August in Washington, D.C., being perennially hot and humid, Congress leaves town, the lobbyists naturally follow, and the town is dead. But not this year, thanks to the imbroglio over Hillary Clinton’s private email server and the fact that she violated federal law by sending and receiving emails with classified documents, including several marked “Top Secret,” on that server.
Of course, having once claimed she never sent or received classified documents, she is now claiming she didn’t know they were classified at the time, but for the secretary of State not to know what is or isn’t classified, if true (a BIG “IF”), does not speak well of her competence.
Still, the fact remains that she violated federal law, which means the Obama administration’s Justice Department must figure out how to handle this, and complicating matters is that the same Justice Department recently found its former CIA director, David Petraeus, guilty of sharing classified information with his biographer and lover, Paula Broadwell, for which the Justice Department fined him $100,000 and gave him a two-year probation, effectively ending his government career.
So both Hillary and Petraeus have disseminated classified information, and the Justice Department made Petraeus pay for it. Will it do the same for Hillary, especially given that the information Patraeus shared was merely classified, while at least two (so far) of Hillary’s emails were “Top Secret,” a much more serious violation?
This is the Justice Department’s dilemma. It’s well known that President Obama much prefers that Joe Biden succeeds him as president. He and Joe are BFFs, while his relationship with Hillary was always so-so, and did not improve when she left his administration. So if the Justice Department goes after Hillary, does it look like a calculated political vendetta?
Much worse — certainly from a perception standpoint — is if the Justice Department does nothing. Obama may prefer that Biden succeeds him, but he definitely prefers that a Democrat succeeds him and — Bernie Sanders’ popularity notwithstanding — Hillary is the presumptive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Obama’s other problem is that Hillary was his secretary of State, so she is well versed in the inner workings of the Obama foreign policy apparatus, which has hardly distinguished itself, and she can tell many a tale about it and the inner workings of the Obama administration. She also has many powerful allies in the Democratic Party, so if Obama’s Justice Department goes after her, she — and her much-beloved, politically savvy hubby — will fight back. But if it lays off, Obama will be accused of playing politics, of a double standard, and about every other malfeasance you can think of.
Either way, this story isn’t going away, and the presidential election keeps getting closer.
I don’t see how Clinton can claim any sort of ignorance. I’m not all that bright, but it seems to me that ANYTHING the Secretary of State sends or receives is at the very least sensitive and should be protected. I just think that Hillary Clinton believes that rules and laws are for “little people”, that she is entitled to be President and that anybody who doesn’t agree is simply too stupid to understand. But as far as rules applying to her go, she probably has a point,. If she were Jane Q. Public, something would have been done by now.
Well, Hillary will claim – and has claimed – that many of her emails were about her daughter’s wedding, baby showers for the grandkid, etc., which is probably not sensitive enough from a national security standpoint that it needs to be protected, but there is no question she believes rules and laws are for the little people, and don’t apply to her or Bubba. I would also heartily agree that she believes the presidency is her due and anyone too stupid to figure that out probably shouldn’t vote. A friend of mine sent me a Youtube video of a guy on the street in Washington holding a board that had pictures of four mansions on it. The first mansion was worth $5,700,000. The second worth $1,700,000. The third worth 11,000,000. The fourth, a beach side mansion worth $13,000,000. The guy then asked people on the street to guess which houses were owned by which candidate for president. Guesses varied from Marco Rubio, to Donald Trump, to Ben Carson, to Ted Cruz (all Republicans). At the end of the video the guy revealed that every house had been owned by Hillary Clinton at one time or another. The street folks were dumbfounded.