There are stories in literature, and in scriptures, of
people who make the Faustian deal[i],
some bargain with the devil that will allow them to have power, or success, or
whatever their evil heart desires. It’s never a good deal. The person’s soul is
in the devil’s control. They’re no longer free. But that everlasting end isn’t
always obvious in the short length of the story.
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| Faust, painting by Jean Paul Laurens |
These stories tend to end in a couple of different ways. One
looks successful in the world view. The person gets power, control over others.
Often they die at the hand of a would-be successor, or in battle. But they appear
to get what they want for this lifetime, so they don’t face the bad rot-in-Hell
stuff until after death.
The other we might call the ignominious end. The great fall.
You know, “pride cometh before the fall,” or “the bigger they are, the harder
they fall.” These tend to make for better literature. Shakespeare used them to
good effect. Macbeth could be one. Maybe King Lear. The wicked king in Hamlet.
In the Book of Mormon there are stories recounting a number
of such bad guys. Sherem (Jacob 7:2-4), Nehor (Alma 1:2-16), Korihor (Alma
30:6-60). Each of them “preached many things which were flattering unto the
people” for power and personal gain. Each of them died shamefully, and
ignominiously.
And then we’re told, “And thus we see that the devil will not
support his children at the last day, but doth speedily drag them down to hell”
(Alma 30:60).
So I’m looking at the current news. And I’m wondering what
version of the story Hillary Clinton is going to experience. So far, her
staying power through scandal is unmatched in American history. Maybe in world
history. She’s not accomplished. She’s had opportunities mainly linked to her
personable-but-corrupt husband, rather than her own accomplishments. Unresolved
scandals have followed them both since their Arkansas days.
Her election to the Senate from New York, a state she hadn’t
lived in, seems unlikely without a Faustian bargain. Granted, she didn’t get
the nomination in 2008 when she ran for president—but, then, she was up against
another person who was playing out his own Faustian bargain. So she bided her
time, nominally as Secretary of State, for which she was magnificently
underqualified, and continued right up through the revelation of international
donations to their foundation in exchange for government favors, still without
rotting in jail. And now she runs for president again, and seems to be having
the nomination handed to her, with minimal events, minimal speaking
engagements, and an absolute minimum of press conferences with questions.
Sometimes the Faustian deal allows the lost soul to be given
eloquence of speech, or charisma—something that attracts the followers. She
seems utterly lacking in normal attractive qualities. And yet she gets the
power she wants, along with the blissful ignorance a dictator would want from a
propagandistic press (which she nevertheless complains about as a “vast
right-wing conspiracy.”
Yet this latest scandal, about her cavalier approach to
state top secret communications may be the final one. It brings up other
scandals—namely, the Benghazi attack: what she was doing that night, why she
refused to provide further security when it was requested months earlier, why
she failed to send rescue during the attack, and why she blamed an obscure
video as the cause. And then she refused to reveal her communications during
that period of time.
That’s where the email problem comes in.
She set it up to have control over her communications, to
keep any possible (and inevitable) Congressional subpoena from being able to
see what she was doing. She thinks she has a right to do whatever she wants,
without having her reasons or actions questioned. And the best way to
accomplish that was to break the law, risking national security by allowing
classified documents on a personal server, rather than kept safe on the
Department of State facilities. Risking the certainty that such a server would
be found and hacked by enemies, and even friends, around the world. All because
she didn’t want to answer to the laws or the American people.
What she did is a crime. Various others have been punished
for much smaller versions of what she’s done. General Petraeus was prosecuted
(and persecuted) for showing his notebook to his biographer—who had top secret
military clearance. Because it wasn’t kept in a locked up environment.
There are some obvious things to think through about Hillary’s
email server.
1.
She knew what laws she was breaking, because she
sent memos to all State Department personnel concerning their communications
and the safeguarding and retaining of information.
2.
She hired someone to create the server; it was
on purpose, with forethought and purpose, and direction not to tell anyone.
3.
She used that server for correspondence with the
president and his staff, with her staff, and with the DOJ and staff. They knew
about the illegal server.
4.
She hired someone to wipe the server, to
professionally erase any traces of communications (and State Department
documentation for history) that she wanted to hide.
5.
Apparently the hirelings who built and supported
the server, a mom-and-pop organization out of Colorado called Platte River
Networks (which must have taken some connections to find because of their
obscurity and distance) and the hirelings who wiped the server must not have
been the same, because the back-up server provided by the Colorado people
fortunately contains a duplicate of all Hillary’s yoga schedules, wedding plans,
and top secret stuff (yet another place top-secret documents shouldn’t have
been).
6.
The limited number of emails she provided,
claiming there were absolutely zero classified documents among them, showed two
in the first random sample of forty or so, and many more as the search through
them continued. These included various ultra-classified highest level secret
documents.
So it’s unbelievable that she could come out with the claims she made Tuesday. This happened when Fox News senior
White House correspondent Ed Henry asked her, “Did you try to wipe—so there would
be no email, no personal no official—wipe the whole thing?”
Clinton: Well, my personal emails are my personal business.
Right? So I, so we went through a painstaking process and turned over 55,000
pages of anything we thought could be work related. Under the law, that
decision is made by the official. I was the official. I made those decisions.
And as I just said, over 1200 of the emails have already been deemed not work
related. Now, all I can tell you is, in retrospect, if I’d used a government
account, and I had said, you know, “Let’s release everything. Let’s let
everybody in America see what I did for four years,” we would have the same
arguments. So, that’s all I could say.
Henry: But did you try to wipe the whole server?”
Clinton: I, I uh, I don’t…you know, I have no idea. That’s
why we turned it over.”
Henry: You were the official in charge. Did you wipe the
server?
Clinton: What, with like a cloth or something?
Henry: No. You know how it works digitally. Did you try to
wipe the whole server?
Clinton: I don’t know how it works digitally at all. I do not
have any…
Henry: Did you not try? Did you not try to wipe it?
Clinton: Ed, I know you want to make a point, and I can just
repeat what I have said. In order to…in order to be as cooperative as possible,
we have turned over the server. They can do whatever they want to with the
server to figure out what’s there or what’s not there. That’s for the, you
know, the people investigating it to try to figure out. But we turned over everything that was work related. Every
single thing. Personal stuff we did not. I had no obligation to do so and did
not.
First of all, if she had obeyed the law and used a
government server, we would not be
dealing with her personal emails for her to sort through post-subpoena while
Congress is waiting. Those would have already been separate, instead of mixed
with official business. If she had used the government server, she could have
collected the emails for the pertinent time period (during Benghazi, for one
round of questioning) with a few clicks.
Second, if she had not obfuscated, stonewalled, and been
contemptuous toward Congress for these years since being asked (that Benghazi
quote, when she said, “What difference now, does it make…” was in January 2013),
then maybe there would have been some trust about her separating out some personal
emails. But we absolutely DO NOT trust her to turn over the important stuff. We assume that’s because the emails are incriminating. That’s
why it will be valuable to have the backup duplicate server—which she must have
known had been located by the time she answered these questions.
And third, she
is beyond ridiculous claiming she wonders if wiping a server with a cloth is
the way to remove data. She’s the official; she made the decision; she hired
the special team to come and triple-wipe the server to remove any possibility
of anything being read on it, before she “cooperated” by turning it over to
investigators.
So, except for those willing to lie for her in the face of
glaring facts, it is obvious what she has done.
The next question is, will she skate, like she has with
every other scandal? Or is there an alternate, ignominious ending in store?
I’m wondering about the ignominy of it, because of that
backup server, in Colorado. Kept in a bathroom closet.
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| Found at RushLimbaugh.com |
As Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday, the jokes just keep writing
themselves. Here are a few of the least scatalogical:
“Now, we already knew, ladies and gentlemen, that Hillary had
flushed most of her emails”
“Code name for her server wipe: Tidy Bowl.”
“Now that her server’s been found in a bathroom, when Hillary
says she’s getting to the bottom of this, it takes on a whole new meaning.”
“The American people won’t take this standing up or sitting
down.”
“Her campaign’s now officially circling the drain.”
Our little think tank added this rewording of her press
conference: when asked whether she had tried to wipe her server, she answers, “What,
like with toilet paper or something?”
This may very well be the beginning of the end in which “the
devil does not support [her], but doth speedily drag [her] down to hell” for a
special, ignominious end to her story.
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