A “dilemma”
is defined by the dictionary as “a situation in which a difficult choice has to
be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.”
We in America now face just such a dilemma – whether (a) to indict presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton for mishandling secure documents, and perhaps as well
for using her position as Secretary of State to enrich herself and the Clinton
Foundation she and her husband run, or (b) to not indict her and prove once and
for all that Washington insiders are completely above the law that the rest of
us are subject to.
The
evidence against Hillary Clinton is now overwhelming that she (a) violated the
oath she took when she was granted a security clearance and has mishandled
classified documents, and (b) lied to investigators when she claimed that the
emails she (thought she had ) deleted from her home server were all personal
and included no government documents. In
fact the number of emails on her home server which have been found to contain classified
information now exceed 1300 and still growing, and include at least a couple
that were the highest possible classification – special access documents.
Moreover, investigators have found explicit written instructions from her to
her staff to remove classification markings from documents and send them to her
over her insecure system. Any one of these offenses would put any ordinary
citizen to jail in short order, as has happened to a number of ordinary
workers.
Of
course Washington has a track record of protecting high officials from the harsh
justice the rest of us face. Most recently Ex-CIA head General David Patraeus
gave notebooks full of classified information to his mistress/biographer, but
the government prosecutors, conveniently, felt they could not bring a solid
enough case against either him or his mistress/biographer, so he got a plea
deal with two years’ probation and a fine.
Ex-CIA director John Deutch simply got a presidential pardon for his mishandling
of classified materials. And a number of members of Congress and/or their
staffs have routinely leaked classified information to journalists for
political reasons, and not even been investigated.
On the
other hand lower level officials like John Kiriakou, a former CIA
counter-terrorism operative, spent two years in federal prison and three
additional months under house arrest for leaking the name of a covert CIA
official involved in "enhanced interrogation techniques." Former
State Department official Stephen Kim was sentenced to three-and-a-half years
in prison for revealing classified information about the CIA's effort to
disrupt Iran's nuclear program to journalist James Risen.
So here
is the administration’s dilemma – either (a) indict Hillary and put the
presidential campaign, and the Democratic party as a whole, into chaos, or (b)
don’t indict her and risk a massive public revolution against the obvious abuse
of power. Of course, the administration may
judge that the American people are too passive, and have too short an attention
span, to really do anything effective about this abuse of power by Washington
insiders. And they may be right. If so, the abuses will continue and get even worse,
and we the voting public will have only ourselves to blame for it.
Posts
