We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump poses a severe challenge to conservatism. What we’re only just beginning to appreciate is that Hillary Clinton poses a challenge, too. The challenge may be stated in the form of a question: Does the right favor the prosecution of Clinton, or not?
She certainly deserved to be prosecuted. It’s a bewilderingly convoluted tale, but the essence of it is this: As secretary of State Clinton deliberately used a private email server to send and receive electronic messages—some of them with highly classified attachments—in a way that could not be monitored or scrutinized by the U.S. government. That she did so deliberately, and not because she was an old fuddy-duddy who didn’t understand all this newfangled stuff about email servers, is clear from the evidence. Many others have been prosecuted for similar, indeed lesser, deeds.
It’s clear, too, that her State Department colleagues quickly moved to cover up Clinton’s illegal conduct. We know from Wikileaks, for instance, that Clinton’s lawyer Cheryl Mills (who also served as her chief of staff at State) sought to cover her boss’s tracks. After Barack Obama declared publicly that he had known nothing of his secretary of State’s private email activity but that she shouldn’t be prosecuted because she was just being careless, Mills sent an email to John Podesta. “We need to clean this up,” she wrote. “He [Obama] has email from her—they do not say state.gov.”
As all the world knows, the Department of Justice chose not to prosecute Clinton, though not from any want of evidence. We were bewildered in July of 2016 when FBI director James Comey, though agreeing that Clinton had passed classified information on a private server, said she had been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” but that she didn’t deserve a criminal prosecution.
Now we learn that the Department of Justice, under Donald Trump, is reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of an offline server. The news comes after Trump tweeted, on December 2, “Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and ‘acid washed’ 33,000 Emails? No justice!”
The obvious question: Is Trump pushing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to dig back into the Clinton email story? Does the public pressure via Twitter have a private component? We are not aware of any private effort by the White House to get DOJ involved in another Clinton email investigation. But it seems unlikely that Trump’s interest has no relation to the new DOJ push. He is the president, after all, and he has the capacity to cajole the Justice bureaucracy to investigate what he wants investigated.
We hope he won’t use that capacity in earnest. An investigation perceived to be political payback will only enhance the Department of Justice’s reputation, well earned under Eric Holder’s six-year term as attorney general, of being one of the most thoroughly politicized agencies in the federal government. The right’s answer to politicized law enforcement cannot be more and bigger politicized law enforcement.
If there are genuinely new revelations about the conduct of Clinton and her coterie at State, fine—investigate. But the time for prosecuting Hillary Clinton for illegally passing classified information has passed. It’s a disgrace that DOJ caved to political pressure and failed to hold her to the standard it held others to, but the political and social costs of trying to rectify that disgrace are too great. Hillary Clinton will forever be remembered as the presidential candidate who lost to Donald Trump. That is a severe punishment indeed.
