One of the benefits of writing about the world, versus being a pen for hire, is you get to speculate about things in public. The check writers in the publishing world are deathly afraid of their benefactors so they turtle up at the first site of trouble. Even lefty rags tip-toe around in fear of pissing off the wrong rich guy. If you want to make a living as a writer, you better keep your head down and show proper deference.
Hobbyists like me have no such restrictions. What bloggers lack in audience share, we make up for in wild-ass speculation, some of which turns out to be right. I was reminded of that by this I saw come over the twitter machine last night. The latest batch of Hillary Clinton e-mails suggest she was up to something other than hiding from Congressional subpoenas.
Back in the summer I wrote this about the scandal and it was picked up by a bunch of sites, including Red State. If you think through the mechanics of building a private e-mail server and then working to keep it private, the set of motivations behind such an effort are small and they range from the mildly devious to the flamboyantly criminal. There’s simply no good reason to have gone off the books in this fashion.
What has made the Clintons so successful at the grift is they never let anyone see inside the box. If three people are in on their caper, those three people have four versions of the “truth” and none of them quite fit with the facts. The reason for that is the Clintons use selective honesty to blind their subordinates to the contradictions. Each member of the caper is sure he is the only one trusted enough to know the whole story.
That’s most likely what’s happening with this scandal. The FBI interviewed the technical people who handled the servers. They have interviewed Clinton staff and have, reportedly, been talking to Hillary through her attorneys. By now the FBI has 85 versions of the truth, all of which sort of fit the facts. Of course, many of these people, believing they are the most trusted aide to the Clintons, are stonewalling out of loyalty.
The other thing the Clintons are good at doing is offering up multiple motivations for their capers. In this case, Hillary has said she wanted to guard her private correspondence. She’s also hinted that she was trying to keep the vast right-wing conspiracy from prying into her affairs via Congressional oversight. These are all relatively innocent explanations. She was justified in breaking the law because her tormentors are big meanies!
It’s this artful use of distraction that causes me to wonder if her campaign is not just another smokescreen. The FBI would be hard pressed to get the green light to indict her even if she was not running for president. Getting the political class to OK it when she is the front runner for the nomination is highly unlikely. That makes her campaign a force-field to repel a full blown investigation. At least that’s what they are thinking.
Put another way, Hillary’s campaign is like a staged terror attack to distract from the bank heist going on across town. As long as she is running for office, the Feds are limited in what they can do to her. The bet is the clock runs out on this by the summer as it will be viewed as too politically dangerous. Win or lose, Team Clinton gets away with what amounts to a bank heist.
Ultimately, that’s what has always worked for the Clintons. The assumption by friends and foes is that they are motivated by power, ideology and politics. Their actions are all in pursuit of office or scoring points against political enemies. Working from that assumption, their enemies always swing and miss because they are aiming at something that is not there.
The real soul of the Clintons, if you will, is good old fashioned greed. It is a love of money and what money brings that drives them. Politics has always been a means, not an end. In this regard they are not much different from most gangsters. Al Capone enjoyed crime, but crime was not his motivation. He liked living large and crime was the means to that end. if Capone happened to be good at making widgets, he would have done that.
If the news reports are accurate, it appears the FBI is figuring out that they have an old fashioned heist on their hands. The smart money says they run into a stone wall, but even Al Capone was eventually brought low on the sort of technical violations of the law we are seeing here. This is not the 1920’s where you can hide the books from the Feds. Every cent that flows in and out of that operation can be traced now.
Still, the Clinton gang is not without its resources. The longer this takes, the less likely it is for the political class to permit a criminal case being brought against her. Imagine Clinton being indicted in June after clinching the nomination. But events have a way of getting away from even the craftiest people so there’s always hope. The image that brings me joy when thinking of the Clintons is of Bill standing on the porch, a bimbo on his arm, waving to Hillary as she is carted away to the penitentiary.
Obvious from day 1 that she and Bill intended to monetize U.S. foreign policy and cover it up along the way. They succeeded to the tune of several hundred million dollars – and left the Middle East and Eastern Europe a disaster.
It has already been made public (but generally ignored) that she revealed Chris Stevens’ Libya travel plans and security arrangements through her personal emails. I think we are only one link away from confirming that the well-coordinated attack and his death were a direct result of her greed and carelessness.
The number of suspicious deaths connected to Clinton scandals and ambitions is quite extensive. Chris Stevens only died as a result of Clinton greed. Did Ron Brown die because he threatened to expose Clinton malfeasance? Did JFK, Jr die because Hillary wanted the NY senate seat? Most Clinton scandals have some deceased persons whose untimely deaths were very convenient.
HillBill aren’t known as the Clinton Crime Syndicate® for nothing!
From a distance, and forgive me for my limited view, I still don’t see how Hillary can not win.
It seems to me the whole system in the States, if not exactly *for* her, is certainly not *against* her. Plus, her established money and well-worked contacts can be used to make sure the upper classes are not opposing her, and the public can be bought with whatever is the soup de jour. Free iPads for everyone? Why not… it is only free money and has no real cost to the government.
I am sure Trump, or maybe one of the other Republican hopefuls, can give her a good run, but in the end the weight of ‘we-had-a-black-prez-so-naturally-now-it’s-a-woman’s-turn’ will crush all in its wake.
Such an idea might, by the way, have worked here but ‘that woman’ a.k.a Maggie Thatcher still boils the blood of lefties after all these years, so we won’t hurry down the distaff route too soon. However, as our socialists just love the rough-and-unpolished idea of commie-loving Corbyn as leader, Sanders might yet surprise everyone. But no, I doubt it will be servers that bring Hillary down, let alone what service Bill got in office.
What you miss from your distance is that she is a terrible campaigner who has won a total of one election in her life – which was handed to her on a silver platter in New York.
She’s barely ahead of a cranky old-commie for the nomination and is running so far to the left, she’ll never be able to come back for the general election. And, unlike Sanders, she has lost her mind on gun-control rhetoric which will cost her huge numbers of votes in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
Privately, I hope you are correct, Drake, but until the other hopefuls emerge as a viable alternative from my perspective even the woman who cannot win elections has to get it right one day.
Plus, as Stalin reportedly said it is not who casts the votes but who counts the votes that matters.
I may be a Brit but I fear for America.
Hillary lost to a nobody freshman Senator who openly and exclusively read from a teleprompter and whose only attribute was the crease in his pants. Always a wooden public figure, her mind, such as it is, is clearly in decline. I wish all my enemies were like her. Our true problem is that we do not have any friends.
The best outcome for the progressive is to take a break from itself. USG is protected from real change by universal suffrage. So, obviously, are you.
Al Capone would probably be deeply offended.
I can not imagine a more despicable character in all of my half century plus on this earth than Hillary, and not to mention her husband. Those two redefined political dynastic corruption, debauchery, and hubris. They posses a unique absolutely psychopathic shamelessness.
“…three people have four versions of the “truth” and none of them quite fit with the facts. The reason for that is the Clintons use selective honesty to blind their subordinates to the contradictions. Each member of the caper is sure he is the only one trusted enough to know the whole story.”
That is the kind of thing FDR did. I reckon they took at least some of their techniques from his manipulative nature. I’ve seen many books where FDR was described as someone who, when you spoke with him, went away with the conviction that he totally agreed, and your ideas would be implemented. Similar, but not quite the same as Bill and Hillary.
You seem to be missing one essential consideration.
Like the pimp who traffics in exceptionally young boys, or “disposable” girls… despite the testimony, and evidence, there’s the potential um…embarrassment in the discovery process involving the ALSO well documented (and incompetently sanitized) “client list”.
I COULD be wrong.
I hope Trump will arrange for a million syrian refugees to move to a blue state without allowing them to move out. After a couple of years it’ll be a red state. Then Trump can move the Syrians to another blue state and so on.
It’d be like a traveling circus.
You know, this is why I’ve long maintained that a President Hillary wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, if you take the long, long, long, long, long view — we’ll be far less likely to get into ill-considered foreign adventures with Her Griftness at the helm, since there are far easier ways to make a buck. The non-Trump Republicans can’t wait to bomb somebody swarthy, as that is the only other play in the “conservative” playbook these days (the other being “tax breaks for donors,” of course).
Hell, you could get an honest-to-God real conservative agenda through — take as much money as the amnesty lobby has dumped into Yeb’s campaign, launder it through one of her many slush funds, and presto, you’ll get an executive order mandating concealed carry, school prayer, and NASCAR attendance. Say what you will about banana republics, at least it’s easy to get el sleazo caudillo’s ear at any time….
… and in the end, the crisis of legitimacy eight years of her shit will produce should be enough to finally get a secession convention going, which is the only real way to preserve a few shreds of the old America.
Hillary will never be indicted; Obama commie will order his enablers in the INjustice department not to indict.
The next prez may appoint 2 or 3 Supreme Court Justices, and given that the Supreme Court adheres to the Constitution the way Bernie Sanders will adhere to free markets and captialism, there is no way on earth that Ocommie will permit any indictment.
Obama may hate Clintons, but he hates the USA and Republicans even more.
Further, the media will run cover for Hillary. She could be video taped slitting the throat of a child, but the media will cover all of it up. They are so in to Hillary that they can see and taste her intestines.
Liberal progressives rule the USA. They can do absolutely anything they choose no matter how illegal, and they will suffer no consequences. Our govt . and ruling class today is no different than Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany; the do whatever they please with full knowledge of total impunity.
The ONLY way out of this is a total dismantling of the government bureaucracy; the total evisceration of ALL of the govt. agencies, which IS the seat of power in our nation.
I’ve been telling people that whoever (whomever?) the GOP candidate is, at the first debate vs Hillary, should begin his opening statement by looking at her right in the eyes and asking, “Hillary, why aren’t you in jail?”
Arguing Clinton is running to be President because she’s running from the Feds isn’t merely far-fetched, it’s downright ridiculous, considering that she also tried running to be President before Obama was elected, before the private server business and it was always clear that she would run again.
I also happen to think Bill can shove his cigar wherever he wants. I don’t know if it’s a good thing to do to cigars but otherwise I don’t really care. The bizarre left-wing notion that “a woman is always right when she says something against men”, by which we derive “a woman should always be believed” might make us feel some joy when we watch the Clintons being harassed by an idiotic left-wing dogma but we should fight against it, because that dogma is bad for everyone.