The noose of accountability tightens on Hillary and Bill Clinton with an investigation (earlier suppressed by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department) now initiated into allegations of improprieties involving their pay-to-play Foundation (dubbed an “influence factory”) and a call for a renewed investigation into Hillary’s email scandal, ordered by a federal judge labeling it “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” Both investigations prompt an interesting parallel to the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” – the ill-fated egg falling off a wall and breaking into a thousand pieces. Despite the best efforts of “all the king’s men,” they simply could not put it back together again.
Falling from a perch atop that wall, Humpty suffered the ignoble fate of an omelet. While open to interpretation, one moral of the rhyme is relationships are built on trust that, once broken, are virtually impossible to repair.
On the battlefield, trust is all-important, knowing one’s back is covered. It gives one the strength to battle insurmountable odds, knowing fellow warriors will inevitably come to the rescue. Such an expectation in Benghazi undoubtedly inspired those we lost to keep fighting until the end, wrongly believing their rescue imminent – one that would never come as the civilian chain of command failed to authorize it.
For over two decades, Americans entrusted Bill and Hillary Clinton to do right by the country – like Humpty, putting them atop that leadership perch. A series of scandals followed that normally would have knocked either one off, save a single redeeming value – the Clinton charisma reminded voters of another young, popular but also flawed president – John F. Kennedy. It was enough to get voters believing the scandals repeatedly haunting the Clintons were not of their own doing but fabricated by “vast right wing” conspirators.
As such the Clintons could do no wrong. Whether the Monica Lewinsky scandal (leading to Bill’s impeachment by the House), or Whitewater (a failed real estate development controversy), or Travelgate (in which “substantial evidence” was found that Hillary lied under oath in denying she played a role in the 1993 White House travel office firings), or Chinagate (a fundraising scandal that plagued Clinton’s 1996 campaign involving sensitive nuclear and satellite technology sold to China for millions in contributions), or Filegate (unauthorized access to FBI files on political critics), or Pardongate (Bill Clinton’s last-day-in-office pardon of fugitive Marc Rich who had illegally traded oil with Iran and whose wife donated to Hillary’s Senate campaign), or any of the other scandals, the Clintons’ integrity took a licking but kept on ticking.
Even during a scandal when the Clintons should have been most forthcoming to heal a family’s suffering over the purported suicide of Vince Foster, they were not. Prosecutor Ken Starr seriously thought about bringing perjury charges against Hillary. In his book, Starr wrote, “In the space of three hours, she claimed, by our count, over a hundred times that she ‘did not recall’ or ‘did not remember.’ This suggested outright mendacity. To be sure, human memory is notoriously fallible, but her strained performance struck us as preposterous.” He decided against prosecution knowing the difficulty proving Hillary lied.
No clearer example of Hillary’s deceptive skills exists than comparing her lack of knowledge about classified material markings during her private FBI investigation but full understanding thereof during her public “Commander-in-Chief Forum” interview.
At last count, almost two-dozen scandals have befallen the Clintons. The common thread seems to be sex, money or power—not quite the attributes of leadership that generate trust. Yet, despite all these scandals, Hillary still weighs a 2020 presidential campaign bid. Perhaps she sees it as necessary to replenish her dwindling Foundation’s coffers.
Events should unfold in 2019 as investigations gain steam into Hillary’s and Bill’s accountability on several fronts that may well sink her presidential hopes before that ship can sail.
As these investigations run their course and with the bevy of scandals already attached to the Clinton name, Americans may not be shocked so much to learn the extent to which they have been played by the Clintons but probably will be more shocked to learn how “all the king’s (Obama’s) men” (and women), occupying positions of trust in law enforcement, have played the American people.
The frightening reveal will be the extent to which Obama’s henchmen failed to recognize that their loyalty lay with “the people” and not with the Clintons. As such, they perhaps have performed a greater disservice than the Clintons, utterly destroying our confidence in the justice system.
If the above all comes to light, it will not be the result of a fair-minded justice system. It will be the result of a dedicated nonprofit, educational organization — Judicial Watch – that has filed numerous lawsuits to gather all relevant documentation to determine the truth.
We know from experience while it takes a long time to build a trusting relationship, it can be lost in an instant. Somehow, however, the Clintons have managed to reverse this process, garnering instant trust only to slowly whittle away at it with each new scandal. They proved able to maintain the loyalty of the king’s men who eyed their rewards coming from an all-but-guaranteed Hillary presidency.
Whether it was Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Hillary’s email scandal was a “matter” and not an investigation), FBI Director James Comey (exonerating Hillary before completing the investigation), senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr (deceiving the FISA court with an anti-Trump dossier paid for by Hillary), Robert Mueller (scrubbing FBI agent Peter Stzrok’s phone texts before turning it over to the Inspector General) or numerous others, Shakespeare’s observance about a corrupt ruling class in “Hamlet” is apropos: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Another reason for Hillary’s non-prosecution may be some of the king’s men may well have committed similar sins – using unauthorized email servers to transmit classified information.
While the rhyme deemed it impossible to put Humpty back together again, repairs have to be done to the justice system to demonstrate Lady Justice is truly blind as to whom stands before her.
