Hillary’s Friends in High Places : Kimberley A. Strassel
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-friends-in-high-places-1438301383
Everyone—from her aides to the State and Justice departments—is bending over backward to protect her.
That’s one way of synthesizing this week’s slew of disparate Clinton revelations. The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee is grappling with a range of scandals, from her use of a private email server while secretary of state, to actions she took while in office that look to have financially benefited her family’s foundation. But what ties all these stories together is the extraordinary number of people who continue to run cover for Mrs. Clinton’s ambitions.
First there is that menagerie of longtime aides who follow her from post to post. At a federal court hearing on Wednesday, a State Department official dropped a new bomb regarding the email scandal, suggesting that Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides also might have been using private email accounts. This came out because the State Department attempted to excuse its failure to produce documents by noting that top Clinton aides—including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan—had not yet turned over their work-related emails. Had those aides used government servers, State presumably would already have their emails. Politico noted that only this week, Mrs. Clinton’s former spokesman, Philippe Reines, “turned over 20 boxes of work-related emails taken in part from a personal email account.”
The Associated Press requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act while seeking details about how Ms. Abedin was given special permission to work with outside clients while still at the State Department. The news organization filed that request four years ago; Mrs. Clinton resigned as secretary of state more than two years ago. And yet her aides, to this day, are sitting on that paper. That’s highly helpful to Mrs. Clinton, who doesn’t want any more embarrassing exchanges made public.
Then there are Mrs. Clinton’s pals still in government. At Wednesday’s hearing, the second in two weeks on the AP request, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon bluntly voiced what everybody has known for a long time, accusing the State Department of, as Politico put it, “dragging out responses to FOIA requests to protect Clinton.” The agency has in fact spent the past nine months doing little else—ignoring congressional subpoenas, slow-walking responses, omitting key documents.
State Department officials initially said they wouldn’t release any of Mrs. Clinton’s emails until the end of this year, a deadline that surely and conveniently would have slipped past the 2016 election. They are only producing those emails now under court order. And they’re doing back bends to excuse away the fact that Mrs. Clinton emailed classified information through her private server. Why all this effort? Barack Obama may not love Hillary, but he needs another Democrat in 2016 to protect his legacy.
Mrs. Clinton has additional friends in law enforcement. Last week news broke that two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled sensitive information. Team Clinton has attempted to fuzzy up the story by suggesting the information wasn’t classified at the time she sent it. Utterly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that sensitive information flowed through a home-brew email system because Mrs. Clinton had evaded all the rules. Any lesser figure (say, David Petraeus) would be in hot water. Yet the New York Times reports that the Justice Department “hasn’t decided if it will open an investigation.” Ah, friends.
Finally, Mrs. Clinton has very good friends in the corporate world. This newspaper reported Thursday that while serving as secretary of state, she took the unusual step of intervening to fix a problem that Swiss banking titan UBS was having with the IRS. In the years that followed, UBS donated $600,000 to the Clinton Foundation, anted up another $32 million in loans via foundation programs, and dropped $1.5 million on Bill for a series of speaking events. Both sides deny any quid pro quo. But the pattern is clear: More than 60 major firms that lobbied the State Department during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure also donated some $26 million to her family’s foundation.
Those in the business and financial world, after all, understand how the Clintons operate: pure Arkansas, purely transactional. You scratch my family foundation; I’ll scratch your government problem. They’ve spent a lot of money getting on Mrs. Clinton’s right side (and they certainly don’t want to be on her wrong side) so expect the corporate cash to now flow toward her election effort. Yes, Mrs. Clinton has, and will continue to have, lots of amigos in the private sector.
Left out in the cold, of course, are all those Americans who would like the straight story on Mrs. Clinton’s emails and her foundation before they have to make a decision about whom to vote for next year. Problem is, unlike Hillary, they don’t have friends in high places who can force those answers into the light of day.
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