Hillary Under Siege

By Matthew Vadum

The raging controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of an insecure private Internet server to transmit emails containing top-secret classified U.S. government documents continues to put the would-be president’s political future in doubt.

Even elements in the Democratic Party establishment are tiring of Hillary’s never-ending antics and scandals.

“Clinton is in the midst of a full-scale Democratic freakout due to her faltering poll numbers and ongoing questions about how she has handled her private e-mail server,” Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post blogged.

“[Vice President[ Joe Biden is considering running. [Former Vice President] Al Gore’s name — yes, Al Gore — was even floated!”

Cillizza quoted “one senior Democratic consultant granted anonymity” saying Mrs. Clinton “has always been awkward and uninspiring on the stump. Hillary has Bill’s baggage and now her own as secretary of state — without Bill’s personality, eloquence or warmth.”

And things just keep getting worse for the anointed Democratic candidate whose digital malfeasance continues to haunt her sputtering presidential campaign.

Intelligence officials asked to review emails from Hillary’s private Internet server have recommended that 305 documents be given to agencies for further examination. The FBI says it may be able to recover some of the information from the server, which it seized last week, despite an “attempt” to wipe it. The FBI “will try to figure what’s there, how it got there and who put it there,” a source told NBC.

Clinton demonstrated once again that she isn’t ready for prime time yesterday when testily pulled the plug on a disastrous press conference in Las Vegas as soon as she found herself under siege by pesky reporters doing their jobs. Clinton angrily blew off the growing furor surrounding her use of private email server for official government business and claimed she did nothing wrong during her time at the Department of State.

“What I did was legally permitted, number one, first and foremost,” the thin-skinned former first lady declared. “We turned over everything that was work related. Every single thing. Personal stuff — we did not. I had no obligation to do so and did not.”

“I regret that this has become a cause celebre. But that does not change the facts and no matter what anybody tries to say, the facts are stubborn,” she said. “I know there is a certain level of anxiety or interest in this, but the facts are the facts.”

When asked if the server, which is now in Department of Justice custody, had been wiped clean, she mocked the questioner. “Like with a cloth or something?”

“I don’t know how it works digitally at all,” she added.

That may be the only true thing Clinton has said recently about the email scandal.

The Daily Mail (UK) published a damning report stating that Hillary’s email firm was operated out of a loft apartment that located its servers in a bathroom closet, which raises new questions about how secure the email messages she sent and received were. The firm, Platte River Networks of Denver, Colo., took care of her so-called “home brew” server. (The Daily Mail article includes a useful timeline of the Clinton email saga at the bottom of the page.)

On the campaign trail recently Clinton made an incredibly insensitive, tone-deaf joke making light of her email improprieties that compromised U.S. national security and for all we know may very well have gotten American operatives abroad or their allies killed.

At the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding dinner last weekend Hillary quipped: “By the way, you may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account,” she said gently shaking her head in an I’m-so-clever kind of way.

“I love it. I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves,” she said grinning to hoots and hollers from the adoring crowd of leftist lackeys.

This wisecrack crystallizes the Hillary Clinton approach to everything. She is manipulative and dishonest. She is irredeemably arrogant and regards herself as above the law. She is contemptuous of the critically important high office she held. She is disdainful of the rule of law and doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about national security if it stands in the way of her personal advancement.

The joke brings to mind Obama’s astonishingly callous, flatfooted one-liner from 2011 in which he laughed off the failed nearly $1 trillion stimulus package that did little more than stimulate the economies of Obama’s corporate and labor movement allies.

It was at a meeting in North Carolina of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that had recommended streamlining the federal permit process for construction and infrastructure projects. An individual off-camera pointed out to the president that the red tape involved in the permitting process can delays projects for “months to years … and in many cases even cause projects to be abandoned … I’m sure that when you implemented the Recovery Act your staff briefed you on many of these challenges.”

A grinning Obama broke in saying, “Shovel-ready was not as … uh .. shovel-ready as we expected,” to the unseemly guffawing of his crony-capitalist ally GE chief executive officer Jeffrey Immelt.

At least this particular Obama monkeyshine didn’t have a possible American body count associated with it.

Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer lambasted Hillary for her meager witticism:

The Joke That Wasn’t has had wider repercussions.

The Post’s Cillizza conveyed the discomfort players in the Democratic fold are feeling.

“[O]ne unaligned senior Democratic operative,” was quoted saying, “The combination of messy facts, messy campaign operation and an awkward candidate reading terrible lines or worse jokes from a prompter is very scary,”

Evidence strongly suggests that Obama administration officials at the highest levels were long aware of Clinton’s cloak-and-dagger email infrastructure. The irretrievably corrupt Clintons created the system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to the international cash-for-future-presidential-favors clearinghouse known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Clinton has admitted that tens of thousands of the emails she sent that happened to be U.S. government property were deleted. Emails were scrubbed while subject to a subpoena from the House Select Committee that is investigating the terrorist attack on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that took place on Sept. 11, 2012.

She is supposed to appear before that committee in October.

If her campaign lasts that long.