There is No E-Mail Scandal- The Latest in Hillary is Ethical News

I've been saying it for months- there is no Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. Now it's leaking out that the FBI is saying it too. There is no real smoke, other than that coming from the GOP's smoke machine, and there is certainly no fire. The FBI will clear her this Summer, and some people will still keep talking about it.

Of course, the details matter:

That point about her intending to break classification rules is important, because in order to have broken the law, it isn’t enough for Clinton to have had classified information in a place where it was possible for it to be hacked. She would have had to intentionallygiven classified information to someone without authorization to have it, like David Petraeus did when he showed classified documents to his mistress (and then lied to the FBI about it, by the way). Despite the enormous manpower and time the Justice Department has devoted to this case, there has never been even a suggestion, let alone any evidence, that Clinton did any such thing.

But when it comes to the presidential campaign, that isn’t going to matter. Republicans already know what they think: Hillary Clinton is a criminal whose every thought and action is vile and despicable, so of course she broke the law. If the investigation doesn’t show that, it could only be because the investigation was a sham. So they’ll just keep saying that this is a scandal, over and over and over.

As Bill and Hillary Clinton’s entire careers have proven, when you’re trying to take someone down, the next best thing to a real scandal is a phony one. Let’s not forget that when Bill was president, no alleged wrongdoing was too trivial to investigate, complete with dark insinuations about nefarious conspiracies and potential criminal behavior. You think the endless investigation of Benghazi is ridiculous? In the 1990s, congressional Republicans took 140 hours of sworn testimony on the urgent question of whether the Clintons had misused the White House Christmas card list. Seriously. That’s something that actually happened.

This is the basic reason why I get so angry when "Bernie Bros" call her corrupt or a criminal- they are doing the Republican Party's job for them. At no point in the last quarter century on the national stage has Hillary Clinton been charged with anything. At no point has she been convicted of anything. At no point have the controversies even been mildly plausible, for that matter. In short, all of the attacks on her have been BS.

This is the problem with reality though- it takes a certain level of intellect to live in it. If the outcome you want is that Hillary is a criminal, you can make up any crazy story and run with it. Ridiculous faux-scandals like Benghazi, which to this day you can't get a straight answer about what she did wrong, can take on a life of their own. You can call Hillary Clinton a murderer, thief, crook, or anything else, if you're willing to stretch and bend the truth. Donald Trump is certainly willing to do that, as we're seeing.

Hillary Clinton, ironically, might be the most ethical and honest leader we have in the nation. She's been in the national eye for decades, and has never been charged or convicted of anything. She's been investigated for everything from her land purchases and travel, to potentially killing people, to some vague violation in Benghazi or with her e-mails, and every single time, she's cleared. I get that this may not be the outcome you want as a reader, or that you might have believed she did one of these things, but that does not make it so. At some point we have to acknowledge that no person in public life has been investigated as much as Hillary Clinton, and she's always cleared of any wrongdoing. It's time to start calling Hillary Clinton the one term that fits- honest.