Watergate? That Was Junior Varsity

The current situation for the United States is dire. Anyone who cares about America’s future must be alarmed. Surely those who wish the US well cannot now support Hillary Clinton, given what we now know. Were she to be elected, still the most likely outcome, the Congress would need almost immediately to move to impeach her, throwing the nation into the kind of constitutional crisis it faced over Watergate. Even worse if they did not impeach and convict her. Even if they did, by voting for her immediately in the face of such corruption, the general population would be announcing to each other that they do not care. As Confucius properly pointed out, if the top of a nation is visibly corrupt, the rest of the nation will quickly and inevitably follow suit. People will decide only suckers follow laws or work for the common good.

This is a fast and bumpy ride to Third World conditions.

Trump would be scary, but not that scary. We are protected from the worst by the fact that he has no personal following in the political elite. He is not part of any existing Washington cartel. The press is not covering up for him—just the reverse. The professional class, including the bureaucrats, are against him. Even a Republican congress is going to include many enemies.

At worst therefore, and even if he were as personally corrupt as Clinton—which he does not seem to be—the greatest danger would simply be that he was ineffectual. Fears of a Trump dictatorship are not credible—even if it were his desire.

Here is what I think is going on with the converging Clinton scandals.

Perhaps the fundamental question is, why did Clinton do her business as Secretary of State on a private server? There is no chance she was stupid enough, and everybody around her was stupid enough, to do it innocently, or not to see the blatant security risk and risk of scandal. She must have had a reason so pressing that the risk was worthwhile.

In other words, she must have been intending, from the start, misbehaviour so serious that such a terrible risk was, to her, worth it. And worth the further risk of stonewalling once the private server was discovered, and the further risk of destroying evidence under subpoena.

So it goes without saying that the truth must be a real bombshell.

We have already had ample evidence, from the Podesta emails, of what that might be: the selling of influence. Bribery, graft. That is bad enough. But as Secretary of State, she was selling influence not over pavement contracts, but over foreign affairs. This is, in other words, treason.

What might the yet-unseen worst be? Voluntarily sharing information with folks like Putin or Iran, in return for money?

After all, American foreign policy since Obama, and Clinton, took office could not have gone much worse, in terms of American interests. Putin and Iran have somehow been ridiculously successful, despite playing weak hands amid the collapse in oil prices. Not to mention China’s successful move into the South China Sea, and the Philippines switching sides in that dispute. It is hard to believe someone wasn’t screwing things up deliberately.

Of course, Putin is backing Trump, isn’t he? After all, we have Hillary Clinton’s and Harry Reid’s word on it. Why would he back Trump if he owns Clinton?

I assume Clinton and Reid are simply lying. That, after all, is their track record. Putin is not behind the Wikileaks dumps. That is the obvious misdirection to use, if Hillary is his real puppet. And how can she not be, if she did not care about the obvious risk of exposing her own diplomatic correspondence to Russian hacks? The real culprit in the Podesta-Wikileaks email leaks might as easily be an individual or a non-state group. How hard is it for anyone without state financial backing to hack into an email account protected by the password “p@ssw0rd”?

As to the discovery of a reportedly huge cache of relevant emails on the Huma Abedin—Anthony Weiner laptop: if someone is involved with people of very dubious ethics, like the Clintons clearly are, she would, if she were smart, want to keep a cache of evidence of their worst wrongdoing, for use whenever necessary to protect her own position. This would be doubly true for her husband, conscious of his own wrongdoing and so vulnerability. Surely she was cunning anough to keep copies of anything incriminating on her own laptop away from the office. By any other logic, having sensitive documents kept at home on a laptop shared with her husband would be terribly reckless. And we know she did this.

This would also explain why Jim Comey, until now leaning over backwards to protect Clinton, has announced the reopened investigation days before the election. Not something he would likely have done if he did not feel forced to do it; whatever the danger he faced by not going public now was greater than the danger of completely alienating Hillary Clinton just before she was likely to become president, and his boss, and able to fire him.

This no doubt was what kept him from convening a grand jury in July. If Clinton won, his job was toast. A fair assessment, it seems, based on the ferocity of the attack against him by Clinton and other leading Democrat spokesmen now. If Clinton now becomes president, she would indeed have to fire him, or declare herself a liar.

This almost has to mean, given his previous actions, that Comey believes he faces a greater risk of losing his job if he cooperated in the coverup. Either he believes that whatever he has found out would ensure that she loses the election, or it would so incriminate her that she would lack the political capital to fire him. That surely suggests something impeachable.

The Manchurian Candidate?

We could tell you what film this still is from, but then we'd have to kill you.

There is an aphorism, “never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by ordinary incompetence.” That may be so; there is much incompetence in the world. But I fear, as I grow older, it is too optimistic. There is also a good deal of malice.

Why did Hillary Clinton use a private server during her time as Secretary of State?

Was it pure incompetence? That is her own defense. She says she wanted it so that she could do all her messaging on one device, one smartphone.

However, it is perfectly possible to have two email accounts on one phone. Did she not know this? Did she ask no one? Given that the Clintons, were tech unsavvy, they managed to get someone to set up a private server for them. Could not get someone to set up a cell phone for them?

And didn’t she know about the need for security? Wouldn’t any one of us know? She was no neophyte to the issue—having spent eight years in the White House. Could nobody in the State Department have ever advised her on security? Moreover, if she was so naïve about security, how is it she took the trouble to have her private server scrubbed before it was turned over to Congress?

Nah. We must rule out incompetence. Although this level of incompetence in itself would disqualify her from the presidency.

No, it must have been cunning. Clinton must have had a motive, from the beginning of her tenure as S of S, for keeping her official business off the record. Not simply the matter of sending classified materials in the open. She had no motive for that. That much must have been collateral damage. Whatever her motive was, it must have been so disreputable that she was ready to accept such collateral damage, and even perhaps letting the public know about it, in order to keep the real secret.

Beyond that, we can only speculate.

What was I doing behind the couch? Oh, just looking for spare change...

The most obvious and perhaps least disreputable thing she might have had in mind was the peddling of influence; using her official capacity to enrich herself. Every politician, after all, seems skilled in it. Fundraising is a constant necessity. Most seem to become lobbyists as soon as they leave office. Theoretically, of course, this is not supposed to happen. Theoretically, there is a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

But, unfortunately, even that does not seem an adequate explanation. By using a private server, Clinton was concealing what she was doing from the American public. But she was probably revealing it to Russia and China. Both, we have long known, have teams of hackers busily at work. They have cracked US government servers. They no doubt would have found a private server a beginner’s exercise. It is hard to believe the State Department, and the Secretary of State, had never been briefed on this issue.

So Hillary was not doing this for secrecy, exactly.

In fact, if Clinton was trading influence in the usual way, with businesses and lobby groups, she was opening herself up to blackmail by foreign powers.

If so, it would be a very bad idea to elect her president. Was she politically suicidal?

Which leaves, I think, only one possibility. Forgive me if I am missing something here, but doesn’t this mean that Russia and China must have been complicit in whatever she planned to do? If so, they could not blow her cover without blowing their own, and losing a valuable asset. They would not blackmail her, because they had no need to.

It all sounds a little paranoid, but what’s the alternative explanation? What am I missing? As I said, mere stupidity seems ruled out.

Oh, Dmitry, you can press my 'reset' button any time!

And now that I think about it, what other thesis better explains the Obama administration’s foreign policy record? Not just Benghazi, which still seems to make no sense on the information we have: there was that line in the sand that Assad crossed in Syria, and then Putin dramatically riding in and saving his ally from US intervention. Could that have been set up, in whole or in part? There was the bizarre inability to come to a SOFA with Iraq, and all the US troops leaving, obviously counter to both US and Iraqi interests. There was Putin’s apparently breathtakingly risky gamble of annexing the Crimea. Did inside information give him the confidence to try it? There was the deal with Cuba, asking virtually nothing of the Castros at a point when Cuba was on the ropes and probably could have been forced to make concessions. There was the failure to back a significant popular uprising in Iran. There is the current nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs. There’s that time Obama’s mic picked him up saying to Russian President Medvedev, off the record, that he would have more freedom to give Russia what it wanted after his re-election. Can it all have been mere American incompetence?

Of course, to explain all these apparent bungles, our conspiracy theory must extend beyond Clinton herself, to include Obama, and probably John Kerry. On the other hand, if she were a particularly effective operator, she might have crippled the American position badly enough that they had few cards left to play.

Perhaps one day we will know. It would certainly not be the first time in history that a foreign minister or other important courtier turned out to be in the pay of a foreign power. All that ever prevents it is personal ethics, fear of exposure, and pure patriotism. For there is obviously a lot of money to be made.

But in the end, we are left with this: either Hillary Clinton is too stupid to be trusted with the presidency, or she is not.

Pray that she is stupid.