Hillary Clinton: A Question Of Integrity, A Threat To The Rule Of Law

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posted on September 3, 2015
hillary-clinton-a-question-of-integrity-a-threat-to-the-rule-of-law.jpg
AP Photo/Jim Cole

As the federal investigation intensifies regarding Hillary Clinton’s wantonly reckless and possibly illegal use of a private email server to send and receive sensitive, classified State Department communications, the details revealed by that probe raise serious and troubling questions for all Americans. 

Moreover, considering Hillary Clinton’s career-long history of attacks on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the questions that those revelations raise—questions about her character, integrity and respect for the rule of law—are especially troubling for gun owners.

First, let’s look at the facts as we now know them, revealed by the Obama Justice Department and FBI in their investigation. 

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly claimed, "I did not send nor receive anything that was classified at the time.”

However, Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough said in a letter to Congress two weeks ago that out of the approximately 30,000 emails sent to or from Clinton, a sampling of 40 of those emails found that four of them—10 percent of the sample—contained information classified by the government as secretTen percent of the emails sampled contained information classified by the government as secret.

Indeed, intelligence community sources who spoke to Fox News on condition of anonymity said last week that an FBI “A-team” is leading an “extremely serious” investigation of the matter, focusing in part on a provision of the Espionage Act regarding “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.”

Regardless of whether Clinton herself sent any secret information through her private email account, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) makes it clear that if she even suspected that any sensitive communications might have gone through the unsecured server, she should have alerted the appropriate authorities.

As the CFR mandates, “Any person who has knowledge that classified information has been or may have been lost, possibly compromised or disclosed to an unauthorized person(s) shall immediately report the circumstances to an official designated for this purpose.” 

Clinton, however, seems to treat the whole investigation as a joke, as if she’s exempt from the law—it’s nobody’s business but hers what she chooses to do or not to do, and it’s beneath her to even entertain questions about the propriety of her actions, thank you very much. 

One exchange, with Fox News reporter Ed Henry two weeks ago in Las Vegas, serves as an excellent example of that imperious arrogance. In a Q&A session with reporters, Henry asked Clinton: “NBC is saying the FBI believes that you tried to wipe the entire server … so there’d be no email, no personal, no official. Did you try and wipe the whole thing?” 

Clinton’s first instinct was to try to deflect the question, parrying Henry’s inquiry with, “My personal emails are my personal business ...” 

But Henry persisted, asking again: “Did you try to wipe the server?” This time, Clinton pleaded ignorance, widening her eyes, shrugging her shoulders and holding her hands out, palms up, like a child claiming to have no idea who emptied the cookie jar: “I’m … I’m … I’m … you know. I don’t … I have no idea.”

Still Henry pressed on: “But you were in charge of it. You were the official in charge. Did you wipe the server?” 

To which Hillary replied, “What? Like with a cloth or something?”—and then laughed. As if it were all a big joke. As if she had no idea what “classified” meant. Or what “wiping” a hard drive meant. Or even—gawrsh—what a computer was. 

Watching it, you could almost see Hillary shake her finger at her questioners, throw up her hands and exclaim—as she did during hearings into the Benghazi cover-up and debacle responsible for four Americans being killed—“What difference, at this point, does it make?” That means the information was classified from the moment it was sent.

Yet every day that goes by, it seems, more damning evidence piles up all around her. 

On Monday, the State Department released thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails—and at least 125 of them contained classified information relating to everything from a potential presidential election in Haiti; to discussions of a conversation between the Russian and American ambassadors to the United Nations; to elections for the presidency of the International Development Bank.

As if that weren’t enough, on Tuesday, Breitbart.com broke a story detailing its own investigation, which revealed that: 

  • Clinton’s private email server was in the same physical location and shared the same network used and operated by the Clinton Foundation.
  • The servers for presidentclinton.com (Bill) and clintonemail.com (Hillary) shared the same Internet Protocol (IP) address.
  • Those servers also shared the same IP address while Hillary was Secretary of State.
  • The servers were housed at the same physical location in Manhattan, and
  • Clinton Foundation employees used presidentclinton.com email addresses.

What that means, as Breitbart’s Patrick Howley points out, is that if any of those Clinton Foundation staffers’ email accounts were hacked, it “would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, as well.” 

(Considering that the Clintons raked in more than $25 million since 2014 for giving speeches—Hillary commands up to $325,000 per speech—you can’t help but wonder whether presidentclinton.biz or clintonemail.us would be more transparent than the vanilla .com domain names they chose.)

Also on Tuesday, Sean Davis of The Federalist revealed that Clinton wasn’t merely the hapless recipient of classified information in emails, she was also the originator who sent it out in the first place. Indeed, since the declassification date on one particular email—July 1, 2025—is exactly 15 years after the email was sent, rather than when it was discovered and redacted, that means the information was classified from the moment it was sent

Make no mistake: Whether or not Hillary Clinton violated the Espionage Act, any other law, federal regulation or even only her responsibilities as the highest-ranking diplomat in the country, her attitude toward the law, toward its enforcers and toward the American people who have every right to expect more from her is clearly one of contempt.

It’s an attitude that says, “I’m Hillary Clinton, I’m entitled to be next in the White House, and after all these years in Washington, I can do whatever I darn well please.” It’s in her very words, her gestures, her tone and her testimony.

And after six years of Obama’s abuse of the rule of law and escalating attacks on the rights of American gun owners, one can only wonder how Clinton would pick up where Barack Obama left off. 

Would Hillary Clinton resort to “extralegal” (to put it politely) or even illegal means to attack the Second Amendment rights of gun owners like you?

Would she smuggle guns from the U.S. to the Mexican drug cartels to try to “prove” her own sound bite claiming that 90 percent of the guns used by the Mexican drug cartels come from the United States? Been there, done that.

Would she sic the FDIC on lawful gun retailers to try to choke off the availability of firearms to law-abiding citizens? Been there, done that. Because beneath any actual law-breaking or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton that may or may not be revealed by Obama’s Justice Department investigation, there’s a sickening underlying sense of imperial special privilege. 

Would she bar gun imports, try to ban rifle ammunition, try to ban gun ownership for millions of America’s elderly and veterans, try to strangle the free-speech rights of gun owners on the Internet, or make an end-run around Congress by issuing scores of anti-gun executive orders that short-circuit the legislative process to undermine the Second Amendment? 

Been there, been there, been there. Done that, done that, done that. 

Regardless of your party politics, regardless of whether you own a gun or care about the Second Amendment, the simple fact that someone under “extremely serious” investigation for possible felonies by an FBI directed by her own party is in serious contention for that party’s presidential nomination—yet few in the mainstream media give it much more attention than Kim Kardashian’s booty—should give you pause for concern. 

Because beneath—and more troubling than—any actual law-breaking or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton that may or may not be revealed by Obama’s Justice Department investigation, there’s a sickening underlying sense of imperial special privilege. 

It’s an attitude that says that laws don’t matter ... that the powerful are exempt ... that the elected are immune ... and that the winners of elections are entitled to exploit and profit from the spoils as they see fit—all of which invariably, inevitably sicken the body of the state. Are we really ready for an imperial presidency? Isn’t that what we left behind with King George?

Where does it lead? It leads to a world where the law is deflected, bent, ignored by lawmakers who plead ignorance, misused by the powerful to consolidate their power, and forced to define—for those who aren’t quite sure—what the meaning of the word “is” is.

One fact is indisputable: When words have no meaning, and when laws mean nothing, your rights mean nothing, either.

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