ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Is it just me or are there others out there in my audience who find it odd that Hillary Clinton, the inevitable presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, would continue to have at the highest level of her staff a woman married to a man who has repeatedly embarrassed himself, his wife and the Democratic Party? Anthony Weiner is a pervert. As to how perverted he might be we can only speculate, but we did see the picture of him sexually aroused in his underpants with his infant son lying next to him. Presumably, Mr. Weiner was sending that picture to one of his digital sweethearts.

Yet Huma Abedin was his lawful wedded wife even after his first and then second scandal, those in which he left Congress and lost his bid for mayor of New York. Well, Hillary is happily married to Bill Clinton so she is accustomed to weird marriages and weird guys. In fact, Bill officiated at Anthony and Huma’s wedding. But still, Hillary’s longest-standing boast in her long and boastful life is that she is on a special mission for children. Did she not with years of child’s advocacy behind her think that Anthony Weiner was an inappropriate father and a bizarre choice of a husband? Could she not after his congressional scandal approach Huma with an ultimatum: “Ditch that creep or you’re fired?”

He was going to cause other problems, and he did. Somehow he — or maybe Huma — got 650,000 emails, many dealing in classified information, onto his laptop. Former FBI agents have told me that those classified documents are now in the hands of America’s enemies. The Russians were mentioned. Why would Hillary have people like this around her? Well, again, she had Bill around her and Sandy Berger, and God only knows how many other creeps. As her competitor for the presidency, Donald Trump, never tires of saying, “She’s got bad judgment.” She should not be running for president. I think the majority of the American people will come to that realization by next Tuesday.

Her entire public life has been a hoax camouflaging real incompetence, and it is ironic that in the end her real nemesis is not her imagined “vast right-wing conspiracy” but the FBI. As I have written so many times before, her problem is not with her political opponents but with what the public calls “the authorities.”

If you have followed her career with the enthusiasm and care that I have you would have seen the FBI popping up repeatedly in Hillary’s scandals. Back in the 1980s it began in Arkansas with FBI Special Agent I.C. Smith questioning her role in fundraising for her husband, Gov. Bill Clinton. It continued into the 1990s, coming to a boil in 1997 when then-FBI Director Louis Freeh responded to a congressional query asking him if he had ever experienced anything like the FBI’s trials with the Clintons. Mr. Freeh responded, “Actually I have,” and he likened his experiences with the Clintons to his “16 years doing organized crime cases in New York City .”

Perhaps her run-ins with the FBI reached a climax this summer with Director James Comey. Mr. Comey may not have recommended Hillary’s indictment in July as many observers thought he would, but he said her handling of classified information on her server was “extremely careless.” That statement, coupled with his letter to Congress Friday, leaves me thinking the director has performed a difficult task admirably. Finally, however, former assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom returned to the FBI’s favored theme for the Clintons. On Sunday he described them as Director Freeh did back in 1997. He described them as acting as a “crime family.”

I have been saying in this column for months that the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s server would be a turning point in the Clintons’ 35-year career of skirting the law. Now that is becoming obvious even to the blas members of official Washington.

• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is author of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc.

Sign up for Daily Opinion Newsletter Manage Newsletters

Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.