Commentary
Last week we channeled our inner Sherlock Holmes in an attempt to figure out the ongoing Hillary Clinton email scandal.
Our starting point was the incredible conclusion that FBI Director James Comey reached after many months of investigation. He spent most of his recap time going over a laundry list of Clinton’s transgressions in an indictment inspired statement. Then he reached the amazing conclusion that there would be no charges since no reasonable prosecutor would ever take the case.
Instead of reaching the conclusion that Hillary was guilty of gross negligence, he said that she was extremely careless and may have lacked the sophistication to know what she was doing. As to the latter statement, he all but called her an ignoramus.
In testimony on Tuesday of last week, Attorney General Loretta Lynch appeared before the Congressional Committee. Since she had all but recused herself from the investigation because of her previous private meeting with ex-President Bill Clinton, she had stated that she would abide by the conclusions drawn by the FBI. To further emphasize this point, during her testimony she evaded “yes or no” questions more than 70 times, referring the interrogator back to Comey. In effect, Mrs. Lynch was playing the part of the Artful Dodger.
Some theorists have said that a devious Bill Clinton, with his vast legal background, may have orchestrated the private meeting in order to give AG Lynch an escape hatch. Shortly after the Bill/Loretta private meeting, Hillary issued a statement that if she were to be elected President, she would retain Lynch in the AG position. Strangely enough, after Bill’s master stroke he has yet to appear in person with Hillary. Perhaps the campaign wizards are afraid that he might spill the beans.
Other strange thoughts to be connected to the many dots we revealed last week include one where Hillary granted an interview to Lester Holt of NBC. In that piece, when Holt quizzed her about the fact that Comey’s testimony had effectively refuted Hillary’s previous claims about the email situation, she replied that she felt that the upshot of Comey’s appearance completely exonerated her. With that statement, she put herself firmly in the alternate universe that President Obama occupies.
Another large dot appeared last week when it was learned that the FBI agents working on the Hillary scandal were forced to sign non-disclosure forms regarding the investigation, which were, in effect a “gag order”.
Going back in time, as Sherlock might put it, we can assume that the exoneration of Hillary began with a statement issued by President Obama in April of this year when he said that Hillary was “careless” but that he did not think she had endangered national security. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that Comey used the same word, “careless” and emphasized it by adding the adverb “extremely”.
Since all lawyers love to parse words, let us do a little “parsing” of our own by referring to Webster’s Dictionary. All of these words pertain to the Clinton scandal. The first would be “lie”, which means to utter untruth, to misrepresent, to deceive, to make false statements, a deliberate falsehood. The next word would be “liar”, which means one who utters a falsehood. Then there is a companion word, “lying”, which means addicted to telling lies. The interesting question posed to Comey during his appearance was whether or not he had considered an investigation into the obvious perjury committed by Hillary when she uttered untruths while under oath to the Congressional Committee. Comey’s rather amazing response was that he had not investigated her testimony before Congress primarily because he needed a referral from Congress to do so. That statement seemed to flabbergast the chairman of the committee, since the FBI can investigate anything it wants to without asking for permission from any other agency. The chairman then said, “If you need a referral, you will have one today.”
A constant dictum of the Obama administration has been to not answer questions about administration scandals by saying that, “I can’t comment because there is an ongoing investigation.” Comey used this maxim when asked if the investigation into the Clinton Foundation had been terminated or was still going on. Apparently Obama violated this excuse when he gave his April statement.
Hillary still faces a series of courtroom appearances and mandates.
The upshot of this whole imbroglio reminds one of the famous quote, “If is walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there is a good chance it’s a duck.”
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