Everything becomes clear in hindsight, right? Well, one thing that is crystal clear is that Hillary Clinton made the biggest mistake of her life and career when she accepted Barack Obama’s offer of the position of Secretary of State.
Can anyone doubt it? — If HRC had stayed in the Senate and continued to quietly build on her record of accomplishment there, she would be president-elect today. Almost all of the relentless attacks on her that have emerged since she announced that she would run in 2016 have been related to her Secstate tenure. Specifically: Benghazi, the e-mails, and “pay for play” allegations related to the Clinton Foundation. None of these would have been an issue for her if she had remained in the Senate.
Secretary of State is one of the most demanding and important jobs in the world, perhaps second only to the U.S. Presidency. But it is not a winner for anyone with further political ambitions. Foreign policy is complex and messy. Outcomes are rarely clear cut. There are few unambiguous accomplishments or victories.
Clinton’s enemies tried to characterize her Secstate tenure as her being “in charge” of everything going on in the world, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the Secretary of State has very limited authority, and is merely one player in an interagency process on foreign affairs that includes multiple military and civilian agencies and that is headed by the President through the National Security Council. Anyone who has worked for State knows that you spend a big part of your day getting “clearances” from other offices and agencies — almost no decisions are made in a vacuum. As George Schultz put it, “Everybody wants to get in on the act.”
The idea that the Secretary of State could on her own order a military rescue at Benghazi is patently ridiculous. And the “pay for play” idea is also ridiculous for the simple reason that the Secretary of State has few if any “goodies” to bestow. As for the e-mails, it was an attempt to get around the clunky State Department bureaucracy in order to actually accomplish something in one of the busiest and most demanding jobs anywhere.
Being Secstate did not help Hillary — it hurt her. This is a great shame for someone who, in the name of party unity and supporting the man who beat her in the primaries, took on a thankless, demanding, and in the end cruelly damaging task. Hillary Clinton understands the concept of public service, a phrase that is not even in Donald Trump’s limited vocabulary. Her tenure as Secstate may have solidified her expertise in foreign affairs, but in an almost issueless campaign, she lost to a man whose knowledge of the world is limited to xenophobia and right-wing conspiracy theories.
And now, will we have Trump and the Republican vermin in Congress launching still more investigations and attacks on her Secstate tenure? Will Trump make good on his nationally televised promise to appoint a special prosecutor and “put her in jail?”
In my view, President Obama owes Hillary a presidential pardon for her actions while Secretary of State. This would not be an admission of guilt. It would be preemptively taking away a weapon from a dangerous and vindictive man, who will use a witch hunt against Hillary to distract attention from his own crimes. I know many of you disagree with me about a pardon, but I firmly believe that in this extraordinary situation it is called for and necessary, and I hope Obama will agree.
More of my thoughts on a pardon in this diary: