Hillary Clinton avoids punishment in Arkansas over secret emails

Arkansas’s bar has declined to sanction former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her handling of her secret emails, rejecting a request that she face a misconduct investigation.

The state Supreme Court’s office of professional conduct didn’t offer any explanation for its decision in an Oct. 17 letter to Ty Clevenger, the lawyer who’d asked for action.

“As in most other states, Arkansas’s bar prosecutors will go to perverse lengths to protect a politically-influential attorney. Lawyers with the right political connections can get away with just about anything, and it doesn’t seem to matter if they’re Republicans or Democrats,” Mr. Clevenger said.

Mr. Clevenger had told Arkansas there was clear evidence Mrs. Clinton committer perjury in her explanation of her handling of her emails, and that she destroyed evidence by having her team delete tens of thousands of messages before the government had a chance to review them.

A bar official refused the complaint last year and Mr. Clevenger asked the professional conduct committee to step in.

They declined.

“After review, it was the decision of the sub-panel to affirm the executive director’s decision and dismiss your grievance filed in connection with the alleged conduct of the respondent attorney,” wrote Joseph Hickey, chairman of the committee.

Mrs. Clinton is currently suspended from the Arkansas bar for having not completed required ongoing certification training. But she could reactivate her license by taking the training, Mr. Clevenger said when he first filed his grievance in 2016.

Now, Mr. Clevenger says it doesn’t appear the committee did any investigation of Mrs. Clinton, despite taking two years to decide on his grievance.

“The reason the Arkansas committee did not offer an explanation is because they can’t admit that they dismissed the case for political reasons,” he said.

Mr. Clevenger said he is considering asking the state Supreme Court to step in and force a review of Mrs. Clinton’s bar status.

He has fought and lost similar grievances in other jurisdictions against Mrs. Clinton and her legal team that was directly responsible for the review and deletion of her emails, which she kept on a server at her home in New York, in a move the FBI said risked exposing national security secrets.