Washington's Double Legal Standards
by Pete Hoekstra • October 10, 2022 at 5:00 am
Our bureaucrats, it seems, have no boundaries when it comes to a former president of the United States. What a precedent to set. Let us compare that to how they treat themselves.
When Hillary Clinton's emails were found to contain classified information, some marked at the highest levels of classification, the FBI did not raid her home in Chappaqua, New York. They did not overturn her office or closets when classified emails turned up that she had not sent back to the government or when she wiped the data on her personal server with BleachBit, which meant the government would never know the full extent of the documents Clinton kept. Why was she treated differently by the FBI?
Consider the case of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied to the Senate when he declared that the intelligence community had no mass surveillance program collecting data on Americans. Not only did he lie in his public testimony before the committee, he also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away.
[Clapper] also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away. Because Clapper is a protected bureaucrat, he faced no consequences, and even joined CNN as a paid national security contributor, regularly attacking former President Trump. CNN does not note that he perjured himself before Congress -- with evidence -- when they put him on the air.
Hayden also stated that the [CIA interrogation] tapes were destroyed, "only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquires." Again, all evidence points to the contrary, and Hayden is wrong to make these clearly false assertions.
Hayden's efforts, however, were just another in a long line of efforts to cover up the actions of unaccountable bureaucrats, who not surprisingly, were never held legally accountable.
My candid advice to Biden, Hayden, Clapper, and many other media commentators, is to consider your own records -- and be careful what you advocate.
Former CIA Director Mike Hayden, shortly after the FBI raided the home of former President Donald J. Trump, responded to a tweet by Michael Beschloss in a way that, apart from disregarding any presumption of innocence, seemingly endorsed the idea that Trump was a spy who, for allegedly having taken classified documents, should be executed by the government, as the Rosenbergs were in 1953 for having passed US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. "Sounds about right," Hayden wrote over of photograph of the Rosenbergs on Twitter.
Full disclosure There is a bit of history between Hayden and me. I opposed his nomination to be CIA director, by saying at the time, "Bottom line: I do believe he's the wrong person, the wrong place at the wrong time."
