By Andrew P. Napolitano - - Wednesday, August 26, 2015
What if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been pulling the wool over our eyes for years?
What if, while she was secretary of state, she ran two secret wars, one in Libya and one in Syria? What if there already were wars in each of those countries, so she used those wars as covers for her own?e

What if President Obama gave permission for her to do this? What if the president lacks the legal authority to authorize anyone to fight secret wars? What if she obtained the consent of a dozen members of Congress from both houses and from both political parties? What if those few members of Congress who approved of her wars lacked the legal authority to authorize them?
What if her goal was to overthrow two dictators, one friendly to the United States and one not? What if the instruments of her war did not consist of American military troops, but rather State Department intelligence assets and American-made, military-grade heavy weapons?
What if under federal law the secretary of state and the secretary of the Treasury are permitted on their own to issue licenses to American arms dealers to sell arms to the governments of foreign countries? What if Mrs. Clinton secretly authorized the sale of American-made, military-grade weapons to the government of Qatar? What if Qatar is a small Middle Eastern country, the government of which is beholden to and largely controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood?
What if the Muslim Brotherhood is a recognized terrorist organization? What if the United States has no lawful or military purpose for putting military hardware into the hands of a government that supports or is controlled by a terrorist organization?
What if the real purpose of sending military hardware to Qatar was for it to end up in the hands of rebels in Syria and Libya? What if it got there? What if some of those rebels are known al Qaeda operatives? What if some of those operatives who received the American military hardware used it to assault Americans and American interests?
What if among those assaulted was the U.S. ambassador to Libya? What if Ambassador Christopher Stevens was assassinated in Benghazi by al Qaeda operatives who were using American-made, military-grade hardware that Mrs. Clinton knowingly sent to them?
What if the United States had no strategic interest in deposing the government of Libya? What if Congress never declared war on Libya? What if Moammar Gadhafi, the reprehensible dictator of Libya, was nevertheless an American ally whose fights against known terrorist organizations had garnered him praise from President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair?
What if the U.S. had no strategic interest in deposing the dictator of Syria, President Bashar Assad? What if Congress never declared war on Syria? What if the government of Syria, though reprehensible, has been fighting a war against groups and militias, some of whom have been designated as terrorist organizations by the secretary of state? What if that secretary of state was Hillary Clinton?
What if Mrs. Clinton had a political interest in deposing the governments of Libya and Syria? What if her goal in fighting these secret wars was to claim triumph for herself over Middle Eastern despots? What if it is a federal crime to fight a private war against a foreign government? What if it is a federal crime to provide material assistance to terrorist organizations? What if these are crimes no matter who consents or approves?
What if, when asked about this while testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mrs. Clinton professed ignorance? What if it is a federal crime for a witness to lie to or mislead Congress?
What if the outcome of Mrs. Clinton’s war in Libya has been the destruction of the Gadhafi government and ensuing chaos? What if that chaos has brought terror and death to many thousands of innocents in Libya? What if Mrs. Clinton has failed to achieve any noticeable result with her secret war in Syria?
What if she managed these wars on an email system that was not secured in a government venue? What if she did that to keep her thoughts and actions secret from the president and from the State Department in case she failed to win the wars? What if she used a BlackBerry she bought at Wal-Mart instead of a secure and encrypted government-issued phone?
What if her management of these wars on the private email system exposed national security secrets to anyone who could hack into her server or her router? What if the server or the router had been kept in the bathroom of an apartment of an employee of a computer company in Denver, Colo., and not under lock and key and armed guard in her home in New York as she has represented?