We often hear about people who are “forced to live in the shadows.” They’re generally sweet, nourishing illegal aliens who can be found easily by everyone except the government employees whose job it is to enforce our immigrations laws.
But the shadows have another, more powerful resident – Hillary Clinton.
Our former secretary of state resides in the shadows too, only her shadows are the nooks and crannies between what is legal and what is not. It’s her home. It’s where she’s most comfortable. And it’s where she made her fortune.
Hillary Clinton is not a new resident of the shadows; she’s lived most of her adult life there. It’s how she invested $1,000 in cattle futures and turned it quickly into $100,000 with no knowledge of commodities trading. It’s how her billing records for the Rose Law Firm magically made it into the most secure area of the most secure residence on the face of the planet, where they remain shrouded in shadows.
These are but two of the countless examples of Hillary’s life in the shadows. These murky flirtations of questionable legality are now joined by other, fresher examples. The tens of millions of dollars the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has raised from foreign governments, much of which was raised while she was America’s chief diplomat, for one. And the fact that, as secretary of state, Hillary exclusively used a private email account to skirt federal archiving laws.
That the Clintons would raise money from regimes with business before the government surprises no one. You can’t expect the people who sold access to coffee with the president and treated the Lincoln bedroom like a Motel 6 for wealthy narcissists to view gatekeeping access to the head of the State Department as anything more than a winning lottery ticket.
What is surprising, though, is the brazenness with which they did it. The Clintons agreed to not accept money from foreign governments while she was secretary of state. That’s like asking Bill Clinton to mentor your 18-year-old daughter while she tries to make the best choice as to which modeling agency to sign with – no matter how many promises are made, you don’t believe him.
Of course the Clintons were going to take money from people who wanted to influence them based on their position in government – that’s how they’ve lived their entire lives. You don’t go from being the First Family of Arkansas – with the governor’s salary at the time set at $35,000 – to someone with billionaire pedophile friends because you’ve chosen the moral path in life. You don’t make $100 million because of who you are by not selling bits and pieces of who you are, or at least renting them out for a while.
The Clintons give speeches for a lot of money, and they give a lot of that money to their “charity.” That charitable donation, in turn, affords them a generous tax deduction. Then, in a Clintonian twist, that charity pays for a large portion of their lives – travel, hotels, meals – so they get to write off the money they’re paid on their personal taxes while living off it through their charity. We should all be so charitable.
But what do you expect, really, from people who wrote off donating used underwear as a tax deduction on an itemized form? Like that underwear, much of what the Clintons do doesn’t pass the smell test. Unlike most Americans, being a Clinton means never having to answer for your actions. You’re just allowed to slink back into the shadows…lather, rinse, repeat.
So when it became known this week that Hillary never once used a government-provided email address while secretary of state, the only people surprised were those in the media who believed their life in the shadows was forced upon them by evil Republicans who were looking for “anything” to attack them for. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, entertain the concept that those criticisms, or at least some of them, had merit – they had to be lies because they came from Republicans.
Now that four years of electronic communications that are by law supposed to be archived by the government are dependent upon the whims of Hillary Clinton to turn over, some doubt is beginning to creep in to the media’s preferred narrative.
How did no one know this until now? How was she able to get away with this? Did she never, ever email the president? Or Obama’s brain, Valerie Jarrett? Anyone in the president’s inner circle? Did no one notice?
Of course they noticed. They all knew. But this is what you get when you deal with the Clintons. President Obama had to ensure that no matter how poorly he did in his first term that he would not face a primary challenge from the only person who could threaten him in 2012, so he put her in charge of the State Department. It was the perfect fit – she could work on what he cared about the least: foreign policy. She’d get the experience she needed to fend off charges of inexperience in 2016, and he didn’t have to deal with her unless he had to.
The president didn’t care that she was operating in the shadows again; his path to re-nomination was clear.
So what happened in those shadows? We don’t know. Congress has received 55,000 pages of emails from Hillary’s four years at the State Department – less than 40 pages per day (pages, not individual emails). What’s in the rest? We, and history, may never know.
Hillary may turn them over eventually, if enough pressure is exerted on her, but it will be on her word that they are complete. What might have been withheld or deleted from her private emails may forever remain, like much of her life, buried in the shadows.
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