THE PATRIOT POST 08/24/2016 ALEXANDER'S COLUMN 08/24/2016

Right Analysis | Right Hooks | Right Opinion Patriot Headlines | Grassroots Commentary Alexander's Column The Clinton Crime Syndicate By Mark Alexander · August 24, 2016    The essential facts about Hillary Clinton's "ethical lapses" — corrupt activities that should render her ineligible for office, if not eligible for prison. "A lie stands on one leg, a truth on two." —Benjamin Franklin (1735) In 1992, a young charismatic Democrat from Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton, defeated a stale older GOP presidential candidate, and then, over two presidential terms, established himself as the undisputed champion of the "BIG lie." In 2008, another young charismatic Demo, Barack Hussein Obama, defeated another stale older GOP presidential candidate, and then, over two presidential terms, took the art of big lies to a whole new level. However, their considerable skills of duplicity and deception notwithstanding, both Bill and Barack have been displaced by the most shameless of all prevaricators, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lies about everything. I have previously outlined Hillary's prolific record of felonious activities and deadly malfeasance in a chronological study, "From Little Rock to Foggy Bottom." Now she's endeavoring to nationalize the political extortion and profiteering she mastered as secretary of state. In this bizarre quadrennial election cycle, when voters are tasked with choosing the least unfit candidate to lead the blossoming kakistocracy — government by the least qualified and principled charlatan — allow me to highlight what I believe are the two most significant Clinton political liabilities. The flood of 24-hour talking-head news recycling about the latest evidence of Clinton's corruption and cronyism is delivered by fire hose from the right-of-center media, and by an occasional dribble from the dominant Leftmedia outlets. Unfortunately, the significance of her corruption and cronyism tends to become lost in the now-meaningless hyperbole of ubiquitous "News Alert" banners. So, as we endeavor to do in our daily editions, allow me to cut through the media din and highlight the essential facts about Hillary Clinton's "ethical lapses" — corrupt activities that should outright render her ineligible for office, if not eligible for prison. What follows is a summary of what matters most about her communication concealment conspiracy to hide her official business from public view, and her nefarious Clinton Foundation shenanigans. I should note that these liabilities have already been factored into the "price" of candidate Clinton, and as long as she can avoid unscripted press conferences that will not change. Unless the FBI puts her in shackles and carts her off to the big house, there is little that will change any Demo's blind allegiance to her. Clinton's Email... When an icon of investigative political journalism, Bob Woodward, was asked recently about Clinton's efforts to conceal her official communications as secretary of state, he kindly responded, "Hillary Clinton just has not come clean on this." Asked why, Woodward said, "Habit of secrecy, the whole idea of the private server was so no one would know. And it's a very bad habit. ... [I]f she became president, are we going to have some kind of transparency? Is there going to be a culture of straight talk rather than a culture of concealment?" Well, in this case, by way of disclaimer, past performance is most assuredly a guarantee of future results. Given the endless loop of news about Clinton's communication servers — her deleted or recovered emails — the significant findings regarding her illegal activities can get lost amid the minor findings. I previously provided a detailed summary of Clinton's email subterfuge, the how and why, but here's what's most important about those communications now. Clinton's "email problem" began when she was investigated by the House Committee on Benghazi, as it attempted to uncover her cover-up of the Benghazi attack to protect Obama's 2012 re-election. The committee learned that Clinton had been illegally using a private email server, and Rep. Trey Gowdy demanded that she surrender those communications. Unquestionably, Clinton set up her not-so-"private server" in order to conceal all her communications from FOIA requests and public scrutiny ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign. While stonewalling the Benghazi Committee, Clinton and her staff sorted through more than 60,000 (sanitized) emails sent during her tenure as secretary of state, using various search terms to determine which were "official" and which were "personal." Then, without any legal authority or third-party accountability, Clinton's team permanently erased 33,000 of those emails — which she claimed as "personal" — before turning the rest over to federal investigators. Or maybe not so permanently erased? Last week, Bill Clinton declared that FBI Director James Comey's conclusion about Hillary's "extremely careless" mishandling of classified email was "the biggest load of bull I ever heard." And considering Bill has been married to Hillary for 40 years, he has heard his share of big bull loads... This week, Comey confirmed that the FBI has recovered nearly 15,000 of Clinton's 33,000 erased emails — perhaps a gift from WikiLeaks or Russian hackers. That discovery left Clinton scrambling for cover. Recall her erroneous claim, "We turned over everything that was work related — every single thing." Likewise, Clinton's other claim — "Director Comey said that my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people" — was also a boldface lie. Typical of Clinton deceptive illogic, she was asserting that she must be innocent because she was slick enough to have escaped indictment of a felony offense by the FBI. But the fact is, Clinton has lied repeatedly about her communications. Having previously claimed that her 33,000 erased emails were related to "yoga classes" or "wedding plans," it's likely that some of the newly recovered emails went through State Department servers or personnel — making them official, not personal. The FBI has turned the newly recovered communications over to the State Department, which will review them for classified information and release what it deems is suitable for release in late November — after the election. However, Federal Judge James Boasberg has ordered State to review the emails by September 22 and release them, however heavily redacted. The FBI has also provided details of its Clinton investigation to congressional investigators. Recall, too, that just prior to the release of that information, Bill Clinton had what was supposed to be a secret meeting with Obama's Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, on the tarmac at the Phoenix Airport. According to Woodward, "[This] reminds me of the Nixon tapes: Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his. ... 60,000 emails and Hillary Clinton has said 30,000 of them, half, were personal and they were deleted. Who decided that? What's in those emails? ... The answers are probably not going to be pretty." Last week Clinton trotted out another lie — blaming former Secretary of State Colin Powell for advising her to use a private email account in order to keep her communications off the grid. But, according to Powell, "The truth is she was using [her personal email] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did [with personal communications]. Her people have been trying to pin it on me." In addition to the revelation about 15,000 recovered emails, a federal judge has ruled that Clinton has 30 days to answer questions from the intrepid folks at Judicial Watch — under oath — for the first time. Recall that Clinton's holiday weekend FBI interview on July 2 was not under oath. Chris Farrell, director of investigations for Judicial Watch, says they "will get Clinton under oath regarding the setup of her outlaw server [in order to] explain the why, the when, and how the server was set up and whether the goal was to avoid her email correspondence from becoming public." Which, of course, it was... The "Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation"... The Clinton Foundation (CF) was founded as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization in 1997, perhaps to put a diversionary philanthropic happy face on Bill Clinton's latest episode of sexual predation — then involving a young subordinate White House intern. CF's stated goal was to "strengthen the capacity of people throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence." Globalism. It's focus was also to advance Albert Gore's so-called "climate change" agenda. Globalism. In its early years, some of the foundation's humanitarian efforts actually received bipartisan praise — as calculated. However, soon after the Clintons left the White House "dead broke," the charitable grants diminished and the foundation began keeping most of its funds and operations in house, hiring its own staff and managing programs internally. Of course, the Clintons were not dead broke for long, except for their ethical and moral account. Over the last 15 years they have amassed a personal net worth estimated in excess of $115 million — most of that from "speaking fees," a.k.a. political influence peddling graft. Their joint 2015 tax return listed a mere $6,725,000 in speaking fees, down significantly from previous years, but then they knew this return would be made public. Once Hillary Clinton was tapped by Obama as secretary of state, restricting her exorbitant pay-to-play speaking fees, she ramped up the foundation's pay-to-play schemes and CF became an official conduit for those seeking to influence politics and policy. Just as leopards can't change their spots, the Clintons can't keep from grifting — or grafting. Indisputably, every dime of the billions of dollars "donated" to CF by Hillary's wealthy Wall Street moguls and foreign government cutouts, some of whom she personally met with during her tenure as secretary, and the dollars coming in now that she's a presidential contender, includes a long quid pro quo list. And not a dime of that graft has been spent without calculating how it would advance the Clintons' statist political and social agenda. An evaluation of CF's most recent 990 tax filing with the IRS helps identify how its programs comport with that agenda. Notably, CF claims that one of its major areas of focus is the betterment of women around the world. But the fact is, Clinton and Obama have made the world far more dangerous for hundreds of millions of women by allowing the unabated metastasis of Islamist oppression worldwide. And here at home, the failed social policies advocated by Clinton and her political allies have enslaved millions of women and children on urban poverty plantations for generations. And on a personal level, Hillary Clinton has been waging a "war on women" for her entire political career — especially those who've been assaulted and, as was the case with Juanita Broaddrick, raped by her husband. But I digress. Because of the "unusual" structure of CF, the nation's leading evaluator of charitable organizations, Charity Navigator, placed the foundation on its "watch list" — at least until last December, when Clinton lawyers convinced it to remove CF from that list. (I wonder if anyone associated with Charitable Navigator suffered a "suspicious death" or IRS audit about the time the watch status was lifted?) It is now clear that Hillary Clinton used CF as a medium for access, which is one of the reasons she attempted to maintain all of her official communications off the grid. We now know that three Justice Department field offices requested permission to open case file investigations of the Clinton Foundation, but in each case those requests were blocked by Obama's lawless attorney general, Eric Holder. In a recent assessment of Clinton's foundation fixer, Huma Abedin, National Review's editors note that she "must be a remarkable woman. She has held down four of the worst jobs in politics, several of them simultaneously: right hand to Hillary Rodham Clinton, fixer and patron-patronizer for the Clinton Foundation, an editor of a journal spawned by a major al-Qaeda financier, and wife to Anthony Weiner. ... It is clear why Mrs. Clinton did not want to release these e-mails: They detail precisely the Clinton Foundation corruption that critics have long alleged. ... Huma Abedin may have been the conductor of influence, but the wrongdoing here is all Mrs. Clinton's. Serial dishonesty, self-serving, and influence-peddling: These are the Clintons, after all. No one can say he is surprised." Two weeks ago, Donald Trump's VP candidate, Mike Pence, declared, "The new emails made public ... make a direct connection between favors done by State Department officials and major foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation. [Americans] are tired of the pay-to-play politics in Washington, DC." Indeed we are — and a joint FBI/U.S. attorney investigation is underway. Because the Clinton Foundation is headquartered in New York, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, will head an investigation into CF's practices to determine the connection between Clinton donors and Clinton favors. Bharara is no Demo hack — he has taken down major crime syndicates and currently has an open investigation into the corrupt Demo dealings of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. According to an Associated Press report, "More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation." Predictably, though, the AP characterized those meetings as merely an indication of Clinton's "possible ethics challenges if elected president." "Possible ethics challenges"? In an effort to short-circuit the investigation, Hillary, Bill and Chelsea claim they will stop raising money from foreign governments if Clinton is elected and will turn CF operations over to independent affiliates. But cutting all those "pay-to-play" deals was no problem while she was secretary of state? And does anybody believe that the Clintons are going to turn operations of CF over to someone who's "independent"? Even the leftist editors of the Boston Globe recommend CF should be shuttered: "If Clinton is elected, the foundation should be shut down. ... Many of the foundation's donations come from overseas, including from foreign governments with troubling human rights records. ... Winding down the foundation, and transferring its assets to some other established charity, doesn't have to hurt charitable efforts. If the foundation's donors are truly motivated by altruism, and not by the lure of access to the Clintons, then surely they can find other ways to support the foundation's goals." So, where will this all lead? Remember, the botched Watergate burglary by Richard Nixon's campaign operatives that would later sink his presidency occurred prior to his 1972 landslide victory over George McGovern. Though Nixon had no knowledge of the illegal break-in, he did have knowledge of its cover-up. It was the aforementioned Bob Woodward and his Washington Post associate Carl Bernstein who discovered the details of the burglary and, later, the cover-up. It's no small irony that a young attorney, Hillary Rodham, served on the Impeachment Inquiry staff and was among those tasked with drawing up impeachment charges against Nixon. Later, the Chief Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, Democrat Jerry Zeifman, Hillary's supervisor, assessed her performance as "dishonest" and claimed she "engaged in a variety of self-serving unethical practices in violation of House rules," including conspiring with Ted Kennedy to keep a politically wounded Nixon in office to help Kennedy's 1976 presidential aspirations. Zeifman wrote that Clinton was "ethically unfit to be either a senator or president — and if she were to become president, the last vestiges of the traditional moral authority of the party of Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson will be destroyed." For the record, Nixon erased 18 minutes of more than 3,700 hours of Oval Office conversations related to discussions about Watergate. Not to be outdone, Clinton erased over 33,000 emails. In 1974, Nixon had the grace to resign from office rather than put the nation through a presidential impeachment process. In a private meeting with his cabinet, Nixon said, "Mistakes, yes ... for personal gain, never." Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has perfected the model of "politics for personal gain." Share Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis