By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media
This is not how Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House was supposed to go: full of never-ending scandals, with a close primary competitor, and two FBI investigations. There is but one week to go before the Iowa caucuses, where the first votes in this year’s presidential race will finally be cast.
While Hillary Clinton is still the clear leader in national polls and likely to receive the nomination, the numbers are extremely close in Iowa between Hillary and the democratic socialist candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). And in the first actual primary, the following week in New Hampshire, Mrs. Clinton is trailing in a CNN poll by almost 30 points. Yes, New Hampshire is right next to Sanders’ home state of Vermont, but Sanders’ potential victories in Iowa and New Hampshire could dramatically alter the dynamics of the race.
But winning the Democratic presidential primary might be the least of Mrs. Clinton’s worries. As the State Department continues its monthly release of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, in compliance with a federal judge overseeing their release, the news keeps getting worse and worse. In the meantime, the weekend snowstormserved as an excuse for the State Department to try to get an extra month to release the final batch of emails, which would conveniently be after—instead of before—the first four states’ primaries and caucuses.
It was recently reported that the emails that crossed Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured “home brew” server included those with the Top Secret classification of SAP, or Special Access Programs, including “‘dark projects,’ such as drone operations,”according to The New York Post. In addition, Paul Sperry reports, “at least one of Clinton’s emails included sensitive information on spies.”
To date, at least 1,340 emails that went through Mrs. Clinton’s server have been deemed classified. Clinton’s defense is that none of these emails were marked classified when she sent or received them. Yet, “An intelligence official familiar with the matter told NBC News that the special access program in question was so sensitive that [Inspector General Charles] McCullough and some of his aides had to receive clearance to be read in on it before viewing the sworn declaration about the Clinton emails.”
In other words, this information was too important for the intelligence community’s inspector general to view it without special access, yet it made its way freely through an unsecure server almost certain to have been hacked by foreign nations. If the CIA were to ever have such access to the Russian foreign minister’s email server, it would be considered a bonanza for them.
Even if Mrs. Clinton’s claims were true, it would make no difference. It doesn’t matter if the material was “marked” classified. What matters is if the content was, in fact, classified. It was her responsibility as secretary of state to know the difference. Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President Bush, spelled it out: “Having any classified information on your private server is against the law. But Special Access Programs contain information so sensitive, it is given a secret ‘codeword’ and placed into a ‘compartment’ to which only a small number of specially cleared people have access. To see this information, it is not enough to have Top Secret security clearance; you have to be cleared for that specific compartment.”
The truth is that as secretary of state, Clinton showed blatant disregard for the security of our nation. When her aide Jake Sullivan said that aides were having trouble sending information via secure fax, Clinton wrote back, “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”
“This is gigantic,” argues former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova. “The removal of the classified marking is a federal crime. It is the same thing to order someone to do it as if she had done it herself.”
The FBI investigation will no longer be examining just the transmission of classified information. There are also 150 FBI agents looking into allegations of public corruption between Secretary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
But the cronyism and corruption didn’t just start when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. Peter Schweizer’s recent article on the Clinton-pardoned international fugitive Marc Rich highlights some of the continuing rewards the Clintons are reaping in return for that last minute pardon of Rich, who was on the list of the FBI’s ten most wanted.
“Rich died in 2013,” writes Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash. “But his business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal.”
Rich’s ally, a Nigerian businessman named Gilbert Chagoury, who was previously convicted of money laundering and working with a criminal organization, “organized an event at which Bill was paid $100,000 to speak (in 2003), donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and in 2009 pledged a cool $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative,” according to Schweizer. One of Chagoury’s relatives even served on Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
No matter where one looks, there seems to be even more Clinton corruption. But don’t expect the mainstream media to report on it.
The mainstream media have been fond of saying that Mrs. Clinton is not the “subject” of the FBI investigation. However, according to Andy McCarthy, subjects may or may not be charged with a crime after the investigation is completed.
“As a technical matter, no matter how extensively the FBI pokes around on its own, no one can be a subject of a real investigation—i.e., one that can lead to criminal charges—unless and until there is a grand jury,” writes McCarthy. “That does not happen until the Justice Department hops on board.”
“So Obama is hedging his bets. He is letting the FBI investigate, but on its own, without Justice Department prosecutors and the grand jury,” writes McCarthy. He adds, “The FBI cannot convene a grand jury and present an indictment. But you’d best believe the FBI can make the Obama administration look very bad if it shrinks from doing so. Then it will be a matter of how far Barack Obama is willing to stick his neck out for Hillary Clinton.”
The Clinton family cannot run away from its corrupt and scandalous record, no matter how far the mainstream media will go to avoid mentioning specifics. Mrs. Clinton set off a firestorm recently when she accused Donald Trump of having “a penchant for sexism.” This brought out people who the Clinton campaign would have much preferred stayed beneath the radar, such as alleged Clinton rape victim Juanita Broaddrick.
The Trump campaign shot back about Bill Clinton’s history with women. There is a lengthy list of women who claim to have been hit on, assaulted, or even raped by Bill Clinton. And Hillary was forced to answer those questions in the context of having just recently tweeted that “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”
Mrs. Clinton’s best ally at this point is a corrupt establishment media that largely ignore her legal and ethical challenges, and which regularly portray the Democratic Party race as being fought over such high-minded virtues as “heart vs. head,” or between “Bernie Sanders’s idealism and Hillary Clinton’s pragmatism.” We’ll see how long they can continue to enable her.