RUTHFULLY YOURS

As readers of my columns know, I am a fan of Peter Schweizer, who runs the Government Accountability Institute and is author of the crucially important Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The book is an exhaustively researched account of the Clinton Foundation scheme, and media reporting indicates that it triggered the FBI’s investigation of the Foundation’s pay-to-play scheming.

Mr. Schweizer is the first to admit (maybe I should say, to brag) that he is not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar. He’s a first-rate investigative journalist. In that spirit, I want to rebut a legal error I’ve heard him make in a couple of interviews over the last few days, most recently when interviewed by Rush Limbaugh this afternoon. Apparently making some errant assumptions based on the fact that the FBI director, by statute, has a ten-year term, he has opined that the FBI is an agency independent of the executive branch; therefore, he concludes, the FBI director does not work for, and may not be fired by, the president.

This is incorrect.

In our system, law enforcement is an executive power. The FBI is thus an executive branch agency. Indeed, far from independent, it is a part of the Justice Department; the FBI director is subordinate to the attorney general in the chain-of-command.

Under the Constitution, all executive power is endowed in one official, the president of the United States. Every official who wields power in the executive branch thus wields it at the pleasure of the chief executive. The president may terminate any executive officer, even those who have been confirmed by Congress, for any reason or no reason. The FBI director is no different.

It is true that Congress has given the FBI director a ten-year term, but it is best thought of as a presumptive ten-year limit. There are two explanations for it.

The first is J.Edgar Hoover. After his legendary (and notorious) 43-year tenure, Congress and the Ford White House decided that such awesome power should not be in a single set of hands for so long. In 1976, a law was enacted limiting the director’s term to ten years.

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead and hoping that the election was sooner than later.

Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one.

With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal:

the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure;

Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader;

Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.

Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were mostly about yoga and Chelsea’s wedding – sort of like saying that one can beat 31 trillion-to-one odds of turning $1,000 into a $100,000 cattle-futures profit in no time by merely reading the Wall Street Journal. Until Friday, FBI director James Comey, in Hillary’s eyes, was a sober and judicious public servant who had rightly seen insufficient cause for her indictment. Now she believes that he is a rank Republican politico seeking to rob her of her presidency.

Clinton thought that she had survived Wikileaks, the Project Veritas ambush tapes, the hacked Colin Powell e-mails, the DNC disclosures, and so on – mostly because of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted wounds, some vicious-if-clever Democratic Party operatives, and a series of Democratic-planted IEDs about Trump’s foul mouth that exploded at preplanned and opportune moments.

Yet no one thought discredited deviant Anthony Weiner could much harm Hillary – except of course “conspiratorial” Donald Trump. He warned months ago that Clinton aide Huma Abedin might have been passing on classified materials to her dissolute husband. Because Weiner couldn’t repress his electronic libido with young girls, he ended up on the FBI’s radar – and by extension his smartphones, tablets, computers, and by further extension supposedly his estranged wife’s confidential communications. It was thought that Weiner might have stopped his sexting addiction when he lost his House seat, when he lost his mayor’s race, when he lost his wife, when he lost his jobs – or, at the very least, before he might lose Hillary (who supposedly fixed Abedin up with Weiner) her election.

Hillary’s team dared Comey to put up incriminating e-mails or shut up about investigating Hillary, hoping that the Obama Justice Department might quash any request for court-ordered warrants. But that demand assumed that Weiner is a loyal Clintonista and will put his fealty to Hillary and the Democrats above his own fear of federal prison and its supposed cultural intolerance for supposed predators. For now, the Clinton attack on the FBI might be not only futile but stupid – antagonizing her inquisitor, without the ability to apply pressure to silence him – if Weiner voluntarily surrenders his warrant-less communications to obtain some sort of deal.

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga. CONTINUE AT SITE

A nagging question has been lost amid the tempest over the FBI’s revival of the Clinton e-mails investigation. As everyone knows, the file has been reopened because of a trove of e-mails found on a laptop shared by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. What we don’t know, however, is: Why has the FBI only recently learned about a computer used by Ms. Abedin?

Remember, Abedin is said to have cooperated in the Clinton e-mails investigation and sat for a lengthy interview with FBI agents. The agents asked her about her e-mail practices. Assuming they asked basic questions, as agents are trained to do, they would have methodically itemized the computers and e-mail accounts she used. Yet, the Abedin/Weiner computer, which is said to contain 650,000 e-mails (an unknown number of which are relevant to the Clinton investigation), was not acquired by the bureau in connection with the Clinton investigation. It was seized in an unrelated investigation of Weiner, reportedly involving his alleged “sexting” with a teenage minor.

Why did the FBI agents on the Clinton e-mails investigation fail to acquire and search this computer months earlier? The question becomes more pressing in light of the Washington Examiner’s report that the FBI failed to ask not only Abedin but other Clinton aides to surrender their computers, smartphones, or other communications devices.

Now, there could be a good explanation, at least in connection with some Clinton aides. If, after a reasonably thorough investigation, the FBI had found no indication that potentially classified information was transmitted or stored on a particular device, there’d be no need to seize it. Let’s say X is a Clinton staffer. Let’s also say the FBI finds that X appears only to have used her government e-mail account for official business; that X did not have an account on the clintonemail.com domain; that whenever Clinton or other government officials e-mailed X, they addressed the e-mail to X’s state.gov account; and that X was cooperative when interviewed and convincingly said she never used her private e-mail for government business. Under those circumstances, it would be reasonable not to ask for the surrender of X’s private cellphone or computers.

Two sources with “intimate knowledge” of the FBI’s investigations into the Clinton emails and Clinton Foundation leaked new information about both of the probes to Fox News Wednesday. The sources say that the latter investigation has been going on for more than a year and is being led by the white-collar crime division of the FBI. They also say that the Clinton Foundation “pay to play” probe has taken a “very high priority,” and the FBI has re-interviewed multiple individuals involved in the case. The sources told Special Report’s Bret Baier that their investigation will likely to lead to an indictment.

Additionally, Baier reported that according to Fox News’ sources, Clinton’s private email server had been breached by at least five foreign intelligence hackers. FBI Director James Comey said in July that he could not say definitively whether her server had been breached.

Via Fox News:

Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.

“There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day,” one source told Fox News, who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.

FBI agents are “actively and aggressively pursuing this case,” and will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, sources said.

Agents are also going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews and the FBI 302, documents agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up, according to sources.

Fox News reports that the re-opened email investigation is being run by the national security division of the FBI and that they are combing through former NY congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. According to the sources, they’ve found emails that came from Hillary Clinton’s private email server that appear to be new. It is not yet known if the emails contain classified information, but that will be known soon.

As for those questionable immunity deals with Clinton’s top aides including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, Fox reports that the laptops that were supposed to be destroyed as part of those deals, have not been destroyed and are now in fact currently in the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., “being exploited.”

The source told Fox News that if a subject at any point lies during the investigation, the immunity deal is “null and void.”

On The Kelly File Wednesday night, host Megyn Kelly asked former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani why all this is coming out now.

One of the most repellent aspects of the 2016 presidential election has been a phenomenon that has its home in leftwing tactics but that has now emerged on the Right in addition to the Left. More precisely, it has revolved around the adoption by precincts of the #NeverTrump Right of tactics usually associated with the Left. The main feature of that tactic deploys a twofold effort at character assassination. The first step is the transformation of political disagreement into a species of heresy. The second step involves the thundering repudiation of the newly minted heretics, who are to be caricatured or demonized, and reminded that they must seek absolution or forgiveness for their apostasy.

A case in point is the New York Daily News column published two days ago by the erstwhile conservative, now Hillary Clinton supporter and #NeverTrump crusader, Gabriel Schoenfeld. “Expose Trump’s enablers,” the headline began, “How many people who should know better are making it easier for him to lie to the American people.”

Exhibit A in that roster of people “who should know better” is your humble correspondent, R. Kimball. In fact, I am the only Exhibit. My heresy is to have decided, rather late in the day, to support Donald Trump for president. Over the last couple of months, Schoenfeld has emitted several needling tweets taking me and others to task for that support. On September 17, for example, he tweeted that I, Victor Davis Hanson, and Charles Kesler were “backing a birther, a bigot, an enemy of the Constitution.” On October 1, I received a solo message: “impeccable timing for your endorsement of the lunatic, just as he implodes.” Then on October 17 we read that “If @RogerKimball, our Ezra Pound, had been born in Italy in, say, 1885, he would be singing Mussolini’s praises.” Note how the perceived pulse of the campaign affects Schoenfeld’s invective: when Trump is thought to be clearly losing, ridicule ensues; when Trump is on the upswing, paranoia and derangement follow.

Perhaps this is the place to mention that Schoenfeld and I, as he notes in his Daily News column, are acquaintances. “Encounter Press,” he writes, “published my first book.” Well, that’s nearly right. The publisher he has in mind is called Encounter Books, not Encounter Press. I should perhaps note for the record that I was not involved with Encounter when The Return of Anti-Semitism, the book to which he alludes, was published.

In a notorious 1996 New York Times essay, pundit William Safire famously said this of Hillary Clinton:

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady – a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation – is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

Could anyone who has followed her political activities since make any sensible rebuttal to Safire’s observation? As many of her critics have noted, Hillary Clinton will lie when she’d be far better served by the truth. Now here we are just days away from an election that could put this woman into the most powerful political position in the world, and apparently she’s still at it.

Conservative site, 100% Fed Up, is reporting this (emphasis added):

Campaigning in Florida on Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton claimed that she was in New York City on 9/11, when terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. She made her claim while discussing terrorism and the threat posed by ISIS.”I know what happened not far from here at Pulse night club in Orlando,” she said. “I was in New York City on 9/11 as one of the two senators. I will defeat ISIS. I will protect America.”

Except that she wasn’t in New York City on 9/11; she was at her home in Washington, D.C. on the morning of that day of infamy and did not get to New York until the next day. Proof of her silly, useless lie is available from her own campaign media operation, the Clinton News Network, which in a 15-year commemoration of 9/11 featuring Clinton said this:

When news broke of the first plane ripping through the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, Clinton had just left her house in Washington, D.C., and was on her way to the Senate. By the time she reached Capitol Hill, evacuations were already underway.

Good grief! The woman is running for the nation’s highest office, and mere days before the election, she gratuitously lies to a crowd of supporters? Even the most naive political beginner would know that you don’t publicly lie about something that can be so easily checked. Had Hillary not been lying for so long, as Safire documents, we might attribute such a gaffe to the various head injuries she’s sustained or as a mental manifestation of the Parkinson’s disease some physicians suspect her to have. But no, her previous history all the way back to pre-Safire argues persuasively that this is one of those people whom many of us have met, and most of us have heard of, a person who simply can’t sort out truth from lies in her own mind and her own mouth. She will, in clear fact, lie when the truth would be to her advantage, as in Florida Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton is, quite clearly, a congenital liar. But here’s the sobering thought to take away from this: if she can’t separate truth from lies, is she also incapable of distinguishing between honest and dishonest behavior? Her behavior as secretary of state would seem to indicate the answer is no, she can’t.

And I ask you again today, folks: is this the kind of person we want leading our America?