By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 27, 2016
The State Department’s inspector general released a
report this week concluding that Hillary Clinton is a breathtakingly brazen and
consistent liar.
No, that’s not a direct quote. Bureaucrats don’t talk
that way under the best of circumstances — and this IG, Steve Linick, is an
Obama appointee whose report is about the apparent Democratic nominee for
president.
So it’s all the more shocking, then, that the report
confirms nearly everything Clinton’s critics have been saying. By setting up a
secret e-mail server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., without proper
authorization from any legal or security official, Clinton displayed a cavalier
disregard for national security and an outrageous desire to hide her doings
from Freedom of Information Act requests, government archivists, Congress, the
press, and, ultimately, the American people.
What’s infuriating about all of this is that it is not,
in fact, news. Yes, the fresh details are justifiably headline-grabbing. But
the underlying conclusion is about as shocking as a Department of Interior
report confirming that bears are currently using our national parklands as
toilets.
Over a year ago, Clinton held a press conference at the
United Nations intended to put the whole controversy to rest. Nearly every
significant statement she made was a lie. And we’ve known it for a year.
For instance, she said, “I did not e-mail any classified
material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material.” We know
that’s untrue. Of the e-mails she handed over (remember, she unilaterally
deleted some 32,000 on her own), 2,079 of them contained classified material,
some given a classification even more sensitive than “top secret,” some fairly
mundane. Her campaign clings to the fact that they were not “marked”
classified.
Nonsense. Classified material is “born” classified, and
it was Clinton’s job to understand that. Moreover, how could the classified
material she sent be marked “classified” if the whole point of her shadow
server was to avoid oversight by the people who do the classifying? It’s like
selling bootleg gin and then claiming that no one from the government marked it
“bootleg.”
Another major lie: that she did this out of “convenience”
because she didn’t want to carry two devices. The whole thing sort of just
happened on auto-pilot while she was concentrating on much more important
things, Clinton insisted.
More lies. Not only did she carry several devices, but
the IG report makes it clear that this stealth rig took a lot of planning and
effort. She told staffers, “I don’t want any risk of the personal being
accessible.”
When two employees in the IT department raised concerns
that Clinton’s stealth server would not properly preserve records, a supervisor
replied that the matter had been reviewed and approved by lawyers and that the
staffers were “never to speak of the secretary’s personal e-mail system again.”
That’s a strange instruction for something lawyers
approved, isn’t it? The IG couldn’t find any evidence of this legal review of
Clinton’s system. These mystery lawyers are surely unreachable because they are
aiding O. J. Simpson in the search for the real killers.
If such a review existed, you’d think the Clinton
campaign would provide it to investigators (and the press). Then again, if
Clinton did nothing wrong, she also would have talked to the inspector general,
as every other relevant secretary of state did. And she would have happily told
her team to cooperate with the IG to clear the air. They all refused. I wonder
why.
Just kidding. Of course I don’t wonder why. From the
earliest days of this scandal — and it is a scandal — Clinton has lied. Unlike
Donald Trump’s lies, which he usually vomits up spontaneously like a vesuvian
geyser, Clinton’s were carefully prepared, typed up, and repeated for all the
world to hear over and over again.
I would think this is an important distinction. Neither
of the candidates is worthy of the office in my eyes, but voters might discount
many of Trump’s deceits as symptoms of his glandular personality. Much like
Vice President Joe Biden, who always gets a pass for launching errant fake-fact
missiles from the offline silo that is his mouth, Trump is often seen as
entertainingly spontaneous.
Meanwhile, Clinton — who lives many time zones away from
the word “entertaining” — is marketing herself as the mature and upstanding
grown-up. She does nothing spontaneously. And that means all of her lies are
premeditated.
No comments:
Post a Comment