Hillary Clinton’s long list of lies
Imagine swapping Hillary Clinton for George Washington in the famous “I cannot tell a lie” story. Almost assuredly, Clinton would have denied any knowledge of the chopped-down cherry tree. A vast right-wing conspiracy was to blame, she might contend.
Clinton has lied so many times on so many subjects that she makes husband Bill (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”) look like an honest man.
Secrecy about her own health put her in the news a few days ago. But one clue to her character — and her elitism — was offered when she was first lady. Then-President Bill Clinton put her in charge of restructuring health insurance. At her orders, even discussions among experts of what to do were kept secret. The idea went nowhere in large measure because Hillary Clinton wanted us all to buy into it on faith.
Many of the people who will vote for Clinton in November hadn’t been born when she began making headlines for her lies and her shady deals. So let’s review:
* Just weeks after Bill Clinton became president in 1993, all seven employees of the White House travel office were fired. They were accused of wrongdoing, including embezzlement. Only one was indicted, and a jury found him not guilty. Clinton testified under oath that she had nothing to do with the firings, which cleared the way for people loyal to the Clintons to be hired. An investigation revealed Clinton herself ordered the firings.
* In July 1993, Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster committed suicide in a park just outside Washington. Foster had been involved in the travel office affair, as well as other controversies involving the Clintons. Knowing an FBI investigation of Foster’s death was underway, Hillary’s chief of staff went into Foster’s office and removed several files. Some of the documents were not recovered until two years later.
* Also during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Filegate scandal erupted. Craig Livingstone, the White House director of personnel security, illegally gained access to FBI files on hundreds of people, many of them political enemies of the Clintons. At the time, Hillary called it “a completely honest bureaucratic snafu.”
* You don’t remember Hillary Clinton criticizing the Internal Revenue Service after it was reported the agency harassed conservative groups, do you? There’s a reason: Many conservatives, as well as nonpartisan critics of the Clintons, suffered repeated IRS audits while Bill was president. Among those targeted were four women who had accused him of sexual assaults, according to various sources including The Christian Science Monitor.
* While a U.S. senator and a candidate against Barack Obama for the presidency, Hillary Clinton in 2008 gave a speech about a trip to Bosnia while she was first lady in 1996. “I remember landing under sniper fire … we just ran with our heads down,” she said. Nothing like that happened, as extensive press coverage of the visit revealed.
* Moving to more recent lies, there is the Benghazi attack of Sept. 11, 2012, in which four Americans died while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. It is known the State Department continued insisting the attack was as a result of a video produced in the United States, unflattering to the prophet Muhammad, even after officials knew the assault had nothing to do with the video.
* And, of course, there’s the email scandal. Clinton illegally used personal email servers for messages containing secret information, then lied repeatedly about what she had done.
There’s much, much more smoke in her background, ranging from her miraculous feat in turning a $1,000 investment in cattle futures into a $100,000 profit in 10 months to the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater land deal. There were the missing billing records from her time as a private attorney to her failures to list some gifts on income tax returns.
There is, in short, much more to Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty than the email and Benghazi scandals.
Should she be elected president, one wonders what she will be thinking when she places her hand on a Bible to take that oath …
Mike Myer can be reached at mmyer@theintelligencer.net.