OPINION:
When Donald Trump said that the crimes Hillary Clinton apparently committed by conducting classified government business over her unsecured “Clintonmail” email system was “worse than Watergate,” the sputtering outrage of the left was amusing. The Clinton camp even dredged up John Dean, the convicted felon who helped manage the Watergate coverup, to insist that Mr. Trump is horribly wrong.
Actually, Mr. Trump is more right than he is wrong. Any reasonable comparison between the Watergate crimes and the crimes comprising Mrs. Clinton’s email mess show that the two are far more alike than they are different.
Though the left insists Richard Nixon ordered the Watergate burglary, that’s not an established fact. There is no question, however, that Hillary Clinton made the decision and ordered her staff to create her unsecured “Clintonmail.com” email system.
She made that decision and issued those orders for a corrupt purpose: to evade the law’s requirements that communications of America’s secrets be conducted only on secure emails, telephones and in secure conference rooms. Those laws aren’t for show: the crimes they describe carry penalties of 10 years in prison for each violation.
Those laws are not the “record-keeping” requirements that are imposed by separate laws and most often the focus of every debate on the Clinton email matter. The legal secrecy requirements are implemented by detailed regulations in Defense, State, and other departments. Their requirements are unambiguous as are the responsibilities the laws and regs impose on people, such as Mrs. Clinton and her staffers, who are given clearances to access classified information.
The laws providing penalties for mishandling secrets establish much more severe penalties than those for burglary or obstruction of justice. The District of Columbia criminal code defines the Watergate break-in as a second degree burglary punishable by two to 15 years in prison. Under the federal criminal code, obstruction of justice is punishable by up to five years in prison.
The federal statute prohibiting the treatment of classified information in a “grossly negligent” manner provides that each offense is punishable by up 10 years in prison. In his July 5 press conference, FBI director James Comey said that among the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton gave the State Department because they were “work related,” 110 emails in 52 email chains contained information that was classified at the time the emails were sent.
Because sending each email is a separate offense, 10 times 110 means Mrs. Clinton and her some of her staffers could get 1100 years behind bars. And there’s more.
The biggest part of the crisis that the Watergate scandal caused was the attempted coverup that Nixon and his closest staffers, including John Mitchell, the attorney general, put the full weight of their offices behind.
The Clinton email scandal quickly tainted Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whom former president Bill Clinton met with on a Phoenix airport runway in late June. Let’s not forget that Bill Clinton appointed Ms. Lynch to her U.S. Attorney’s job from which President Obama elevated her to attorney general.
Less than a week after that meeting, FBI Director James Comey conducted a highly unusual press conference. He first described conduct by Mrs. Clinton that precisely fit the description of a federal crime under Title 18 US Code Section 793 and then proceeded to declare that no reasonable prosecutor would bring those charges. He stopped the investigation.
But Mr. Comey had to restart the investigation after agents effectively faced him down with new evidence found in the computer shared between Mrs. Clinton’s closest aide and confidante, Huma Abedin, and her now-estranged husband, former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner.
As my friend Andy McCarthy wrote on November 1 in National Review, FBI agents conducting the parallel investigation into the Clinton Foundation have been regularly stymied by prosecutors who don’t seem interested in prosecuting the Clintons for anything having to do with the Foundation. These prosecutors are people who Ms. Lynch hired, managed and in some cases promoted during her years as U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York.
That sort of corruption exceeds that of the Watergate coverup because it permeates the Justice Department and — because Mr. Obama used the unsecured email to correspond with Mrs. Clinton — as well as the White House and the State Department. Mrs. Clinton’s alleged selling America’s foreign policy for contributions to the Clinton Foundation — goes hand in glove with it. Under Title 18 U.S. Code Section 201, that sort of self-dealing is a felony punishable by two years in prison.
The most recent news reports say that the FBI has confirmed that Hillary Clinton’s private email system was hacked. Information — possibly secret or top secret information — was extracted from it at least five times by parties unknown. Russia, China, Iran and other American enemies are at the top of the suspect list. Mrs. Clinton’s intent to disclose secrets can be inferred by the fact that she ordered the unsecured email system to be created and used it to communicate secret and top secret information.
Richard Nixon, despite all his misconduct and crimes, put nation above self and resigned rather than put the country through a long and tumultuous impeachment. As her long record proves, Hillary Clinton will never put nation above self.
• Jed Babbin served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration. He is a senior fellow of the London Center for Policy Research and the author of five books including “In the Words of Our Enemies.”
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