Don’t Overlook Hillary Clinton

Before Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and 50 other intelligence analysts deceived Americans in the run-up to the 2020 election by warning that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the earmarks of a classic Russian information operation” – and before Obama, Brennan, Obama’s FBI Director James Comey, and National Intelligence Director James Clapper falsified an Intelligence Community Assessment in December 2016 to destabilize Donald Trump’s first term – there was Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton at the heart

The media’s focus these days is on President Trump’s possible cameo in the so-called “Epstein files” and Obama’s role in advancing the Russia collusion hoax. These stories crossed when DNI Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe released compelling evidence that six weeks before his term concluded, Obama pressed the intelligence community to ignore its previous assessments and instead rely on the sham Steele dossier and an ambiguous and unverifiable sentence fragment to smear Trump and undermine his presidency before it began.

But let’s not forget the Clinton campaign’s role in this kabuki dance.

Clinton, not Obama, was Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election. As we learned last week from the declassification of reports issued by Gabbard and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, the weight of the heretofore concealed evidence is that if Putin had a preference, it was most likely Clinton – not the wildcard first-time officeholder who surprised the world by winning.

According to the now declassified September 2020 majority staff report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Putin’s principal goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, not help any particular candidate. Thus, he chose not to leak the most compromising allegations about Clinton, presumably so that he could later use them to weaken her expected presidency. If Russia really wanted to help Trump, the purported information – whether true or not – would have been released during the campaign.

The intelligence community plays favorites

The intelligence community and media, which did have a clear favorite in 2016, carefully hid the compromising accusations, including secret meetings in which State Department representatives are alleged to have unlawfully offered assistance to religious groups in exchange for their support in the 2016 election, along with emails from Democratic National Committee officials describing Clinton’s “psycho-emotional problems,” including “uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.” Clinton was said by these sources to be on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers.”

Recently declassified intelligence files show that Clinton authorized the bogus Steele dossier during the 2016 campaign to deflect attention from her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, and to discredit Trump. Obama, his senior intelligence team and Democratic leadership used the dossier to push the dishonest Russia narrative, Trump’s first impeachment, and a largely successful effort to block his first-term agenda.

That private server

Just a year earlier, a bombshell New York Times report disclosed that Clinton breached core security protocols by exclusively using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. She may have done so to shield emails about improper Clinton Foundation fundraising efforts, her hiring of private consultants, and other political conflicts. In a highly inappropriate press conference before the 2016 election, Jim Comey took it upon himself to excuse Clinton’s security lapses, curiously asserting that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a criminal case. An investigation led by Chairman Grassley found that Comey intended to exonerate Clinton even before the FBI interviewed her.

On July 21, 2025, Grassley released a long buried June 2018 FBI Inspector General report that concluded the FBI never fully investigated Clinton’s use of the private server. Further, contrary to sound investigative protocols, witnesses were permitted to attend each other’s depositions, and no action was taken when Clinton’s lawyers accessed confidential information, or when her aides used hammers to destroy BlackBerry phones and BleachBit software to erase the emails. According to Grassley, then-DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz confirmed that Obama scuttled the investigation to protect Clinton’s candidacy.

Hillary Clinton no stranger to scandal

When Clinton served as Obama’s secretary of state, foreign governments and corporations donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and paid Bill Clinton premium prices for speeches, including governments that obtained substantial State Department assistance. Clinton personally attended meetings with foundation donors and sought favors for them, a practice begun when she was New York’s junior senator.

Bill Clinton’s White House run was rocked by allegations over investments Bill and Hillary made in the Whitewater Development Corporation. Despite the disappearance of key documents from the White House private quarters, evidence of Hillary’s questionable activities, and the conviction of one of their business partners, neither Clinton faced prosecution.

In 1978 and 1979, while first lady of Arkansas, Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures, generating almost $100,000 in profit in less than a year. Despite suspicions suggesting that the profits were disguised pay-offs from Tyson Foods and the improbability of such returns, there was no official investigation.

While Hillary Clinton’s time on the national stage may be sunsetting, she remains the epitome of the disparate standards to which Republicans and Democrats are held by American elites.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.