The election season isn’t over yet, there are still 4 more days to go. But regardless of the outcome — whether Hillary Clinton wins or loses — her goose appears to be cooked, by most judgments.
As Democratic media pundit after pundit starts to finally face the truth — that the Clintons’ corruption is just too heinous and overwhelming to ignore or excuse — discussion is now turning to how the country will deal with Clinton and her close inner circle — regardless of whether or not she claims “victory” on Election Day.
So committed to her are many Democrats and high-powered figures in the Obama administration that talk has begun to paint FBI Director James Comey as a partisan enemy, rather than just as a potential meddler in the election.
It’s almost comical how fast the Democrats have changed their tune on Comey, going from complimentary and deferent in the wake of his recommendation not to indict Clinton after the FBI’s initial investigation to vitriolic now that the FBI chief has decided to reopen the former Secretary of State’s case.
Even if Comey concludes the new emails contain no new evidence of crimes committed by Hillary, it’s clear that the Clinton house of cards is coming apart.
Hyperbole aside, there are at least five “spears” that Hillary must dodge in order to not be fatally wounded in her quest to win and stay in the nation’s top job, and the chances of her successfully eluding or deflecting all of them are slim to none. The five are:
- Her Email Mess
This is the case that just keeps building, and with every instance of new information being added, it just keeps getting worse. First, Clinton tried to play innocent and claim that she wasn’t aware of classified information on her home email server.
Then, she tried to claim that even though classified emails may have been sent and received, they weren’t classified at the time they were communicated.
Then she claimed not to have known about the classification code (a small “c”) in many emails denoting their secret status. And finally, she claimed that all of her emails had been turned over to investigators.
All of these things turned out to have been false; they were lie on top of lie on top of lie.
In addition to all of the above, she admitted that her assistants erased over 33,000 messages, but she claimed they were deleted because they contained personal information. Then, it came out that the messages were not simply deleted; they were “bleached” clean, in a secure erasure process worthy of an intelligence operation.
If Clinton really had nothing to hide, why did she erase the emails in the first place? Why were they deleted so irreversibly? Ultimately, this is the biggest “smoking gun” in her case, and it’s one that she can’t do anything about; she can’t put all the pieces of Humpty-Dumpty together again.
It would be one thing if Clinton had come clean about the whole debacle from the beginning, but as time goes on, her behavior has shown that owning up to a crime is not the style of either Clinton; in fact, their standard operating method is just the opposite, as most veteran Clinton watchers will attest.
Instead, the standard Clinton response is usually to play ignorant, vigorously deny the truth, blame their woes on partisan enemies (à la a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”) before admitting to the original offense (if there’s no other choice) and then angrily trying to downplay the significance of it.
This lying, especially if it’s under oath, could well be the first criminal charge that Hillary faces, whether she’s elected or not. The official charge is perjury, but unlike her husband’s case with Monica Lewinsky, what’s at stake is not just who enjoyed someone’s affections or who said what about a sexual encounter, but national security.
This pattern of lying on Hillary’s part is borderline pathological, and it will mark her historically, regardless of whether she’s actually tried for it.
- The Clinton Foundation
With the near-continuous media attention focused on the Clintons’ eponymous foundation, it’s amazing that this organization still survives and operates, but therein may lie the key to its mystery. If the Clinton Foundation is nothing but a giant money laundering operation or tax evasion scheme for the Clintons’ billionaire donors — as has been suggested — the Clintons have more or less let someone hold a Sword of Damocles above their heads.
Have you ever wondered why, despite all the incredibly negative publicity about the Clinton Foundation and all the innuendo that’s come out about it, it continues to operate?
It’s quite possible that certain cadres of the Clintons’ most shadowy associates insist that it does, hoping that the incessant media coverage will at some point die down and go away.
After all, it’s not so easy to find a vehicle to launder one’s money, especially one that hides in plain sight and comes complete with introductions to fellow fraudsters, world leaders and corporate entities looking to do business in some of the shadier parts of the world.
It’s also possible that the Clinton Foundation is more or less the Clintons’ only source of regular income. Sure, there are speeches (although not many have been offered as of late, and at this point, the Clintons’ fees may be in free fall), stock options (some of Bill’s apparently have yet to vest) and outright gifts.
But it may very well be that absent a political office, the Clinton Foundation is Bill’s and Hillary’s (and Chelsea)’s bread and butter. No wonder why they’re so loath to shut it down, even in the face of near-daily exposures of it.
Although many people say the Clintons are wealthy, it’s a funny thing about wealth — many rich people have nearly all their assets invested in a mad struggle to make ever more money as quickly as possible. Like Michael Jackson, their worth may be huge, but their day-to-day income may be more a case of hand-to-mouth (in admittedly large amounts).
When you’re living the one-percent lifestyle that all three of the Clintons most assuredly enjoy, money gets spent just a little faster than it does with the average person.
- Campaign Crimes
The term “crimes” is appropriate here because they are nothing less than crimes. Collusion with the Democratic National Committee (DNC), hiring of operatives to foment violence at Donald Trump rallies, committing voter fraud, circumventing campaign-finance laws, rigging primaries — there seems to be no end of illicit activity that the Clinton campaign has engaged in.
As the political website The Hill put it, “If Dem[ocrat]s will rig a debate for Clinton, what won’t they do?”
Of course, the Democrats, in this case, are very much driven by the person at the top of their ticket, rather than the other way around. The Clintons’ outsize influence over their party comes from the enormous amount of money (estimated by some outlets at more than $3 billion) that they’ve raised for it over the last four decades.
Even if the Clintons’ brand is bordering on toxic, their party is for all practical purposes still attached to them at the hip; it would likely take criminal charges to sever the connection, and this severance would be incredibly painful.
- Pay-For-Play
The first email leaks during the Democratic National Convention confirmed what many had suspected all along — that the Clinton campaign was offering pay-for-play deals to donors. In fact, there was even an email to the DNC staff that used that very term. “Can we set up a time for a very brief call to go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters?”
But pay-for-play is the Clinton way, as exemplified from her time as head of the State Department. The watchdog group Judicial Watch recently released 725 pages of emails from longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin wherein it was revealed that Abedin gave “influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the Secretary of State. In many instances, the preferential treatment provided to donors was at the specific request of Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band,” according to the group.
In October, it was revealed that the King of Morocco wanted Hillary Clinton to speak after he made a $12 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. There is no way that he paid Hillary $12 million just for her to make a speech. So the question is, what else did he want for his donation?
If WikiLeaks or the FBI (whose White Collar crime unit is looking at these deals specifically) can prove these charges without a doubt and that these were not just isolated instances, but were part of a larger pattern, this could move from the category of merely unethical behavior to prosecutable offenses — ones that typically carry stiff sentences.
- Using the State Department as a Racketeering Enterprise
This is an interesting angle that veteran prosecutors have been seeing for some time now — to charge Clinton and/or her aides under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law similar to the way Mafia families are prosecuted.
If officials can show that there was a pattern of corruption from Clinton’s tenure at the State Department — consistently favoring donors to the Clinton Foundation, for instance, or giving special treatment to cronies — this could be the most serious charge of all and one that could put both Clintons behind bars for a long time.
Donations to the Clinton Foundation or payment for speeches to Bill Clinton as a “quid pro quo” for State Department favors could fall under the category of bribery and would be equally damaging for both Bill and Hillary.
Combine all of the above with the fact that there are now five Clinton accomplices under investigation — Hillary campaign Chairman John Podesta, Hillary’s aide Huma Abedin, Abedin’s ex-husband Anthony Weiner (on whose laptop 650,000 emails related to Hillary Clinton the FBI discovered), Virginia Governor and Clinton fixer Terry McAuliffe and Clinton power lawyer Cheryl Mills — and you’ve got a recipe for an extremely unstable campaign that probably will collapse under the weight of all its baggage sooner than later.
Already, some media outlets such as The Chicago Tribune and The Orlando Sentinel are turning against Clinton and in some cases asking her to step aside in order to prevent a Constitutional crisis (as GOP nominee Donald Trump has done with his businesses) if she’s elected.
This last chapter in the presidential campaigns has been an impressive finale to a long, hard-fought season, but like a great summer action movie, the real conclusion may come after what everyone presumes is the end.
