Kevin Williamson‘s latest column at National Review Online explains why no one should expect the email scandal revolving around Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton to lead to any legal action.
It has been amusing to watch the evolution of her lies on the issue: She was going to turn over all the evidence, until she unilaterally destroyed (crime) and withheld (probably a crime) a great deal of it. She insisted that the communication that passed through her off-site toilet (her secret e-mail server was located in the bathroom of a loft apartment in Denver, because that does not seem sketchy at all) was not classified, until it was shown that some of it was; she then said that what she personally sent or received was not secret or sensitive, until it was shown that it was; she then said that none of it was marked as such, until . . .
Strike three.
If you are a Democrat, the safest place in the world to be is under the authority of other Democrats. Lois Lerner, the criminal who used the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon on behalf of the Democratic party, was never going to be charged, or even disciplined, by her overseers in the IRS or at the Department of Justice. After pulling one of the worst Gestapo stunts in modern American history, she’s receiving a nice, comfortable pension, and those who enabled her crimes were given fat bonuses. There was no way that Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch was going to charge Lerner — what do you imagine the odds are that they’ll discover their integrity in the matter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee? Unless President Barack Obama should decide to take this opportunity to rid his party of the Clintons forever (a slim but non-zero possibility), nothing is going to happen.
The Obama administration can traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels, poison rivers, assassinate American citizens, more or less make up health-care law as it goes, lie about critical foreign-policy questions, and criminally mishandle sensitive information, and all of that amounts to – nothing. For it to amount to anything, you’d need a Justice Department, an FBI, and federal judges with self-respect sufficient to outweigh their institutional political cowardice. And that we do not have.