There is a treasure trove of articles on Hillary and her email server scandal but the two articles below give you an idea of how her evasion of the truth of today’s scandals dates back to the 1990’s. Hard to believe that so many Democrats are so faithful to her and her spun webs of evasion.It will be fascinating to see how Hillary’s emails will be tied to her own personal slush fund – The Clinton Foundation. Perhaps the Washington Post will assign 20 journalists to investigate the Clinton Foundation like they assigned to investigate Donald Trump. Don’t hold your breath !!!! Truly amazing how many influential people help her to cover her tracks. Guess that is what Crony Capitalism is all about ! NancyClinton’s Lawyer, Under Oath
Hillary’s aide is so evasive that she can’t even clearly vouch for her own honesty.
Cheryl Mills in Washington, D.C., in 2015. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESSThe news out of last week’s Cheryl Mills deposition was that the Clinton confidante didn’t say much about Hillary’s email server. Which only goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has a serious problem—and she knows it.
This is, after all, Cheryl Mills. For more than 20 years, she has served as the Clintons’ very own Winston Wolf ( Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction”)—their fixer, their problem-solver. From impeachment right up through Benghazi and the server, Ms. Mills is the one constant in the behind-the-scenes obstruction. The less she talks, the more alarm bells ought to ring.
Opinion Journal Video
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton on the former Hillary Clinton aide’s deposition in a case concerning the former Secretary of State’s private server. Photo credit: Getty Images.This was the measure to watch when Ms. Mills arrived last Friday to sit for an interview with attorneys for Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over missing federal records.
In early May the oversight group convinced a federal judge to order discovery into the creation and operation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server. Judicial Watch was granted permission to depose seven central figures, including Ms. Mills, who served as Hillary’s aide at the State Department and later as her private lawyer.
Mrs. Clinton claims she set up the home-brew server in an innocent act aimed at convenience, so it was notable that Ms. Mills marched into her deposition accompanied by no fewer than seven lawyers—three representing Ms. Mills herself, and two each from the Justice and State departments. Two of the government lawyers made clear that they were not only representing their departments but also guarding Ms. Mills in her capacity as a former federal employee. This is President Obama’s assist for Mrs. Clinton.
The lawyers earned their pay. The entire 270-page transcript of the deposition, which Judicial Watch released Tuesday, has an almost eye-glazing repetition about it.
A persistent Judicial Watch attorney attempts to ask Ms. Mills a straightforward question. Before she even finishes, Ms. Mills’s army of attorneys falls all over itself to object, to insist that the query is outside the “scope” of the inquiry or too vague, and to instruct the witness not to answer.
On the rare occasions that they do allow Ms. Mills to open her mouth, it is only after coaching her on what is a permissible response. Not that they need to worry, as Ms. Mills appears to have lived on a distant planet the past several decades.
She doesn’t “know” or can’t “recall” even basic facts or conversations. “I don’t recall having such discussions.” “I can’t speak” to that. “I don’t have a recollection of doing so.” “I don’t know the answer to that question.”
She can’t, or won’t, make a direct statement even about her own honesty. “Are there any reasons why you would not be able to answer truthfully here today?” asks the Judicial Watch attorney. “Not that I know of,” Ms. Mills responds, suggesting that there may be reasons she’s lying, but that she probably won’t recall them until later.
In the spirit of looking cooperative, Ms. Mills did on occasion natter away, filling time with utterly irrelevant factoids about State Department org charts and her interest in Haiti and food security. In this way, she managed to spend most of a day evading and stonewalling every relevant question.
Ms. Mills can barely recall any conversation with anyone while at the State Department about a server, or email, or anything. She is clueless or mum on why the server came to be or who knew about it, or how it worked.
Notably, the Mills team spends much of the interview suggesting she had no real knowledge of the system while on the federal payroll. Why does the timing matter? Because Ms. Mills began working as a private lawyer for Mrs. Clinton after they left government. Anything she learned at that point is therefore protected by attorney-client privilege. Which is convenient.
Frustrating as this surely was for Judicial Watch and the nation, it can’t have been surprising. The Clintons haven’t survived all these years without the support of talented people, and Ms. Mills—give her credit—is unrivaled when it comes to protecting her bosses. Her deposition was something approaching performance art, a perfectly crafted mix of polite ignorance, purposeful misdirection and clever defense.
Yet the presence of all those lawyers proves that Ms. Mills knows she, and her boss, could have a major problem.
What is Bryan Pagliano, the former Clinton IT specialist, telling the FBI under his reported immunity deal? Will it conflict with the Mills deposition? (Interestingly, Mr. Pagliano recently announced he intends to plead the Fifth at his upcoming Judicial Watch deposition.) And what does federal Judge Emmet Sullivan think when he reads the transcript of the Mills runaround? He ordered this discovery to get answers, and it’s eminently clear that Ms. Mills is deliberately not giving them.
Her performance is all anyone needs to know about Mrs. Clinton’s guilt in the server scandal. Someone who set up a home-brew email system for “convenience” wouldn’t need people like Cheryl Mills.
Write to kim@wsj.com.
THE WALL STREET JOURNALHillary’s Crooked Defense
In Clintonworld, anything that isn’t found criminal becomes permissible.
“I’m not a crook.”
In 1973 the sitting president, Richard Nixon, used these words at a news conference to deny allegations he had profited off his public service.
In 2016 an aspiring president, Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for the White House, is advancing an aggressive variant of the Nixon defense. It runs like this: Anything that isn’t criminal is permissible—and therefore none of it should be disqualifying for the Oval Office.
This has become the go-to argument for Team Clinton these days. Thus Maryland Democrat Rep.Elijah Cummings was quick out of the box last week when the State Department’s inspector general released a damning report finding that then-Secretary of State Clinton had defied the department’s rules by setting up her private email server. Mr. Cummings, ABC News said, pointed out that the inspector general’s report “does not accuse Clinton of any crime.” The implication is that it therefore doesn’t matter.
Chalk it up as one legacy of the first Clinton presidency, which has prepared the way for the second. Because by refusing to resign after being caught out in an affair with an intern, President Bill Clintonsuccessfully lowered the bar for would-be President Hillary.
In his fight to remain in office, Mr. Clinton’s argument was that because sex between two consenting adults—even between the president of the United States and a subordinate 27 years his junior—wasn’t a crime, it was nobody’s business but his and his family’s. In this brave new world, even perjury turned out not to be a crime when Bill Clinton did it, because it was about sex.
Today the No Crime/No Foul defense defines the case for Mrs. Clinton. And she and her defenders have been invoking it for years:
“There were no criminal violations involved here.” The speaker was Clinton Budget Director Leon Panetta in July 1993, putting forward the White House party line on the firing of seven people in the travel office, in which some had detected Hillary’s hand. Three years later, an internal memo would surface confirming Mrs. Clinton as the force behind the sackings.
“As far as even a breath of criminal activity by either the president and the first lady, it will turn out to be nothing at all.” This time it was White House counsel Lloyd Cutler in March 1994, dismissing the inquiry into the smelly Whitewater land deal. The remark came at the same time Mrs. Clinton was explaining to the press that she hadn’t been forthcoming about the details because she had been trying to protect her family’s privacy.
“Those motives for helping Webb Hubbell, you can criticize or not, but they’re not criminal.” This was 1998, and it was now the turn of Lanny Davis, a former White House special counsel. Mr. Davis was arguing that the hundreds of thousands in payments that Mrs. Clinton’s former law partner had received from Clinton associates after he’d resigned from the Justice Department was not hush money to keep him quiet.
“No evidence of a crime.” “Nothing criminal.” “Nothing illegal.” “No criminal activity.” How frequently these words pop up when the subject of discussion is some action by Mrs. Clinton.
Now we have the FBI investigation into her private email server. When the New York Times reported the news last year, the Clinton campaign haggled over the Times’s use of—you guessed it!—the word “criminal” the Times had used to describe the investigation. The Times issued a correction.
In a perverse way, it all works to Mrs. Clinton’s advantage. For so long as a criminal conviction is presented as the only possible disqualification for running for president, Mrs. Clinton will remain viable even if she does get indicted. In addition, the whole obsession with whether the FBI investigation will end up in an indictment helps deflect attention away from other key aspects of the server mess that themselves make pretty substantive claims for Mrs. Clinton’s unfitness.
Even putting aside the question of criminality, we know the following: While in a position of trust, Mrs. Clinton deliberately chose to put American security at risk by setting up her home server. In so doing, she also concealed what should have been public records from the American people. In the year since she’s been found out, almost every public statement she has made in defense of her actions has been exposed as false. And she refused to cooperate with investigators.
In short, this is a woman who never tells the truth when a lie will serve her purposes equally well.
What an extraordinary place this has left her party and her country. Here we are, six months out from the presidential election, and the Democratic nominee is under federal investigation.
It used to be, before the Clintons first moved into the White House, that having no criminal conviction was something that kept you out of prison. But the way Mrs. Clinton and her defenders talk, it’s almost as though it should make her president.
Write to McGurn@wsj.com.
