Lock Her Up!!

Most of the nation awaits the inevitable conclusion of the Show Trial underway in the Senate and it ain't pretty at all. Honestly, it's as if Al Capone had stacked his tax fraud trial jury with members of his own crime organization, and stifled the prosecution by not allowing documents or witnesses. In fact, The Defendant-in-Chief yesterday felt confident enough to remark at a Davos presser that the trial will be a big zero because "honestly, we have all the material. They don't have the material." Yes, he said the whole Obstruction of Congress impeachment amendment thing out loud, and doesn't care. Why should he when he knows he'll be acquitted, no matter what.

(It's also worth noting that Red State Republican Senators represent a majority of the Senate, but only 18% of the U.S. population. Hmmmmmmm.... that's the core of MAGA-land right there.)

But no matter. Today we're positing what would have happened to Hillary Clinton if her 3 million popular vote majority made her President! Or even, if the 80,000 combined votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania hadn't gone to the T-monster, thus making her an Electoral College winner, too!

It's quite a "What If?" But with a high degree of confidence I can say that Clinton would have been impeached before the 2018 mid-term election.

Now before we go any further, don't expect this to be a Hillary love letter. I voted for her because the alternative, as we now know, was too awful to contemplate. True, many of her positions on certain issues were aligned with my own. However, she exhibited prior questionable judgments that made me an unenthusiastic supporter. (Exhibit A: the sudden appearance of the Whitewater investigation Rose Law Firm billing records. Exhibit B: her claim to be under sniper fire when she landed in Bosnia, 1996. Exhibit C: her dreadful 2016 campaign.)

Overall, I think she would have been OK as Chief Executive. But she would arrive at the White House with heavy baggage from the campaign that the GOP House and Senate would be investigating with full force from Day One. Here are the subjects they'd be pushing for impeachment, and they were all red meat for the "LOCK HER UP!!" chants at Trump rallies:

Uranium One.

The Clinton Foundation. 

More Benghazi More.

The Mishandled and Missing Emails. 

Let's take a look at each of these!

The sale of Uranium One was a real hot ticket back in 2015 and early 2016. When the book "Clinton Cash" came out, it put this topic square up front. I had friends claim that Clinton made millions off the deal and that she was going to be exposed and pull out of the race within a week or so. Well, that didn't happen. But it didn't keep GOP-heads from insisting that Clinton was single-handedly  responsible for the sale of this proud company to the Russians. And that Russia got all this yuuuuge chunk of American-mined uranium for its own weapons. And Clinton put the profits into her foundation and pocketbook! And Clinton was a traitor! RRRRRRR!!

As you might know, passions still run high. There were donations made to the Clinton Foundation that were, well, awkward. Bill did receive $500,000 for a speech to a group friendly to the sale. But in the end, as Secretary of State, H Clinton was one of nine officials who signed off on the vetted  deal, and only the President could have stopped it. As for the rest of the "Clinton Cash" BS reaction that surrounded Uranium One, it all fell apart in the end. The Trump Department of Justice quietly  announced it was dropping its investigation into this mostly baseless canard.

Ha Ha Ha HA HA HAAA HAAAA HAAAARRR OH HA HA HAAAA!

The Clinton Foundation has always been seen by MAGAites as a slush fund cash cow for Bill and Hillary. As written in "Clinton Cash" and promulgated by multitudes of right wing media platforms, the Clintons have used their foundation as an access-to-power scheme. Donate, and you get what you want from the then-Secretary of State and friendly influence from the past President. Again, my conservative friends were agitated by the blatant disregard for the law! These Clintons, RRRRRRR!!

Except, of course, that the charges set forth in "Clinton Cash" and subsequent accusations from the GOP fever swamp have crashed and burned. Yes, after more than two years of effort, the Justice Department announced it's closing down its probe and expects no charges. It's very hard for many to accept, including the conservative National Review, which when reporting on this development, stated that the Clinton Foundation was defunct. (It isn't.)

As for the oft-stated corrupt nature of the Clinton Foundation, the gold-standard charity watchdog, Charity Navigator, has consistently given it high marks. (In severe contrast, the Trump Foundation was recently forced by New York courts to close shop because of its fraudulent operations. The Trump family, being its Board of Directors, was fined $2 million dollars.)

Benghazi. Or, BENGHAZI!!! If you were in a coma between September 12, 2012 through H Clinton's epic 11-hour House testimony on October 22, 2015 you would have missed an enormous amount of partisan BS spun by both parties. The deaths of 4 Americans, including the Ambassador to Libya, at a CIA operations base that had been clumsily designated as a "consulate" was a real fustercluck. Plenty of finger-pointing and hysterics to go around. Republican rhetoric rose to accusing Clinton of accessory to murder and treason. Democratic rhetoric spun a series of stupid CYA defenses that failed to satisfy.

In the end, the House launched 10 separate investigations on what went down in Benghazi. 107 witnesses were called to testify, and did. The Executive Branch produced over 100,000 document pages in compliance with House requests. There were 33 individual hearings. Hillary Clinton emerged as blameless for the four deaths, but not so blameless in the subsequent spin. Because she had slipped through their fingers yet again, Republicans ratcheted up their fury toward her. GRRRRR!!

And, of course, her emails. The disclosure that Clinton used a private server for her Secretary of State business was THE big catch of the Benghazi hearings. It can be argued that this revelation, with the tortured and defensive spin by Hillary, and its subsequent handling by the FBI, sank the S.S. Clinton on November 8, 2016.

The big question remains: why the hell did she do it? Hills insists it was for convenience. She was accustomed to it for her Blackberry. And that it's a practice that's not uncommon within government. This seems true, even, stupidly, amongst top-level Trump Administration nitwits.

But it always seemed to me that Ms. Clinton chose this route because of her 20+ years of being in the crosshairs of the GOP Hate Machine. I believe she decided that using the private email server would provide some extra insulation for her... a layer of privacy and obfuscation. As a result, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for such info by reporters, groups and individuals were stymied. State Department couldn't give them what it didn't have, officially. She had been sneaky.

But then, once outed, the problem compounded. Clinton lawyers separated her official emails from personal business ones, roughly 30,000 each. As was her prerogative, she had her personal emails sent to her email vendor, Platte River Systems, with instructions to hold for 60 days if they were somehow needed, and then delete afterwards. A doofus at Platte forgot to delete them after 60 days. And it was after this 60 day period that the House issued its subpoena for these personal emails. The doofus panicked and deleted them too late, and in apparent "defiance" of the House request. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you "the missing emails!!"

Yep, a big dopey mess that would hang around Hillary's neck like an albatross. And if she had become President, it's guaranteed that it would be used in an Impeachment inquiry. Along with the ridiculous accusations from the Uranium One kerfuffle, the Clinton Foundation flat tire, and BENGHAZI!

Each and all of these wouldn't amount to impeachable offenses. But given how ham-handed Hillary was in getting in front and past these problems, I have every confidence that she and her advisors would have gummed everything up, leading to Obstruction of Congress/Justice charges.

So, she gets impeached and the trial happens in early 2018. Considering how many Democratic Senators were up for re-election in 2018, and how unpopular President Hillary Lightning Rod would probably be, it's not crazy to think that there would be enough Democratic defections to make a Senate conviction possible. Yeeesh, what an alternative timeline!

I will be very happy when our current President and his Administration take a spectacular fall within a few months after the Senate trial concludes. Even though he very likely will be acquitted by his Senate enablers, there will be more and more terrible stuff coming down the pipeline. You can bank on it. It's almost as if The Fates had decided that whoever emerged victorious in 2016 would be dashed and destroyed. What a time to be alive.