RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Mr. Trump is a business nationalist without a core philosophy of government, so his policy arc is going to be an adventure. But some of his voters might be surprised to learn that he wants to flood the U.S. with cheap Mexican goods and other dangerous foreign imports.”

Donald Trump is going to build a wall, and it’s going to be a beautiful wall, and everyone will love it—but it’s also going to have one notable side entrance. To wit, the GOP frontrunner won’t let Mexicans into America but he’ll make an exception for Mexican drugs.

Mr. Trump released a 10-paragraph health plan last week, perhaps in response to the criticism that he has no policy details. We’ll discuss the complete outline at a later date, but one detail that leapt out for comment is his endorsement of foreign pharmaceutical importation—an idea even liberals left for dead a decade ago. His campaign promises to “remove barriers to entry into free markets,” because “allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers.”

Sorry, it won’t. The U.S. maintains a “closed” drug distribution network of manufacturers, suppliers and pharmacies—precisely because overseas drugs often aren’t safe and dependable. Recent years have seen a proliferation of pill mills and forgery rings that slip counterfeit or adulterated products into global supply chains. The World Health Organization estimates 10% of drugs world-wide are bogus.

In the case of Mexico, the U.S. State Department warns travellers that as many as 25% of the medications available south of the border are fake. The Los Zetas, Sinaloa and Juárez cartels have diversified their portfolios into deceptive pharmaceuticals. The modern “closed” U.S. system was created in 1999 because Southern California was awash with fraudulent black-market compounds smuggled from Mexico. CONTINUE AT SITE

As our friend Guy Benson tallies things up in the Clinton email scandal, there were not only a whopping 2,079 emails containing classified information that were stored and transmitted on Hillary Clinton’s non-secure private server system. It turns out that she personally wrote 104 such emails – which, the Washington Post gingerly observes, “could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.” I’ll say. In fact, I have said: see my February 6 column describing the damage the former secretary of state has done to national security by exposing intelligence secrets, collection methods, and sources of information to hostile foreign intelligence services.

Let’s also keep in mind a fact that’s easy to forget since what’s before our eyes is so outrageous: For now, we are only talking about the Clinton emails that she deigned to turn over to the government. As Guy reminds us, there are another 32,000 emails that she attempted to delete. There have been reports indicating that the FBI has been able to recover at least some of these from the server. It is a shoe that has yet to drop.

Recall the state of play: Mrs. Clinton originally insisted no classified information was ever transmitted on her servers. When this became untenable, she changed her story to claim that she never personally sent or received classified emails – a claim that, even if true, would be of little legal relevance since she caused the creation of the private server system via which, because of the way she ran her office, the transmission of classified emails by her underlings was inevitable. But of course, we now know for sure that the claim is not true: Wholly apart from what she may have received, Clinton personally wrote and sent those aforementioned 104 emails containing classified information.

So the final evolution in this bogus defense is that there were “no classified markings” on emails stored or sent via the private server. Obviously, this is offered to intimate that she had no way of knowing she and her subordinates were handling classified information with criminal recklessness.

It isn’t just the ties.

Donald Trump has taken some grief for the fact that his signature neckties are made in China. But the scope of Trump-branded products made outside America is larger than has previously been reported — especially when that includes the clothing line named after Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, which is listed on the Trump Organization website as part of the Trump empire.

Thousands of items with the Trump name on them — furniture, shirts, shoes, salad bowls, even “Trump body soap,” and much of Ivanka’s growing jewelry and clothing line — have been made by companies, often paying Trump simply for the use of his name on their goods, that employ foreign workers.

Clothing and home goods are a small part of Trump’s fortune. His total income from licensed home goods was between $2.5 million and $13.1 million, according to his personal financial disclosure.

These Trump company business decisions are directly at odds with the central message of his presidential campaign: a promise to bring back jobs that have been sent abroad.

“I am going to bring jobs back to the United States like nobody else can,” Trump said in his closing statement at last week’s debate in Detroit, ahead of the Republican primary in Michigan on Tuesday.

“I’m going to bring jobs back from China. I’m going to bring jobs back from Mexico and from Japan,” Trump said during the Feb. 13 GOP debate in South Carolina.

In Detroit, Trump admitted he had his clothing line manufactured in China and Mexico. But he claimed that it is “impossible for clothing makers in this country to do clothing in this country.” Trump blamed the Chinese government’s devaluation of the yuan, which helps to make Chinese-made goods cheaper for American consumers than those made in the U.S.