Hillary Standard: Take the Money

By Debra J. Saunders Hillary Clintons campaign team warns that damaging leaks of campaign staff emails -- leaked via the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and probably hacked by Russia -- are proof that Russia wants to tilt the election in favor of Donald Trump. Be it noted Team Clinton had little trouble using registered agents for foreign governments to raise large donations for the presidential campaign. When the campaign decided to take money raised by lobbyists for foreign interests campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in newly leaked email chain from 2015 Im ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Take the money!! communications director Jennifer Palmieri added. The decision was a tricky one according to the emails Politico reported in part because the campaign already was accepting help from lobbyists for foreign nations. In HillaryLand there are no walls. When she was secretary of state Clintons deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin also was on the payroll of the Clinton Foundation which raised money from global interests and the private consulting firm Teneo. The American people should have been Abedins only consideration but with multiple paychecks she had to answer to more than one master and she held the keys to Clintons calendar. Last week WikiLeaks revealed that Clinton State Department senior aide Caitlin Klevorick gave special access to big Clinton Foundation donors eager to get in on the lucrative rebuilding after Haitis devastating 2010 earthquake. Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC Klevorick wrote to the Foundations director of foreign policy. Foundation donors might expect concierge service while those who didnt give to the Clinton charity could be shunted to a large government website. Was this arrangement best for the desperate people of Haiti? I truly doubt it. The very fact that Clinton set up a homebrew server to host her national security correspondence says it all. In her youth Clinton worked on the House Judiciary Committees Watergate investigation. Surely she understood that official correspondence belongs not to officials but to the public. Yet she took the risk that classified documents could be hacked in order to maintain control. Then she claimed that she handed all of her work emails to the government. Not true. FBI Director James Comey later revealed the FBI found thousands of work emails not turned over to the State Department. The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed suit to learn more about Clintons emails. A federal judge ordered Clinton to respond to Judicial Watch questions in writing. On Thursday Clintons attorneys filed her under-oath responses. In answer to 25 questions about the emails Clinton gave a variations on the theme that she did not recall at least 21 times and objected to 18 questions. When she answered she provided no new insight. In July Clinton complained to 60 Minutes that theres the Hillary standard and then theres the standard for everybody else. She is right. Most people couldnt get away with deleting thousands of State Department emails. Clinton complains people dont think she is honest or trustworthy but really why did she do it? Alas she cannot exactly recall.