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‘The Clinton Contamination’ Trends On Twitter As Maureen Dowd Warns Of ‘Collateral Damage’

By Robert Jonathan
Published on: 02:02 PST, Jul 10, 2016

In a currently trending — if not “viral” — Op-Ed called ‘The Clinton Contamination,” longtime New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claims that Bill and Hill Clinton have sullied the reputations of President Obama, FBI Director James Comey, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others.

“In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington… and jeopardized the futures of Hillary’s most loyal aides,” Dowd, an acknowledged liberal, opined.

Dowd’s high-profile column is a response to Comey’s decision — which apparently also was a major letdown to Bernie Sanders supporters — on Tuesday not to bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton in the unsecure private server/email investigation, even though he described the presumptive presidential nominee’s handling of sensitive and classified intelligence information as “extremely careless” while she was serving as U.S. Secretary of State.

For what it’s worth, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange predicted that for political reasons, no indictment would be forthcoming. Wikileaks released thousands of Hillary Clinton emails into the public domain.

In late May, a State Department Inspector General determined that Hillary Clinton violated federal protocols by using a private email server rather than a presumably more secure dot.gov account for conducting the nation’s foreign policy while she was America’s top diplomat.

Under intense questioning before the House of Representatives on Thursday, Comey acknowledged that a federal government employee would likely face disciplinary action for equivalent infractions.

Moreover, although Clinton no longer works for the government, presidential nominees are traditionally entitled to national security briefings containing classified information, which puts her security clearance potentially into play. Congressional Republicans have demanded that Hillary Clinton no longer receive such briefings during the campaign.

Parenthetically, during the hearing, Comey also wouldn’t comment about whether the Clinton Foundation is still subject to an FBI probe. Although as yet unproven, Clinton foes have claimed that foreign governments and multinational corporations made huge cash donations to the Clinton family charity in exchange for favorable treatment from the State Department while Hillary Clinton was in office, in what some critics have described as a pay-for-play scheme.

According to Dowd, it was unwise for President Obama to nominate Hillary Clinton for the State Department post in the first place and to campaign with her in North Carolina on the same day that Comey declined to recommend an indictment.

“It’s quaint, looking back at her appointment as secretary of state, how Obama tried to get Hillary without the shadiness… Obama was left in the awkward position of vouching for Hillary’s ‘steady judgment’ to run an angry, violent, jittery nation on the very day that his FBI director lambasted her errant judgment on circumventing the State Department email system, making it clear that she had been lying to the American public for the last 16 months.”

Dowd asserted that Hillary Clinton had already compromised Obama when he went on 60 Minutes to preemptively insist that the private server maintained by his preferred successor as commander in chief posed no danger to U.S. national security. Dowd also decried the rendezvous that Bill Clinton and AG Lynch had at the Phoenix airport a few days before Comey cleared the former president’s wife of wrongdoing in the server matter. “The meeting seemed even more suspect a week later, when the Times reported that Hillary might let Lynch stay on in a new Clinton administration,” she noted.

“Hillary willfully put herself above the rules — again — and a president, campaign and party are all left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her,” Maureen Dowd declared in her column entitled “The Clinton Contamination,” and that “the email transgression is not a one off. It’s part of a long pattern of ethical slipping and sliding, obsessive secrecy and paranoia, and collateral damage.”

Added: Apparently Clinton fans on Twitter are ticked off about Maureen Dowd’s analysis of the Clintons, while some Obama fans are outraged that she referred to the president as “Barry,” prompting the #PresidentObamaNotBarry hashtag to trend. According to Gateway Pundit, Obama went by “Barry” until he was a young adult. “The #PresidentObamaNotBarry hashtag has been taken up by both supporters and opponents of Obama on Twitter with opponents bringing up how personally disrespectful liberals were toward President George W. Bush in and out of office.”

[Photo by Matt Rourke/AP]

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