RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Republicans convened in Cleveland this week and rhythmically chanted for the incarceration of Hillary Clinton, the candidate the Democrats will nominate for president next week in Philadelphia. Some pundits found the Republicans’ new slogan harsh and extreme.

But who are the real extremists here?

In what must be an historical first, Democrats are about to anoint a contender for the White House who faces at least four federal investigations and a serious, private anti-corruption lawsuit. Even after the Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon’s legal woes were not this grave at this stage of the 1972 election.

Just days after the FBI and Justice Department whitewashed Clinton’s abuse of 2,113 classified e-mails on her unauthorized, unsecure, do-it-yourself computer server, the State Department resumed its own investigation of this matter. State previously yielded to the FBI’s probe. With that exercise concluded, State once again is trying to learn if Clinton and her top staffers violated the department’s rules for handling national secrets.

“Because neither Hillary nor her aides are currently State employees, it is at least somewhat unusual to reopen an investigation,” former U.N. ambassador John Bolton told me. “If they were still employed, disciplinary action could include cancelling their security clearances, lowering their [government pay]-grade, or even being fired. None of those are now possible, except for revoking security clearances if they still have them, and flagging their personnel records so that State and/or other agencies don’t hire them in the future.”

If Clinton loses her security clearance, this would shatter what little remains of her claim that her tenure at State qualifies her for the presidency. And if she survived such a wholesale implosion of her credibility, it’s hard to imagine how she could function without clearance, nor even claim that she deserves it.

“A president must have access to classified information in order to make national-security decisions,” said former State Department spokesman Richard Grenell. “If Hillary is punished with a security-clearance revocation beyond January 2017, she should step aside. She would be putting U.S. national security at risk, again.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department evidently continues its investigation of Clinton’s possible official corruption through the Clinton Foundation. Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash – and his eye-opening documentary of the same name — spells out how the Clinton Foundation collected six and seven-digit donations, soon after which Hillary’s State Department performed special favors for those same contributors. This included State helping donors pursue foreign mining deals, cash in on Haitian disaster assistance, and corner the American market on uranium ore.

“The question that seems to escape everyone is why did Hillary have a separate e-mail server in the first place?” asks K. T. McFarland, a veteran of Richard Nixon’s National Security Council and Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon. “Was it because the Clintons knew from the start they wanted to keep the connection between the Clinton Foundation and her decisions at the State Department away from any prying eyes?”

As if that weren’t enough, the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees wrote the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia on July 11 to “request an investigation to determine whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed perjury and made false statements during her testimony under oath before congressional committees.”

And the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on July 12 is looking into three software companies that helped maintain Hillary’s server.

Atop these official government probes, Judicial Watch’s private lawsuit continues regarding Clinton’s possible violations of the Freedom of Information Act.

If voters elect Hillary Clinton, she will bury all of this, laugh it off, and then feel emboldened to pursue further and possibly deeper lawlessness. If, conversely, voters elect Donald Trump, his Justice Department might bring — imagine this — justice to Hillary Clinton.

Maybe then, Hillary’s crime spree will end, and a judge will instruct the Federal Bureau of Prisons to lock her up.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online.