Hill versus Bill, part 2016

We all know Bill, the lovable rogue who gets things done and who gets away with everything. 

We all know Hillary, the smart one who rarely gets credit but always gets caught. 

Being accomplished, ambitious, energetic, and intelligent has brought Hillary to the place where two roads now diverge in a wood.  

One other factor has accelerated Hillary’s career and it’s the one factor that might end it. Bill. 

{mosads}There are numerous unanswered questions pending for Hillary Clinton by congressional investigators, editorialists, and reporters. They seek details.  

Among many different areas of inquiry, they seek details on the U.S. government’s approval of a Russian company’s takeover of a Canadian uranium mining company that owns approximately one-fifth of all known uranium deposits in the United States. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was in a position to approve or deny the acquisition. She approved it. 

Money from each phase of this deal flowed into both Bill Clinton’s pocket and into the Clinton Global Initiative. Not all of the money was reported, as required by the Obama administration’s rules. The Clinton Global Initiative is now amending several years of tax returns. Uranium is a strategic asset and cannot be exported out of the U.S. without express governmental approval. These are important but complicated questions. 

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of a special congressional committee investigating the tragedy at Benghazi, sent Hillary Clinton’s lawyers a letter with 138 questions regarding her exclusive use of a privately owned and maintained email server for State Department communications. She explained she decided to use a private email server for her “convenience,” admitting to comingling official business and personal emails.  

Secretary Clinton decided, in apparent contravention of State Department rules, upon her retirement from State to control all of her official emails rather than turning them over, unaltered, to the government for review and retention. Instead, she sent to the State Department printed versions, which cannot be sorted electronically, of only those emails that her team of lawyers determined were official. Her personal emails were deleted.

Later, facing congressional requests to have a third party examine the server itself, she declared that all records on the server were deleted. There is some evidence that she had years of advance knowledge that congressional investigators were likely to seek access to her official emails. She is a Yale-educated lawyer whose first job after graduation was on the congressional committee investigating Watergate. She cannot say she does not understand the importance of maintaining evidence. 

I have only a few questions. They are simple and they are more important.  

   1.    If you are elected President, will you close the Clinton Global Initiative and take Bill off the paid speaking circuit? 

   2.    If the answer is yes, then why not do it now? 

   3.    If the answer is no, then perhaps you should consider rejoining your family foundation and close the campaign to be president. 

President Kennedy’s favorite poet was Robert Frost and his most famous poem is likely one that the young Hillary knew well: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh 

Somewhere ages and ages hence: 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— 

I took the one less traveled by, 

And that has made all the difference.

As she once asked, in another context, “what difference, at this point, does it make?” 

It makes all the difference. 

One stray thought passed through my mind. What if the now deleted emails would have exonerated Hillary?

Boland is the founder and president of Dome Advisors LLC