Hillary’s Vast Inspector-General Conspiracy Team Clinton prepares to give investigators the Ken Starr treatment.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-vast-inspector-general-conspiracy-1454026662
The Hillary Clinton apparat has never obeyed Marquess of Queensberry political rules, and they’re most vicious when cornered. So perhaps it reveals something about the probe into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified material on her personal email server that her enforcers are now assailing the integrity of the investigators.
The latest target is David Seide, who serves as counselor and acting senior adviser to State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. A decade ago as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Mr. Seide was tangentially involved in the prosecution of David Rosen, the finance director of Mrs. Clinton’s New York Senate campaign in 2000, who was acquitted at trial.
“You have a guy who used his former position to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into Mrs. Clinton that amounted to nothing, who then continues that work in the State Department. That has fingerprints on it that are just too visible and just lead to all sorts of questions,” Steve Israel told Politico for a Jan. 25 hit and run.
The wired-in New York House Democrat is a Clintonista in good standing, and Mr. Israel went on to speculate: “It actually seems to be a pattern emerging. This is the second known high-ranking official in the IG office with a glaring conflict of interest.” Emilia DeSanto, the deputy IG at State, is a former aide to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.
A spokesman for the IG denied any conflict, noting that Mr. Rosen was indicted by a different federal prosecutor after Mr. Seide left the government. Mr. Seide did investigate the same 2000 Brentwood gala and fundraiser whose alleged campaign-finance violations led to the Rosen charges, and he won a conviction against a separate Clinton donor, who helped bankroll the event, for stock-price manipulation.
If Mr. Seide must now be portrayed as a Republican in drag, Mrs. Clinton is probably paranoid about larger troubles. As assistant U.S. attorney from 1991 to 2003, Mr. Seide specialized in white-collar fraud. In 2014 a Seide-led Federal Housing Finance Agency probe of J.P. Morgan ’s mortgage-backed securities resulted in a $13 billion settlement, and he’s worked for the Wilmer Hale law firm with its roll of marquee Democratic partners and clients.
Then again, the familiar Clinton method is to depict anyone looking into their dealings as partisan maniacs. In the 1990s they converted the respected center-right jurist Kenneth Starr into Torquemada, and the first lady herself smeared the special counsel. “We get a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband,” she claimed on the “Today” show in 1998, adding that Mr. Starr was “using the criminal justice system to try to achieve political ends in this country” and “very frankly, to undo the results of two elections.”
The airstrike on Mr. Seide is also notable because the Clinton campaign claims the conspiracy includes the intelligence community’s Inspector General Charles McCullough, who confirmed that her emails contained hundreds with classified material. Yet Mrs. Clinton dismissed the controversy in an interview with NPR last week as little more than “a continuation of an interagency dispute that has been going on now for some months” about what information ought to be secret. Now Foggy Bottom is apparently out to get her too.
The Democratic frontrunner apologized in September for her email infidelities, but at CNN’s town hall this week she seemed to retract it: “I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because what—nothing that I did was wrong. It was not in any way prohibited.”
This legalistic evasion and the return of smash-mouth defense likely means the Clintons are more anxious about the email investigation than they care to admit. It also may be intended as a warning to FBI Director James Comey that he too will get the Ken Starr treatment if the bureau recommends a criminal prosecution for her willful disregard of government procedures in handling America’s national security secrets.
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