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On 16 Feb 2022, Lefty Lundquist <lefty_lundquist@ggmail.com> posted some news:sujksp$m2d$2@dont-email.me:

Hillary deserves to be executed, seriously. She destroyed evidence,
hid official government emails on a private server, sold uranium to
Russia and falsified a smear document on a political opponent. Stand
her up and put a rope around her neck.

On Wednesday, the conservative group Judicial Watch released two hundred
and ninety-six pages of e-mails that Hillary Clinton and her aides at
the State Department had exchanged. Judicial Watch’s president has said
that they came from the e-mail account of Huma Abedin, who was then
Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. In these e-mails, Abedin is forever
chasing down her colleagues, across different floors of hotels. “Where r
u?” she writes to the policy aide Jake Sullivan. “Where r u?” she asks
the State Department official Paul Narain. “Meet you at Hyatt,” she
tells the President’s body man, Reggie Love. You sense a swarm of
prominent people circling Abedin, hoping to win a quarter-hour of her
time or a minute of her boss’s: the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the
banker Stephen Roach, the cyclist Lance Armstrong. Abedin’s own
attention is on the other young staffers who have daily contact with
Clinton—on the need to clarify, confer, meet up. Sullivan is in the
lobby or “gallivanting”; Narain is at the ballroom; Philippe Reines is
in his hotel room; Sarah Farnsworth is at the lobby bar. These tiny
social centers of power regulate the far-larger one, Clinton herself. To
those outside it, even just outside it, the circle around the Secretary
of State can seem impenetrable. “I hope that one of you can get this to
the Secretary—I’ve sent it to everyone else,” Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote
to Abedin and Sullivan, in April, 2009, appealing to them to forward a document. At the time, Slaughter was Clinton's director of policy
planning.

In each of the Clinton e-mail releases, the question has been whether
improper influence filtered through this circle, in particular from the
Clinton Foundation. In this week’s batch, the headlines came from an
exchange between Abedin and Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton,
who was trying to get a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent named
Gilbert Chagoury, a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, access to the
State Department. “We need Gilbert chagoury to speak to the substance
person re lebanon,” Band wrote to Abedin. “As you know, he’s key guy
there and to us and is loved in lebanon. Very imp.” Abedin replied that
the right person was a Lebanon policy expert named Jeffrey Feltman and
said, “I’ll talk to Jeff.” The exchange might have ended here, but Band
wrote back. “Better if you call him,” he said. “Now preferable. This is
very important. He’s awake I’m sure.” Celebrities and power brokers
genuflected to Abedin, but Band was sure he could lean on her. The most interesting words Band deployed were the simplest ones: “we” and “us.”
In a sense, they contained the essence of the many Clinton e-mail investigations: Whom did the Secretary of State’s senior staff
understand to be within the bounds of that “we”?

But when news organizations tracked down Feltman there was a delicious
turn. The State Department’s Lebanon expert had never heard about
Chagoury from Abedin or anyone else. “I was not aware of the proposal
that he speak to me until this email exchange was released, but in any
case we never spoke,” he told CNN. Band, in trying to take advantage of
the social dynamics around the Secretary of State, had misunderstood
their nature, and had promised access he couldn’t give. He thought he
was the heavy, and Abedin the functionary, but maybe it was the other
way around.

In the e-mails around Clinton, there is a constant, low-amplitude, transactional scurry: of older people for an audience, and of younger
people for a position. “Was just thinking about you and trying to see
where things were with your situation?” Abedin writes to a young
prospect. She promises Band that she will call someone who expected to
but did not get an ambassadorship. A young volunteer from the Clinton Foundation’s efforts in Haiti is interested in a position with the State Department, and a résumé and application are passed along. Clinton
herself, as she appears in the e-mails, seems far from this action,
sweating the policy details. “Pls print,” she is always asking her
staffers, when they send her lengthy memos. The promised scandals have
failed to materialize; there has been no evidence so far of a quid pro
quo, just an environment that includes entitled multimillionaires and
pushy Doug Band.

Washington right now is in a period of enforced transparency, with
Edward Snowden; WikiLeaks; Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee; and the
alleged Russian operative, or operatives, Guccifer 2.0. What they have
revealed is not some new hidden system of levers beneath the capital
but, rather, the same old system that we’ve more or less tolerated all
along. Access to governmental power depends too much on personal
relationships; rich friends of politicians have too easy a time gaining
an audience. “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s
legal,” the journalist Michael Kinsley famously said, during the George
H. W. Bush Administration, and for a long time that was regarded as a
truth about Washington. As a matter of ethics, it still holds; as a
matter of politics, it seems outdated.

The many different anti-Clinton camps, on the left and on the right,
share an assumption that all of the Clintons’ decisions are oriented
around off-the-books agendas, and that these agendas emerge in moments
of stress. This has amped up the fervor of the various probes into
Clinton’s e-mail and the Benghazi episode—by means of foia, subpoena,
and Russian hack—and it has also created a wild hype. In June, Julian
Assange told ITV that WikiLeaks had the goods on Clinton, and that its
material “could proceed to an indictment.” Republicans have spent years promoting the idea that at the heart of the Benghazi episode lies a
profound criminality, self-interest, and corruption. The insistence that
the probes will reveal illegal activity has crowded out the more
realistic possibility that the relationships around Clinton are simply unsavory—and this, in turn, has reduced the chances that this episode
will end with efforts at reform. “Lock her up!” Donald Trump’s crowds
cry, but each time they do it seems more ridiculous. We have seen so
many of her e-mails. Lock her up for what?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-real-scandal-of -hillary-clintons-e-mails

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