The State Department lies, covers up the lie, and admits it -- but no one loses his job

Eighteen minutes of deleted audio got Richard Nixon impeached. Eight minutes of missing video? Well, diplomacy and all that.

From Lois Lerner’s weaponizing the IRS on behalf of Democrats before the 2012 elections to Mrs. Clinton’s toilet-server shenanigans to gross abuses of prosecutorial power among Democratic state attorneys general, the lesson of the Obama years is clear: If you are close enough to power, you can do anything, and there is never a price to pay.

That video is our property, and the event it documents is of some concern to us as a people, inasmuch as some of us (not many, but some) retain sufficient self-respect and resent being lied to, with malice aforethought, by our own employees, and might be inclined to make a public issue about it in this election year. But of course that gets harder to do when the evidence is destroyed, which is why somebody in the Obama administration — and it would not be too hard to find out who — destroyed that video.

Get six months behind in your child-support payments, and you’ll go to jail. Lie about conducting secret negotiations with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism as it goes about working to acquire nuclear capabilities, and then destroy the evidence of your lie, and what happens? We won’t even bother to make public who the guilty party is.

Yes, of course they know.