Hillary Clinton’s White House Dreams Crushed

Leo McNeil ^ | March 4, 2015 | Leo McNeil

[LeoMcNeil]

After claiming not to use email while Secretary of State, it has been discovered that Hillary Clinton in fact had private email addresses. This information was obtained in a shady manner by a hacker who called himself Guccifer. Much of the information was originally hacked from old Clinton hack Sydney Blumenthal. It appears that in addition to various personal greetings and inquiries Blumenthal send Hillary what he described as confidential information about Libya. Hillary’s problems at least start with Guccifer, they continue with 50,000 pages worth of documents she provided to the State Department in relation to the House Benghazi investigation. Those documents also come from Hillary’s private, FOIA shielded email accounts. It’s because of Guccifer that the general public even knew about Hillary’s private email account.

Now that the State Department has Hillary’s emails they’re going to be forced to go through them for both FOIA requests and any investigations conducted by Congress. Even the New York Times has noted Hillary’s actions are problematic. In fact, Hillary’s private email account may very well be illegal. Not illegal in the sense that public officials can’t have private email accounts but illegal because she conducted government business over her private account. By conducting government business over a private email account, Hillary prevented the public from obtaining information via FOIA requests and she prevented Congress from obtaining information about her tenure in the State Department.

Not surprisingly the Obama administration, current and former, have been quick to throw Hillary under the bus. Former press secretary Robert Gibbs led the way calling Hillary’s actions highly unusual. Whether the White House is orchestrating the release of these emails remains to be seen. Obama may want to knock off Hillary in favor of Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. The administration could also be deflecting attention away from yesterday’s speech to Congress by Benjamin Netanyahu and the kerfuffle surrounding it. Either way, the administration is distancing itself from Hillary and perhaps bringing along other Democrats in the process.

Let’s face it, Hillary’s Presidential hopes are in desperate peril right now. She has two major problems facing her (we won’t count Bill who is a perpetual problem). Not only did she use her private email addresses for official State Department business, she also used her position in the State Department to solicit donations for the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation is a $2 billion enterprise which, while Hillary was Secretary of State, obtained donations from several foreign governments. At least one was a “new” donation, meaning the country did not donate before Hillary became Secretary of State.In addition several corporations including General Electric gave hefty donations to the Clinton Foundation after Hillary negotiated favorable trade deals for them with various countries. In other words, the appearance is that Hillary’s Foundation was being paid in exchange for Hillary using her official position to further corporate interests.

Odds are Hillary is going to run for President despite all of this. If she doesn’t run then the Democrats will be left in the awful position of not having anyone ready to run for President. So many potential candidates have not started campaigns because they believe Hillary is inevitable. Hillary isn’t going to throw the entire Democrat Party under the bus like this. If she does it’s only because this scandal grows to the point that she has no chance whatsoever of winning in a general election which likely means that even the Democrats are turning against her. Nevertheless these twin scandals are massive. They show a fundamental breach of trust by Hillary. By hiding official business on her personal email and by the appearance of using the office of the Secretary of State to solicit donations for her personal foundation, Hillary looks like someone who is shady and cannot be trusted. The American public is a trusting sort but once trust is broken it takes a long time for a national politician to recover. Hillary’s chances of winning the Presidency have diminished substantially.

[longfellow]

This biatch should not be allowed on white house tour let alone to run the country.

[lavaroise]

I always felt Obama’s promises to Hillary were a means to control her and keep her down.