Hillary and the FBI: Who Is Surprised? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Hillary and the FBI: Who Is Surprised?
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The Washington Post. May 27, 1994. The headline:

Hillary Clinton Futures Trades Detailed

The story begins as follows:

Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.

The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In about 10 months of trading, she made nearly $100,000, relying heavily on advice from her friend James B. Blair, an experienced futures trader.

The new records also raise the possibility that some of her profits — as much as $40,000 — came from larger trades ordered by someone else and then shifted to her account, Leo Melamed, a former chairman of the Merc who reviewed the records for the White House, said in an interview.

Then there’s this story from the New York Times on January 5, 1996:

Memo Places Hillary Clinton At Core of Travel Office Case

The story begins:

A memorandum by a former Presidential aide depicts Hillary Rodham Clinton as the central figure in the 1993 travel office dismissals, a politically damaging episode that the aide said had resulted from a climate of fear in which officials did not dare question Mrs. Clinton’s wishes.

The newly released draft memorandum, written by David Watkins, the former top administrative aide at the White House, also sharply contradicts the White House’s official account of Mrs. Clinton as merely an interested observer in the events that led to the dismissal of the White House travel staff and their replacement with Clinton associates from Arkansas.

In the memorandum, apparently intended for Thomas F. McLarty, who was the White House chief of staff, Mr. Watkins wrote that “we both know that there would be hell to pay” if “we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady’s wishes.”

And there’s this from the Washington Post on June 2, 1996:

Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater Controversy: A Close-Up

Reports the Post:

When considered in isolation, many of the questions to which Hillary Clinton has had to respond — especially those involving small-time transactions in provincial Arkansas more than a decade ago — might appear minor. Many people, perhaps most people, forget events that occurred long ago and say things occasionally that are later contradicted by records or the memories of others. But when the questions and answers involving her are viewed in their totality, they appear more significant. One minor issue sets the context for the next and, stitch by stitch, a pattern emerges. That larger pattern has drawn the scrutiny of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, whose investigators are engaged, among other things, in a task unprecedented in modern times: determining whether the president’s wife committed perjury, made false statements or obstructed justice.

And who can forget this jewel from 1998 as the Monica Lewinsky scandal dawned, with President Clinton wagging his finger at the cameras and telling a flat out lie that “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” There was Hillary Clinton telling NBC’s Matt Lauer on the Today Show that:

“The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

There was no “vast right-wing conspiracy.” And the accusations of sexual misconduct both in the White House and before Bill Clinton’s time in the White House turned out to be 100% true.

Oh yes. Let’s not leave this out from the Times in 1996:

Elusive Papers of Law Firm Are Found at White House

After nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House said this evening that it had unexpectedly discovered copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm that describe her work for a failing savings and loan association in the 1980’s.

Federal and Congressional investigators have issued subpoenas for the documents since 1994, and the White House has said it did not have them. The originals disappeared from the Rose Law Firm, in which Mrs. Clinton was a partner, shortly before Mr. Clinton took office.

The newly discovered documents are copies of billing records from the Rose firm, where Mrs. Clinton helped represent Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan run by James B. McDougal, the Clintons’ business partner in the Whitewater land venture. The originals are still missing. Investigators have been seeking the documents to determine the role Mrs. Clinton played in the firm’s representation of the savings and loan.

All of this well before headlines like this one from her tenure as Secretary of State:

Is Hillary Clinton a ‘liar’ on Benghazi?

Hint: Pat Smith, mother of the murdered Sean Smith of State Department IT fame, says yes, Clinton lied — and to Pat Smith’s face.

All of this before we get to where we are with the emails, the Clinton Foundation, the King of Morocco and the fact that Hillary Clinton has become the first presidential nominee in American history to be the subject of not one but two FBI criminal investigations.

So what do we have here? Nothing new. What we have is a pattern — a very long and very distinct pattern — of bad judgment and repeated episodes of lying. Recall this New York Times column by the late William Safire titled “Blizzard of Lies” that appeared in January of 1996. Wrote Safire in part of Hillary Clinton:

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.

Safire called it exactly. Hillary Clinton’s career has taken her from one low to another low to an even still lower low. Her judgment and her character, from an unethical cattle futures deal as First Lady of Arkansas to the emails and the FBI investigations as a Secretary of State and presidential candidate, have been shown repeatedly to be questionable at best, abysmal at worse.

One can agree or disagree with the actions of James Comey. But the fundamental fact is that it is, once again, the judgment and character that repeatedly shows up as a pattern in Hillary Clinton’s actions that have drawn in the FBI in the first place.

All of which says exactly why Hillary Clinton should never be President of the United States.  

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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