Thinking back to this December 2013 piece . . .

1) Hillary and the team around her cannot see her clearly; their self-image is warped. Clinton friends and supporters told Ron Fournier that she could be the Pope Francis of Washington, transforming an “ancient institution marred by scandal and incompetence.”

2) For all of his other flaws, Ron Fournier does not buy this sort of spin. He writes today, “The media and the American public are familiar with the stale Clinton tricks, which now only play into the GOP caricature that Hillary Clinton is calculating, paranoid, and wholly political.”

3) For all of his other strengths, Fournier strangely insists that it is just a “GOP caricature” that Hillary Clinton is “calculating, paranoid, and wholly political.” When she has built an entirely off-the-books secret system for e-mail, away from National Archives and other record-keeping systems, away from FOIA requests, entirely controlled by her people, it’s not a caricature anymore. It’s just fact.

4) While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had Huma Abedin under a “special contract” that allowed her to be a consultant for private clients while keeping her $135,000-per-year State Department job. All of these “special contracts” now must be reviewed by someone genuinely independent.

The lesson of this is everyone — President Obama, the press, the American taxpayers — were extraordinarily foolish to trust Hillary Clinton to police herself. She does not believe that the rules, laws, and regulations apply to her. To her and her inner circle, her motives are always beyond reproach, her financial compensation is always fair and well-earned, her critics are always part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” She is the walking embodiment of the status quo and Washington’s worst habits of secrecy, arrogance, self-righteousness, and inability to distinguish between self-interest and the national interest.

As I concluded back then:

Expecting Hillary Clinton to be a transformative reformer of Washington is like expecting Donald Trump to become a Bolshevik, Kim Jong Un to renounce power and become a monk, or the New York Yankees to push for the end of free agency in baseball. Powerful people rarely if ever decide to completely overhaul the system that made them powerful.