The Attorney General of the United States, Loretta Lynch, testified before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. I’m a senior member of that committee.
She was asked a lot of questions, and answered them (or didn’t answer them) for about four hours. Republicans of course spent a lot of their time trying to gain insight into why FBI Director Comey (who is subordinate to Attorney General Lynch) chose not to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. Lynch dodged virtually every question by a Republican, coming back again and again to her pat answer, that she’d left the matter up to “career agents and prosecutors, including Director Comey” and if we had any questions about anything, take it up with them. So much for transparency, and accountability. She after all is the Attorney General of the United States, and Comey answers to her. But you’d never have known it from the hearing.
So what’d I ask her? Well I was the third Republican to question her (each member of the committee gets five minutes, alternating back and forth between Republicans and Democrats.) And I had five questions prepared to ask her – I got around to three of them.
I first told her that I found FBI Director Comey’s decision not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton disheartening, because to a lot of Americans, it looked like there was a double standard – one for Hillary Clinton, and one for everybody else. After all, Hillary Clinton had lied when she said she never sent or received classified information over her private email server, when in fact she’d sent over 100 emails with classified information, and eight of them were even TOP SECRET. So I asked Attorney General Lynch if she agreed with Director Comey, and with most Americans, that Hillary Clinton had lied. She gave a non-answer answer, basically saying go back and read what Comey said.
I then said that I think that one of the great mysteries of this case is how Director Comey came to the conclusion that Hillary Clinton’s “extreme carelessness” didn’t constitute the “gross negligence” necessary to be guilty of violating the law. She gave another non-answer answer.
Since she hadn’t answered either of my questions up to that point, I decided to use my remaining time to make a point – specifically about another time in this country’s history when we saw a double standard at play. Eighteen years ago, it was Hillary’s husband who was in trouble. Bill Clinton was accused of sexually harassing a number of women. One of the women brought a lawsuit against him, and he lied under oath, committed perjury. For this he was impeached by the United States House of Representatives, and put on trial in the United States Senate. I was chosen to be one of the prosecutors in that Senate trial, and my principal focus was perjury. I argued before the Senate that not only were the elements of perjury proven, but that there were hundreds of people behind bars all over America for perjury, and no one, including the President of the United States, should be above the law. Well even though perjury was clearly proven, all the Democratic Senators voted against removing President Clinton from office, so the vote was 50/50 and he remained President. There was a double standard back then with Bill Clinton, and we are now seeing a double standard again with Hillary Clinton.
(You can see the five-minute exchange between myself and Attorney General Lynch by clicking here.)
One final point. After Director Comey let Hillary Clinton off the hook last week, he testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Comey said something that surprised a lot of the Members of the committee, and that was that he had not considered any of Hillary’s statements made before the House Benghazi Committee (the Trey Gowdy Committee) in his report. It was there that Hillary under oath made most of her false statements about never having sent any classified emails on her private server, etc. Comey said he hadn’t received a referral from Congress asking him to consider her testimony there (apparently no one on the Committee thought it was necessary.) So now the Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Jason Chaffetz, and the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, have together sent a letter to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia requesting an investigation to determine whether Hillary Clinton committed perjury during her testimony under oath before Congress. (Click here to see a copy of the letter.)
Whether Hillary Clinton will finally be held accountable for her transgressions by the judicial system, or by the voters this fall, or not at all, remains to be seen.