Hillary Clinton, Imperialism and the Lesser of Two Evils – Part Two

NinaIllingworth August 3, 2016November 17, 2022 1996 campaign finance scandal, 2016 US Presidential Election, Attorney General, Bernard Nussbaum, Bill Clinton, bribery, cattle futures trading, Cattlegate, Charlie Trie, China, ChinaGate, CIA, classified information, Clinton 2000 Senate campaign, Clinton administration, Clinton Foundation, Clinton Legal Defense Fund, Clinton Library, conflict of interest, Deep Dives, Democratic Party, Democrats, Department of Commerce, Donald Trump, email server scandal, Espionage Act, Essays, ethics, evidence, FA1, Fallout Boy Lynch Comey and the Hot Potato Plot, FALN, Fantastic Lies, FBI, federal law, Federal Records Act, first lady, Freedom of Information Act, Hillary Clinton, illegal arms sales, Imperialism, insider trading, Inspector Generals Office, investigation, IRS, James Comey, James Riady, Janet Reno, Jim Guy Tucker, Jim McDougal, John Huang, Johnny Chung, Justice, Justice Department, Loretta Lynch, Maggie Williams, Marc Rich, Maria Hsia, MP6, NDA, neoliberalism, New Four Square, Nina Illingworth, Observations from Outside the Death Star, obstruction of justice, OODS, Op-Ed, PardonGate, Politics, PRC, President Obama, Private email server, rat line, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, Roger Clinton, scandal, Secretary of State Clinton, Steve Linick, Susan McDougal, Syria, Ted Sioeng, The Foggy Bottom of Clintons Muddy Waters, Time Magazine, Tony Rodham, Tyson Foods, US State Department, Vince Foster, war, watchmen, WD7, Webster Hubbell, White House, Whitewater, Whitewater Development Corporation

Editor’s note: this is Part Two of what will most likely be a three part essay discussing why the politician regarded by most as the lesser of two evils in the 2016 US presidential election (Hillary Clinton) is probably still far, far more evil than most voters realize. You can find Part One of the piece here and while it’s probably not absolutely necessary to read it in order to understand this portion of the essay – it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Last time we looked at Clinton’s fairly miserable record as a politician and why she represented a direct threat to an independent press as well as the function of free and fair elections. This time we’re going to take a look at Hillary (and Bill) Clinton’s longstanding and notably flagrant disregard for the law as well as the threat it represents to the Justice system as a whole. With any luck at all, part three will wrap up the series by showing how the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s commitment to modern day colonialism both facilitate and motivate her (at times) criminal activities.

Once again, please be mindful that while it is not entirely necessary to click on all the embedded links in this article, your comprehension of the piece will be vastly improved by doing so – to be perfectly honest with you, I’m growing exceptionally tired of explaining to naysayers that they can’t demand “sources” if they won’t be bothered to click on the sources I provide throughout the article.

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A Pattern of Deliberate Misconduct

Welcome back my friends; now that you’ve had a moment to catch your breath, can we continue to examine why Hillary Clinton’s status as the “lesser evil” is largely a question of degrees?

Good, because in addition to subverting the concept of an independent press and threatening the function of fair elections through her ties to related corporate entities; Clinton’s flagrant, even habitual disrespect for the law also threatens the American justice system. Again folks, this is not hyperbole in the slightest and a brief examination of Hillary’s much vaunted thirty years in public life readily proves it.

Unless you’ve somehow been living under a rock, you already know that Clinton has a longstanding history of generating legal troubles that are unprecedented in and would seemingly be disqualifying for, literally any other Democratic presidential candidate – including President Obama. I will not insult your intelligence by listing every crack-pot, right wing conspiracy theory thrown at Bill and Hillary during their first tour of duty in the White House; but there are in fact a number of legally disturbing things you should still be aware of:

Cattlegate: as a lawyer and First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was almost certainly guilty of either insider trading or accepting a bribe disguised as returns from trading cattle futures. That really isn’t an opinion either, one expert analyst described Clinton’s ridiculously successful trades as “like buying ice skates one day and entering the Olympics a day later” while another mathed out the odds of such a return as “at best 1 in 31 trillion.” Those are both polite ways of explaining that Clinton’s results were virtually fucking impossible for a rank amateur with no experience in the cattle futures market and therefore, some form of fraud was almost undoubtedly involved.

Whitewater: this is the grand bull moose of right wing Clinton conspiracies and I don’t want to waste a lot of time going over all of the suspicious deaths and murky land deals that guys like Alex Jones have transformed into a cottage industry; for what I hope are obvious reasons. There are however several things you need to know here, not the least of which is that those land deals were in fact as shady as shit and resulted in the conviction of “fifteen individuals—including (Clinton business partners) Jim and Susan McDougal, White House counsel Webster Hubbell, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker.”

Furthermore, a mere hours after the 1993 death of longtime Clinton associate Vince Foster, “chief White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum removed documents, some of them concerning the Whitewater Development Corporation, from Foster’s office and gave them to Maggie Williams, Chief of Staff to the First Lady.” Nobody sane is trying to say that the Clintons murdered Foster, but lost in all rhetoric and shouting is the fact that those same documents would turn up in the Clinton home months later and their removal represents clear obstruction of justice – both in the case of Foster’s death and the Whitewater investigation as a whole.

Don’t take my word for it; current FBI Director and former Whitewater deputy special counsel James Comey (more on him in a minute) agrees! In an extremely candid, March 31st Time magazine article, Comey revealed that “Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case.” He also added that the Clintons behavior constituted “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté” but was instead “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.” This is the sitting Director of the FBI talking to a mainstream magazine my friends; not some crackpot shouting on YouTube about lizard people!

Chinagate: if you were ever going to make a political thriller movie based on a Clinton administration scandal, Chinagate is the one you should pick. Arguably the most serious campaign finance scandal in US history, the Chinagate debacle involved foreign donors illegally contributing to the Democratic Party, the Clinton/Gore re-election campaign and even the Clinton Legal Defense Fund – ostensibly on behalf of the People’s Republic of China to influence US domestic politics; and in direct violation of US law.

The scandal also involved evidence that the Clinton Administration (through the Department of Commerce and at Hillary’s instruction) sold seats on tax-payer funded trade missions to private donors, accusations that the Clinton administration (and in particular, Attorney General Janet Reno) “willfully impeded” investigations into the scandal and even possible foreign espionage.

Unfortunately for future generations, the (somewhat less than vigorous) investigation into the case fell apart when somewhere between 94 and 120 (depends on which source you ask) refused to testify, took the fifth under oath or simply fled the country. Truth and justice had a little more luck on the campaign finance side and after years of investigating numerous fundraisers involved in the scandal, the Justice Department actually managed to convict Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung, John Huang, James Riady and Maria Hsia; but were unable locate to suspected foreign agent Ted Sioeng.

Despite the fact that each of these individual cases generated credible evidence and even sworn testimony of direct involvement by the Chinese government – no one in the Clinton administration was ever charged; a result which met with heavy criticism in the media and among several FBI agents involved in the investigation.

Pardongate: before leaving office, outgoing President Bill Clinton pardoned over 450 people – including personal friends, convicted fraudsters, kidnappers, terrorists and cocaine pushers; even his own half-brother Roger Clinton. These pardons also included four Clinton business associates convicted during the Whitewater investigation, a billionaire fugitive who’s wife had made substantial donations to both the Clinton Library as well as Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign and clients/associates of Tony Rodham, Hillary’s brother.

Most disturbing of all however, were the pardons that appeared to directly help Hillary Clinton’s 2000 senate campaign – including 16 members of the Puerto Rican paramilitary/terrorist organization FALN and the pardon of four members of a predominantly-Republican voting New York Hasidic community that then voted heavily in favor of Clinton during the senate race; in a scandal known at the time as the New Four Square controversy. Collectively and particularly in reference to the pardon of Marc Rich, no less an authority than former Democratic President and human rights activist Jimmy Carter referred to these actions as “disgraceful.”

Please understand that these above examples are by no means complete and are also entirely focused on the Clinton family’s consistent and pervasive lack of respect for the law. There are no blowjob stories here, I purposely avoided allegations that Hillary Clinton helped silence Bill’s numerous female accusers and I’m barely even acknowledging partisan accusations that the Clintons used the FBI and IRS to persecute political enemies. Hell, I actually even left out numerous straight up ethics violation scandals in the interests of time and to allow us to focus on more modern examples of why Hillary Clinton is an active threat to the rule of law.

The Injustice League

Which of course brings us to today and Hillary Clinton’s two major, ongoing legal problems (that we know about) – the Clinton Foundation and her use of an unauthorized and insecure, private email server during her time as Secretary of State; the latter of which we’ve already covered here on this website in great detail over the past few months.

In late April, we took our first serious look at the Hillary Clinton private email server scandal with a Recommended Reading post focused on one of the earliest credible, in-depth breakdowns of the scandal by independent investigator Chetan Hebbale. Although the primary focus of the article was to share Hebbale’s amazing investigative work with a larger audience, I also took opportunity to examine Clinton’s clear violation of the Classified Information non-disclosure agreement she signed when taking office.

You can read the article itself for more details, but the important point to remember for this discussion is that Hillary Clinton signed a legal agreement with the US State Department that required her actively check if information was classified before she sent it along insecure channels; especially in the event she wasn’t sure if the information was classified.

Once I finished the article, I naively decided to focus on other scandals – after all Hebbale’s criticism was pretty damning and I myself had proven she’d broken at least one law with the mere power of Google; surely the FBI could take it from there, couldn’t they?

An entire month later and after becoming increasingly frustrated by what I now know was excessive foot-dragging by the FBI; I released a second, eight thousand word, heavily sourced article on the Clinton private email server scandal entitled – “The Foggy Bottom of Clinton’s Muddy Waters.”

Although the primary focus of this piece was to examine why the FBI was operating so slowly, why President Obama had been so tight-lipped about the investigation and where the Democratic Party might turn if Clinton was indicted – the article also provided numerous links and mountains of evidence that Clinton was in fact guilty of both felony and misdemeanor violations of the law. Finally, I hypothesized that if the Party simply chose to ignore Clinton’s obvious guilt, they stood a very real chance of losing the upcoming election to Donald fucking Trump; a prediction that seems far less ridiculous today than it did on the first of June frankly.

Yet, even still, as the weeks passed I continued to assume that Clinton’s clear and obvious violations of the both the Federal Records Act and the Espionage Act would result in an FBI recommendation to indict – if anything, I was far more worried that Attorney General Loretta Lynch would choose to ignore a recommendation to indict Clinton for political reasons. It wasn’t until the very end of June when Lynch’s highly irregular, private runway meeting with Bill Clinton was purposely leaked to the press that I realize just how deeply the fix was in for Hillary yet again.

So it was that finally on the fifth day of July, when James Comey stepped out to issue his literally unprecedented public statement about his pseudo-decree in the Clinton email server investigation; I already knew that there was simply no goddamn way he was going to recommend indictment. What I didn’t expect however, was for Comey carefully lay out in step by step detail why Clinton was almost certainly guilty of at least misdemeanor violations; before actively misrepresenting the concept of mens rea and recommending that the Justice Department not indict Clinton. If you haven’t seen fifteen minute recording of the FBI Director’s statement I highly recommend that you watch it now – it is utterly and completely unfathomable to me that after that statement, Comey somehow chose not to indict; it’s that damning.

Furious at this blatant and quite literally gross miscarriage of justice; I sat down to write about why James Comey had obviously made the wrong decision and furthermore, why his extensive legal experience meant he knew damn well that he was re-writing the law to avoid indicting Clinton. Although I am not myself a lawyer, a close personal friend of mine is an accomplished attorney and he agreed to help me with any difficult legal concepts as well as checking over my final work with experienced eyes.

Eight days later I published what still might be the most extensive, utterly damning review of the Hillary Clinton private email server scandal available on the internet – “The Biggest Lie: Clinton, Comey & Intent as it Pertains to the Espionage Act.“

Culled from numerous legal references, roughly six and a half hours of Congressional testimony and more than fifty (primarily mainstream) news articles, this essay accomplishes two important things; it demolishes FBI Director Comey’s legally unsound argument for refusing to recommend an indictment and it definitively demonstrates that Hillary Clinton repeatedly and knowingly broke the law.

Furthermore, it also debunks numerous, notably erroneous arguments offered in Clinton’s defense by both mainstream media and Hillary herself – including the ideas that Clinton didn’t know the information was classified, that the information was actually up-classified long after she sent it and that she hadn’t willfully lied about the case on multiple occasions. Finally, I presented Hillary’s obvious intent to violate multiple federal laws by pointing out that she never once used a secure state.gov email account and even offered significant evidence that Clinton’s primary motive for breaking the law was to avoid the Freedom of Information/Federal Records Act.

I don’t want to brag, but in the words of the attorney who helped me check it over before publishing, the case was “airtight” – while another lawyer offered that it was a indictment of Clinton, Comey and the idea that America still provided equal justice for all. To this day nobody with a law degree has been able to properly explain to me why Hillary Clinton hasn’t been indicted and my purely anecdotal, social media survey of people who claim to have a law degree currently stands at fourteen to three in my favor.

This was followed up a week later by “Fallout Boy: Lynch, Comey and the Hot Potato Plot” – a detailed look at how Bill Clinton’s clearly orchestrated, grossly improper visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch lead to James Comey making the choice not to indict Hillary Clinton; a decision that technically nobody was responsible for. We also examined the obvious conflict of interest problems facing both Comey and Lynch in the Clinton email server case, their ethical requirements to recuse themselves from the case proceedings and why a special, independent prosecutor should have been brought in immediately.

Again, I haven’t forgotten about the Clinton Foundation but can we just stop and talk about how completely fucking insane all of this is for a moment? The Director of the FBI (himself a former prosecutor) re-wrote multiple aspects of federal and common law to justify failing to indict a woman who not only lied; she also purposely destroyed evidence and government records – while doing everything in her power to avoid responding to investigators. When Hillary finally did agree to speak to the FBI, the “interview” was not conducted under oath, wasn’t recorded and no transcript of Clinton’s testimony was created; Director Comey wasn’t even in the room for the interview and he didn’t actually speak to all of the agents who were.

Additionally, all of this was rubber stamped without so much as a glance over by an Attorney General who seems to owe much of her career (both public and possibly private) to Clinton’s husband and the President Hillary served under as Secretary of State, Barack Obama. This obvious conflict of interest absolutely should have resulted in Lynch recusing herself but she chose to remain in charge of the case for reasons that are still completely unclear; despite effectively offloading the decision about whether to indict Clinton onto James Comey – a man who as a result of these decisions, was now effectively overseeing his own government investigation.

Remember, this happened in a case involving a Presidential candidate from the ruling party who has a long, prior history of being investigated for violating federal law. It happened in a case itself spun out from evidence gleaned during a massive, openly hostile congressional investigation that questioned, under oath if the government was selling weapons to terrorists in Syria; which as it turns out, is apparently exactly what the State Department was doing. It happened in a case that involves such careless handling of highly-classified information that hostile, foreign governments almost certainly gained significant access to America’s most sensitive secrets; including both signals and human intelligence likely paid for with American lives.

Just what in the name of all that is goddamn holy is going on here and why the fuck isn’t this trav-sham-mockery of justice the lead story on the news ever single bloody night?

Am I the only person that thinks it’s probably not an accident that Hillary (and Bill, who will be an active part of her administration) has now walked away from two, if not three, of the biggest internal government investigations in US history with the help of a home team Attorney General and active, willful efforts by Clinton herself to obstruct justice?

If the US legal system won’t enforce the law against Clinton; even when she’s obviously guilty and actively obstructing justice – why would Hillary ever stop breaking the law whenever it’s convenient?

If Clinton’s obscene political media machine can rig one Democratic Nomination Process with almost no blow-back, why wouldn’t they rig another; or better yet, an actual election?

Doesn’t it concern anyone that the odds on favorite candidate to be the next President of the United States is openly contemptuous of the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act?

Don’t you question the wisdom of turning the entire government over to to a woman nobody trusts; because she has lied repeatedly, consistently and over time – even after she’s been objectively caught lying and more than half the country knows it?

If the mainstream media won’t even tell you when Clinton lies and you can’t look it up because Hillary’s destroyed her own records – how will you even know when she’s lying and when she’s telling the truth?

Who watches the watchmen when the watchmen have all been bought?

Continued in Hillary Clinton, Imperialism and the Lesser of Two Evils Part Three – coming soon…