Hillary would lose on the issues.
My last column noted that although America is fighting something like five wars, nobody seems to be talking about it. It would be nice if that were the only important subject that’s not getting enough attention but it isn’t. Here are a few other topics that would be getting major daily attention, if our press and our candidates were better.
Corruption
In 2006, Rep. Nancy Pelosi led a campaign to take Congress back from the GOP by claiming that the Republicans had fostered a “culture of corruption,” and promising to “drain the swamp.” That catchphrase vanished after the election, but the corruption did not. And in the waning years of the Obama Administration, the corruption looks pretty bad. It even appears to have reached the FBI.
The FBI ultimately decided not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton over her email scandal. That created a lot of criticism. But now it turns out that the FBI official in charge of the investigation was awfully close to the Clintons. The FBI official is deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, was running for state senate in Virginia. Her campaign received a donation of nearly a half million dollars from the political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who has been close to the Clintons for decades (and has his own brushes with the law). Then, a bit later, Andrew McCabe was put in charge of the investigation into Clinton’s emails, an investigation that — to the dismay of many longtime Bureau insiders — recommended no charges. Now McCabe is facing calls for his resignation.
As Stephen Green points out, McAuliffe encouraged Jill McCabe to run just days after the Clinton email scandal broke. I’m sure he knew who her husband was when he did so. The FBI claims there’s no connection, but this is very bad for the already-tarnished image of the FBI.
Meanwhile, we have Clinton’s pay-for-play deal with the King of Morocco. To the consternation of her advisers, she agreed to speak in Morocco in exchange for a promised $12 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. As the Huffington Post noted, “It is generally frowned upon for presidential candidates to be pumping foreign leaders for money.” At least her staff recognized that and eventually replaced Hillary with Bill and Chelsea.
But this sort of thing seems to have been par for the course at the Clinton Foundation, which, as ABC News reported, gave special treatment to “Friends of Bill.” As Bob Woodward commented, “But the mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation, and actions by the State Department, which she ran, are all intertwined and it’s corrupt. . . . But the election isn’t going to be decided on that.” Not if Clinton can help it.