By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, June 03, 2016
The State Department lied to the American public to sell
the Iran deal. The State Department acknowledged this lie, in public, during a
press conference. The State Department destroyed video evidence of its having
done this, and then admitting doing so.
None of this is in dispute.
Nobody is getting fired.
Jen Psaki, the witless Pippi Longstocking of the American
diplomatic project, admitted under questioning from James Rosen of Fox News
that the State Department had lied — flat-out — about the fact that secret
talks had been under way between the United States and Iran over the Islamic
terror state’s nuclear-weapons program. Psaki attempted to justify this lie,
insisting that “diplomacy needs privacy,” which is true enough. But this wasn’t
private, or a question of discretion: The facts were out there, and the State
Department lied about them.
Is it any wonder that Mrs. Clinton, to whom deception is
an instinct, felt so at ease in the State Department that she went to
extraordinary, illegal lengths to conceal her communication as secretary of
state from the public and from ordinary oversight?
This being an official State Department press conference,
Rosen’s question and Psaki’s attempts at justifying her department’s dishonesty
were caught on video. Eight minutes of that video has been destroyed, including
the relevant parts.
But, oh, hear the lament of John Kirby, State Department
spokesman. This sort of thing is unacceptable, he says, “not in keeping” with
the State Department’s “commitment to transparency.” That same State Department
had been, five minutes before his confession, suggesting that a technological
“glitch” had destroyed the video.
The State Department has no commitment to transparency.
It has a commitment to deceit, a deep and vigorous one. And, as is usual, these
things go all the way to the top. If the secretary of state — who already was
in all but the most formal sense a presidential candidate — could, in direct
violation of federal law, conspire to keep her communication insulated from
ordinary oversight, and if her office could basically tell Congress and investigators
to buzz off when they demanded access to that communication, then why can’t
some peon edit a video?
Which peon, though? Psaki says she has no knowledge of
the episode, and Kirby says that, despite the vast intelligence operation at
the disposal of the State Department, he doesn’t know who the naughty party is.
Funny how the best and brightest and most highly informed people on Earth (so
they tell us, endlessly) can’t find their asses with both hands when they’re
afraid that somebody might lose his job. If we believe Barack Obama — and I do
not — he has learned about practically every controversial event in his own
presidency from television news shows, as though he were a spectator in his own
administration.
We found Osama bin Laden, but we can’t find a vandal in
the State Department?
Eighteen minutes of deleted audio got Richard Nixon
impeached. Eight minutes of missing video? Well, diplomacy and all that.
From Lois Lerner’s weaponizing the IRS on behalf of
Democrats before the 2012 elections to Mrs. Clinton’s toilet-server shenanigans
to gross abuses of prosecutorial power among Democratic state attorneys
general, the lesson of the Obama years is clear: If you are close enough to
power, you can do anything, and there is never a price to pay.
That video is our property, and the event it documents is
of some concern to us as a people, inasmuch as some of us (not many, but some)
retain sufficient self-respect and resent being lied to, with malice
aforethought, by our own employees, and might be inclined to make a public
issue about it in this election year. But of course that gets harder to do when
the evidence is destroyed, which is why somebody in the Obama administration —
and it would not be too hard to find out who — destroyed that video.
Get six months behind in your child-support payments, and
you’ll go to jail. Lie about conducting secret negotiations with the world’s
leading sponsor of terrorism as it goes about working to acquire nuclear
capabilities, and then destroy the evidence of your lie, and what happens? We
won’t even bother to make public who the guilty party is.
Yes, of course they know.
Lois Lerner, the IRS inquisitor who targeted the
president’s political opponents for official harassment, is currently enjoying
a fat federal pension and got some nice bonuses before she went on her way.
Whoever destroyed the video will probably get the same thing.
Every now and then, a politician will start a sentence by
saying, “The American people will not put up with . . . ” whatever it is that
the politician wants to abominate. But the fact is, the American people keep
proving over and over that they will put up with anything.
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