Author: Andrew P. Napolitano

The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of legal misery. Here is what happened. Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisors when she was Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her and have significant positions in her presidential campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and done in the presence of the same legal team which represented all five aides. The atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of the interrogations is to … Continue reading →

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Last weekend, Hillary Clinton dispatched her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to offer a defense of her alleged espionage. The espionage allegations against her are that in order to escape public and Obama administration scrutiny, she had all of her emails as secretary of state diverted from a secure government server to a non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New York, and, in so doing, failed to protect state secrets in at least 2,200 instances during her four-year tenure. The essence of her husband’s defense is that the secrets were not secrets when she saw them and the investigation … Continue reading →

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Would all of our lives be safer if the government could break down all the doors it wishes, listen to all the conversations it could find and read whatever emails and text messages it could acquire? Perhaps. But who would want to live in such a society? To prevent that from happening here, the Framers ratified the Fourth Amendment, which is the linchpin of privacy and was famously called by Justice Louis Brandeis “the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” He wrote those words in his dissent … Continue reading →

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In 2014, President Barack Obama signed 12 executive orders directing various agencies in the departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security to refrain from deporting some 4 million adult immigrants illegally present in the United States if they are the parents of children born here or legally present here and if they hold a job, obtain a high-school diploma or its equivalent, pay taxes and stay out of prison. Unfortunately for the president, the conditions he established for avoiding deportation had been rejected by Congress. In response to the executive orders, 26 states and the House of Representatives sued the … Continue reading →

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What if the latest craze among the big-government crowd in both major political parties is to use the power of government to force employers to pay some of their employees more than their services are worth to the employers? What if this represents an intrusion by government into the employer-employee relationship? What if this consists of the government’s effectively saying that it knows the financial worth of employees’ services better than the employers and the employees do? What if the minimum wage, now on the verge of being raised to $15 per hour everywhere in the land, is really the … Continue reading →

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The FBI investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to protect state secrets contained in her emails has entered its penultimate phase, and it is a dangerous one for her and her aides. Federal law enforcement sources have let it be known that federal prosecutors and the FBI have completed their examination of raw data in the case. After the FBI acquires raw data — for example, the nature and number of the state secrets in the emails Clinton failed to protect or the regular, consistent, systematic nature of that failure — prosecutors and agents proceed to draw … Continue reading →

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What is the connection between personal freedom and rising from the dead? When America was in its infancy and struggling to find a culture and frustrated at governance from Great Britain, the word most frequently uttered in speeches and pamphlets and editorials was not “safety” or “taxes” or “peace”; it was “freedom.” Two acts of Parliament broke the bonds with the mother country irreparably. The first was the Stamp Act, which was enforced by British soldiers who used general search warrants issued by a secret court in London to rummage through the personal possessions of any colonists they chose, ostensibly … Continue reading →

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On Feb. 7, 1946, Arthur Terminiello, a Roman Catholic priest who was a fierce opponent of communism and believed that President Harry Truman was too comfortable with it, gave an incendiary speech in a Chicago hall that his sponsors had rented. The hall held about 800 people, but nearly 2,400 showed up. Father Terminiello’s opponents outnumbered his supporters by a 2-1 ratio. The atmosphere in the hall was electric, with almost everyone present taking sides for or against this priest — all under the watchful eyes of Chicago police. The speech delighted the priest’s supporters and enraged his detractors. When … Continue reading →

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What if Hillary Clinton is in legal hot water and she knows it but won’t admit it? What if she has decided to go on the offensive and make her case that she did nothing unlawful with her emails that contained state secrets? What if the essence of her defense is that other secretaries of state used non-secure email devices and thus it was lawful for her to do so, as well as the point that none of her emails was “marked classified” at the time she sent or received them? What if these defenses do not hold up to … Continue reading →

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Surely, Hillary Clinton hopes for the happy conclusion to the maddening string of primaries and caucuses that have exhausted her. Surely, she hopes to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party this year. And surely, she hopes to be elected president. These hopes are realistic probabilities in her own mind. But if she is hoping for the end to her legal woes, that is a false hope — and she knows it. The relentless barrage of bad legal news for Clinton, which has been relegated to below-the-fold stories because of the primary news position of the presidential primary contests, … Continue reading →

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What if all the remaining presidential candidates really want the same things? What if they all offer essentially the same ideas couched in different words? What if these primary races have become beauty pageants largely based on personality and advertising? What if our system of governance is so deep into the fabric of big government in the second decade of the 21st century that all the presidential candidates really believe that most voters actually want the government to care for them? What if all major candidates in both major political parties promise a federal government that can right any wrong, … Continue reading →

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This has not been a good week for Hillary Clinton. She prevailed over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses by less than four-tenths of one percent of all votes cast, after having led him in polls in Iowa at one time by 40 percentage points. In her statement to supporters, standing in front of her gaunt and listless looking husband, she was not able to mouth the word “victory” or any of its standard variants. She could barely hide her contempt for the Iowa Democrats who disserted her. Sanders isn’t even a Democrat. According to official Senate … Continue reading →

The post Hillary: Headed for the Slammer appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is not the sudden resurgence of Bernie Sanders. It is the fidelity to the rule of law of the FBI. The recent revelations of the receipt by Clinton of a Special Access Program email, as well as cut and pasted summaries of state secrets on her server and on her BlackBerry nearly guarantee that the FBI will recommend that the Department of Justice convene a grand jury and seek her indictment for espionage. Here is the backstory. It seems that every week, more information comes to light about Clinton’s grave legal woes. Her worries are in two … Continue reading →

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In one week during January 1973, President Richard M. Nixon was inaugurated to his second term, former President Lyndon B. Johnson died, the United States and North Vietnam entered into the Paris Peace Accords, and the Supreme Court legalized abortion. Only the last of these events continues to affect and haunt the moral and constitutional order every minute of every day. The Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade is arguably its most controversial in the post-World War II era. Its effect has been as pernicious to human life as was its 19th century intellectual progenitor, Dred Scott vs. Sanford, in … Continue reading →

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The federal criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to secure state secrets was ratcheted up earlier this week, and at the same time, the existence of a parallel criminal investigation of another aspect of her behavior was made known. This is the second publicly revealed expansion of the FBI’s investigations in two months. I have argued for two months that Clinton’s legal woes are either grave or worse than grave. That argument has been based on the hard, now public evidence of her failure to safeguard national security secrets and the known manner in which the … Continue reading →

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