The congressional testimony of FBI Director James Comey regarding the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation gave us the uncomfortable feeling that that we’d seen this movie before. Indeed, the Watergate scandal that resulted in President Nixon’s resignation featured questions similar to those that that have arisen in the course of the Clinton e-mail saga.
But there is at least one stark contrast. It took a no-nonsense judge and a relentless congressional investigation to get the facts revealed about Watergate, while in the current mess the facts are already largely in plain sight. What rankles is the refusal of top governmental officials to act on those facts.
President Obama has summarily assured us that whatever it may look like, Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while serving as secretary of state did not in fact compromise national security. Cue up the newsreel of President Nixon assuring the public that he was “not a crook” while he was knee-deep in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in and indeed had authorized the use of the FBI and other government agencies to stymie investigators.
Last October, right at the outset of the FBI investigation of the Clinton e-mails, Mr. Obama went on national TV and flatly told the nation – and, of course, his underlings at the Department of Justice and the FBI – that “I can tell you this is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
And this past April, the president, in a televised interview, was asked whether – given the revelations that Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails contained classified information, including 22 with “top secret” information –he could “still say flatly that she did not jeopardize America’s secrets.”
Mr. Obama answered, in part, as follows:
I’ve got to be careful because, as you know, there have been investigations, there are hearings, Congress is looking at this. And I haven’t been sorting through each and every aspect of this. Here’s what I know: Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.…
I continue to believe that she has not jeopardized America’s national security….What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there are – there’s classified, and then there’s classified…. There’s stuff that is really top secret, top secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source.
So the president had no real information here but was essentially giving Mrs. Clinton a pass. We would have expected a more rigorous concern on the president’s part for the integrity of the classified secrets process, especially since Jonathan Pollard and others convicted of mishandling classified documents received no such benefits of the doubt.
But the president’s message was clear and it is not surprising that the FBI director recommended against going any further in pursuing Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private server even though much damning evidence had been uncovered: In addition to e-mails containing classified information –something Mrs. Clinton said didn’t exist – there were thousands of State Department-related e-mails that she didn’t produce as investigators had requested, even though she said she produced them all.
Mr. Comey also noted that Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail account was well known and she used it extensively outside the United States, to the extent that “we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal account.”
Indeed, experts consulted by the New York Times said it is not just possible but probable the account was hacked.
In other words, “hostile actors” likely had access to the information contained in the secretary of state’s e-mails – and the FBI has no interest in pursuing the matter.
Further, Mr. Comey, although he spoke in somewhat caustic terms about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system, seems to have been less than serious about the investigation. Thus, though the investigation took approximately a year and involved such personal credibility issues as her inaccurate claim that no classified material was carried on her e-mail system, her counterfactual claim that she used one communication device, her specious claim that she returned all work-related material to the State Department, her fallacious claim that neither she nor anyone else deleted work-related material from her account, and her untrue claim that her lawyers had read all of her e-mails to determine which ones had to be turned over to investigators, she herself was not questioned until three days before the final report was released.
Nor was she questioned under oath. Nor was a transcript of the questioning made.
What also gnaws about the missing e-mails is not just that they may contain relevant information about Mrs. Clinton’s use of her personal account for official business, although that is, of course, proper cause for concern. It is that the missing e-mails could shed light on Mrs. Clinton’s possible conflicts of interest in her actions as secretary of state that favored large contributors to the Clinton Foundation.
Of particular note, this past April there were reports of a business deal involving Canadian mining investors who had made contributions to the foundation and were in the process of selling their uranium company to a Russian state-owned energy company. The deal required approval by the State Department among other government agencies and the deal was ultimately approved. The New York Times headlined a news report on the matter “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.”
Now, there may or may not be something there, but we can only wonder if any of those disappeared e-mails would have shed some light on the situation. Shades of those missing 18-and-a-half minutes of Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes.
