Here’s Hillary on the stump, with some egregious dissembling that we could not let pass unremarked: "Of all the people running for president, I've been the most vetted, the most investigated, and -- my goodness -- the most innocent, it turns out," she said to applause.  My goodness, what a shameless liar!  Does she think everyone has forgotten about Filegate, or the cattle trade?  Good gosh, the woman practically out-does her famously dishonest husband. The commodity trade may have gone uninvestigated, and she may not have been charged with wrongdoing, but that hardly means she was innocent – not unless we put quotes around “innocent” the way we would if we were referring to O.J. Simpson. 

Granted, Hillary was not suspected of murder, merely of taking a bribe via $100,000 worth of profits she allegedly earned on some cattle-future trades. But even if O.J. had merely punched Ron Goldman in the nose rather than slit his throat, we doubt he would have had the chutzpah to run for high office rather than spend the rest of his days as he has, seeking out golf partners.

Luckier Than Martha

In the end, Hillary succeeded in quashing the bribery charge, and one can only surmise that her friends in high places were more influential than Martha Stewart’s friends in high places.  But she had help from a credulous media that was either too stupid or too lazy to investigate the facts of the case, which it must be admitted were somewhat obscured by the arcana of commodity trading. But if the mainstream press failed to do its job, the many incriminating details were brought to light by, among others, commodity trader Victor Niederhoffer, whose investigative piece in National Review left little wiggle room for exculpation. Niederhoffer deftly traced her paper trail, concluding that her explanations for her results were highly implausible. How implausible?  About 1 in 250 million, according to a computer model run by some university economists. Another skeptic pointed out that Hillary had made her profits betting on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled.

Hillary is well beyond the statute of limitations for this one, but that doesn’t mean every pile of manure she shovels our way doesn’t stink. It is almost certain that she got a free pass for a felony more serious than the one Martha Stewart went to jail for. Perhaps if she gets elected some diligent reporter will exhume the details to show us yet again that her trading profits could only have been a bribe. “For what?” is the only question that remains unanswered after twelve years.