By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 04, 2015
Every time the State Department pulls out a new fistful
of Hillary Clinton e-mails like Richard Dreyfuss yanking a license plate out of
a shark’s belly in Jaws, someone declares that there’s “no smoking gun!”
I’ve written before about how shouting “There’s no
smoking gun!” is a non-denial denial. Ask a cop. When a murder suspect
immediately exclaims, “You have no indisputable evidence I murdered my boss!”
instead of, “I didn’t do it!” it’s a good sign that the suspect thinks he
covered his tracks, not that he’s innocent.
Fellas, if your wife asks if you’re having an affair,
respond by saying, “You have no proof!” See if she takes that for a denial.
But here’s the thing. There is a smoking gun. In fact,
there’s a whole smoking arsenal. The problem is that the standards for what
counts as a smoking gun keep changing.
Nearly everything Clinton has said in her defense
regarding her secret server has been a lie. Among the minor lies: her claim
that she set up the server so she could use a single device. (She had two.) Her
claim that the State Department was saving her e-mails to staff. (It wasn’t
until 2010.) Her claim that she erased tens of thousands of e-mails because
they included, among other things, her e-mail correspondence with her husband.
(Bill Clinton doesn’t use e-mail.)
Hillary Clinton said she never solicited e-mail from her
lugubrious political hatchet man, Sidney Blumenthal. The latest e-mails show
that she was in near-constant contact with him, encouraging him to keep his
various reports coming. Blumenthal was barred from getting a job at the White
House, so Clinton set him up at her charity–cum–super PAC, the Clinton
Foundation.
The more important lie: She said she never received or
sent classified information. “I did not e-mail any classified material to
anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material.”
Note: This was not an off-the-cuff statement. She said
this while reading from notes, after consulting with her campaign team and her
lawyers, in a ballyhooed press conference in March at the United Nations.
And it was a lie. When the inspectors general of the
State Department and the Intelligence Community confirmed in July that she had
sent classified material, Clinton “clarified” her carefully prepared lie by
saying that what she meant was none of the e-mails she sent or received were
marked classified at the time.
This left out the fact that the whole point of the
secret server was that it was hidden from the officials whose job is to
designate documents as classified (and to keep it all hidden from Freedom of
Information Act requests and congressional oversight). It’s like setting up an
illegal still and then claiming none of the moonshine you sold was marked
“illegal.”
But the deceit goes deeper. Most people can be forgiven
for not understanding the difference between classified documents and classified
information. A classified document is marked “Top Secret” or some such. But
people who work in government understand that lots of information is classified
simply by virtue of the kind of information it is.
My National Review colleague Andrew McCarthy, a former
federal prosecutor, has been setting his head on fire trying to get the
mainstream media to take note of this fact. He points out that according to an
executive order issued by President Obama, all “foreign government information
is presumed to cause damage to the national security” and is therefore presumed
classified. Clinton routinely ignored this rule. That’s not just my opinion. A
study by Reuters found that “Clinton and her senior staff routinely” ignored
these rules.
“Here’s my personal e-mail,” Clinton told Middle East
envoy George Mitchell, who then proceeded to convey numerous private
conversations he had with foreign leaders.
The Washington Times reports that Clinton’s unsecured
e-mails contained spy-satellite information about North Korea’s movement of its
nuclear assets. This sort of information is universally recognized as top
secret and is normally subjected to draconian safeguards. There is no way
Clinton didn’t know this.
All of these — and many other — facts would have counted
as “smoking guns” if they had been divulged immediately after Clinton’s U.N.
press conference. But Clinton, with the help of her praetorian defenders in the
media, keeps moving the goalposts.
Still, all of this ignores the biggest smoking gun of
them all: her illicit server. It’s sitting in plain view, its smoke visible to
anyone with eyes to see.
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