Before the news cycle inevitably churns with the latest Democratic candidate imbroglio and Don the Con’s impeachment trial, we really should note, just for the record, that Hillary Clinton has been exonerated, yet again, by Trump’s federal sleuths.
You may have missed that news the other day – not just because you were likely tracking the war tensions with Iran or the House vote to curb Trump’s war powers, but because the press typically plays up accusations but pays far less attention to exonerations.
But today I’ll do my modest best to re-balance the scales.
Trump’s Justice Department has signaled that its long probe of Hillary’s work at the Clinton Foundation and her dealings as Secretary of State – a probe ordered by Trump – turned up a grand total of nothing. No criminal charges. No evidence of corruption. Reportedly, there was “nothing worth pursuing.” As one senior Justice official told The Washington Post last Thursday, “We didn’t expect much of it…And as time went on, a lot of people just forgot about it.”
Trump had been jonesing for a very different result. In late 2017, he tweeted: “Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about…totally Crooked Hillary.” Also: “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department and FBI isn’t looking into all the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary.” (Let’s decode that. Many people in our Country referred to his cultists. But psychiatrists are probably best qualified to explain his use of the word Everybody.)
By the way, this is the second time in four months that Hillary has been cleared by the feds. Just for the record.
Back in October, Trump’s State Department concluded its own probe into all that tiresome business about her private email server. As you may recall, the president who’s a national security risk was obsessed with the idea that Hillary was using private email to deliberately transmit classified information. But his State Department sleuths came up with nothing. (The New York Times, which in 2016 had repeatedly hyped the email story on page one, ran the October exoneration on page 16). The State Department report concluded: “There was no persuasive evidence of systematic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
As Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!” And did Trump apologize to Hillary after State announced its exoneration? That would’ve been a first.
And he’d long been peddling a lie that he hoped his Justice Department would validate. We heard it a lot during the 2016 campaign: “Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of American uranium, and, you know, she was paid a fortune…a tremendous amount of money.” In essence, his repetitive lie was that Hillary, as Secretary of State, signed off on a deal to give Russia lots of American uranium in exchange for a fat donation to the Clinton Foundation.
But Justice reached the same conclusion that fact-checkers had long reported: Hillary had no role.
In 2010, Russia’s atomic energy agency got a controlling stake in a Toronto company called Uranium One. As part of that deal, the Russian agency got the rights to roughly 20 percent of uranium extraction capacity in the United States. An obscure U.S. board – the federal Committee on Foreign Investment – had to OK the deal. Nine agencies, including the State Department, had representatives on the board. Hillary was never on the board. She did not participate in the multiagency decision, and there was no evidence of any quid quo pro – of any Russian donation – to the Clinton Foundation.
But has Trump tweeted about the Justice Department exoneration, perhaps to apologize for his lies? Quite the contrary. He knows what his fact-free fans want to hear, and he duly delivered last Thursday at his latest rally: “Crooked Hillary – you should lock her up, I’ll tell you!”
Meanwhile, the Russian military intelligence hackers who worked so hard for him in 2016 are back in the field – hacking this time in Ukraine, digging for dirt on Joe Biden. Since their sabotage of our last election worked so well, why not try it again with full confidence that the impeached president will say or do nothing about it?
So forget Hillary already. He and his benefactors are the real story.