When former secretary of state and current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton finally capitulated and turned over her now infamous e-mail server to investigators last year, she had all of its data deleted first. She claimed — time and again — that she had already turned over all work-related e-mails on a USB drive and that she and her staff had only deleted those e-mails that were entirely personal. Given her long chain of lies and half-truths on this and other topics, it will come as no surprise that she lied. Again.
Clinton initially refused to turn over the server, saying, “The server contains personal communications from my husband and me and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private.” Setting aside for the moment what would likely happen if a mere mortal refused to cooperate with federal agents conducting an investigation, her refusal echoed with recollections of “I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.” Once she decided to “cooperate” and turn over the server, it was found to have been formatted. Again, for mere mortals, that would — in all probability — be called tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice.
Besides lying to the public — in statement after statement — Clinton took the not-unheard-of approach of lying about her e-mail use and disclosure under oath. It would appear to be something of a family tradition. On October 22, 2015, Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi that — among other things — she had turned over all work-related e-mails to the Department of State. With this most recent revelation of nearly 15,000 previously withheld e-mails, the potential perjury case against Clinton that is being promoted by House Oversight Chairman Representative Jason Chaffetz may gain more steam. Perhaps it will drag out until after the election. If she wins, she could continue another family trait: being impeached for perjury.
The germane point here, though, is her claim that she had “met all of [her] responsibilities” by turning over a USB drive containing about 30,000 e-mails that she claimed were all of her work-related e-mails. As was widely reported last week, that turns out not to be the case at all. In fact, the FBI has discovered that Clinton withheld at least 14,900 work-related e-mails. That’s half as many as she turned over. As The New American has said in other articles about new e-mails which had been released, it is clear she had something to hide. Now, it appears that at least part of that something was that, as secretary of state, she was essentially auctioning off access to the Department of State.
Among the e-mails recently disclosed are numerous e-mail conversations showing that access to the State Department was often for ticket-holders only. And those tickets were handled by the Clinton Foundation. As Breitbart reported:
In one flagrant example, the Crown Prince of Bahrain was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation to get access to the secretary of state. He got it after pledging $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative.
Much of this “pay-for-play” was handled by Clinton’s girl Friday, Huma Abedin, who had an unusual employment situation. As The New American previously reported:
During Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, Abedin was her deputy chief of staff. During that time Abedin had a “special government employee” arrangement that allowed her to work other jobs. At one point she held four jobs simultaneously. All of those jobs were connected, in one way or another, to Hillary Clinton. She was part time aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, personal assistant to Hillary Clinton, salaried employee of the Clinton Foundation, and private consultant for Teneo Holdings, which was founded by three partners all with close ties to the Clintons.
So, during her time at the State Department, Abedin had four bosses and three of them were Hillary Clinton. As part of her job with the Clinton Foundation, Abedin used her job at the State Department to grant access to that department in a way that raised funds for the foundation? Confused yet?
It appears the Crown Prince of Bahrain was not an anomaly. The New York Post reported, “A staggering 85 of the 154 private citizens who managed to meet or speak with her by phone donated money to the Clinton Foundation.”
As Breitbart also reported, “In more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million.” It appears that Clinton was willing to risk national security and break more than a few federal laws in the handling of classified information on her private unsecured server for the sake of keeping all of her underhanded dealings as secretary of state off the record. And the primary motivator appears to be something as simple as money.
Big donor after big donor was granted access to the U.S. government, but only after paying a huge price to Clinton’s foundation. Many of those donors are now closely connected to her campaign.
One need not exercise much in the way of imagination to foresee what the next Clinton presidency would look like.
