SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist
The Clinton Contamination
Maureen Dowd
JULY 9, 2016
President
Obama joined Hillary Clinton on Tuesday for the first time during her
presidential campaign. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — It says
a lot about our relationship with Hillary Clinton that she seems well on her
way to becoming Madam President because she’s not
getting indicted.
If she were still at the
State Department, she could be getting fired for being, as the F.B.I. director
told Congress, “extremely careless” with top-secret information. Instead,
she’s on a glide path to a big promotion.
And that’s the
corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their
reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast
carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even
thrive.
In a mere 11 days,
arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest
brands in Washington — Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch — and
jeopardized the futures of Hillary’s most loyal aides.
It’s quaint, looking
back at her appointment as secretary of state, how Obama tried to get
Hillary without the shadiness. (Which is what we all want, of course.)
The president and his
aides attempted to keep a rein on Clinton’s State Department — refusing to
let her bring in her hit man, Sidney Blumenthal.
But in the end, Hillary’s
goo got on Obama anyhow. On Tuesday, after Comey managed to make both
Democrats and Republicans angry by indicting Clinton politically but not
legally, Barry and Hillary flew to Charlotte, N.C., for their first joint
campaign appearance.
Obama was left in the
awkward position of vouching for Hillary’s “steady judgment” to run an
angry, violent, jittery nation on the very day that his F.B.I. director
lambasted her errant judgment on circumventing the State Department email
system, making it clear that she had been lying to the American public for
the last 16 months.
Comey, who was then
yanked up to Capitol Hill for a hearing on Thursday, revealed that instead of
no emails with classified information, as Hillary had insisted, there were
110, of those turned over to the State Department. Instead of Clinton’s
assurances that the server in the basement in Chappaqua had never been
breached, Comey said it was possible that hostile actors had hacked Clinton’s
email account. Among the emails not given to State, he said at least three
contained classified information.
Hillary had already
compromised the president, who feels he needs her to cement his legacy. Obama
angered F.B.I. agents when he was interviewed
on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last fall and undermined the bureau’s
investigation by exonerating Hillary before the F.B.I. was done with its work,
saying pre-emptively, “This is not a situation in which America’s national security
was endangered.”
Hillary willfully put
herself above the rules — again — and a president, campaign and party are all
left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her.
Obama aimed to have
no shadows, but the Clintons operate in shadows.
After Bill Clinton
crossed the tarmac in Phoenix to have a long chat with Lynch, the attorney
general confessed that the ill-advised meeting had “cast a shadow” over her
department’s investigation into his wife and that she would feel
constrained to follow the recommendation of the F.B.I.
“I certainly wouldn’t
do it again,” Lynch said, admitting it hit her “painfully” that she had
made a mistake dancing with the Arkansas devil in the pale moonlight.
The meeting seemed
even more suspect a week later, when The Times reported that Hillary might let
Lynch stay on in a new Clinton administration.
The fallout from the
email scandal has clouded the futures of longtime Hillary aides Cheryl Mills,
Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, who were also deemed extremely careless by
Comey for their handling of classified information. The Times reported that
they could face tough questions as they seek security clearances for diplomatic
or national security posts. (Not to mention remiss in not pushing back on
Clinton about the private server.)
“You’ve got a
situation here where the woman who would be in charge of setting national
security policy as president has been deemed by the
F.B.I. unsuitable to safeguard and handle classified information,” Bill
Savarino, a Washington lawyer specializing in security clearances, told
the Times.
So many lawyers in
this column, so little law.
President Obama is
not upset about being pulled into the Clinton Under Toad, to use an old John
Irving expression. He thinks Washington is so broken that the next president
will need a specific skill set to function, and he thinks Hillary has that.
But what should
disturb Obama, who bypassed his own vice president to lay out the red carpet
for Hillary, is that the email transgression is not a one off. It’s part of
a long pattern of ethical slipping and sliding, obsessive secrecy and paranoia,
and collateral damage.
Comey’s verdict that
Hillary was “negligent” was met with sighs rather than shock. We know who
Hillary and Bill are now. We’ve been held hostage to their predilections and
braided intrigues for a long time. (On the Hill, Comey refused to confirm
or deny that he’s investigating the Clinton Foundation, with its unseemly
tangle of donors and people doing business with State.)
We’re resigned to the
Clintons focusing on their viability and disregarding the consequences of
their heedless actions on others. They’re always offering a Faustian deal.
This year’s election bargain: Put up with our iniquities or get Trump’s short
fingers on the nuclear button.
The
Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules. Imagine them in the White House
with the benefit of low expectations.
