Courtesy of the Rolling Stone, this is how it works:
You start with the assumption that Hillary Clinton is corrupt.
After all, there have been whispers and accusations and investigations and allegations and scandals with ominous names like WHITEWATER and BENGHAZI for years. Even if you can’t describe exactly what she’s done wrong, there must be something to all these stories, right?
And if she’s corrupt, then we definitely need to investigate her. Virtually everything she does is suspect. Any mistake she makes can’t simply be an accident or a lapse in judgment; there must be some criminal intent behind it. It doesn’t matter how many millions of taxpayer dollars or thousands of man-hours it takes in FBI investigations and congressional hearings. No price is too high.
And when you investigate endlessly, you find evidence. Emails and documents and memos and call logs and testimony. It adds up to thousands of pages, millions of words, piles of binders that make the perfect dramatic prop in a hearing room.
And we know all those documents must be suspicious. After all, they appeared because there was an investigation into corruption, so they must be evidence of something. Plus, there are just so darn many of them.
And with all that suspicious evidence, the conclusion is clear: Hillary Clinton is corrupt. And if she’s corrupt, we have to investigate her. And if we investigate her, we’ll uncover evidence. And if we find evidence, it must be suspicious. So she must be corrupt. So we have to investigate her.
And on and on it goes. For decades.
It’s also known as the Perjury Trap. If you have enough investigations, then you can get her to testify under oath and maybe — just maybe — she’ll say something incorrect. Doesn’t matter what: the weather, whatever. Sure, maybe she was mistaken. Or maybe her recollection is bad. But if she is wrong, you can call it a LIE and maybe even PERJURY. Then you can IMPEACH her.
This will be the next four years.