A Nation of Laws—Sort Of
By Victor Davis Hanson April 3, 2016
https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-nation-of-laws-sort-of/Any fair reading of State Department and general federal government laws regarding the use of classified information by federal employees makes it is clear that Hillary Clinton violated the law—both by improperly setting up her own private server, and then by sending information through it that was classified. And it is evident that Clinton went to such extraordinary lengths in order to mask her communications and shield them from the sort of Freedom of Information Act suits that now are plaguing her—and that she arbitrarily decided which of her private server emails were public and which private, and then simply destroyed thousands of them without audit.
If she is not indicted by the Obama administration for violations of federal laws or conspiracy to obstruct justice, in the future it will be almost impossible to prosecute successfully any federal employee for violating government protocols about the handling of classified information. If Clinton avoids indictment, it will make a mockery of the Obama Justice Department that sought to prosecute Gen. David Petraeus for showing his personal journals, which contained classified information, to his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. The government leveraged Petraeus on the basis that he knew his notebooks contained classified information though they were not formally identified as such; Hillary Clinton knew the same about her own communications, but unlike Petraeus was sneaky enough not to admit to that fact on tape or to associates.
In 2007, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted and then won a conviction against Scooter Libby, in an investigation that ostensibly began over accusations that Libby had leaked the “covert” status of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the spouse of flamboyant loudmouth Joseph Wilson, who was making wild (and later to be proven unfounded) charges against the Bush administration. Yet in a bout of prosecutorial (and politicized) overreach, Fitzgerald had known all along—but kept quiet—about Secretary of State Colin Powell’s aide Richard Armitage being the self-admitted leaker of information concerning Plame’s employment with the CIA. And Fitzgerald also either knew or should have known that Plame was not really a covert operative but instead was widely recognized to have worked at the CIA. Given such precedents, how can the Obama administration possibly determine the degree of wrongdoing of its own former secretary of State and the likely Democratic presidential nominee? The answer is that this is now a country, after all, that jails a video-maker on a trumped-up probation charge to cover up false talking points about a supposed riot of aggrieved Muslims who ad hoc showed up to kill four Americans. And it jailed Dinesh D’Souza, another video-maker, on a rather minor campaign money-raising infraction.
Federal immigration law simply no longer exists—at least for anyone from Latin America or Mexico who crossed the southern border illegally. President Obama himself, prior to his reelection bid, warned immigration activists that to suspend enforcement of federal law was the act of a king, not a president—and then got reelected and committed the very monarchial sins that he warned about. Presumably if a French woman or a Vietnamese man tried to cross the northern border of the U.S. illegally, he or she would probably be detained. In other words, immigration law has been reduced to a question of ethnic politics and Democratic Party demography. Charges of “racist” in connection with immigration actually are true—but the slurs are directed at the wrong parties: those who insist on open borders do so entirely on ethnic grounds, privileging Spanish speakers in a way they do not Swiss who forget their passports at the airport customs office or Russians who overstay their visas. Quite simply, whether federal immigration law exists depends entirely on the ethnic identity of the transgressor and the perceived political advantage of non-enforcement.
