Donald Trump famously said in an October of 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton that she would be in jail if he became president. Pointing to her deletion and destruction of emails that were a focus of an Obama administration Department of Justice investigation, Trump further explained he would, as president, have a special prosecutor investigate Clinton. Yet, it is over six months since Trump was sworn in as president, and there is no special prosecutor and little indication that the Trump administration is making any effort to develop a case for prosecuting Clinton.
Then, on Tuesday, came a report from Ed Klein at Newsmax that the Trump administration Department of Justice had reopened the investigation of Clinton. That investigation had been strangely closed last year in conjunction with a statement by then-Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James B. Comey in which Comey effectively said evidence indicated Clinton had broken the law but she would nonetheless not be prosecuted. Now, just about as strangely, the story is, according to Klein, that the Trump administration’s Justice Department, after reviewing evidence pertaining to Clinton, is considering offering her a plea bargain in which she admits guilt and receives zero punishment related to both her emails and “pay to play" deals with foreign governments and businesses. This is a plea bargain the average criminal defendant dreams of receiving but has virtually no chance of seeing offered.
Whether the Trump administration does nothing or offers Clinton the dream plea bargain that Klein mentions, either course would be about the opposite of the one to which Trump, as a candidate, said he aspired.
What would explain this reversal from promising to jail Clinton to choosing to let her go Scot-free?
Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News senior judicial analyst and former New Jersey state judge, provided a possible answer to this question in an interview this week with host Stuart Varney at Fox Business regarding another Clinton administration email scandal — this one involving former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
In the interview, Napolitano expressed infuriation that the Trump administration is hiding from the public the content of emails from Lynch describing her June of 2016 meeting with former President Bill Clinton. Lynch said shortly after the meeting that her conversation with Bill Clinton was "a great deal about his grandchildren” and “primarily social and about our travels,'' while not at all dealing with the then-ongoing Justice Department investigation of Hillary Clinton — Bill Clinton’s wife. However, the redacting of Lynch’s emails raises suspicion that the discussion was much different than Lynch claimed.
Recall that this meeting is important because, at the time, Lynch was the top official at the Justice Department that was investigating Hillary Clinton for mishandling emails as secretary of state, mishandling that could result in charges of espionage due to the confidential nature of information in a number of the emails. Indeed, later in the week, the apparent impropriety of Lynch’s private meeting with the investigation subject’s husband led Lynch to announce that she was removing herself from the determining of whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Holding up to the camera printed copies of the Lynch emails in the Fox Business interview, Napolitano, who is a Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board member, showed that the emails’ contents had been blacked out and said he was infuriated that the blacking out had been done by Trump’s Justice Department. “I would have expected the Obama Justice Department trying to protect its attorney general, but, if she did something untoward with Bill Clinton — and she apparently did, we have the right to know about it,” declared Napolitano.
After noting that the blacking out is “a violation of the public policy that requires transparency,” Napolitano proceeded to present what he called a “dirty little secret” that explains why the Trump administration would want to protect the previous administration by preventing the public from knowing about improper or illegal acts and declining to prosecute people for alleged illegal acts. The reason, Napolitano explains, is “so its successor — the Justice Department of ‘President Whoever,’ fill in the blank — won’t come after” people in the Trump administration.
Watch Napolitano’s complete interview here:
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