Andrew C. McCarthy - 13 Aug

BALL OF COLLUSION

ALSO BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY

Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad

The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy

Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case
for Obamas Impeachment

ANDREW C. McCARTHY

BALL OF COLLUSION

THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND
DESTROY A PRESIDENCY

2019 by Andrew C. McCarthy

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Table of Contents

Introduction

T his a story about hubris. Sure, theres plenty of collusion. But hubris is the more fitting word. This is a story about what happens when those we trust to be the guardians of our system anoint themselves the masters of our system. For our own good, of course.

As for collusion, that word weve heard so incessantly from pundits and leaky government officials, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has rendered his judgment that there was noneat least, not the collusion he was hunting for. There really was a collusion plot, though. And it really did target our election system. It absolutely sought to usurp our capacity for self-determination. It was just not the collusion youve been told about. It was not Donald Trumps collusion with Russia.

Here is the real collusion scheme: in 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States governments law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment. This scheme had two parts: Plan A, the objective; and Plan B, a fail-safe strategy in case Plan A implodedwhich all the smartest people were supremely confident would never, ever happen which is why you could bet the ranch that it would.

Plan A was to get Mrs. Clinton elected president of the United States. This required exonerating her, at least ostensibly, from well-founded allegations that were both felonious and politically disqualifying.

Plan B was the insurance policy: An investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he were elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton campaigngenerated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage. An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump un-re-electable under the guise of building an impeachment case.

The Clinton Emails Caper

Upon becoming President Obamas secretary of state, Clinton improperly set up a private, non-secure system for email communications. It featured her own personal server, stored in her home and, later, maintained by a private contractor headquartered in Colorado. Secretary Clinton used this private email system for all of her official State Department communications, notwithstanding that doing so (a) violated government regulations (which, as the department head, she was responsible for enforcing); (b) violated governmental record-keeping and record-production obligations imposed by federal law; and (c) made it inevitabledue to the nature of her responsibilitiesthat streams of classified information would flow through and be stored in the non-secure system.

This lack of security meant that top-secret intelligencesome of it classified at the highest levels, some of it involving Clintons communications with the President of the United States and other top national-security officialsbecame accessible to people who were not cleared to see it. Accessible not just to those lacking security clearance, but also to hostile actors, including foreign intelligence services and anti-American hackers.

When asked, nearly two years after leaving office, to surrender copies of her emails (by an Obama State Department under pressure from congressional investigators and Freedom of Information Act claimants), Clinton caused tens of thousands of her emails to be destroyed. Not just deleted. Destroyed. As in: purged with a special software program (BleachBit) designed to shred electronic documents. The aim was to prevent their being recovered. Ever. By anyone.

In all, Clinton undertook to destroy over thirty thousand emails, even though some of them had been demanded by congressional subpoena. And this would not be a Clinton story if we failed to note that, in the time-honored family tradition, Hillary lied her head off about the substance of the destroyed emails: We were to believe that, in thousands upon thousands of email exchanges, one of the busiest public officials and most obsessively political creatures on the planet had lolled her days away gabbing about yoga routines, family vacations, and her daughters wedding.

The FBI was eventually able to reassemble portions of the tens of thousands of purged emails. Several thousand, the FBIs then-director James Comey reported, were work-related, and at least three of them were classified. We will never have a final count because, in extirpating her correspondence, Clinton and her subordinates took extraordinary measures to defeat forensic investigation. And why not? After all, if you had discussed some earth-shattering development in yogaperhaps a secret breakthrough in utthita trikonasana!you wouldnt just delete that, right? Youd want to make certain that all the kings horses and all the kings menand all the prying FBI agents, the nosy congressional committees, and those ferrets down at Judicial Watchcouldnt put those emails together again.

Doesnt everybody BleachBit their deleted emails?

Even the emails Clinton deigned to turn over were rife with classified intelligence. They also contained other government information that, though not classified, is supposed to be kept on the governments secure system because it is sensitive.

Mrs. Clintons misconduct appears to have transgressed several federal criminal laws. Among the most obvious are those making it a felony to mishandle classified information, convert and destroy government records, and obstruct congressional investigations. Plainly, while the classified information offenses are the most egregious, they are not the only crimesjust the only ones we ever heard much about.