I’ve got a new American Spectator column up, and it’s about the news over the weekend that the FBI has evidence of an attempted quid pro quo, in which State Department staff Patrick Kennedy, whose name never ceases to surface when stories of Hillary Clinton’s corruption at the State Department are told, offered to help FBI agents with overseas postings at American embassies in return for the Bureau’s cooperation in reclassifying at least one Hillary e-mail downward from “Secret” status.
The deal was never actually struck, which the Clinton praetorian guard holds out as evidence that there is nothing untoward to see here. The column doesn’t buy it, and neither should you…
This isn’t acceptable, to be charitable. This communication took place amid Hillary’s denials that any classified material was sent or received on her email, which her former employees still working at State — including Kennedy — knew to be a lie. And rather than give the public the truth, which wouldn’t come out until much later, after she had won the Democrat nomination, Kennedy was working to remedy her false denials by making a lie true.
And further, he was offering essentially a bribe to the FBI in order to procure more favorable field on which the Clinton email investigation would play out.
This isn’t some ho-hum bureaucratic deal-making at work — or if it is, it illuminates precisely how like the Third World the corruption in Washington has become.
Consider what would happen if the middle manager or legal counsel at XYZ Corporation, whose CEO is under FBI investigation, were to offer perks and valuables to FBI agents individually or collectively as a quid pro quo for a reframing of the investigation. We all know how that would go — the charges would pile up, the offender in question would be quickly dismissed, the corporation would be dragged through the mud, and the CEO would be accused of directing the attempted bribe.
In this case there is no evidence Hillary Clinton was behind Kennedy’s offers — but we also don’t know how hard investigators have looked. After all, this horse-trading didn’t happen when Hillary was wrapping up her affairs at State in 2012; it happened last year when the FBI investigation was ramping up. One assumes Kennedy understood the stakes at hand, and one assumes he’s smart enough to know how best to butter his own bread as a Clintonite.
And given Kennedy’s role as the Clintons’ fixer at State, you would expect that he would be the primary individual put to the squeeze in any investigation of the email scandal. Kennedy, after all, was involved in the questionable political hiring of Clinton IT tech Bryan Pagliano to a nonpolitical State Department job; Pagliano was the man who set up Hillary’s private server and ended up getting immunity in the investigation.
But yes — Toner and the rest of the Democrat stooges disguised as federal bureaucrats are correct. For those of us rubes in the hinterlands this might seem a flagrant example of an out-of-control government, but for our betters inside the Beltway it’s a Tuesday.
And they wonder why we increasingly recoil from consent to be governed by them.
What’s particularly noxious about all this is the dismissive way each of these revelations are treated. Not just by the Clintons, whose arrogance and condescension is part and parcel of the brazen way they go about assaulting the rule of law in this country. But by everyone in the ruling class. The mainstream media, which is now little other than an extension of the Democrat National Committee, and the political class in Washington just look at these things and shrug: this is how business is done.
But that’s just the point. This is how business is done when we’re governed by an unfit mob of kakistocrats – and that’s what we have. We’re governed by an entire class of people who have never produced anything, who have ascended on the basis of family connections or having earned a degree from the right university – there was a study out just recently which found that the more prestigious a university is the more left-wing its political bent, which is hardly surprising, who adopt all the right conventions and attitudes of the ruling class and in doing so become more and more contemptuous of the rest of the country.
So when you have a Hillary Clinton, whose entire existence in public life has been an unbroken string of graft, inside dealing and lies, the kakistocracy in place in Washington rushes to excuse all of it and adopts her formulation of “vast right-wing conspiracy” to denigrate the critics. You’re a kook and a conspiracy theorist to get worked up about the FBI disclosures, just like you’re a kook if you believe all of the Wikileaks stuff. Or you’re being duped by the Russians if you are. And so on.
Meanwhile we’re presented daily – and not just by Wikileaks, by the way – with evidence of how utterly corrupt and disgraceful these people are. And what worse, we can’t seem to find anyone in the Democrat Party who’s willing to call it out for the sewer of theft, lies and abuse it’s become. They all seem to be in on it.
If there is anyone in that party who finds it unacceptable that the Secretary of State was taking money from foreign governments and people with business in front of the State Department while she was making decisions on their treatment, such critics are suspiciously quiet.
If there is anyone in that party who cannot stomach the idea that the Secretary of State was communicating on an unsecured private e-mail server wide open to hacking by foreign intelligence agencies and others, putting state secrets at risk, and that it appears the President of the United States was doing the same thing, you don’t hear a lot of complaints.
If there is anyone in that party who is uncomfortable with the idea that the Secretary of State was committing a fairly bright-line violation of federal law governing the handling of classified information, and that the Justice Department actively covered up and sabotaged an investigation which would clearly have resulted in at least an indictment, nobody has been willing to come forward.
These people destroyed the Nixon presidency – and quite probably justifiably so – over far, far less than what we already know Hillary Clinton is guilty of. They still look upon Watergate as the gold standard of Washington scandals, and Watergate was nothing compared to the myriad bad deeds their party has committed over the past eight years. But there is zero political hygiene to be found. None.
And so when something like the latest FBI revelation comes out, all you get are blank stares. They’re not even fazed by the idea Hillary has career State Department people trying to cut deals to make her legal problems go away.
You cannot run a country this way. Something terrible is coming if this is the standard.
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