Let’s get Hillary: a modern witch hunt from Republicans
I spent part of yesterday watching yet another Republican-led House of Representatives investigation into “Hillary Clinton’s emails,” and believe me, you know that old saying about “more boring than watching paint dry”?
Yup, that’s how nothing this circus was.
Repubs know they’re digging a dry well, just as the holes they dug on Benghazi and everything else anti-Hillary have been dry. There’s no there there, because nearly everybody understands exactly what it was that Hillary did, which was simply to do what most of us do: she had two different email accounts, one for State Department business and more for her personal stuff, and she occasionally sent or received emails on one account that more properly should have been sent or received via the other.
Ooohh, terrible! A crime against humanity, rendering Hillary Rodham Clinton clearly unfit to be President.
Well, that’s ridiculous. This entire ordeal has been stressful and embarrassing to her; the tension it’s put her under probably contributed to her current mild bout of pneumonia. But a reason not to vote for her? Only in the minds of people who wouldn’t vote for her under any circumstance, and would vote for the Republican candidate if his name were Elmer Fudd instead of Donald Trump.
So desperate are these Republicans to find anything against Hillary that at yesterday’s hearing one of them, Jason Chaffetz, from Utah, chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, handed a subpoena to the FBI’s assistant director during the hearing, demanding “the full [Clinton email] file with no redactions of personal identifiable information.”
This was a virtually unprecedented act—two, actually: to subpoena a sworn witness in the middle of a Congressional investigation, and demanding moreover every email, on any topic whatsoever—her health, private conversations with her husband, to her daughter, to foreign leaders, to President Obama, whatever.
Keep in mind, this is the same Jason Chaffetz who was not content with the fact that the F.B.I. already found nothing lawfully wrong with what Clinton did—“she did not lie or break the law,” FBI director Comey testified. So the top investigative body of the United States of America stated conclusively that Hillary Clinton is innocent of the charges to which Republicans have subjected her, but Chaffetz and his Republican cronies will not rest until they find something, anything to use against her. “The FBI has concluded their portion,” Chaffetz conceded, but “the FBI…has not looked at other things that she did potentially…”.
“That she did potentially…” Think about this statement. Imagine you’ve been indicted and tried for some major criminal offense. After a lengthy hearing, the F.B.I—the frigging Federal Bureau of Investigation—finds you innocent of every charge your prosecutor could dream up. Just when you think you’re a free woman, you hear the damned prosecutor stand up and demand to the Judge that this hearing is not over. Why not? Because you have done something wrong “potentially.”
In an alternate universe, perhaps. But wait, there’s more. Let’s say that, in your trial, it was shown clearly and conclusively that you did nothing wrong—you broke no existing law. But what if what you did should have been against the law, at least in the eyes of your prosecutor? Then that prosecutor continues to hound the Court, to demand that you, the alleged perp, be found guilty anyway, even though you’re innocent of all charges, because…well, because your prosecutor doesn’t like you.
Sound Orwellian? It is—unless your name is Jason Chaffetz. Even though Hillary broke no law, “the law probably needs to be updated or they’re not properly applying the law, and that’s why we need to explore this,” he told Fox News (where else?), and continued to insist, like a delirious mental patient, “She broke the law.”
Okay, so according to the FBI she broke no laws. Chaffetz is unable to cite any law on the books that she did break. But, in his fevered mind, he wants reality changed so that she did break a law. This is how biased, how intemperate and, quite frankly, how insane this Republican party has gotten due to its hatred of Hillary Clinton. She broke no law…Repubs wish she had broken a law so they could nail her…and because they run the Congress, they will never, ever let her off the hook, but will continue to harass her, forever if need be, because…well, because they can.
This is the definition of a witch hunt. And this Chaffetz–the Utah Mormon who has been been called “a grandstanding charlatan,” who led the attack against Planned Parenthood, who oversees the Secret Service through his committee chairmanship yet never revealed that he had applied to the Service and been rejected until this was outed and he was forced to, explaining, “I haven’t looked at that in more than a decade. It’s not something that’s entered my mind…seriously, this was like 10 minutes, 12 years ago,” as if that were an adequate explanation for not telling the truth about something so important—this Chaffetz, who boasts on his website of his “core conservative principles of accountability,” is the perfect witch hunter to lead it.
