During the 2016 presidential cycle, Donald Trump taunted Democrats with chants of “Lock Her Up!” amid the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Now that Democratic prosecutors are hurling charges at the former president left and right, Clinton says she is not gloating.
Hillary Clinton, Back Again
“I didn’t think that [the appearance] would be under these circumstances, yet another set of indictments,” Clinton said, laughing.
“It’s hard to believe,” she said. “I don’t feel any satisfaction. I feel great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.”
Clinton’s words were contradicted by her body language during an appearance on MSNBC on Monday night with Rachel Maddow that suggested she felt a bit of glee.
The latest charges in Georgia bring a total of 91 counts that the former president faces including in New York and in two federal cases.
Hillary Clinton said repeatedly that Trump was not a “legitimate president.”
“He knows that this wasn’t on the level,” Clinton said on CBS Sunday Morning in 2020.
Hillary Clinton Likely Committed Fraud With Steele Dossier
These cases involving Trump are a matter of prosecutorial discretion.
The greatest irony for the Democrats with these Trump indictments, particularly the ones related to his effort to overturn the 2016 election, is the degree to which they are unconcerned with how Clinton engaged in what looks like fraud that year. The U.S. Code defines a person who engages in fraud as someone who “falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact.”
It was Clinton’s campaign that hired Fusion GPS to compile what became the Steele Dossier. It used a suspected Russian spy named Igor Danchenko to provide fraudulent information that was used to launch the fraudulent FBI Crossfire Hurricane. As a result, the U.S. government spent millions chasing after shadow in an effort to make Trump into a lame duck.
After Trump’s election, many would argue the Democratic Party organized resistance within the federal bureaucracy to undermine him.
Hillary Clinton called herself “part of the resistance” and started an organization to resist Trump. She blamed the Russians for her loss.
Clinton’s actions clearly seem to fit the definition of conspiring to defraud the United States. The Justice Department defines the crime as saying, “To conspire to defraud the United States means primarily to cheat the Government out of property or money, but it also means to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest. It is not necessary that the Government shall be subjected to property or pecuniary loss by the fraud, but only that its legitimate official action and purpose shall be defeated by misrepresentation, chicane or the overreaching of those charged with carrying out the governmental intention.”
Clinton’s Russiagate fraud certainly fits this bill. Now when will Merrick Garland seek to charge her?
Democrats Argued in 2016 That Clinton Should Not Be Prosecuted By Trump
The Trump indictments have overturned the unwritten norms of American politics, ones that Hillary Clinton’s defenders in 2016 hoped would be kept in place amid the Trump taunts.
“Around the world, it’s not uncommon for rulers who have just come to power to prosecute, imprison, and even execute their rivals or predecessors; historically, it’s probably the norm. The United States has been an international outlier—it has been exceptional, even—in its long pattern of peaceful and non-recriminative transfers of power,” Atlantic columnist David H. Graham wrote in 2016. “Even Richard Nixon, who likely could have been convicted of crimes, was pardoned by Gerald Ford. In announcing that decision, which was deeply unpopular, Ford cited the necessity of preserving American norms.”
Mother Jones similarly opined against the possibility of punishing Clinton over her emails.
“Revenge as an ubertactic might work for him in business, but constantly behaving vengefully is hardly a positive attribute for a presidential candidate or a commander in chief,” Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn wrote before the 2016 election.
Biden Alleged to Have Pressured DoJ Against Trump
The New York Times reported in March that Joe Biden leaned on Attorney General Merrick Garland to bring Trump to justice. It has the Democrats’ devotion to that quaint notion as nothing other than political tribalism.
“He also told confidants that he wanted Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to stop acting like a ponderous judge and to take decisive action,” the Times said.
Biden said the silent part aloud following the 2022 midterm elections.
“We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power if he does run, making sure he — under legitimate efforts of our Constitution — does not become the next president again,” Biden said.
Democrats are creating precedents they will live to rue as Republican prosecutors use their statements against Republicans as fodder for criminal indictments.
Once a genie is out of the bottle, it seldom gets put back. And only America suffers.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting. He writes opinion columns from a conservative perspective.
