If there is one person to credit for Hillary Clinton dodging the bullet for her malfeasance and misfeasance at State Department it is a guy named Patrick Kennedy who is the Under Secretary for Management. He is a career employee and arguably the most powerful single person in the State Department as he controls basically everything that happens there.

I’ve never met the guy, but one can assume that his politics are pretty far left and anti-American. Those seem to be necessary attributes to advance at State.

Over at wemeantwell.com, former State Department official Peter Van Buren gives us the advantage of his personal knowledge of the man. Van Buren, admittedly, has a bit of an axe to grind as Kennedy tried to torpedo his book on State Department f***-ups in Iraq because Kennedy thought it made State look bad. But here are some other highlights:

Kennedy and Benghazi

And at the Congressional Benghazi hearings, there’s Pat testifying Clinton did no wrong, that State as an institution did no wrong, and helping throw a few lesser officials under the bus in hopes of making it all go away.

One of those officials Pat helped deep six later came out as a whistleblower, suggesting Clinton’s staff skimmed incriminating documents off the pile turned over to Congress.

Kennedy also was the one who hand-picked the members of State’s internal Accountability Review Board that failed in December 2012 to find any senior official at fault for any wrongdoing in the run-up to Benghazi. That Review Board chose not to interview Secretary of State Clinton about her role in Benghazi.

Kennedy and Child Prostitution Cover-Up

It was Pat who helped former American Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman retire in order to curtail a public investigation.

A State Department investigator asserted Gutman solicited “sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.” Howard Gutman and members of Clinton’s security detail were also accused of hiring prostitutes. According to an internal memo prepared by the State Department Inspector General in October 2013, Kennedy personally called off an investigation.

While there is little doubt Kennedy is a Clinton loyalist, his real passion seems to be for foiling any oversight of State by anyone. He also has a personal stake here. He either personally approved Clinton’s private email server or he sandbagged any objections to it. So how the server goes, so goes Patrick Kennedy.

Some interesting things have happened. Kennedy has take charge of trying to claim that the highly classified emails found on the Clinton email server were not, in fact, classified:

Two sources confirmed that Kennedy went to Capitol Hill in early July and argued the 2011 Abedin email – which as Fox News first reported kick-started the FBI probe along with a second 2012 email from Clinton aide Jake Sullivan — did not contain classified material.

To make his case, Kennedy cited a 2011 Irish Times newspaper report about the Libyan revolution, to claim the information was already out there.

One participant found it odd Kennedy insisted on having the discussion in a secure facility for classified information, known as a SCIF, though Kennedy said the Abedin email was unclassified, and the Irish Times story did not contain comparable details.

Also, to defend the State Department’s decision to release the email without redactions, Kennedy said a contact at the CIA was in agreement, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the claims, though the intelligence did not come from the CIA.

It is never a good sign when you require a meeting in a SCIF to convince people information is not classified. This seems to indicate that Kennedy knew the information was classified, that is could be proven that he had that knowledge, and in order to protect himself from legal jeopardy he had to carry out his sad charade in a SCIF. He also demonstrated that telling the truth was something he didn’t hold in very high regard.

What is even more absurd is that after the Intelligence Community IG reported to Congress the existence of two emails containing Top Secret material, Kennedy has denied the Intelligence Community IG access to Hillary’s emails, one can only assume for fear of what he will find:

A spokeswoman for intelligence community IG I. Charles McCullough tells National Review that McCullough “has had no further communications from Undersecretary Kennedy since he declined [on July 24] to implement two out of four recommendations and denied our office any further access to the 30,000 e-mails.” (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

The other development that has Kennedy’s fat, chocolate-smeared, fingerprints all over it is the new scam being run by State on redacting information from Hillary’s emails.

Until recently, when State released the batches of Hillary’s emails they redacted classified information and used the FOIA code to show that as a reason. This made it ridiculously easy for anyone to see the stunning volume of classified material mishandled by Clinton. Now they’ve changed. FOIA exemption b(5) is for ‘deliberative’ materials. This protects draft correspondence and internal agency debates from disclosure. Guess what has happened?

At least four classified Hillary Clinton emails had their markings changed to a category that shields the content from Congress and the public, Fox News has learned, in what State Department whistleblowers believed to be an effort to hide the true extent of classified information on the former secretary of state’s server.

The changes, which came to light after the first tranche of 296 Benghazi emails was released in May, was confirmed by two sources — one congressional, the other intelligence. The four emails originally were marked classified after a review by career officials at the State Department. But after a second review by the department’s legal office, the designation was switched to “B5” — also known as “deliberative process,” which refers to internal deliberations by the Executive Branch. Such discussions are exempt from public release.

In the blink of an eye, classified material was not only protected from disclosure but it was also kept from even being acknowledged as classified. Who controls States FOIA process? You guessed it. Patrick Kennedy.

Right now State is at the epicenter of two investigations that are only slightly related: Hillary’s emails and the Benghazi attack. Kennedy is leading State’s response on both investigations despite the heroic conflict on interest involved.

Congress should expect that it will face resistance at every turn in its efforts to find out what happened at Benghazi and with Hillary’s email server. That resistance is only partly rooted in partisan politics. Most of it comes from professional civil servants who are trying to protect their agency from criticism and to obscure their own bad judgments and misconduct.

As an aside, when I first stumbled onto a mention of Patrick Kennedy, I assumed that he was another privileged git of that inbred criminal clan from New England that seems to think it is destined to drink and screw its way to governing the United States. Forever.

Back in the 17th century, the King James I of England, who was simultaneously King James VI of Scotland, was confronted by a particularly unruly, disloyal, and predatory clan named MacGregor. In 1604, he’d had enough. He issued a decree that made possessing the last name of MacGregor a capital offense.

”… the name of McGregor should be altogether abolished, and that (all) persons of that Clan should renounce their name and take same some other name, and that they nor none of their posterity should call themselves Gregor or McGregor thereafter under the pain of death.”

Any man in England or Scotland could hunt MacGregors down like dogs and still be within the law. I think it is high time we tried this in America.