Hillary Clinton -- Lawless, Power-lusting, Opaque, and Now, Finally, Done

Hillary Clinton has hung around and hung around, despite her long record of lawlessness, secrecy to hide her power-lust, and disregard for others.  As an admirer of Saul Alinsky, she, like Obama, is a proponent of class and group warfare who sees oppressors and victims everywhere in American society.  That vision is most useful in justifying never-ending power grabs by government and the politicians who use that power to extort wealth and further power from the People and their private sector enterprises.  As does Obama, she turns a blind eye to the obvious conclusion that her government solution to all problems is flawed because there is no power in the private sector as great as that of government, which is controlled by people even more morally challenged for the most part.

Hillary has always been drawn into corrupt practices.  The Whitewater and Tyson's Chicken scandals while the First "Lady" of Arkansas set the expectations of rational observers before she moved into the White House.  Her unlawful practice of hiding documents and violating transparency laws was early in full evidence when she became First "Lady" of the United States.  She could not find subpenaed documents relating to Whitewater, until they or some subset of them turned up in plain sight quite mysteriously.  Then the HillaryCare fiasco she orchestrated with Ira Magaziner demonstrated a penchant for holding secret meetings that were required to be public meetings.  Hillary removed papers from Vince Foster's office after his mysterious death.  Hillary and Bill accused the operators of the White House Travel Office of wrongdoing, without any justification, in order to try to install their own friends in that job.  What kind of person would send someone to prison in order to gain a job for a friend?

So, it is hardly surprising that we are now hearing that Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to extort and/or to offer favors to nations if they granted money to her foundation.  Alright, it is true that I do not directly and certainly know that favors or harm were promised unless the donations were made.  But the appearance is very bad and what is worse, knowing Hillary's ethics and practice, the rational individual has to expect it to be most likely that promises or threats were made, which caused some nations not very friendly to America or to the equal rights of women to make contributions to her foundation.  Once again, one senses that transparency is greatly lacking on Hillary's relationship with these donator nations.  Her foundation is widely known to function as a sort of political slush fund, though it does also do some charitable work.  The foundation fits the pattern of being another tool to obscure her activities.

Now most recently we discovered that the reason that the House of Representatives and Judicial Watch could not get her e-mails relating to the Benghazi incident, is because she did not use the State Department e-mail account as she was required for conducting State Department business.  No, she used e-mail addresses operating off of a server in the basement of her home, as did some of her close assistants in the State Department.  Federal law requires that all government e-mails be maintained and preserved.  Hillary had her people examine her e-mails on one of the e-mail addresses operating out of her personal server and turn some set of them over to the State Department, many months after leaving the office.  This is a huge violation of the transparency requirement.  Those and who knows how many other e-mails she has not turned over should have long ago been examined by the State Department to find any that might be relevant to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by Judicial Watch and to the investigation of the House of Representatives.  This is a majority interference with the essential checks and balances We the People must maintain on our government to constrain its tendencies to tyranny and excess.

Hillary was well-aware that her actions were in violation of law and yet she did not step forward with her e-mails until she was caught.  I heard her friend Lanny Davis make the claim that she was not hiding her personal e-mail, because she had sent thousands of e-mails to thousands of people using it.  This does not mean that she was obeying the transparency requirements.  What it does imply is that the many people who were in government positions knew that she was violating the law by using her personal e-mail account for government business.  The extreme and total corruption of the Obama administration is evident in the fact that these people did not bring down an Inspector General investigation of her e-mail use while she was still serving as Secretary of State.  But while the Inspector General did not bother Hillary, nine investigations within the State Department did find that the law-violating use of private e-mails was widespread in the State Department and in many of our embassies around the world.  Such a violation was even used as a reason for sacking one ambassador during Hillary's tenure in the State Department.  But Hillary is always above the law!

As bad as Hillary Clinton's violation of transparency laws and court orders is, it may be even more disturbing that because she did not use the State Department e-mail, she had to have exposed many, many secrets to governments and groups unfriendly to the U.S. and opposed to individual rights.  It is already known that her home server system was not very secure with respect to hackers.  It was only a useful tool to deceive the American People, but not to hide classified State Department business from Qatar, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China.  I expect many Americans do not understand how much State Department business is classified and do not understand how badly many other nations would want to see the Secretary of State's email and that of the people she corresponded with.  While there are many reasons that her tenure as Secretary of State was not a success, it may very well turn out that one of them was because many nations were hacking her insecure e-mail accounts.  [Ari Fleischer has also said that it is most likely the case that Russia, China, and Iran, among other nations, have read all of Hillary Clinton's e-mails, including everything about State Department business.  Update on 9 March 2015.]

Any thinking American should be horrified by the risk she put U.S. foreign policy and defense in with what for her was a political career convenience.  This was an extremely irresponsible act and one which surely violated the law.  She belongs in prison, not in a campaign to become the next President of the United States and the most powerful leader of the world's most powerful government.

But, who cares why Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in Benghazi and who cares if court orders were violated?  Who cares if an essential check on government power and corruption was violated?  Who cares if Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea were reading Hillary's e-mail and that of her correspondents about our foreign and defense policies?  We are about to test the American voter once again.  I hope they will not prove as unthinking as they were when they twice voted for Obama.  If they only prove a wee bit better thinkers, then Hillary Clinton is now toast.

For those of you who do care about why Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans died in Benghazi, Judicial Watch did recently obtain enough e-mails from a number of Hillary Clinton's top State Department aides and advisers to discover that they had immediately recognized that the attack was by a terrorist group.  They did not speculate in those e-mails that it was a "random" mob that was incensed by an obscure Internet video.  Given the strident and angry "Who cares" attitude of their boss, perhaps it is at least possible that they did not inform Hillary that the attack was a terrorist attack.  So which of these are part of the real story?

• Hillary was unable to conclude from the evidence that the attack was a terrorist attack.
• Her aides knew she would not be interested in the cause of the attack.
• Her aides knew that she wanted plausible deniability for her ridiculous claim that a random mob was incensed by an obscure Internet video and spontaneously attacked the Consulate.
• Her aides, knowing her famous furies, were afraid to tell her the real reason for the attack.
• Hillary did know that the attack was by a terrorist group, but it was politically inconvenient to make that public with Obama's re-election campaign underway, so she lied about the cause.

Update on 11 March 2015:  Hillary Clinton destroyed 32,000 e-mails last year which she claimed were personal.  She refused to turn her home server over for any attempt to recover and check the disposed e-mails according to a report in the Washington Times.  We do not know how many other e-mails she has not turned over, but the timing of her destruction of e-mails would have allowed her to destroy the e-mails relating to the Benghazi incident.