Hillary Clinton’s Corrupting Touch

The news that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, manipulated the levers of power at the DNC to ensure that Hillary Clinton would win the party’s nomination for President should not really come as a surprise to anyone.

What is surprising is that she actually resigned when she was outed through the release of thousands of emails stolen from the Democrats’ email system, allegedly by Russian hackers. 

Among the more than 19,000 messages released by the WikiLeaks website, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Harriet Torry, are signs of bias in favor of Hillary Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign, undermining the DNC’s stated objective of broad-based support for Democrats seeking office.

“He isn’t going to be president,” Torry says Ms. Wasserman Schultz wrote in an email about Mr. Sanders in late May, according to WikiLeaks, weeks before Mr. Sanders endorsed Mrs. Clinton.

Torry reports another email sent from a DNC address to two DNC communications officials indicated a plan to smear Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump with a fake Craigslist job post for women who wanted to apply to one of Mr. Trump’s organizations, with the title “Honey Bunch” and job requirements including “no gaining weight on the job.”

ABC’s Hayley Walker reports one email exchange suggested bringing up Sanders’ religious beliefs as a way to hurt his campaign in parts of the country.

“It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WA can we get someone to ask his belief,” Brad Marshall, CFO of DNC, wrote in an email on May 5, 2016. “Does he believe in God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My southern baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

Amy Dacey, CEO of the DNC, subsequently responded “AMEN,” according to the emails reviewed by Walker.

What is even more amazing is the Democratic National Committee documents include spreadsheets and emails that appear to show party officials planning which donors and prominent fundraisers to provide with appointments to federal boards and commissions.

As The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reported, the spreadsheet—which was accompanied by emails sent between officials with the DNC’s finance team—contains 23 names of little-known corporate executives and professional fundraisers who have donated to the committee and various Democratic political action committees.

The donor spreadsheet is included in an email chain in which Jordan Kaplan, DNC’s national finance director, asks other officials to provide names of donors they want to propose for federal commissions.

“The disclosed DNC emails sure look like the potential Clinton Administration has intertwined the appointments to federal government boards and commissions with the political and fund raising operations of the Democratic Party,” Ken Boehm, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group told The Daily Caller.

“That is unethical, if not illegal.”

Now to the astonishment of those poor souls who thought that Wasserman Schultz was being sent to political Siberia, or otherwise being punished for her blatant corruption, she was promptly made honorary chair of the Clinton campaign’s 50-state program to help elect Democrats around the country.

But this fits the pattern that Clinton has followed as she has corrupted virtually the entire liberal establishment of this country, and especially the Democratic party’s elected officials in Congress.

There is a wealth of facts indicating that Hillary Clinton violated the Memorandum of Understanding she had with the State Department and the Obama administration regarding the conduct of her relationship with the Clinton Foundation and its donors.

Objectively, when one reviews the facts set forth in Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash, there is a wealth of facts indicating that Hillary Clinton violated the constitutional and statutory prohibitions against accepting gifts from foreign governments.

Likewise, regarding the vast breach of national security revealed in her scandalous use of a private email server and her treatment of classified information—and her demonstrable lies about it—Democrats have completely abandoned any fealty to objective truth, or the consequences that would accrue to anyone else who engaged in similar conduct.

As former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy put it, “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.”

Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations because he concluded that there was no intent to harm the United States. In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.

None of these facts seem to interest Democratic Party elected officials and party operatives who should have some allegiance to the higher interests of their party and its principles.

None of these facts seem to interest major figures in the liberal sisterhood of powerful female media personalities, academics, activists and donors who make-up the core of Hillary Clinton’s political base.

And even more worryingly, none of these facts seem to interest major figures in the establishment media.

Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin wrote what might well be the final epitaph for objective truth among Democrats this way, “almost any Democrat who’s not Clintons’ payroll will tell reporters and others privately that these are serious issues,” but they are so corrupted by the death of truth and what our friend Diana West calls “normalizing the abnormal” that, as far as we can tell, as of today none of have come out publicly and said that the conduct of Bill and Hillary Clinton, whether or not it is illegal, is wrong.  

If what’s been documented in Clinton Cash, the private email server scandal, and now the revelations that Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz bent the rules (or worse) to help Hillary Clinton aren’t wrong to Democrats, then nothing Bill and Hillary Clinton might do in the White House will be wrong either.

George Rasley is editor of ConservativeHQ, a member of American MENSA and a veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2008. He served as lead advance representative for Governor Sarah Palin in 2008 and has served as a staff member, consultant or advance representative for some of America’s most recognized conservative Republican political figures, including President Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. He served in policy and communications positions on the House and Senate staff, and during the George H.W. Bush administration he served on the White House staff of Vice President Dan Quayle.