ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The slime pit called Clinton Inc. gets deeper and deeper. The latest disclosures by WikiLeaks reveals that a top official at the Justice Department alerted Hillary Clinton to the progress of the FBI investigation into her email correspondence. This disclosure alone should be enough to make even the most trusting believer in the innocence of Lady Macbeth lately of Little Rock take due notice of the raw facts (but it probably won’t).

It’s clear now that both the Department of Justice and the State Department were working closely with Hillary’s campaign to minimize the political damage she should expect to suffer from the revelations that as secretary of State she played fast and loose with the nation’s closest-held security secrets, and purely for her own convenience had sent official emails via an unsecured private email server. This was a felony, usually severely punished.

Everyone could see early on that Hillary, her aides and her lawyers were doing things that any conscientious prosecutor would have found more than sufficient to file obstruction of justice charges against her. When confronted with the facts, she and her aides lied, not just to the public, but to investigators and prosecutors, and destroyed evidence they resolutely said they didn’t have.

It’s not yet clear who is responsible for hacking John Podesta’s private email accounts, but it is abundantly clear that what has come out already should lead to indictments. It’s further clear that with friends like John Podesta, the chairman of her campaign, Hillary needed no enemies. The complaining of her partisans about hackers and invasions of privacy, together with their refusal to deal with the facts now in the public sphere, ring hollow indeed. Hypocrisy always stinks, and is never pretty.

This should be a needed lesson in humility for the Washington reporters and political correspondent who live and prosper by leaks and secrets obtained if necessary by hook and crook. They know that leakers always have an agenda of their own and it rarely has anything to do with the public good. Nevertheless, these worthies are arguing now that leaks damaging to the Democratic campaign should be dismissed because they’re from private communications, illegally obtained. Heaven forfend!

There’s a further needed lesson in the predicament of Donna Brazile, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, whose acute pain in her nether region was invited by the lady herself. She had no reluctance to leak questions, obtained from her position at CNN News, to Hillary in advance of the presidential debates. She has no standing now to criticize anyone for anything.

The disclosures of recent days would have been more than enough to destroy the chances of any presidential candidate of either party in the past, but she’s counting on her friends and acolytes in the big media to minimize, if they can, the impact of the facts, and try to change the subject of the conversation.

The critics of Donald Trump, who has lately been staying out of Hillary’s way as she destroys herself, have accused him of exaggeration and going over the top in his public statements. But when he describes his opponent as “Crooked Hillary,” perhaps in a moment of excessive gallantry he’s actually sugar-coating the plain and bitter truth.

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