RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do you ever feel like all of Washington’s regulatory, ethics, and law-enforcement agencies looked at Bill and Hillary Clinton and shrugged, “Eh, they’re the Clintons, they’re going to get away with it anyway”?

Last week, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a close Clinton ally, caused a stir when he suggested that if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, the Clinton Foundation — formally named the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation — would have to be disbanded.

“I know it’ll be hard for President [Bill] Clinton because he cares very deeply about what the foundation has done,” Rendell told the New York Daily News. “It’d be impossible to keep the foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem.”

The “appearance of a problem” to which Rendell refers is presumably the fact that foreign governments and foreign citizens could give unlimited amounts of money to the foundation, donations that would look like bribes to skeptical outside observers. The Clintons’ defenders quickly point out that Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea do not collect salaries from the foundation, and thus do not personally benefit from it. Except the foundation pays for the family’s travel expenses, as disclosed in the organization’s Form 990, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. That disclosure notes that the family “may require the need to travel by charter or in first class” because of “extraordinary security and other requirements.”

The Clintons get nothing from the foundation except free travel on chartered jets and first-class airline seats and hotel stays and, oh yes, control over a giant operating budget to steer to the charities and good causes that they prefer. Practically nothing!

In any case, within a few days Rendell had recanted, suggesting that a President Hillary Clinton would merely need to keep the Foundation at arm’s length during her term.

RELATED: House Clinton and the Wages of Corruption

“I think if the secretary becomes president, she obviously can have no further involvement with it, can’t ask for money for the foundation,” he said. “They may decide to let partners carry on the work for the next four to eight years.”

Huma Abedin must be a remarkable woman: She has held down four of the worst jobs in politics, several of them simultaneously: right hand to Hillary Rodham Clinton, fixer and patron-patronizer for the Clinton Foundation, an editor of a journal spawned by a major al-Qaeda financier, and wife to Anthony Weiner.

Mrs. Carlos Danger has some explaining to do.

So does Mrs. Clinton. More, in fact.

Mrs. Clinton plainly has lied about her e-mails, repeatedly, and then lied about lying about them. The new e-mails released in response to ongoing litigation from Judicial Watch include 20 previously unseen exchanges between Mrs. Clinton and her chief aide, Ms. Abedin, which now brings the total number of official, work-related e-mails Mrs. Clinton failed to turn over to investigators to just shy of 200 — so much for those claims that these were private communications about yoga classes and Chelsea’s wedding plans.

It is clear why Mrs. Clinton did not want to release these e-mails: They detail precisely the Clinton Foundation corruption that critics have long alleged. Specifically, the e-mails detail Huma Abedin’s role – while she was on the State Department’s payroll — acting as a fixer for the Clinton Foundation, making sure that influential friends overseas, especially donors, had access to the U.S. secretary of state in order to keep their egos inflated and their wallets deflated.

Abedin already admitted during legal proceedings that one of her assignments while working at State was seeing to “Clinton family matters,” which is inappropriate on its face. But what those matters consisted of is a fairly obvious case of rewarding Clinton Foundation donors with access to the nation’s No. 1 diplomat. Who were those donors? Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain wanted a sit-down with Secretary Clinton but was rebuffed; Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band intervened through Abedin to try to find a work-around for the crown prince, who gave donations to the Clinton Global Initiative totaling $32 million through 2010. Donations to the Clinton Foundation came in from the kingdom itself and from the state oil company. Band also intervened to secure a visa for a foreign athlete held up because of his criminal record, doing so at the behest of donor Casey Wasserman, a Hollywood sports-entertainment mogul, whose foundation has contributed between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation (here Abedin demurred).

For our recent “Tricky Hillary” issue (National Review, Aug. 1, 2016, on NR Digital), I wrote a feature arguing that Mrs. Clinton should be impeached. Given that, through the last quarter-century of our politics, we have learned that pending Clinton scandals are interrupted only by new Clinton scandals, it comes as no surprise that my point has just been proven by a scandal that erupted last week.

It’s actually a new scandal based on an old scandal — the “old” one, of course, emanating from the former secretary of state’s lawless homebrew server system, implemented for the specific purpose of avoiding the recordkeeping and disclosure requirements of federal law.

In keeping with page one of the Clinton-media playbook, any scandal that emerges on Friday night is “old news” by Monday morning. The press seeks to stretch this hidebound strategy by regarding as “old,” and therefore stale and unworthy of attention, any new revelation tied to the e-mail debacle. It’s the gambit you’d expect, given Mrs. Clinton’s failed attempt to destroy well over 30,000 e-mails, tens of thousands of which are now dribbling out for the first time.

Since the newly revealed e-mails put the lie to Clinton’s always risible claim that these communications were unrelated to State Department business, they tend to be double-whammies. First, their substance is stunningly corrupt, often showing how she and her staff ran the State Department as an annex of the Clinton Foundation, the enterprise Bill and Hillary used to monetize political influence to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Second, even the most innocuous of the e-mails that concern State Department business illustrate that Clinton brazenly lied to Congress and the public for over a year: maintaining that the destroyed e-mails involved yoga, Chelsea’s wedding, and other personal matters, not the operations of government.

Mrs. Clinton’s audacity has caught the attention of two congressional committees, whose chairmen have noticed that the new revelations show she quite intentionally misled lawmakers in House testimony. (The testimony pertained to the Benghazi massacre, another “old” Clinton scandal, if you’re keeping score.) Last week, those chairmen — Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) and Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) of, respectively, the Oversight and Judiciary Committees — penned a letter to the Justice Department asking that Clinton be investigated and prosecuted for perjury.

RELATED: House Clinton and the Wages of Corruption

Except as a political salvo to remind the public of Clinton’s mendacity as she campaigns for the presidency, the letter is pointless. The Obama Justice Department, having already declined to prosecute a solid felony case against Clinton for mishandling classified information and withholding government records is not going to give perjury allegations the time of day. More to the point, though, the congressional plea for a criminal investigation is wrongheaded. Mrs. Clinton should be impeached, not indicted.

Republicans keep telling us they are “constitutional conservatives.” Well, how about it? The remedy provided by the Framers to deal with corrupt executive-branch officials (including former officials who might seek to wield power again) is impeachment, not criminal prosecution. That is because, for the well-being of the nation, the critical thing is that power be stripped from those who abuse it, to prevent them from doing further damage. Whether, beyond that, they are prosecuted for any criminal offenses arising out of the wrongdoing is beside the point.

As a practical matter, moreover, the perjury case chairmen Chaffetz and Goodlatte posit is weak, as I will demonstrate in a subsequent column. That is no fault of theirs. Perjury is a hard criminal case to make. Its focus is not a pattern of palpable deception but, more narrowly, whether a witness, in the course of being deceptive, has told provable, literal lies. The art of deceit (on which the Clintons wrote the book) generally involves deflection and misdirection. More common than flat out lies are assertions that quibble with, rather than respond, to the question; or that, while intentionally misleading, are technically accurate. It is rare for prosecutors to charge a perjury case even after a jury has clearly found a witness’s testimony to be false. Our everyday lives tell us why: It is often quite easy to detect that a person’s version of events was dishonest, even if it is difficult to pluck out a single sentence that was literally false.

But for now, let’s leave to the side the four perjury allegations specified in the Chaffetz-Goodlatte letter. Let’s stick with the Constitution.

Madison et al. gave Congress its own powers to check rogue executive conduct — and for them, no such conduct would have been more egregious than misleading the People’s representatives. The Framers would have thought laughable the suggestion that corrupt members of the president’s cabinet — officials who had taken their corrupt actions with the president’s knowledge and support — would be prosecuted by the president’s own law-enforcement agents. Indeed, at the time the Constitution was adopted, there were no such agents. Law-enforcement was handled by the states, and the attorney general was basically the president’s lawyer. There was no Department of Justice until 1870, nor anything like the FBI until 1908. That did not stop the Framers from including impeachment in the Constitution, nor cause Madison any hesitation in regarding impeachment as Congress’s “indispensable” tool.

EDITORIAL: Mrs. Clinton and Her Fixer

Mrs. Clinton is the perfect example of why impeachment, not criminal prosecution, is the appropriate response to public corruption. The test of fitness for an office of public trust is whether an official is trustworthy, not whether she is convictable in a criminal court. Consequently, as I outlined in Faithless Execution, “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s trigger for impeachment — need not be violations of the penal code. As Hamilton explained, impeachable offenses are misconduct stemming “from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and are thus properly “denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The influence that Colin Powell has over Hillary Clinton is something to behold. His word is her command. When he tells her to break the law and endanger the nation’s secrets, she doesn’t hesitate. She salutes smartly and does as she is told.

Clinton has been desperate for the moral cover of Colin Powell for her e-mail arrangement since the scandal first broke last year. Now we’ve learned that Clinton told the FBI that Powell advised her to use private e-mail as secretary of state at a dinner in 2009. This escalates Clinton’s e-mail defense from “Hey, Colin Powell did it, too,” all the way to “Colin Powell made me do it.”

The Powell defense has given Clinton shills something to say on TV, but it doesn’t make much sense. While the former general used a private e-mail as secretary of state, it was at a time when the department didn’t have a robust email system of its own. And he obviously didn’t set up his own private server. After Powell left State, the department’s rules steadily got stricter about using official e-mail for State Department business and preserving e-mail records — and Clinton blew through them all.

On the advice, we are supposed to believe, of none other than Colin Powell, the Professor Moriarty of Clinton’s illicit e-mail practices. The New York Times reported last week that at a dinner party hosted by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright that included other former secretaries of state, Albright asked Clinton’s predecessors what counsel they would give her. Allegedly, Powell didn’t advise Clinton (channeling Winston Churchill) that “diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions,” or (channeling Will Durant) that “to say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy,” or even to avoid a land war in Asia. He told her to use private e-mail.

Powell says that’s not how he remembers it. If Clinton really wanted someone’s permission to use private e-mail, she could have asked the State Department, which she never did. In a new book, the left-wing journalist Joe Conason writes that Clinton had already decided to use private e-mail months before the Albright dinner.

Seasoned Republican political handlers serially attack Donald Trump and his campaign as amateurish, incompetent, and incoherent. The media somehow outdid their propaganda work for Barack Obama and have signed on as unapologetic auxiliaries to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and openly brag that, in Trump’s case, the duty of a journalist is to be biased. We have devolved to the point that a Harvard Law professor teases about unethically releasing his old confidential notes of his lawyer/client relationship with Trump.

Conservative columnists and analysts are so turned off by Trump that they resort to sophisticated metaphors to express their distaste — like “abortion,” “ape,” “bastard,” “bitch,” “cancer,” “caudillo,” “dog crap,” “filth,” “idiot,” “ignoramus,” and “moron.” Some of them variously talk of putting a bullet through his head given that he resembles, or is worse than, Caesar, Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. Derangement Syndrome is a more apt clinical diagnosis for the Right’s hatred of Trump than it was for the Left’s loathing of Bush. Had such venom been directed at leftists or minorities, the commentators likely would have lost their venues.

Trump’s political obituary over the last 14 months has been rewritten about every three weeks. During the primaries, each time he won a state we were told that that victory was his last. Now, in the general-election campaign, his crude ego is supposedly driving the Republican ticket into oblivion. The media have discovered that what gets Trump’s goat is not denouncing his coarseness, but lampooning his lack of cash and poor polling: broke and being a loser is supposedly far worse for Trump’s ego than being obnoxious and cruel. So far, he is behind in most of the polls most of the time.

But not so fast!

Mysteriously, each time he hits rock bottom, Trump — even before his recent “pivot” — begins a two-week chrysalis cycle of inching back in the polls to within 2 or 3 points of Clinton. Apparently Trump represents something well beyond Trump per se. He appears to be a vessel of, rather than a catalyst for, popular furor at “elites” — not so much the rich, but the media/political/academic/celebrity global establishment that derides the ethos of the middle class as backward and regressive, mostly as a means for enjoying their own apartheid status and sense of exalted moral self, without guilt over their generational influence and privilege.