RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Thursday, National Law Journal’s Marcia Coyle reported that Alaska lawyer Moira Smith recently claimed on Facebook that nearly 20 years ago, in 1999, Justice Clarence Thomas touched her buttocks at a dinner party. To say that Smith’s account raises questions about its accuracy is an understatement; the story was obviously fabricated.

Smith has produced no witnesses for the alleged incident, so Coyle ran with Smith’s version. As Smith tells it, she was helping to set the table at the small dinner party, hosted by the head of a legal scholarship program to which she belonged, and ended up standing next to Justice Thomas, who was mysteriously seated alone at the table before dinner while the other guests mingled elsewhere. At that point, Smith alleges, Justice Thomas squeezed her buttocks several times and suggested she sit next to him.

Since Smith had no witnesses, she helped Coyle track down several of her roommates from that period whom she claims to have told about the incident shortly after it happened. Those roommates have varying levels of recollection that seem to correlate pretty strongly with their level of involvement with liberal political causes.

Laura Fink, the most outspoken of the roommates, is the liberal co-founder of a California political-consulting firm connected to the Clintons and the SEIU. A second housemate remembers a discussion but has a “fuzzy” memory of the details, and a third had nothing but vague memories and wouldn’t let Coyle publish his or her name. The only other source to go on the record was Smith’s ex-husband, Paul Bodnar, a former senior director for energy and climate change in the Obama administration’s National Security Council.

Smith herself has been closely associated with partisan causes for more than two decades, including working for a Democratic state legislator, giving money to Senator Mark Begich (D., Alaska), and serving as national committeewoman for the Young Democrats of Alaska. Smith’s current husband, Jake Metcalfe, was chairman of the Alaska Democratic Party until he stepped down to run for Congress. He withdrew from that race during the primary after his campaign was revealed to be responsible for several fake websites attacking one of his rivals. Metcalfe has worked for unions, too, including the Alaska affiliate of the public-sector employee union AFSCME.

Felony mishandling of classified information, including our nation’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets; the misappropriation and destruction of tens of thousands of government records — these are serious criminal offenses. To this point, the Justice Department and FBI have found creative ways not to charge Hillary Clinton for them. Whether this will remain the case has yet to be seen. As we go to press, the stunning news has broken that the FBI’s investigation is being reopened. It appears, based on early reports, that in the course of examining communications devices in a separate “sexting” investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the bureau stumbled on relevant e-mails — no doubt connected to Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner’s wife and, more significantly, Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidant. According to the New York Times, the FBI has seized at least one electronic device belonging to Ms. Abedin as well. New e-mails, never before reviewed by the FBI, have been recovered.

The news is still emerging, and there will be many questions — particularly if it turns out that the bureau failed to obtain Ms. Abedin’s communications devices earlier in the investigation, a seemingly obvious step. As we await answers, we can only observe that, whatever the FBI has found, it was significant enough for director James Comey to sense the need to notify Congress, despite knowing what a bombshell this would be just days before the presidential election.

One thing, however, is already clear. Whatever the relevance of the new e-mails to the probe of Clinton’s classified-information transgressions and attempt to destroy thousands of emails, these offenses may pale in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s most audacious violations of law: Crimes that should still be under investigation; crimes that will, in fitting Watergate parlance, be a cancer on the presidency if she manages to win on November 8.

Mrs. Clinton appears to have converted the office of secretary of state into a racketeering enterprise. This would be a violation of the RICO law — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971 (codified in the U.S. penal code at sections 1961 et seq.).

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered.

In an Oct. 24 response, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran.

The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch, according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon.

The inquiry launched by the lawmakers is just one of several concurrent ongoing congressional probes aimed at unearthing a full accounting of the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran.

“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.”

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey revealed Friday that the FBI has reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her handling of classified material, merely 11 days before Election Day. Mr. Comey cited new evidence, but the disclosure raises troubling new questions about the Democratic candidate and FBI.

In a letter to Congress, Mr. Comey wrote that in connection “with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” The FBI “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant,” but presumably the new emails are significant enough for Mr. Comey to conclude he had no choice but to take the extraordinary step of returning to the Clinton file so close to Nov. 8.

Liberals decided in real time Friday that Mr. Comey is now a partisan attempting to influence the election, but the same liberals had a ball after his July media appearance when he created a new legal standard of “extremely careless” instead of “grossly negligent” to exonerate Mrs. Clinton. Then the FBI chief was the reincarnation of Eliot Ness. At the third debate, Mrs. Clinton cited Mr. Comey’s probity: “The FBI conducted a yearlong investigation into my emails. They concluded there was no case.” Liberals can’t have it both ways.

The reality is that Mr. Comey’s Clinton probe has been a kid-glove exercise all along. Only days before he prematurely ended the investigation and proclaimed that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case”—a decision for the Justice Department, not the FBI— Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an Phoenix airport tarmac.

When the FBI later released its investigation summary and interview notes on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, they showed Mrs. Clinton telling agents that she “could not recall” or “did not remember specifically” key details and events 27 times. The interview wasn’t taped, and Mrs. Clinton wasn’t put under oath, though it is a crime to lie to the FBI.

Recent revelations include the immunity deals extended to Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to get them to surrender their laptops. The FBI could have sought a subpoena or search warrant to do as much, but Justice didn’t empanel a grand jury. Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were allowed to serve as lawyers for Mrs. Clinton at her FBI interview, despite being material witnesses. Their deals specified that the laptops would be destroyed, meaning they can’t now be re-searched and cross-checked against Mr. Comey’s new information.

This week we learned that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe steered more than $675,000 to the political campaign of the wife of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who oversaw the Clinton investigation in the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office. Mr. McAuliffe is a longtime Clinton friend who is under FBI investigation himself over campaign finances. CONTINUE AT SITE

The objective of this libelous new report from the hard-Left money-making and incitement machine the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is made plain within it: “Before you book a spokesperson from an anti-Muslim extremist group or quote them in a story, research their background — detailed in this in-depth guide to 15 of the most visible anti-Muslim activists— and consider the consequences of giving them a platform.”

They wish to silence those who speak honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, blaming us for a supposed rise in “Islamophobia.” If they really want to stamp out suspicion of Islam, of course, they will move against not us, but the likes of Omar Mateen, Syed Rizwan Farook, Tashfeen Malik, Nidal Malik Hasan, Mohammed Abdulazeez, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the myriad other Muslims who commit violence in the name of Islam and justify it by reference to Islamic teachings.

The SPLC doesn’t do that because its objective is not really to stop “Islamophobia” at all, but to create the illusion of a powerful and moneyed network of “Islamophobes,” who can only be stopped if you write a check to the SPLC. That’s what this is really all about.

In constructing this illusory edifice, the SPLC labels me and fourteen others “anti-Muslim extremists.” We are, of course, no more “anti-Muslim” than foes of the Nazis were anti-German, but note the word “extremists.” That’s the mainstream media and Obama administration’s term of choice for jihad terrorists. In what way are we “extremists”? Has anyone on the SPLC’s hit list (and given the SPLC’s track record of inciting violence against its targets, that is exactly what it is) ever blown anything or anyone up? Beheaded anyone? Boasted of our imminent conquest of any territory and the massacre of or enslavement of its people? No, all we have done is speak critically about jihad terror and Sharia oppression. The SPLC is trying to further the libel that we are the other side of the coin, the non-Muslim bin Ladens and Awlakis. Until we commit any terror attacks or conspire with others to do so, however, the SPLC’s libel is only that: a libel.

There is a trait campaigning groups have that is well known. Once they have achieved their objective, they continue. Usually it is because there are people with salaries at stake, pensions, perks and more.

Suddenly the SPLC seemed to spy a new fascism. The SPLC saw this new fascism in people who objected to people flying planes into skyscrapers, decapitating journalists and aid workers and blowing up the finish line of marathons.

One got the impression that it had become immensely useful for some people to be able to smear those concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, and try to make them akin to Nazis. The only other movements who find this equally useful are, of course, Islamic extremists.

Here is this “anti-racist” organisation, largely made up of white men who present themselves as being anti-racists, and yet who spend their time attacking Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a black immigrant woman. At the top of any list of “hate-groups,” the SPLC must in future be sure to place itself.

The SPLC’s list of “anti-Muslim activists” also includes a practising Muslim, Maajid Nawaz, one of the most principled and courageous people around calling out the extremists in his faith for their bigotry and hatred. He does so, like Hirsi Ali, at no small risk to himself.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), based in Montgomery, Alabama, has struck again. The self-appointed boundary-markers and policemen of free discussion have issued what they call a “Field Guide” to help “guide” the media in “countering prominent anti-Muslim extremists.” It is hard to know where to start with such idiocy, so let us start from the beginning.

The SPLC was founded in 1971, ostensibly to fight for civil rights among other good causes. By the end of its first decade it was targeting the KKK and other racist organisations. So far so good. But like many a campaigning organisation, they experienced the happy blow of basically winning their argument. By the 1990s, there were mercifully few racist groups in America going about unchallenged. When a member of the KKK cropped up everybody in civil society pretty much understood that here was a bad person who should not be given a free pass.