By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Will Hillary Clinton beat the rap over her private email server?
“Beat the rap” is the appropriate term. I would wager serious money that even the most ardent of Hillary’s supporters would admit — if given a dose of truth serum — that they know her private server was set up to conceal from the public the nature of her involvement with the Clinton Global Initiative. There is no other plausible explanation for all the effort that went in to setting up the server and the contrived explanations from Hillary and her team for the 30,000 deleted emails.
If you listen to Fox News, you will be confident that an indictment is on the way.
Andrew Napolitano, a former federal judge and regular Fox News contributor, contends that Hillary violated State Department policy and broke federal laws dealing with classified material — and that there is “ample evidence to indict her.”
Former federal prosecutor and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani argues that Hillary broke the law “at least 15 times” in the way she set up the email server.
On Sean Hannity’s program, Newt Gingrich stated flatly, “No reasonable person can doubt that Secretary Clinton broke the law.”
Another Fox News commentator, Andrea Tantaros, argues that the way Hillary handled her emails was “a felony” and “highly illegal.”
Not everyone on the right is as confident. Rush Limbaugh does not believe that the Obama administration will pursue an indictment of Hillary, and that we will find ourselves with another successful Clinton cover-up to add to the list that began with Hillary’s cattle futures scam and Whitewater. Rush is convinced that what he calls “Hillary’s willing accomplices in the media” will be able to throw up a smokescreen dense enough to cover for her right through this fall’s elections.
Rush may be correct. But maybe not. There have been recent convictions of politicians in New York State who were once seen as untouchable as the Clintons. One of them, Sheldon Silver, a Democratic Party politician from Brooklyn and the speaker of the New York State Assembly from 1994 until his arrest on federal corruption charges in 2015, was for years a frequent topic on the local talk shows in New York.
If you listened to the way reporters discussed him on those programs, everyone in Albany knew he was on the take. But the common wisdom was that Silver knew how to cover his tracks, that he “knew where the bodies were buried,” that he “had friends in high places,” that he was too clever and manipulative to ever get caught.
In fact, he was reelected to the New York State Assembly on January 7, 2015, and was elected speaker for the 11th time, with almost unanimous support from the Democratic majority — at the very time he was being investigated by federal authorities for corruption. That didn’t matter to his Democratic colleagues. They were confident that “Shelly” would beat the rap.
He didn’t. The investigation uncovered years of payoffs from law firms that had dealings with New York State. Members of those law firms and former colleagues of Silver testified against him in exchange for non-prosecution agreements.
Last November, in a unanimous decision, a jury found him guilty on all counts, resulting in his disbarment and automatic expulsion from the New York State Assembly. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and, according to a story in The New York Post on May 3, “also was ordered to fork over nearly $5.2 million in ill-gotten gains and another $1.75 million in fines.”
Corruption is not a partisan thing in New York. In addition to Silver, Dean G. Skelos, a Republican from Long Island, and former majority leader of the New York Senate, was found guilty of eight bribery, extortion, and conspiracy counts.
Skelos used his position to pressure a Manhattan developer, an environmental technology company, and a medical malpractice insurer into providing his son Adam Skelos with roughly $300,000 via consulting work, a no-show job, and a direct payment of $20,000. The New York Post reports that “dozens of other so-called public servants,” including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, are also under investigation. The plot thickens.
Perhaps Hillary and Bill are in a class of their own when it comes to these matters. Maybe they are more untouchable than these formerly untouchable New York politicians. We are going to find out over the coming months. But at least we can take some comfort from how Silver and Skelos received justice. Our system works at least some of the time.
A downside: Silver and Skelos will continue to get their state pensions while doing time in prison. Silver will get $80,000 per year, Skelos $95,000. The Post editorialized on the mess: “Corruption is endemic. Career politician syndrome and its cousin, pay-to-play politics, are at the root of this. And they must end. Here’s how.” See what you think.
The Post recommends “term limits. Silver and Skelos held office for a combined 70 years.” Also an end to “paying criminals for ‘their service’ with hefty pensions until the end of their natural lives, despite being behind bars.” The Post calls for cutting in half the length of a legislative session “to make it possible for regular citizens to represent their constituents and maintain careers.”
Beyond that, the Post recommends a “lifetime ban on elected officials and staff working as lobbyists” to end the “revolving door between lobbying and politics,” along with a prohibition against “individuals and corporations seeking state contracts from contributing to candidates for public office. A simple fix would be to bar candidates from accepting any entity’s or individual’s contribution in the five years before a contract is awarded and in the five years after a contract’s conclusion.”
I bet the same thought struck you that struck me: These proposed reforms, if enacted at the federal level, would put the Clinton Global Initiative out of business. Perhaps that is why the Post editorial ends with a note of pessimism: “With the corrupt politicians still running the asylum, these simple reforms will take a taxpayer revolt to restore good government.”
Can anything like a taxpayer revolt happen in this country? Middle-class American taxpayers are not comfortable with the idea of revolts and street protests to get their way, much less violence. But they know how to vote. Maybe they will do that in an unorthodox manner this year.
There have been successful nonviolent revolutions in the past. England called theirs the “Glorious Revolution.” Someone good at marketing will have to come up with a term for ours.
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