With Hillary Clinton the all but certain to be the Democrat nominee for president in 2016, relaunching her campaign, it's important to look back on her accomplishments and her background. This list is intended as a first installment to give a brief outline of what Hillary has done in the past
A. As secretary of state
1. The Russian "reset"-- no list of accomplishments by Hillary would be complete without discussing the reset with Russia. To understand the reset, a little background is needed. In the August of 2008, the Russians invaded the neighboring country of Georgia. Georgia is a small country (about the size of New York state) with fewer than four million people. The area was conquered by the Russian Tsars at the start of the 19th century and it eventually became part of the Soviet Union. During those two hundred years of Russian rule, the biggest thing to happen in Georgia was when a native of the area, Yosef Dzugasvilli, became the leader of the USSR. Dzugasvilli, of course, is better known by the name he assumed, Josef Stalin. When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, Georgia became an independent country for the first time in almost 200 years. Not surprisingly, the government was strongly anti-Russian. During the invasion by the Russians in 2008, two of the country's provinces were conquered and were set up as a pro-Russian separate nation. This was the first aggressive move by Russia against any of its neighbors since the end of the Soviet Union. The West reacted strongly but not militarily. Sanctions were imposed on the Russians by many western countries including the USA.
Five months after the invasion of Georgia, America got a new president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. The two of them came up with a new strategy for dealing with Vladimir Putin and the Russians. America would drop all sanctions. America would have the European allies drop their sanctions too. The invasion of Georgia would be forgiven, and the Russians could keep their control of the conquered area. We would all start over in our relationship with Russia. There would be a "reset".
Hillary held a ceremony at which she met with the Russian foreign minister and presented him with a red button that said "reset" in Russian. Of course, the State Department got the Russian word wrong and instead used a similar Russian word that means "overcharged". More important than the lack of caring shown by the button mistake, however, is the bad message that it sent to the Russians and Putin. It told them that even if they invaded a neighbor, America would just forget and forgive them. Russia was given a free hand to gobble up the territory of its neighbors.
Since the reset episode, Hillary's strategy has encouraged Russia to invade and take over Crimea and a big chunk of the eastern Ukraine. Thousands have died. Russia is on the march. America has followed the Clinton/Obama policy, however, and done nothing.
2. Preparedness against terror attacks on embassies -- America's embassies and consulates are frequently targets for terror attacks. During the administration of Bill Clinton, US embassies in east Africa were attacked by al Qaeda terrorists. After 9-11, however, the Bush administration increased security at American installations around the world and there were no successful attacks during those years. Then, in 2009, Hillary Clinton took over as secretary of state. She now was in charge of overseeing security for our consulates and embassies. In the Summer of 2012, the Middle East was in turmoil. The Arab Spring had seen chaos across the region. In many places anti-American feelings were running high. As the anniversary of 9-11 approached, it was obvious that the date would be a likely time for another terror attack on America. Clearly, there was a need for heightened security. Hillary Clinton did nothing to increase security. Instead, Clinton allowed security at our consulates in Libya to be reduced. That reduction came despite multiple requests from the American ambassador to Libya for increased security. Those requests were sent to Mrs. Clinton, although she denies ever seeing them. The denial of those requests were sent back to the ambassador under signature of Mrs. Clinton, although she denies ever seeing those documents as well. A few weeks prior to 9-11, intelligence reports given to the State Department said that there could well be a terror attack in Benghazi on 9-11, but nothing was done to increase security at the US consulate in that city.
Of course, on 9-11-12, there was a terror attack in Benghazi against the US consulate and four Americans including our ambassador were killed. This is the same ambassador who had pleaded for more security. Either Mrs. Clinton couldn't be bothered to consider something as mundane as security for American diplomatic personnel even after intelligence warnings that an attack was coming, or Mrs. Clinton really did not care about those personnel.
On that same day in 2012, American embassies in other cities were attacked, but fortunately no one was killed.
3. Stopping the Iranian nuclear program -- the attempts by the USA to get Iran to stop its development of nuclear weapons was mainly under the control of the White House. Mrs. Clinton did not play a major role in that effort. It seems president Obama thought it was too important to let Hillary Clinton get very involved in it. Instead, Hillary's role was limited more to enforcing the sanctions that America had imposed on Iran for its continuing nuclear program.
One instance of violation of the sanctions came when a group of Swedish companies including the massive conglomerate Ericsson were discovered to be going around the sanctions to trade with Iran even supplying materials and equipment that could facilitate the Iranian nuclear program. The State Department started an investigation to determine what had happened with these Swedish companies and what action ought to be taken against them for violating the sanctions. Just as this investigation was underway, the Clinton Family Foundation set up a Swedish subsidiary organization which raised over $25 million in contributions many from those who were the subjects of the State Department investigation. For some reason, none of these contributions were disclosed on the Clinton Family Foundation website despite a "policy" that all contributions were to be so disclosed. Then, while the investigation was still going, Ericsson hired Bill Clinton to come and give a one hour speech for a payment of three-quarters of a million dollars. After the fee was paid for the speech, the State Department decided that there would be no action taken against the Swedish companies that had violated the sanctions.
4. Developing America's energy security-- When Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State, the official position of the Obama administration (which Hillary Clinton often repeated) was that there was no way that the USA could "drill" its way out of energy shortages. We would be reliant on foreign sources of energy and faced rising prices (or so we were told.) One project, however, that would by its completion have increase world oil output by over 1% was the Keystone XL Pipeline. All that additional oil would come from Canada and would put more of the world's oil supply outside the control of OPEC and countries hostile to the USA. The State Department had to review and approved the application for the construction of the pipeline. Hillary Clinton's response to this problem was to make sure that the State Department issued no decision on the pipeline. To this date, there has still been no decision, even though it is more than six years later. Normally a review of this sort takes a few months at most. Hillary had the State Department delay this very important project just so that some environmentalist groups would not get angry at the administration. In a choice between doing what was good for America or doing what was good for her politically, Hillary chose political benefit over the USA.
B. As senator from New York
1. The Iraq War -- Hillary Clinton saw the same intelligence that president Bush and other world leaders saw about the weapons programs that Saddam Hussein was running in Baghdad. She concluded that America had to go to war with Iraq to end the threat from the likelihood that Iraq would get weapons of mass destruction. She voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the war.
A few years later, Mrs. Clinton tried to evade responsibility for that vote, but the facts cannot be changed. Hillary voted for the war. She came to the same conclusion as George Bush and the majority of Congress.
2. The surge in Iraq -- in 2007 and 2008 while running for president Hillary Clinton opposed the surge in Iraq. She accused the generals who testified before Congress about the merits of the surge of lying. As she put it after General Petreus (then commander of US forces in Iraq) testified, anyone who accepted what he said had to have a "willing suspension of disbelief". Recently, we learned that Hillary later told others in the administration that she really did want to oppose the surge, but she did so because she thought it would be good for her campaign. In other words, the good of her campaign was more important than the safety of the American forces in Iraq and the ultimate success of the USA in that war.
C. As First Lady
1. The Healthcare Plan -- early in Bill Clinton's first term, he let Hillary propose a massive healthcare plan that was rejected by the country and the Congress, even though the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate at the time. After that debacle, Hillary withdrew from the policy side of the administration and did nothing else.
2. Bill and Monica -- perhaps Hillary's biggest success while first lady was her defense of her husband when word got out that he was having sex with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, in many places including the Oval Office. Hillary knew that the story of the affair was true; Bill had done it many times before. Nevertheless, Hillary told the country that the story was just part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" to get her husband. For Hillary, these were lies told in a good cause: the future of her husband and herself. It worked.
D. As First Lady of Arkansas
1. Walmart -- While she was first lady of the state of Arkansas, Hillary was put on the board of directors of Walmart. She never raised with the board the issue of how much the Walmart associates get paid. She never raised with the board the issue of the affect that Walmart had on local businesses when it moved into a new town. She did, however, collect a great deal of money in the form of director's fees.
2. Tyson Foods -- The other major corporation with headquarters in Arkansas is Tyson Foods. Hillary opened a brokerage account at the same broker as an advisor who happened to work for Tyson. In just under three months, Hillary managed to turn $1000 into 100,000 by investing each day in commodities, something she had never previously dabbled in. Amazingly, for three months, every trade that she made was profitable. The records of the account of the advisor from Tyson were "lost" (sound like those emails?), so we don't know for sure if he happened to have lost $100,000 during the same time. It certainly appears possible, however, that this was a method for transferring cash from Tyson to the Clintons. With the "loss" of the records, there is no way to know for sure.
3. Whitewater -- this was beaten to death while Bill Clinton was president. We will not go over it yet again. Suffice to say that there was enough there to merit the appointment of a special prosecutor in Washington.
E. As an attorney
1. We don't know all that much about Hillary's work for the Rose Law Firm. Indeed, we don't really know if she practiced law or if she was a partner there more because, as wife of the governor, she attracted a great deal of business. After all, who could be more plugged into state government than the first lady?
A. Honesty
1. It's hard to know where to begin when discussing Hillary Clinton's honesty. Let's begin with the story about what caused the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. They died in a terrorist attack on 9-11-12. The State Department and the rest of the administration had received warnings of a possible attack about two weeks prior to the event. Even before the attack had ended, reports reaching the State Department confirmed that this was an attack by the al Nusrah Front, a group which formed a part of al Qaeda. Mrs. Clinton's chief advisors wrote emails confirming their knowledge. Despite this, Hillary Clinton supported the story that the attack was a spontaneous response to a youtube video that essentially no one in Libya had seen. Even a few days later, when the bodies of the men who were killed were received at an airbase in Delaware, Mrs. Clinton told the families of the dead that their loved ones had died because of the youtube video. Hillary could not bring herself to tell the truth because it might have hurt the Democrats in the election. Instead she chose to lie both to the nation and, even worse, to the grieving families of these poor men who were killed, in part because Hillary herself had ignored the security of the consulate.
2. Hillary's email system -- Federal law and regulations require that government employees use the federal email system for their government correspondence. Mrs. Clinton knew that when she became secretary of state, but she chose to create her own private email system outside the federal one. That allowed Mrs. Clinton to prevent any communications from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law. It also allowed the spy services of every major nation to hack into her system and read all of her emails, but she did not care. When this fact was disclosed earlier this year, Hillary held a press conference at the UN. She said at the time that she set up her own system because she did not want to carry two devices with her (one for the federal email service and one for her private stuff.) She also said that she used the private email server to communicate with her husband Bill. These were lies and she knew it. Hillary knew that her phone could have held more than one email connection. Further, Hillary herself had said previously that she traveled around with two phone, a tablet and a laptop. Finally, we learned that Bill never, NEVER uses email.
That takes us to the destruction of Hillary's emails. The State Department asked for Hillary to turn over her email from when she was secretary of state. This is required by law. Instead, Hillary had her attorneys winnow out only the email that she wanted released and then the remainder were erased. Hillary said that only private email was destroyed, but since that time we have good reason to believe that is not true. Hillary could easily have proven her contention by letting an impartial third party review the other email before they were erased. Instead, she destroyed the evidence.
3. Hillary's travels in Bosnia -- in her campaigning, Hillary told crowds about the time she landed in Bosnia and was met with sniper fire that caused her to run to shelter. Video of the trip show that she actually landed and was presented with flowers by some local children. She then walked leisurely to a building. The whole story of being under fire was more like one of Brian Williams' "memories" than reality. It was a lie.
Achievements
A. As secretary of state
1. The Russian "reset"-- no list of accomplishments by Hillary would be complete without discussing the reset with Russia. To understand the reset, a little background is needed. In the August of 2008, the Russians invaded the neighboring country of Georgia. Georgia is a small country (about the size of New York state) with fewer than four million people. The area was conquered by the Russian Tsars at the start of the 19th century and it eventually became part of the Soviet Union. During those two hundred years of Russian rule, the biggest thing to happen in Georgia was when a native of the area, Yosef Dzugasvilli, became the leader of the USSR. Dzugasvilli, of course, is better known by the name he assumed, Josef Stalin. When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, Georgia became an independent country for the first time in almost 200 years. Not surprisingly, the government was strongly anti-Russian. During the invasion by the Russians in 2008, two of the country's provinces were conquered and were set up as a pro-Russian separate nation. This was the first aggressive move by Russia against any of its neighbors since the end of the Soviet Union. The West reacted strongly but not militarily. Sanctions were imposed on the Russians by many western countries including the USA.
Five months after the invasion of Georgia, America got a new president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. The two of them came up with a new strategy for dealing with Vladimir Putin and the Russians. America would drop all sanctions. America would have the European allies drop their sanctions too. The invasion of Georgia would be forgiven, and the Russians could keep their control of the conquered area. We would all start over in our relationship with Russia. There would be a "reset".
Hillary held a ceremony at which she met with the Russian foreign minister and presented him with a red button that said "reset" in Russian. Of course, the State Department got the Russian word wrong and instead used a similar Russian word that means "overcharged". More important than the lack of caring shown by the button mistake, however, is the bad message that it sent to the Russians and Putin. It told them that even if they invaded a neighbor, America would just forget and forgive them. Russia was given a free hand to gobble up the territory of its neighbors.
Since the reset episode, Hillary's strategy has encouraged Russia to invade and take over Crimea and a big chunk of the eastern Ukraine. Thousands have died. Russia is on the march. America has followed the Clinton/Obama policy, however, and done nothing.
2. Preparedness against terror attacks on embassies -- America's embassies and consulates are frequently targets for terror attacks. During the administration of Bill Clinton, US embassies in east Africa were attacked by al Qaeda terrorists. After 9-11, however, the Bush administration increased security at American installations around the world and there were no successful attacks during those years. Then, in 2009, Hillary Clinton took over as secretary of state. She now was in charge of overseeing security for our consulates and embassies. In the Summer of 2012, the Middle East was in turmoil. The Arab Spring had seen chaos across the region. In many places anti-American feelings were running high. As the anniversary of 9-11 approached, it was obvious that the date would be a likely time for another terror attack on America. Clearly, there was a need for heightened security. Hillary Clinton did nothing to increase security. Instead, Clinton allowed security at our consulates in Libya to be reduced. That reduction came despite multiple requests from the American ambassador to Libya for increased security. Those requests were sent to Mrs. Clinton, although she denies ever seeing them. The denial of those requests were sent back to the ambassador under signature of Mrs. Clinton, although she denies ever seeing those documents as well. A few weeks prior to 9-11, intelligence reports given to the State Department said that there could well be a terror attack in Benghazi on 9-11, but nothing was done to increase security at the US consulate in that city.
Of course, on 9-11-12, there was a terror attack in Benghazi against the US consulate and four Americans including our ambassador were killed. This is the same ambassador who had pleaded for more security. Either Mrs. Clinton couldn't be bothered to consider something as mundane as security for American diplomatic personnel even after intelligence warnings that an attack was coming, or Mrs. Clinton really did not care about those personnel.
On that same day in 2012, American embassies in other cities were attacked, but fortunately no one was killed.
3. Stopping the Iranian nuclear program -- the attempts by the USA to get Iran to stop its development of nuclear weapons was mainly under the control of the White House. Mrs. Clinton did not play a major role in that effort. It seems president Obama thought it was too important to let Hillary Clinton get very involved in it. Instead, Hillary's role was limited more to enforcing the sanctions that America had imposed on Iran for its continuing nuclear program.
One instance of violation of the sanctions came when a group of Swedish companies including the massive conglomerate Ericsson were discovered to be going around the sanctions to trade with Iran even supplying materials and equipment that could facilitate the Iranian nuclear program. The State Department started an investigation to determine what had happened with these Swedish companies and what action ought to be taken against them for violating the sanctions. Just as this investigation was underway, the Clinton Family Foundation set up a Swedish subsidiary organization which raised over $25 million in contributions many from those who were the subjects of the State Department investigation. For some reason, none of these contributions were disclosed on the Clinton Family Foundation website despite a "policy" that all contributions were to be so disclosed. Then, while the investigation was still going, Ericsson hired Bill Clinton to come and give a one hour speech for a payment of three-quarters of a million dollars. After the fee was paid for the speech, the State Department decided that there would be no action taken against the Swedish companies that had violated the sanctions.
4. Developing America's energy security-- When Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State, the official position of the Obama administration (which Hillary Clinton often repeated) was that there was no way that the USA could "drill" its way out of energy shortages. We would be reliant on foreign sources of energy and faced rising prices (or so we were told.) One project, however, that would by its completion have increase world oil output by over 1% was the Keystone XL Pipeline. All that additional oil would come from Canada and would put more of the world's oil supply outside the control of OPEC and countries hostile to the USA. The State Department had to review and approved the application for the construction of the pipeline. Hillary Clinton's response to this problem was to make sure that the State Department issued no decision on the pipeline. To this date, there has still been no decision, even though it is more than six years later. Normally a review of this sort takes a few months at most. Hillary had the State Department delay this very important project just so that some environmentalist groups would not get angry at the administration. In a choice between doing what was good for America or doing what was good for her politically, Hillary chose political benefit over the USA.
B. As senator from New York
1. The Iraq War -- Hillary Clinton saw the same intelligence that president Bush and other world leaders saw about the weapons programs that Saddam Hussein was running in Baghdad. She concluded that America had to go to war with Iraq to end the threat from the likelihood that Iraq would get weapons of mass destruction. She voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the war.
A few years later, Mrs. Clinton tried to evade responsibility for that vote, but the facts cannot be changed. Hillary voted for the war. She came to the same conclusion as George Bush and the majority of Congress.
2. The surge in Iraq -- in 2007 and 2008 while running for president Hillary Clinton opposed the surge in Iraq. She accused the generals who testified before Congress about the merits of the surge of lying. As she put it after General Petreus (then commander of US forces in Iraq) testified, anyone who accepted what he said had to have a "willing suspension of disbelief". Recently, we learned that Hillary later told others in the administration that she really did want to oppose the surge, but she did so because she thought it would be good for her campaign. In other words, the good of her campaign was more important than the safety of the American forces in Iraq and the ultimate success of the USA in that war.
C. As First Lady
1. The Healthcare Plan -- early in Bill Clinton's first term, he let Hillary propose a massive healthcare plan that was rejected by the country and the Congress, even though the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate at the time. After that debacle, Hillary withdrew from the policy side of the administration and did nothing else.
2. Bill and Monica -- perhaps Hillary's biggest success while first lady was her defense of her husband when word got out that he was having sex with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, in many places including the Oval Office. Hillary knew that the story of the affair was true; Bill had done it many times before. Nevertheless, Hillary told the country that the story was just part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" to get her husband. For Hillary, these were lies told in a good cause: the future of her husband and herself. It worked.
D. As First Lady of Arkansas
1. Walmart -- While she was first lady of the state of Arkansas, Hillary was put on the board of directors of Walmart. She never raised with the board the issue of how much the Walmart associates get paid. She never raised with the board the issue of the affect that Walmart had on local businesses when it moved into a new town. She did, however, collect a great deal of money in the form of director's fees.
2. Tyson Foods -- The other major corporation with headquarters in Arkansas is Tyson Foods. Hillary opened a brokerage account at the same broker as an advisor who happened to work for Tyson. In just under three months, Hillary managed to turn $1000 into 100,000 by investing each day in commodities, something she had never previously dabbled in. Amazingly, for three months, every trade that she made was profitable. The records of the account of the advisor from Tyson were "lost" (sound like those emails?), so we don't know for sure if he happened to have lost $100,000 during the same time. It certainly appears possible, however, that this was a method for transferring cash from Tyson to the Clintons. With the "loss" of the records, there is no way to know for sure.
3. Whitewater -- this was beaten to death while Bill Clinton was president. We will not go over it yet again. Suffice to say that there was enough there to merit the appointment of a special prosecutor in Washington.
E. As an attorney
1. We don't know all that much about Hillary's work for the Rose Law Firm. Indeed, we don't really know if she practiced law or if she was a partner there more because, as wife of the governor, she attracted a great deal of business. After all, who could be more plugged into state government than the first lady?
Character
A. Honesty
1. It's hard to know where to begin when discussing Hillary Clinton's honesty. Let's begin with the story about what caused the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. They died in a terrorist attack on 9-11-12. The State Department and the rest of the administration had received warnings of a possible attack about two weeks prior to the event. Even before the attack had ended, reports reaching the State Department confirmed that this was an attack by the al Nusrah Front, a group which formed a part of al Qaeda. Mrs. Clinton's chief advisors wrote emails confirming their knowledge. Despite this, Hillary Clinton supported the story that the attack was a spontaneous response to a youtube video that essentially no one in Libya had seen. Even a few days later, when the bodies of the men who were killed were received at an airbase in Delaware, Mrs. Clinton told the families of the dead that their loved ones had died because of the youtube video. Hillary could not bring herself to tell the truth because it might have hurt the Democrats in the election. Instead she chose to lie both to the nation and, even worse, to the grieving families of these poor men who were killed, in part because Hillary herself had ignored the security of the consulate.
2. Hillary's email system -- Federal law and regulations require that government employees use the federal email system for their government correspondence. Mrs. Clinton knew that when she became secretary of state, but she chose to create her own private email system outside the federal one. That allowed Mrs. Clinton to prevent any communications from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law. It also allowed the spy services of every major nation to hack into her system and read all of her emails, but she did not care. When this fact was disclosed earlier this year, Hillary held a press conference at the UN. She said at the time that she set up her own system because she did not want to carry two devices with her (one for the federal email service and one for her private stuff.) She also said that she used the private email server to communicate with her husband Bill. These were lies and she knew it. Hillary knew that her phone could have held more than one email connection. Further, Hillary herself had said previously that she traveled around with two phone, a tablet and a laptop. Finally, we learned that Bill never, NEVER uses email.
That takes us to the destruction of Hillary's emails. The State Department asked for Hillary to turn over her email from when she was secretary of state. This is required by law. Instead, Hillary had her attorneys winnow out only the email that she wanted released and then the remainder were erased. Hillary said that only private email was destroyed, but since that time we have good reason to believe that is not true. Hillary could easily have proven her contention by letting an impartial third party review the other email before they were erased. Instead, she destroyed the evidence.
3. Hillary's travels in Bosnia -- in her campaigning, Hillary told crowds about the time she landed in Bosnia and was met with sniper fire that caused her to run to shelter. Video of the trip show that she actually landed and was presented with flowers by some local children. She then walked leisurely to a building. The whole story of being under fire was more like one of Brian Williams' "memories" than reality. It was a lie.
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