses, and financiers could buy access to American politicians, Schweizer says. "Foreign entities are prohibited by federal law from giving to political campaigns and super-PACs. But with the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees, foreign entities can sidestep what has been a longtime consensus point in American politics." That point: American foreign policy isn't like politics, where campaign donations buy access and favors. With the Clintons, foreign policy is politics by other means.
When his wife became secretary of state, Bill Clinton's speaking fees skyrocketed. He gave two speeches in Nigeria at $700,000 apiece. He was paid $750,000 by Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company, for a speech in Hong Kong. He gave 13 speeches for more than $500,000 a pop from the time he stepped down as president in 2001 to the day his wife left as secretary of state in 2013. Eleven of them occurred while she was in office, Schweizer found. PolitiFact confirmed his numbers and speech dates.
The examples of the Clintons' remunerating themselves with help from holding high office are numerous. He got $16.5 million from Laureate International Universities, the parent company of an online diploma mill, as honorary chancellor for five years. Laureate Education Inc. got $55 million in State Department grants. The Clintons benefited from deals in Russia, India, Colombia, and Africa. At least Bill Clinton did.
Meanwhile, they've broken all the rules. The Clinton Foundation, more a slush fund to finance the family's living expenses than a charity, signed a document promising to disclose any donations from foreign entities during Hillary's tenure as secretary of state. At the time, John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wondered aloud why the foundation needed to take in any foreign money at all: "If you're traveling to some country and you meet with the foreign leadership and a week later or two weeks later or three weeks later the president [Bill Clinton] travels there and solicits a donation and they pledge to give at some point in the future but nobody knows, is there an appearance of a conflict?" Now, as secretary of state himself, Kerry must know the answer. The foundation violated the agreement at least five times.
They got away with it, largely unscathed. Hillary Clinton was stung by the email case. But she's sticking with the family formula when you're caught red-handed: Stonewall and confess to nothing and eventually the problem will go away. This has worked since her $100,000 gain betting on cattle futures in 1978. An academic study calculated the chance of such a windfall happening legitimately at 1 in 13 trillion. Yet the sham was soon forgotten. This time, in this presidential race, voters have no excuse. We know who Hillary Clinton really is."
www.weeklystandard.com/yup-shes-crooked/article/2003312
