Six years seems such a long time ago. The kids were little, TikTok didn’t exist, and gas prices averaged $2.23 a gallon under Obama. The election was coming up, and Hillary Clinton was going to win. Naturally.
And then we found out what a bunch of hacks those pollsters and other media cheerleaders for the Democrats were.
We found out how wonderful things can be when the right people, like those gasbags at Davos, are told off. Mean tweets were embarrassing but oddly funny and satisfying. The gas prices got lower. The country was energy independent for the first time in 70 years. Nobody bowed to the Saudis. Regulations were eased. The economy was growing at a pace unseen in 40 years. We discovered that someone cared about border security and at least paid lip service to “draining the swamp.” No more new wars.
Government insiders openly declared they were part of the “resistance” to stop Donald Trump. Whistleblowers were venerated — God bless that Saint Alexander Vindman. And it happened all while the FBI, CIA, and Obama Administration ratcheted up pressure on Donald Trump for being a supposed Russian secret agent.
Fast forward to now.
Hillary Clinton and her team of Perkins Coie, Michael Sussman, Robby Mook, current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Marc Elias, her media hitmen at Fusion GPS, buddies at Brookings, willing reporters, and many others, worked with actual Russians to come up with the Russian collusion hoax against Trump while he was a candidate and sitting president. The FBI, CIA, and Obama Administration were all in on it. They lied to the FISA court to get warrants to spy on him. You know that story.
But now, the same people at the highest reaches of the FBI and DOJ and other bureaucratic insiders are going after Donald Trump again to get copies of documents he says he has every right to possess. They claim he’s obstructing justice because the former president isn’t giving up his copies of documents they don’t want him to have. Among the ones they want to get their hands on, insiders say, are Russian collusion operation documents.
With that in mind, it seems prescient that former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe weighed in on the former Secretary of State’s treatment of classified documents that she, for the record, did not have the privilege to retain as a president does. And what she did with them. And wasn’t prosecuted. Or raided.
Some context: during the height of her campaign, in September 2016, Clinton was in the crosshairs of the Select Committee on Benghazi for failing to send help to U.S. special operators under attack while overseeing the CIA building being used as a gun-running operation by the ambassador to “friendly jihadists.” The Obama administration, no stranger to gun-running operations — looking at you Fast and Furious — tried to pass off the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack as a reaction to a video few people had seen instead of the jihadi attack it was.
CIA special operators Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed fighting, and State Department aide Sean Smith and Ambassador Chris Stevens were murdered. The American man whose video was used by Hillary Clinton as the excuse for the attack was imprisoned.
“At this point, what difference does it make?” said the Secretary of State in what we were constantly reminded was her “11 hours” of testimony. Our people were left to twist in the wind with no cover from Clinton or Obama for 13 hours.
And now comes Ratcliffe’s observation about Hillary Clinton’s possession and destruction of documents. He wrote on TruthSocial:
Precedent matters. 6 years ago, DOJ/FBI asserted this litany of destruction/concealment of classified materials did not merit obstruction of justice charges against HRC. By comparison, DOJ/FBI’s assertion of possible obstruction by DJT is wholly untenable.
When he was in Congress, Ratcliffe questioned former FBI Director James Comey about why Hillary Clinton wasn’t prosecuted for obstruction of justice after all the things she did to destroy documents.
His list, from FBI documents, included:
- Her computer and thumb drive containing her emails were “lost.” The FBI never examined those.
- Two Blackberry devices had SIM cards and SD data cards removed. The FBI never examined those.
- Thirteen Hillary Clinton mobile devices were “lost” or destroyed by a hammer. The FBI never examined those.
- Server backups were deleted. The FBI couldn’t examine those.
- After Congress ordered Clinton’s team to preserve documents, both the hard drives of her “attorney” who doubled as her staffer and her other aide/attorney, which contained all Hillary’s emails were wiped with BleachBit. The FBI didn’t examine those.
- After the subpoena, Hillary Clinton’s email archive was wiped clean with BleachBit. The FBI couldn’t examine those on her Platte River network.
- After the subpoena, backups of Clinton’s Platte River server were wiped clean. The FBI couldn’t examine those.
Comey told Ratcliffe, “I don’t think there’s evidence to establish” that Hillary Clinton obstructed justice.
And now comes Trump, who declassified documents and, like every other president, took some copies with him.
We can now appreciate this conversation from September 2016, weeks before the election. We can imagine what information would have been found in Clinton’s emails about Benghazi and perhaps her conspiracy to frame Trump for allegedly being a spy. Do you suppose her “30,000 emails” and those of her attorneys and aides might have something on them about Russian collusion and her campaign operation, not just Benghazi, yoga poses, and Chelsea’s wedding?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member