EDITORIAL: Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s Islamic connection

OPINION:

So many lies, coincidences and distractions, so little time. Perhaps the most serious (who can keep count?) of the new Hillary revelations are that Huma Abedin’s emails are among the missing from Hillary’s private email server. Were Ms. Abedin’s emails trashed to cover a conflict of interest when she was taking pay as a private consultant while on the State Department payroll as an aide to Hillary?

Ms. Abedin was traveling chief of staff and “body woman” during Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. That’s her role in this campaign. That intimacy, long demonstrated, has been a crucial contribution to the Clinton decision-making process, both before and after her service in the Obama administration.

Huma Abedin comes from a distinguished Muslim family. Her father, of Indian Muslim heritage, taught in an American university and afterward was set up in a private foundation in Saudi Arabia. The purpose and goals of the foundation have never been quite clear, but it was intended to influence international opinion. His work has been carried on by his widow, a leading member of a women’s auxiliary organization of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hillary and her top aide visited her in the Middle East, presumably to discuss the chaos in the region and what American policy should be. The Obama administration sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a sort of an Islamic version of the Christian Democratic parties in Europe, ignoring the uncomfortable fact that so many of the Islamic terrorist organizations bedeviling the Middle East have all sprung from the bowels of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The public interest law firm Judicial Watch has filed a request to open Ms. Abedin’s emails from her four years at the State Department. News accounts suggest that Ms. Abedin used Hillary’s private email server to avoid the proper procedures of the official State Department email network. Others have used such servers in the distant past, but the Obama administration early on strengthened the rule that government traffic had to flow on government networks. Hillary Clinton knew this well, and ignored the rule.

That puts her in direct violation of State Department regulations, if not federal law, and makes the Abedin correspondence critical, adding a new dimension to the controversy. This connection was first disclosed three years ago by Rep. Michele Bachmann and other Republicans, but in the usual excess of political correctness the liberal noise machine, led by The Washington Post and joined in by Sen. John McCain and others, denounced her as a purveyor of Islamophobia and McCarthyism.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican, raised questions about the propriety of Ms. Abedin drawing State Department pay as a part-time aide to Mrs. Clinton while drawing pay as a consultant to private clients. The State Department said there was no question of her passing government information to her private employers, but didn’t say why there was no question.

Attempts to bring public scrutiny to the odd Abedin arrangements have been, characteristically, called “McCarthyism” and Islamophobia. This is the frequent defense invoked by liberals when legitimate questions are raised about inconvenient Democratic sins. The defense slides over the fact that in addition to the excesses of certain congressional investigations in the late 1940s, the investigations identified a number of Communist conspirators at a time when the old Soviet Union was a mortal enemy of the United States.

There may be nothing in the Hillary-Abedin correspondence but innocent girl talk about who was coming to dinner, commiseration over wayward husbands and chatter about the grandchildren. But what we’ve learned about Hillary is that there is very little innocence about her. That correspondence was public property.