Mistake of a Lifetime What if Mrs. Clinton had Stayed in the Senate? By James Taranto
“Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat to become secretary of state in the Obama administration, making her the public face to the world for the man who dashed her own hopes for the presidency,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 22, 2008.
Well, that was a mistake.
Maybe even the mistake of a lifetime. You’ve probably heard that Mrs. Clinton is seeking the presidency again. As in 2008, she is the inevitable Democratic nominee but her prospects are looking shaky. This time virtually all of her problems, except those having to do with her character and political talent (or lack thereof), can be traced to her decision to leave the Senate and join the Obama administration.
Start with the one that is most obvious, and most severe: the metastasizing scandal over her improper use of a private email server. As the Associated Press reported in March, when the scandal first became public:
Members of Congress who are demanding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails are largely exempt from such scrutiny themselves.
Congress makes its own rules, and has never subjected itself to open records laws that force agencies such as the State Department to maintain records and turn them over to the public when asked.
There’s also no requirement for members of Congress to use official email accounts, or to retain, archive or store their emails, while in office or after. That’s in contrast to the White House and the rest of the executive branch.
The AP piece suggests that makes hypocrites of the Republicans who currently hold majorities in Congress, but then goes on to note that “open government advocates are largely unconcerned. They agree it makes sense for Congress to be treated differently from the executive branch.”
Congress already conducts much of its business in the open, and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which “provides members of Congress with immunity for their legislative acts . . . has been generally interpreted to give them broad control over their records,” as the AP notes. Also Congress, like the president but unlike executive-branch agencies, is accountable to the people through elections.
At any rate, whether this arrangement is justified or not, it would have allowed Mrs. Clinton to maintain control of her official communications without running afoul of any law, regulation or custom.
What about the mishandling of classified information, now the subject of an FBI investigation? “The referral was not criminal, and the Clinton camp immediately pummeled the New York Times’ sloppy reporting that it was,” notes political scientist Charles Lipson at Real Clear Politics. “But that’s small ball and misleading at that. The [Department of Justice] is not investigating a civil matter here. It is investigating a crime.”
Sen. Clinton was not a member of the Intelligence Committee, but even if she had been, members of Congress have faced minimal consequences for compromising national-security secrets. A 2010 piece by the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky recounts the case of Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat:
Mr. Leahy . . . leaked like a sieve during his previous tenure on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The San Diego Tribune, for example, reported that in a 1985 television interview, Mr. Leahy, then vice chairman of the committee, disclosed a top-secret communications intercept of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s telephone conversations. The intercept had facilitated the capture of the Arab terrorists who had hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered American citizens. Mr. Leahy’s callous disregard for maintaining the secrecy of American intelligence activities ended up costing the life of an Egyptian operative involved in the operation.
In July 1987, The Washington Times reported that Mr. Leahy had disclosed secret information about a 1986 covert operation planned by the Reagan administration to topple Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Federal intelligence officials told the paper that Mr. Leahy had communicated a written threat to expose the operation directly to CIA Director William Casey. Then, just weeks later—surprise, surprise—news of the secret plan turned up in The Washington Post, causing it to be aborted.
Leahy resigned from the Intelligence Committee in 1987 after giving a reporter a secret (but unclassified) report on the Iran-contra scandal. But that was it as far as consequences, and nearly three decades later he remains in the Senate. In February he announced he’ll seek an eighth term next year.
As for Mrs. Clinton, a Monmouth University poll out Wednesday finds that “a majority (52%) say that her emails should be subject to a criminal investigation for the potential release of classified material.” Only 41% oppose a criminal investigation. Not surprisingly, the results have a partisan skew; 82% of Republicans and only 23% of Democrats favor a criminal investigation. But so do 54% of independents. And as Lipson notes, this is no longer primarily a political matter: “As that investigation moves forward, it will take on a life of its own, as it should in a government of laws.”
A Fox News report suggests one direction the investigation could take:
The Clinton campaign stuck to the argument that the Democratic presidential candidate, while secretary of state, never dealt with emails that were “marked” classified at the time. . . .
A State Department official told Fox News that the intelligence community inspector general, who raised the most recent concerns about Clinton’s emails, made clear that at least one of those messages contained information that only could have come from the intelligence community.
“If so, they would have had to come in with all the appropriate classification markings,” the official said.
The official questioned whether someone, then, tampered with that message. “Somewhere between the point they came into the building and the time they reached HRC’s server, someone would have had to strip the classification markings from that information before it was transmitted to HRC’s personal email.”
The official said doing so would “constitute a felony, in and of itself. I can’t imagine that a rank-and-file career DOS employee would have done this, so it was most likely done by someone in her inner circle.”
We noted Wednesday former Obama spokesman Bill Burton’s observation that “this wouldn’t be happening without the [congressional] Benghazi investigation.” That may be true. It’s also true that the Benghazi investigation wouldn’t implicate Mrs. Clinton if she had stayed in the Senate. There might not even have been a Benghazi investigation, because there might not have been a Benghazi attack. There might not even have been an intervention in Libya, of which Mrs. Clinton was reportedly one of the main backers within the administration.
When von Spakovsky’s old piece reminded us of Leahy’s opposition to ousting Gadhafi in 1986, we wondered what he thought about the operation that achieved that objective a quarter-century later. The Burlington weekly Seven Days reports that in March 2011 “Leahy told Vermont Public Radio . . . the U.S. ‘had no choice but to respond, especially after Gadhafi claimed he was going to have a cease fire and then set forward to actually slaughter his people.’ ”
The state’s junior senator, Bernie Sanders, “sounded a more skeptical note,” saying he was “not quite sure we need a third war.” The wisdom of the Libya intervention could yet become a campaign issue.
And it is not the only administration policy for which the former secretary of state may be called to account. As the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins concedes, in a column mainly critical of Jeb Bush’s comments on Iraq: “She played a supporting role in a disastrously managed withdrawal, which helped lay the groundwork for the catastrophe that followed.” A Sen. Clinton would have the flexibility to dissent from the administration on matters like the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Iran deal if she thought it either wise or expedient to do so.
On domestic policy, too, keeping her perch in the Senate would have allowed her to operate with greater independence. She probably would have been constrained to vote for ObamaCare in 2009; every other Democrat was, and she was a longtime advocate of “health-care reform” who (unlike Obama) campaigned in favor of compelling the purchase of medical insurance. But she could have supported it with reservations and emerged as a critic of some of the program’s worst aspects rather than just another mindless supporter.
Mrs. Clinton’s decision to leave the Senate also made her money scandals much worse. Assuming she had sought re-election in 2012 (and there is no doubt she’d have won easily), she would have been barred by congressional rules from collecting all those embarrassing fat honorariums between 2013 and 2015, and she would be tied to the Clinton Foundation’s shenanigans only by association.
Of course that wouldn’t be great for the family and the foundation’s bottom line, not only because of her forgone fees but because her husband’s take might not be quite so inflated if he had remained the spouse of a senator rather than the secretary of state. Then again, his fees now, and hers a decade hence, might be considerably higher if her presidential prospects were brighter. So maybe it was a case of—to coin a phrase—short-term thinking.
Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Her?
“Hillary Just Wanted to Send Emails From Her Phone Like a Normal Person. Then the Trouble Started.”—headline, ThinkProgress.com, Aug. 14
Fox Butterfield, Is That You?
- “On the surface, wannabe president Hillary Clinton is having a no-good, very bad, terrible August. Despite several attempted and ultimately unsuccessful campaign launches to re-introduce herself to Americans who grew tired of her years ago, Clinton’s favorability and trust numbers are seriously declining.”—Andrew Malcolm, Investor’s Business Daily, Aug. 13
- “MSNBC Host: Clinton Thinks We’re Stupid, but I’d Still Vote For Her”—headline, Daily Caller, Aug. 13
- “China is ruled by a party that calls itself Communist, but its economic reality is one of rapacious crony capitalism.”—former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Aug. 14
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