Trump: “I’m Not Under Investigation.” Hillary, on the Other Hand…
At Camp David on Saturday, President Donald Trump reminded reporters for the thousandth time that he was not personally under investigation for cooperating with the Russian government during the 2016 election. However, he said, his opponent in said election could not necessarily say the same for her status with the FBI.
“Just so you understand, there’s been no collusion,” he said. “There’s been no crime. And in theory, everybody tells me I’m not under investigation. Maybe Hillary is. I don’t know, but I’m not.”
According to an MSNBC reporter, Trump went on to say that Clinton and the Democratic National Committee were more guilty of collusion with Russia than anyone in his campaign. “There has been no collusion between us and the Russians,” he reportedly said. “Now, there has been collusion between Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Russians. Unfortunately, you people don’t cover that very much.”
While nothing has leaked to the public about a federal investigation into the Clinton campaign’s relationships with Moscow, we did learn last week that the FBI is indeed investigating the Clinton Foundation on allegations of a pay-to-play scheme the former Secretary of State was running while serving in the Obama administration. These allegations, which first surfaced thanks to the bombshell book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, haunted Hillary throughout the election, though they were largely overshadowed by the investigation into her private email server.
According to reports, investigators in Little Rock, Ark. are in the initial stages of interviewing witnesses and gathering evidence to determine whether Clinton improperly sold access and state favors to the wealthy donors who contributed money to her charitable foundation.
But what about Trump’s remarks about Clinton’s collusion with Moscow? Is there any, as they say, “there” there?
Well, it depends. If you believe that Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were guilty of collusion when they met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower last summer, then yes, the Clinton campaign is most certainly guilty of the same thing. That is to say, if the definition of “collusion” is working with a foreign government to gather opposition research on your opponent, then you betcha, Clinton is absolutely just as guilty as the Trump campaign. This is proven by the fact that her campaign and the DNC (insofar as they were separate entities) paid Fusion GPS to develop the infamous dossier. That dossier was mostly based on conversations the journalists working for Fusion (and Christopher Steele) had with paid Russian officials. It’s the same thing. And that’s not even getting into Clinton’s attempt to do the same with Ukrainian officials.
The real point is not that Clinton should be in prison for this kind of “collusion,” but that it’s not a crime in the first place. Unseemly? Unethical? Dirty? These are words you can use to describe this sort of political warfare, but you cannot call one candidate a traitor and the other an innocent angel. Either they both belong behind bars or neither of them does.
But like Trump said, that’s not something the media wants to talk about.