Motive is important in Ms. Clinton’s email case, because motive tells us why she was trying to hide from historians and from the public her operations as the U.S. Secretary of State: was it because she didn’t want them to know that she was selling to the Sauds and her other friends the U.S. State Department’s policies in return for their million-dollar-plus donations to the Clinton Foundation, and maybe even selling to them (and/or their cronies) U.S. government contracts, or why? However, those are questions regarding other crimes that she might have been perpetrating while in public office, not the crimes of her privatized email operation itself; and those other crimes (whatever they might have been) would have been explored only after an indictment on the slam-dunks, and for further possible prosecutions, if President Obama’s people were serious about investigating her. They weren’t. Clearly, this is selective ‘justice’.
So: the basic question here is: Is this a democracy, at all? Or, are some people just brazenly above the law?
The character and content of this country are at stake here. This issue is important not only as substance, but as symbolism. Of course, that’s also true with any criminal conviction or refusal even to prosecute; but, in Clinton’s email case, the symbolism is simply enormous: it’s a bold statement, to the entire world, about today’s America, and about whether this government’s routine pontifications, regarding other nations’ not being “democratic,” are little — if at all — more than a very black pot deriding some kettle for not being sufficiently white. A crony-capitalist country is in no moral position to dictate anything to the rest of the world. Hiding what it is (a foul oligarchy), only makes what it is, even worse, and more dangerous. Its allies — in NATO, the EU, and elsewhere — are then members of an international gang, which has no justifiable reason even to exist, and which is incredibly harmful not only to their own people, but to all nations. And, if the next U.S. President refuses to prosecute this case, then the continuation of hiding it, the continuation of that cover-up, will not only be blatant; it will show, to the entire world, that nothing short of a revolution can rectify the situation in America. If this country is that crooked at the top, what can it be down below?
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse