“It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good disposition.” —Thomas Jefferson (1785)

In 1980, Arkansan Paul Greenberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the “Pine Bluff Commercial.” In September of that year, after listening to his state’s greenhorn governor fallaciously extol his brilliance and virtues, Greenberg dubbed William Jefferson Clinton “Slick Willie.”

That derogatory nickname was a perfect fit.

A decade later, when Bill and Hillary Clinton set their sights on the White House, Greenberg wrote, “[Slick Willie] doesn’t mean liar. It means dissembler. This is a particular subspecies of lying. It’s a very lawyerly, sophisticated, elastic lie. In my opinion, the old-fashioned lie would be a step up.”

Indeed, Slick Willie perfected the art of the BIG Lie, but “Slick Hillie” is no piker. With the help of her patron saint Barack Obama and their Leftist cadres in the Democratic Party, Hillary now trots out whoppers with a frequency that defies comparison.

A year ago, as Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid was getting underway, I outlined her long record of deceptions, obfuscations and subterfuges, from Little Rock to Chappaqua. The question now is, “Slick Hillie — will any scandal stick?”

So, just how slick is she?

On Monday night, June 27th, the Democratic National Committee’s point man, Bill Clinton, had a “primarily social” private meeting with Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch.

Despite their assertions that the meeting was “unscheduled,” it was obviously coordinated to give Bill advance assurance of the FBI’s decision to refrain from indicting Hillary. This would explain why, when a local Phoenix news crew heard the two were at the airport at the same time, there was an effort to black out any coverage. According to one of those reporters, “The FBI there on the tarmac instructed everybody around, ‘No photos, no pictures, no cell phones.’”

According to Hillary, “I learned about [the meeting] in the news and it was a short, chance meeting at an airport tarmac and both of their planes, as I understand it, were landing on the same tarmac at about the same time. … It was purely social.”

Once news of their tarmac social broke, Lynch announced that she would remove herself from the decision process regarding a Clinton indictment and, in the words of the New York Times, “accept whatever recommendations career prosecutors and the F.B.I. director made.”

Of course she could remove herself. She knew the fix was already in.

The next day, BO, who obviously received the same report Lynch gave to Bill Clinton, scheduled his first joint appearance with Hillary Clinton for this week.

On Saturday, July 2nd, unannounced and under cover of a holiday weekend, Hillary Clinton reported for an FBI interview, which was apparently little more than a formality.

And that brings me to Tuesday morning of this week, when I was working on my column, “What Difference Does 13 Hours Make?” I had finally seen the movie “13 Hours,” based on the assault and murder of our ambassador and three American security personnel by al-Qa'ida terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

Given the recent release of the House Benghazi report, it was a good juncture to revisit the false narrative Clinton propagated regarding this attack to protect Obama’s 2012 re-election bid.

Indeed, that report stated unequivocally, “What we did find was a tragic failure of leadership — in the run up to the attack and the night of — and an administration that, so blinded by politics and its desire to win an election, disregarded a basic duty of government: Tell the people the truth.”

To reiterate, the reason Obama centered his 2012 re-election bid on his claimed “Middle East victories” was because his domestic policies were a disaster. Predictably, BO’s campaign-driven withdrawal from Iraq left a power vacuum filled by the Islamic State and the unprecedented escalation of terrorism worldwide.

We have provided substantial analysis on Clinton’s “Web video” charade to divert attention from the al-Qa'ida attack in Benghazi.

Ahead of the 2012 election, we delivered a “Memo to Mitt Romney,” insisting that Mitt must, in his final debate with Obama, “make the case that the reason Obama is obfuscating the facts on who attacked and killed our Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi is to maintain his thematic campaign pretense that ‘al-Qa'ida is on the run.’”

Unfortunately, Romney didn’t challenge Obama. Had he done so, he’d likely be running for re-election this year.

We provided detailed analysis of Hillary’s cover-up of the Benghazi cover-up and her diversionary protest, “What difference does it make?” The difference between lies and the truth.

But the topic of my column changed mid-morning on Tuesday, as news broke that FBI Director James Comey would not recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton.

Before getting to his conclusion, let’s revisit a few facts.

Obama made peace with Hillary after the 2008 election by appointing her secretary of state on January 21, 2009, the day after he took office. She held that position until February 1, 2013.

After being sworn in, Clinton signed a national security secrecy agreement, a breach of which constitutes a felony under 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) for anyone who “through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.”

In May 2014, after Clinton had resigned as secretary of state, the House established the Select Committee on Benghazi to investigate the false narrative that Clinton and others floated to protect BO’s re-election campaign.

When investigators discovered Clinton had concealed her official communications on a private, non-secure email server in order to hide them from Freedom of Information requests ahead of her 2016 election bid, she denied it. And that was the beginning of another plethora of lies.

Clinton denied there were emails about her orchestration of the Benghazi cover-up to protect Obama’s 2012 re-election bid. But that, too, was a lie.

Clinton denied there were classified communications, sent and received, on that server, but — you guessed it — that was a lie. Some were classified “Top Secret/Special Access” — the highest classification. And, according to Comey, “She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.”

Clinton insisted her off-the-grid server was secure: “It had numerous safeguards and was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches.” But that was a lie. There were archived backups of all her emails stored on an insecure server in a closet of a vendor in Colorado. The FBI determined that it’s highly probable her emails — all of them — were read by both the Russians and Chinese.

Clinton claimed that she provided all her official emails to the State Department: “We went through a thorough process to identify all my work-related emails, and delivered them to the State Department – and provided all of my emails that could possibly be work related.” But that was a lie. After all, it was Clinton’s team that decided what constituted “official” and “work related.” Comey noted, “The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails” that had not been turned over to the State Department.

However, there were thousands more incriminating emails that remain undiscovered. According to Comey, “There are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”

Clinton denied that she deleted all her communications archived on that server, but that was a lie — and many of those communications were unrecoverable.

The fact is, Clinton concealed all of her communications as secretary of state (and also destroyed records of her meetings) in order to hide them from public scrutiny and prevent them from being accessed ahead of her long-planned 2016 presidential bid. Her role in the Benghazi cover-up is a prime example of why she wanted those communications “private.”

So, what did Comey find?

His recommendation to the Justice Department is a case study in contradictions.

He noted, “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”

That finding alone should have meant an indictment, but Comey inexplicably concluded, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

So “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position” should know this was a gross violation of law, but “no reasonable prosecutor would bring” charges?

On that note, former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani said, “This is the special exemption for the Clintons. It would be unreasonable for a prosecutor not to go forward with it and almost an abdication of duty. A reasonable prosecutor would have brought this case no doubt. … [Violating this statute is] a felony — 10 years in prison.”

Comey admitted, “To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences,” but not former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The FBI just found that she was “extremely careless in the handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

In other words, after finding “evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way,” because Clinton was just stupid, warranted no charges. Obviously Clinton’s motive for keeping her communications off the grid was more than negligent, it was a feloniously nefarious subterfuge.

As former DoJ prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes regarding Comey’s conclusion: “The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. … In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute.”

Comey’s bottom line: “Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

Of course, Clinton was elated, but unavailable for comment as she was boarding Air Force One with Obama for their scheduled political junket to North Carolina — the first time they have flown together since 2012. However, her spokesman, Brian Fallon, said, “We are pleased that the career officials handling this case have determined that no further action by the Department is appropriate. … We are glad that this matter is now resolved.”

Donald Trump responded kindly, “The system is rigged. The final jury will be the American people, and they will issue the verdict on her corruption, incompetence, and bad judgment on November 8th.”

But like Mitt Romney, Trump will go down in flames if he does not successfully call Clinton out on the fact that, yes, she committed prosecutable offenses, but her biggest lie was the false Benghazi narrative — refusing to call for military assistance to protect her State Department ambassador and personnel in order to protect Obama’s faux re-election campaign theme.

There is an outside chance that DoJ prosecutors might still take some action against Clinton, but it’s more likely that a catastrophic impact with an asteroid would negate the need for such an indictment. The real question remaining, will Congress seek to prosecute Slick Hillie for perjury? They did not have much luck with Slick WIllie… However, if Clinton ever wants another high level security clearance, the only way she will qualify is, like Obama, to get herself elected president.

However, this I know for certain: The decision not to recommend indictment of Hillary Clinton is the worst possible decision for Democrat prospects of winning the presidency this year.

On a Clinton indictment, I have written, “Be careful what you hope for,” because if Clinton was just a placeholder for a Biden-Warren replacement ticket, that combo would pose a much more difficult challenge for Donald Trump than a Clinton-Warren ticket.

Why?

I’ll answer with another question: How can Clinton successfully attack Trump?

What’s she going to hit him with? His marital history? His ethics? His honesty? His wealth? His Wall Street connections? His politically incorrect ways? On every one of those issues, one of two things applies: Her record is either as bad as or worse than his, or he’s managed to turn a “weakness” into a strength. Substantial numbers of working-class Democrats are tired of Slick Willie and Slick Hillie and have discovered Trump’s appeal. A couple of Trump-Clinton debates will be reality TV worth watching.

Richard Nixon never lived down “Tricky Dick” in his second term, much as “Slick Willie” dogged Bill Clinton’s second term. The question is: Will Hillary Clinton be able to endure “Slick Hillie” before being elected to a first term?

And a final note.

While the pundits punt Slick Hillie’s indictment dodge around the political circuits, there is one group of Americans who take this news more seriously than any other — our military men and women, both active duty and Veterans. The consensus in the active duty community is, “Will our next Commander in Chief totally disregard the Rule of Law we are charged to ‘to Support and Defend’ with our lives?”

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis