At this late date anyone shocked by Hillary Clinton lying is like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who pronounced himself “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money].” Anyone who believes any of the various and inconsistent explanations and justifications of her claiming private ownership of the public record of her service in the State Department probably also believes that her 30,000 or so destroyed “private” emails — half of everything she claims to have written — really were private.
And in fact Hillary Clinton’s lying — any Clinton’s lying — is indeed, as the Clintons would say, old news. What is new is that she has lied so much in so many different venues that she has now been reduced to lying about her lying.
Thus on “Fox News Sunday” she replied to Chris Wallace’s request for her to comment on FBI Director James Comey’s comment that “none of those things you told the American public [about classified information being sent and received on her private server] were true.”
CLINTON: Chris, that’s not what I heard Director Comey say, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity, in my view, clarify.
Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.
Comey, of course, said exactly the opposite. His July 5 prepared statement on the FBI investigation confirmed that
Seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters…. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).
In short, everyone, even the Associated Press and the Washington Post (Four Pinocchios), recognized Clinton’s claim that Directory Comey said her statements were truthful was a gaffe “short-circuited” reply a lie. But now, ignoring universal advice about what people standing in a hole should, she has doubled down, digging even deeper below the surface of truth. Yesterday, speaking to combined conventions of black and Hispanic journalists, Hillary declared that “what we have here is pretty much what I have been saying throughout this whole year and — and that is that I never sent or received anything that was marked ‘classified.’”
Well, that too, of course, is a lie. The only thing consistent about Hillary’s serial explanations of her server fiasco is their mendacity. When she first went public with her defense in a disastrous press conference in March 2015, she declared without any “marked” or other qualification that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”
When that claim was easily proven, er, short-circuited, she took to saying “marked classified,” in hopes that would fool enough people who might not know that classified information does not have to be “marked” classified to be classified. As Director Comey said in his prepared statement, “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”
But perhaps she wasn’t lying about knowing that she sent and received classified information. Perhaps it is a mistake to assume that Hillary Clinton actually knows what she “should know.”
So, what we have now is the nominee of one party who bombastically disregards and disrespects truth and the nominee of the other who is a calculated, lawyered-up, serial liar.
And to think we used to be a great nation….
