If Only Hillary Had Won . . .

There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted.

The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.” The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.

China would be delighted, as would Iran. But most important, there would be no collusion narrative — neither one concerning a defeated Donald Trump nor another implicating a victorious Hillary Clinton. In triumph, progressives couldn’t have cared less whether Russians supposedly had tried to help a now irrelevant Trump; and they certainly would have prevented any investigation of the winning Clinton 2016 campaign.

In sum, Hillary’s supposedly sure victory, not fear of breaking the law, prompted most of the current 2016 scandals, and her embittering defeat means they are not being addressed as scandals.

For example, why would FBI director James Comey have been so foolish as to ask for a FISA warrant request without fully informing the judge of the compromising details of the Steele–Fusion GPS dossier? Or why would Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been so reckless as to meet with Bill Clinton in a stealthy jet rendezvous on an Arizona tarmac when her department was concurrently investigating his spouse?

But those are precisely the wrong questions, given the Washington careerist mind. The right one is “Why not?” — in the context of the overwhelming likelihood that Hillary Clinton would not only be elected president but also would follow the well-known Clintonian habit of punishing both enemies and neutrals while rewarding friends, the more obsequious, the better.

Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin thought they were taking zero risks in lying to FBI investigators when they claimed that they had no idea about Clinton’s unlawful private server, even though they had, in fact, discussed the server in emails and used it themselves when sending emails. But why should they have cared, given Trump’s certain looming defeat and the fact that Andrew McCabe was somehow involved or would be involved in running, or rather massaging, the investigation? Their only real danger might have been telling the truth to FBI investigators: that both they and Hillary had known precisely what she was doing. For telling the truth, both Mills and Abedin would soon have faced career-ending payback from a President Clinton.

A President Hillary Clinton would have appreciated Loretta Lynch’s quasi-legal efforts to ossify the email investigations of Clinton’s unlawful server. Indeed, in the swampiest sense, Lynch took a good gamble that the odds would pay off handsomely for her obeisance, with either a continuance of her tenure as attorney general, or perhaps soon a future Supreme Court nomination.

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