On December 19, 1998, President Bill Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives. There are many people who believe the Impeachment of Bill Clinton was about the sex scandal with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. While his behavior in office with a subordinate employee would have gotten any CEO in America fired, that was not what got Clinton impeached. He was impeached for Obstruction of Justice and Perjury to a Grand Jury. Both of those articles failed in the Senate.
To convict someone in an impeachment trial in the Senate, you need 67 votes. There were 50 votes for conviction on the obstruction charge and 45 for the perjury charge. That didn't mean he was innocent. It just meant the Senate didn't want to remove him from office for it. Clinton later signed a plea agreement and gave up his law license for five years.
He is the only president to have been impeached. Nixon resigned before impeachment proceeding could begin and Andrew Johnson was not impeached by one vote. However, if his wife wins election this fall, the very first thing Congress may do after her inauguration is take up impeachment proceedings against her for perjury. Dishonesty under oath seems to run in the Clinton family.
Two Republican congressmen, Jason Chaffetz and Bob Goodlatte have asked the District Attorney for the District of Columbia to investigate Hillary Clinton for perjury during her testimony on October 22 of last year. Now, when those hearings were held, the media played it up as a huge victory for Sec. Clinton. She had endured nine hours of grueling questioning from frothing Republicans and never said anything as stupid as "what difference does it make now anyways." So, clearly she won in the eyes of the media.
In those nine hours, there was one particular exchange with Congressman Jim Jordan from Ohio that is now a problem for Clinton. Earlier in the hearings, he had already exposed her lying to the American people about the cause of the attack on Benghazi. Indeed, the only positive press for Republicans that day came as a result Jordan's earlier questioning. But in the third session, at the end of the day, Jordan turned his attention to Clinton's emails. There are four specific times during that exchange where Hillary Clinton, under oath, did not answer Jim Jordan's questions truthfully. We know that what she said wasn't truthful because they were directly contradicted by FBI Director, Jim Comey this summer when he announced the results of the FBI's investigation into her email server. I'm going to show you each of those four answers from Clinton and follow them up with the direct contradiction from Comey so you can see the evidence for yourself.
Let's start with her first answer.
Clinton: I provided the department, which has been providing you, with all of my work-related e-mails, all that I had. Approximately 55,000 pages.
That actually wasn't an answer to the question Jordan asked, but she said it under oath and therefore it needed to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Turns out, it wasn't. Here's Director Comey counter to that argument at his press conference earlier this summer.
Comey: The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.
She lied. She lied under oath.
Next.
Jordan: Did someone physically look at the 62,000 e-mails, or did you use search terms, date parameters? I want to know the specifics.
Mrs. Clinton: They did all of that.
Two points here. First, the attorneys for Clinton who conducted this search were sitting behind Sec. Clinton at the hearing. They were Cheryl Mills and David Kendal. Both of those attorneys also represented President Bill Clinton at his Impeachment trial in the Senate back in 1998. Small world, hunh.
Second, Clinton's testimony was that her attorneys not only used search terms to find which of her emails were private and which were public, but that her attorneys also read each and every one to be sure. Here's Director Comey on this same topic earlier this summer.
Comey: The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014.
Comey's statement and Clinton's statement cannot both be true. The fact that her attorneys did not go through every email is also probably why her first answer that she had turned over all of her work related emails was not true.
Next, Representative Jordan wanted to know how many servers Clinton used. Was it just one or more than one?
Jordan: Is that right? There were two servers?
Clinton: No.
Jordan: OK.
Clinton: There was a -- there was a server...
Jordan: Just one?
Clinton: . . . that was already being used by my husband's team. An existing system in our home that I used, and then later, again, my husband's office decided that they wanted to change their arrangements, and that's when they contracted with the company in Colorado.
Jordan: And so there's only one server? Is that what you're telling me? And it's the one server that the FBI has?
Clinton: The FBI has the server that was used during the tenure of my State Department service.
Ok, now that answer is a little hard to follow. At first she claims there aren't two servers. She then said they used one existing server and then had a contract with a company in Colorado. So, if her statement is consistent throughout, that means they had one server set up in their home, and then contracted with the company in Colorado and sent their existing server to them. That would be very unusual to do, to say the least.
Here's director Comey clearing it up for us.
Comey: Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.
Several different servers is by definition more than one. It's also more than two. So, even if Clinton was confused in her answer, several is more than a couple and she still said something under oath that was untrue.
Finally, was there any classified information in her emails?
Clinton: There was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.
Here's Comey announcing the FBI's findings.
Comey: From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification.
Notice that Clinton used the term, "marked classified." While Comey said that anyone in her position should have known that something was classified even if it wasn't marked classified, that is not the point today. The issue is whether she lied under oath to the House Committee or not. She said "marked." Again, here's Comey.
Comey: Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.
"Only a very small number" is still more than "none." What Clinton said under oath was not true.
This testimony may not be the only time Clinton committed perjury. In the civil suit brought by Judicial Watch asking for all of Clinton's emails, she had to sign an affidavit saying she had turned over all of her work emails. She signed it, but as Comey demonstrated, she didn't actually turn them over. Again, that's perjury. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it will matter.
Comey laid out a beautiful case that the Secretary had been grossly negligent with our state secrets. He then failed to recommend that she be charged with gross negligence in mishandling our state secrets. There is no doubt she committed that crime and yet she won't be prosecuted for it because she is the Democrat Nominee for President. That's a travesty of justice that should be unacceptable in a nation who's creed is that all are created equal.
She has lied under oath at least five times. That's also a crime. But, if the Justice Department wouldn't prosecute her for Gross Negligence with classified information, why would they prosecute her for Perjury? I have no faith that justice will be done here either.
I also don't have any faith that an impeachment trial against a president Hillary Clinton will be successful. Yes, all four counts of Perjury to the House Committee and the one count of Perjury in court would pass the House. But, the Senate will be close to 50-50 and you need 67 votes to convict over there. She won't be convicted, and that simple math may mean the House would decide not to impeach her in the first place. She's done the crimes. She won't do the time.
Our Government has decided that some of us are just more equal than others. It seems many Americans have come to the same conclusion. Bill Clinton is the only President ever to have been impeached. But, most Americans have a positive opinion of him today. Hillary has endangered the lives of American spies with her illegal email activities. Those emails may have lead to the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist who was working with us to stop the Iranian nuclear program. He was executed by Iran last month. But, despite her reckless and lawless behavior, she's still leading in the polls.
The only way for Hillary Clinton to be brought to justice for her crimes against this nation is for her to lose the election in November. There is only one person who has the mathematical possibility of being able to do that. I know a lot of you don't like him. I don't like him either. But, if Donald Trump loses, Hillary wins, and the idea that all of us are equal before the law will lose as well. The only person who can bring Hillary Clinton to justice is you. And, I hate to say this, but the only way you can do that, is to hold your nose and vote for Trump.