Yes, the Clintons Are Playing Us. But Will They Get Away With It?

A couple of weeks ago, I devoted a column to reflecting on the signal oddity of this campaign season. “There is no reason to believe,” I wrote, “that the supreme oddity that has characterized this primary season has run its course.” I expected, and expect, more of it.

And so it goes.  I could not have imagined, two weeks ago, that Bill Clinton would delay a flight to arrange a private meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Odd, what?

Pause to consider what happened: the sitting attorney general of the United States meets privately with the spouse of the subject of an ongoing FBI criminal investigation.

Yes, you can file it under “Impropriety, Appearance of.”

It was not supposed to have come to the public’s attention at all. “The FBI there on the tarmac instructed everybody: no photos, no pictures, no cell phones,” said Christopher Sign, the enterprising local news reporter in Arizona who broke the story.

Why did Bill Clinton request the meeting? If Loretta Lynch is to be believed, it was to talk about his grandchildren, not Hillary.

That’s so nice.

There was, and continues to be, considerable fury in response to the meeting — more, oddly enough, than has been gingered up for Hillary’s behavior over Benghazi or her email scandal. But maybe, like Al Capone’s tax troubles, this will be the straw that breaks the candidate’s back.

Maybe.

Loretta Lynch ought to recuse herself from the case altogether. Instead she has said that she will “accept” whatever recommendation the FBI makes with respect to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home-brew email server.

Does that mean that Hillary will be brought to justice over her willful compromising of national security?

Again, maybe. But those chickens have not yet hatched and it would be foolish to try to count them.

The whole saga of the Clintons’ corruption has gone into overdrive in the last week or so.  There was the damning report of the Benghazi committee. There was her “voluntary” 3-hour interview with the FBI on Friday.

There was tarmac-gate. Everywhere the volume in the Clinton corruption saga seems suddenly to have been turned up.  After a period of quiescence, suddenly there is ceaseless activity.

And “what might be towards that this sweaty haste doth make the night joint laborer with the day?”

Quite possibly, not much. Rush Limbaugh, a close and canny observer of the Clinton crime family, suspects that we’re all being played, yet again, by the Clintons. A flurry of activity, a cathartic purging of punditry, and then . . . nothing.

Andrew McCarthy has speculated along similar lines. Noting how various tactics can be deployed to delay or derail criminal investigations, he has outlined how this latest flurry of news might well be a deliberate strategy to “create appearance of thorough investigation, but assure no-charges outcome.”

Still, it is a dangerous game that the Clintons are playing — dangerous for the country, of course, but also for themselves. There is every chance that, whether or not she is indicted, Hillary will be weakened by the cloud of corruption that follows her as the cloud of dirt follows Charlie Brown’s Pigpen.

And, who knows, it might even happen that the weight of the evidence will be too much for Hillary’s supporters to countenance. A lot rests on the shoulders of FBI Director James Comey. Will he follow the investigation where the evidence leads? Or will he bow to political pressure? It is not too much to say that the future of the rule of law in this country depends on his decision.  It’s likely that we will know in a matter of weeks.