The Many Reasons We Cannot Trust Hillary Clinton

Clinton’s Pattern of Deception Can be Traced Back Decades

By Nancy Flory Published on October 22, 2016

Can voters trust Hillary Clinton? She’s been caught in lie after lie — why does she still have supporters? For Millennials and younger people who weren’t around or old enough to remember, Clinton’s pattern of deception can be traced back decades — and Americans are frustrated as they witness the mainstream media do a cursory flyby on the events, glossing over any perceived indiscretions. Here’s a refresher in why Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

The New York Times’ William Safire, in his 1996 commentary titled “Essay; Blizzard of Lies,” put together a splendid piece of informative journalism — well before Clinton’s lies cost any lives. Americans are coming to the sad realization, Safire opined, “that our first lady … is a congenital liar.” Take that in for a moment. It was well known, back in 1996, that this woman was capable of lying on a grand scale, expressly to further her own interests. Here’s what we knew back then:

Commodities Trading

In 1979, Hillary Clinton explained that her incredible 10,000 percent profit on commodities trading was the result of her own canny ability to work the market. We know now that her story was a lie — a lawyer ran her account through a “disreputable broker.” Eventually, Hillary Clinton admitted that her friend James Blair had executed 30 of her 32 trades directly with the broker. Why did she lie? According to Safire, “To admit otherwise would be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe.”

Vincent Foster’s Suicide

Following the apparent suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, Hillary Clinton reneged on an agreement that would have allowed the Justice Department to examine the files in Foster’s office related to the Whitewater scandal. She lied in an April, 1994 press conference, saying “I don’t know that [Maggie Williams, then-chief of staff] did remove any documents.”

Three months later it was reported that Hillary Clinton had indeed instructed Williams to remove the Foster documents from the White House. Her obstruction of justice went without punishment. “Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster’s White House office, were spirited out in the dead of night and hidden from the law for two years — in Hillary’s closet, in Web Hubbell’s basement before his felony conviction [and] in the President’s secretary’s personal files,” Safire reported. “The records show Hillary Clinton was lying when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.&L., and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell’s father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million.” By hiding the records until the statute of limitations passed, Hillary Clinton was able to avoid a lawsuit by the bank regulators she cheated.

Hillary Under Fire? Not So Much

In a 1996 visit to war-ravaged Bosnia, Hillary Clinton claimed that she and her entourage “landed under sniper fire and had to run ‘with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.'” Videos released later showed a calm Hillary Clinton walking slowly across the tarmac, waving at the gathered crowd and greeting a small child who brought a poem for Clinton.

Travelgate

The Travelgate scandal involved the firing of the entire White House travel aides staff, who were then, according to the New York Times, harassed unnecessarily by the F.B.I. and Justice Department in an effort to justify hiring Clinton cronies to replace them. Some speculated that the FBI probe and the harsh news media coverage led to the suicide of Vincent Foster. Hillary Clinton told the General Accounting Office, through her attorney, that “she had no role in the decision to fire the employees, did not know the ‘origin of the decision,’ and ‘did not direct that any action be taken by anyone’ other than keeping her informed.”

However, David Watkins, a campaign official who took over the White House Administration, remembers it quite differently, according to the GAO report. “Watkins said the First Lady wanted to get “our people” into the travel office.” According to a memorandum released later, not only was Hillary Clinton the key figure in the firings, but because she had created a “climate of fear” for the White House staff, aides were much less likely to question her wishes. Watkins had been summoned on more than one occasion to speak with Hillary Clinton about the firing of the White House travel staff to make room for the company that handled the Clinton campaign’s charters. Fear of the Clintons, said Watkins, led him to the conclusion that “I must more forcefully and immediately follow the direction of the First Family.”

The Many Tales of Benghazi

On September 11, 2012 American diplomatic and intelligence-gathering installations in Benghazi were attacked, killing four Americans. The House Select Committee had been warned by a security officer who had been sent to assess the threat level at the installation that death was imminent: “I told [them] that this was a suicide mission; that there was a very good chance that everybody here was going to die; that there was absolutely no ability here to prevent an attack whatever.”

The threat was known and within hours the White House knew that the Benghazi attack was planned and not a spontaneous reaction to an offensive video, as Clinton claimed incessantly to the American public. She said it best, however, in her September 12, 2012 statements to Egyptian Prime Minister Kandil: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest. … Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Later, in an interview with a hand-picked reporter, Hillary denied having been subpoenaed regarding the Benghazi attack. This assertion was promptly addressed by Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), chair of the committee investigating the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack when he produced the subpoena. Clinton’s heartlessness was felt worldwide when questioned about the two stories she told to the public regarding the inflammatory video theory versus and al Qaeda attack, she petulantly erupted, “What difference does it make!”

‘C’ Stands for Confidential, Hillary

The private email server has perhaps been the most talked about egregious behavior on Clinton’s part, and it stems from the information she had on the Benghazi attack. During the 2014 investigation on the Benghazi attack, the State Department realized they didn’t have emails to comply with requests related to the investigation. While Clinton released 30,000 work-related emails, her team divulged that 30,000 emails that they had decided were personal were deleted.

The New York Times in March broke the story that Clinton had used a private email account while working at the State Department. Later, she hired a nondescript Colorado company operating out of an apartment to store work and personal emails from her time as Secretary of State. As the investigation heated up, agents began getting concerned that documents of a confidential nature were stored on a private and unsecured server outside of State Department protocol. Hillary Clinton played dumb with FBI agents, telling them that “she had no idea that the letter ‘C’ stood for confidential in official e-mails,” reported the New York Post.

Curiously, she then adamantly claimed on multiple occasions that there were no classified documents sent via her private email. At a Democratic debate in February, Clinton claimed that “I never sent or received any classified material.” And again in July, 2016: “Let me repeat what I have repeated for many months now,” Clinton said. “I never received nor sent any material that was marked classified.” According to Politifact, the investigation ultimately found that Clinton was lying once again. Of the emails that the investigators were able to acquire, 110 contained classified information, 8 e-mail chains contained top secret information, 36 chains contained secret information and 8 contained confidential information. It is impossible to say how many classified documents were destroyed by Hillary Clinton’s team before the investigative team could retrieve them.

Little Lies

As Kevin Williamson has written, Hillary seems to lie gratuitously, just to stay in practice. Consider her little lies about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest (she was 6 years old when he climbed the peak); and her 1975 trip to the Marine Corps to sign up for service only to be told that she was too old at 26 (she was already engaged to a candidate for Arkansas Attorney General and held a law degree, 26 is not too old for the Marines, and a friend of hers remembers that she went to the recruiter’s office to manufacture a controversy about how they treated women).

William Safire seemed to grasp Hillary in totality and the futility of questioning why she lies. “Therefore, ask not ‘Why didn’t she just come clean at the beginning?’ She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”

Don’t expect Hillary to change if she wins the White House. Just take what she says with a million grains of salt.

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