RUTHFULLY YOURS

During today’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing examining FOIA compliance at the State Department, Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) strayed from his prepared remarks to address Democrat ranking member Elijah Cummings’ opening statement, which Gowdy said he found “instructive if not predictable.”

Cummings yesterday released an email exchange in which former secretary of state Colin Powell advised Hillary Clinton on the use of personal email and devices shortly after she was sworn in as secretary of state.

“I hope to catch up soon [with] you, but I have one pressing question which only you can answer! What were the restrictions on your use of your blackberry?” Clinton asked Powell, who served as secretary of state under President George W. Bush.

Clinton wanted to continue using her Blackberry in her new position and Powell responded saying he didn’t have one and developed another system instead that allowed him to communicate with people without it going through servers at the State Department.

“What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers,” Powell wrote. “I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.”

Democrats are citing this email exchange to argue that Powell had influenced Clinton’s decision to circumvent the rules.

Gowdy was having none of it.

“Secretary Clinton said that she followed all State Department rules and regulations, but the truth is, she did not,” the fiery former prosecutor began. “Secretary Clinton said her unique email arrangement was approved by the State Department but it was not. Secretary Clinton said she used one device for convenience but she did not. Secretary Clinton said she did not send or receive classified material. But she did. She said that she turned over all of her work-related emails. But she did not. She said her attorneys personally reviewed each email. But they did not. So when faced with a series of demonstrably false statements, utterly impeached by both fact and logic, the ranking member did what lots of criminal defense attorneys do — which is blame the investigator. And when that didn’t work, they throw the Hail-Mary pass of all criminal defense attorneys: ‘Other people did it too!’ Which brings me to General Colin Powell, one of the most respected people in our country’s history.”

He continued, “Hillary Clinton said to the FBI — and I’ll concede that she says different things to the public than she says to the FBI, but she told the FBI that Colin Powell’s advice had nothing to do with her decision to set up her unique email arrangement with herself.”

Gowdy repeated himself to drive the point home: “Secretary Clinton told the FBI — under penalty of not telling the truth! — that Colin Powell’s advice had nothing to do with her decision to set up that unique email arrangement with herself!”

Well, it looks like Hillary Clinton’s oft-repeated canard — “I never sent or received any e-mails marked classified” — has been so thoroughly discredited that it now poll-tests poorly. Hence, she broke out a new wineskin for the same old rotgut at last night’s candidate forum: the “header.”

The issue arose when she was bluntly questioned by a military vet who pointed outthat, had he recklessly mishandled classified information the way she did, he’d have been prosecuted. She countered:

Classified material has a header that says “top secret,” “secret,” “confidential.” None of the emails sent or received by me had such a header. What we have here is the use of an unclassified system by hundreds of people in our government to send information that was not marked. There were no headers, there was no statement … “top secret,” “secret” or “confidential.”

Obviously, Mrs. Clinton is tactically morphing “marked” into “header” because some of her emails were marked classified.

Were she to repeat the “nothing marked classified” lie and leave it at that, the public would be reminded not only that she is known to have lied about this (FBI director Comey acknowledged as much in his House testimony); but also that she fibbed in ludicrous fashion when called on the markings in her FBI interview — claiming to have believed the “(C)” designation had to do with putting paragraphs in alphabetical order. (Of course, it refers to classified information at theconfidential level, something well known to Clinton because, among other reasons, she was for a decade a heavy-duty consumer of classified documents, in which the “(C)” designation is ubiquitous.)

Of course Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health is a legitimate issue for the 2016 election.

So is Donald Trump’s. So is Gary Johnson’s. So is that of any presidential candidate.

Mrs. Clinton’s media allies (which is to say, the media, more or less) are circling the wagons on this issue, and it is curious.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza made an unpersuasive attempt to explain why it was legitimate to treat John McCain’s health as a campaign issue in 2008 but illegitimate to do the same with Herself in 2016. McCain, he points out, would have been 72 years old at the time of his election, the oldest person ever elected to the office; Herself will, if elected in November, be a sprightly . . . 69 years of age. McCain bore the scars of Vietnam and Arizona: He was grievously wounded — and tortured — by the Vietnamese, and he suffers from a recurring melanoma, which necessitates occasional trips to the doctor to have a patch of dodgy skin removed. Skin cancer is no joke, but millions of Americans live with melanoma of the sort McCain has with very little effect on their lives other than inconvenience.

Mrs. Clinton, in spite of her probably fictitious attempt to join the military, was never a prisoner of war, nor does she, so far as any record made public shows, suffer from cancer or any other chronic condition.

Still, she is not exactly the picture of health. As Cillizza notes, she suffered a concussion as a result of an unfortunate tendency to fall down, purportedly stemming from an upset stomach. There is at least one thing that leaps to mind that causes both digestive revolt and falling on one’s ass, and it is whispered that Mrs. Clinton drinks immoderately, though there is no evidence that this is in fact the case. She sometimes requires a helper step to get into the SUVs that whisk her hither and yon in her pursuit of the presidency.

RELATED: My Brain Injury Made Me Forget, but My Health Is Not an Issue!

Mrs. Clinton is also remarkably forgetful: During a midsummer interview with FBI agents investigating her furtive and illegal e-mail practices, Mrs. Clinton used the words “I cannot recall” or similar formulations more than 40 times. Doctor Johnson once remarked that the prospect of being hanged “concentrates the mind wonderfully,” and perhaps it is the case that the prospect of being brought up on federal charges related to the handling of classified material has the opposite effect, producing a kind of special-purpose dementia.

Mrs. Clinton of course inspires the conspiracy kooks, an effect that is very much amplified by the fact that her opponent in 2016 is a big-league conspiracy kook leading a team of minor-league conspiracy kooks. Louis Brandeis was absolutely correct about sunlight’s being the best disinfectant, but Mrs. Clinton is a creature of the shade. Given her history of rampant, craven, deep, broad, sustained, overarching, continuous, relentless dishonesty about practically every aspect of her personal and public lives, is it really so implausible that she’d lie about her health? No. She’d lie about her health even if there were nothing to lie about, just to keep in practice.

Imagine a mafia don who wants to have some evidence destroyed, maybe even have a witness “disappear.” Does he have a sit-down with his trusted capos, who will then give the job to a reliable button-man? Not if he’s taken the Clinton Family course in advanced criminology — known around the campus as “(C).” If the don is a graduate, he knows the new way to get away with murder is to have all your orders communicated by your lawyers.

At the Washington Examiner Wednesday, Byron York had a very interesting report about the destruction of thousands of Clinton e-mails after Congress had issued a subpoena for them. (Obstruction of a congressional investigation is a felony under federal law.) The report is based on the FBI’s heavily redacted summary report of its Clinton e-mails investigation.

The e-mails were destroyed by a technician at Platte River Network (PRN), which had been retained by Clinton to handle her server. The tech is clearly a man (referred to as “he” several times), but his name is redacted from the FBI report. Evidence strongly suggests that this PRN technician initially lied to the FBI, then changed his story and clammed up about any instructions he might have been given.

A bit of background: In December 2014, Cheryl Mills instructed the PRN tech to implement a change in Clinton’s e-mail-retention policy: Any e-mails older than 60 days (translation: any remaining e-mails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state) were to be purged from the server. Purging in this context did not just mean deletion, it meant destruction: The Clinton team was using the BleachBit program to ensure that the purged e-mails could never be retrieved or reassembled. This was a conscious scorched-earth operation, headed up by Mills, the Clinton Family’s Tom Hayden — longtime consigliere and Clinton’s chief-of-staff at the State Department.

But there’s a Fredo in every good crime story, right? In this case, it is the PRN tech, who apparently did not follow instructions. According to his original story to the FBI, about three months went by when, out of the blue, in what he described as an “Oh sh**!” moment, he remembered that he had forgotten to purge the e-mails. So . . . he of course took it on himself to do it.

You’ll be shocked to learn, though, that that’s not quite how it happened.

On March 3, 2015, the New York Times broke the story that, while secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had systematically used an unauthorized homebrew server system for all her e-mail communications, including the tens of thousands related to government business. This finally roused the House Benghazi Committee from its slumbers. (As I noted at the time, the Benghazi Committee had curiously failed to issue a subpoena for Clinton’s private e-mails, despite knowing of her use of private e-mail addresses for government business even before the Times report revealed them publicly.) The same day the Times report was published, the committee zipped a letter to David Kendall, Clinton’s lawyer at the prestigious Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C. (Clinton has a legion of lawyers, but W&C’s Kendall is her main outside-the-government attorney.) The committee’s letter demanded that the e-mails be preserved and produced. The next day, March 4, the committee issued a subpoena directing Clinton to produce e-mails from her private e-mail addresses.