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POLITICS

Meltdown at Justice Attorney General Lynch abdicated her duty in the Clinton probes.

Fewer than three of 10 Americans trust government to do the right thing always or most of the time, Gallup reports, and the years since 2007 are “the longest period of low trust in government in more than 50 years.” The details emerging about the multiple investigations into Hillary Clinton explain a lot about this ebbing public confidence in institutions such as the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Start with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. A cavalcade of former Justice heavyweights are now assailing FBI director James Comey for reopening the Clinton email file, and Justice sources are leaking that the director went rogue despite Ms. Lynch’s counsel not to alert Congress so close to an election.

But Mr. Comey works for the Attorney General. If she thinks Mr. Comey was breaking Justice rules by sending Friday’s letter to Congress, then she had every right to order him not do so. If Mr. Comey sent the letter anyway, and he didn’t resign, Ms. Lynch could then ask President Obama to fire him.

Our guess is that she didn’t order Mr. Comey not to send the letter precisely because she feared Mr. Comey would resign—and cause an even bigger political storm. But the worst approach is to let a subordinate do something you believe is wrong and then whisper afterwards that you told him not to. The phrase for that is political cowardice.

Ms. Lynch’s abdication began when she and her prosecutors declined to empanel a grand jury. It continued in June after her supposedly coincidental rendezvous with Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac. She could have told Hillary Clinton’s husband that the appointment was inappropriate, or refused to let him board her plane. She says the conversation was “social,” but she allowed the ex-President to create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” Ms. Lynch conceded at an Aspen forum in July. The Clinton campaign compounded the problem by gossiping to the press that Mrs. Clinton would keep Ms. Lynch on as AG if she wins.

Ms. Lynch also abandoned her post when Mr. Comey staged his July media event dissecting the evidence in the Clinton email case and exonerating the Democratic nominee. The FBI’s job is to build a case, not make prosecutorial decisions. Yet Ms. Lynch later told Congress that rather than make up her own mind on the evidence she would merely “accept the recommendation of that team” at the FBI “and there was no basis not to accept it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Did Comey know Obama could be Hillary’s star witness? By J. Marsolo

The WikiLeaks emails prove that Obama knew that Hillary was using a private email system.

As an experienced prosecutor, FBI director Comey knew that Hillary would argue in her defense that Obama knew about her using the private unsecured email system. Obama did not stop her, did not object, and corresponded with Hillary on her system. Given these facts, Hillary would argue she did not have the intent to violate the statutes because her superior, the command in chief, the president, conversed with her on her private email system. Hillary would argue, How can I have the intent to violate the law when the president knows I use the private email system he uses to contact me? Leaving aside that it is Hillary making the argument, it is a reasonable and powerful defense against the charges.

Comey recited the facts sufficient to establish a prima facie case that Hillary violated the law. This should have been enough to recommend indictment because one can infer intent from the facts. The facts were clear enough to warrant an inference that Hillary acted with intent. It is then up to a judge or jury, the trier of facts, to draw the inference. The trier of facts may or may not draw the inference, but the facts are sufficient to warrant an indictment. But Comey must have known that Obama knew about her use, and that Obama did not object or tell Hillary to stop. The FBI review of the emails must have shown emails to and from Obama and aides to Obama. Accordingly, Comey would have concluded that Hillary did not have the criminal intent because she believed that Obama was OK with her use of a private unsecure email server.

A review of Comey’s statement of July 5 shows (emphasis added):

1. “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.”

Brazile merely the tipster…Clinton the true cheater in debate By Russ Vaughn

Donna Brazile is all over the news right now and the villain of the day on most conservative websites for her role in obtaining presidential debate questions in advance and then providing them to the Clinton campaign ahead of the actual televised event. There is much outrage over her clearly dishonest and unethical behavior, with her laughable denial captured on FOX News, looking full face into the camera and lying as only a Democrat pol can when confronted with the hard evidence. Even the leftist media is seeking a bit of separation from this obvious cheater, as CNN has fired her as an on-air contributor.

But all this outrage is misdirected; Brazile merely provided the heads-up, very detailed for sure, as she not only gave the Clinton campaign the word-for-word question about a very emotional public issue – contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan – but also provided a physical description of the female questioner so there could be no mistaking when and where the stolen response needed to be used. Brazile even noted that the questioner had a rash from her public water contamination. As you could expect, armed with all that forbidden information, Clinton managed to be right on top of this emotional public issue during the debate, demonstrating how she’s a thoroughly prepared leader for America, right?

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! What this now exposed situation makes abundantly clear is that this contemptible woman, her loathsome campaign staff, and the despicable Democratic Party leadership, when offered the chance to cheat, even with tens of millions of Americans watching, had no reluctance to do so. Hillary Clinton went out there on that debate stage forearmed with at least one answer that we know of (and who knows how many others?), looked straight into those cameras just like dishonest Donna Brazile, and cheated before the entire world. And this is the person the Democratic Party offers to America to be entrusted with our futures and our nation with all our national wealth?

Crooked Hillary, indeed…and she infects all those around her.

To Err Is Huma The FBI investigates the Clintons. They attack the FBI. By James Taranto

Partisans of Hillary Clinton insist the public has too much information about the FBI’s various inquiries into the Democratic presidential nominee and her associates. On its face, that claim seems reasonable. After all, Anthony Weiner is involved.

On Friday we learned, from director James Comey’s letter to Congress, that the FBI is once again investigating Mrs. Clinton’s illicit private email server. Two days later (and also in today’s print edition) The Wall Street Journal published a thorough report by Devlin Barrett revealing that for months the bureau has also been investigating the Clinton Foundation, “to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling.” That probe has met with resistance from Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department.
Late Friday the New York Times broke the news of the Weiner angle. The FBI has been looking into allegations, reported in September by DailyMail.com’s Alana Goodman, that the former congressman “carried on a months-long online sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl” who he knew was a minor. (In a statement to DailyMail.com, Weiner professed his innocence, though only of this particular allegation: “While I have provided the Daily Mail with information showing that I have likely been the subject of a hoax, I have no one to blame but me for putting myself in this position. I am sorry.”)

In 2010 the Times described Weiner as “one of the most eligible bachelors on Capitol Hill.” The occasion was Weiner’s marriage to Huma Abedin, a top aide to the most qualified person for anything ever. Weiner and Abedin, who “was once featured in a Vogue fashion spread,” were wed by Mr. Most Qualified, a k a Bill Clinton.

Abedin, who uses her maiden name (can you blame her?), had an account on Mrs. Clinton’s private server. According to the Times, FBI agents on the Weiner case found emails “pertinent” to the server investigation on a device Weiner and Abedin had shared. The Journal’s Barrett reports the Weiner laptop contained 650,000 emails.

That’s a gross figure, in more ways than one, but “underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state.” Agents couldn’t tell for sure because their warrant covered only the Weiner investigation. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports, they obtained an additional warrant to look for material relevant to the server investigation.

The Post notes that “an announcement from the FBI in early October, when the emails were discovered, might have been less politically damaging for Clinton than one coming less than two weeks before the Nov. 8 election.” That didn’t happen, it appears, because Comey wasn’t briefed on the find until last week.

According to the Journal, early this month “New York-based FBI officials notified Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command. . . . Mr. McCabe then instructed the email investigators to talk to the Weiner investigators and see whether the laptop’s contents could be relevant to the Clinton email probe.” Comey was told only after that determination.

Call Hillary Clinton’s Bluff The FBI director and the Democratic nominee are getting what they deserve.By William McGurn

Here are four words this columnist never thought he would type: Hillary Clinton is right.

Mrs. Clinton is right, at least, to this extent: When an FBI director links a presidential candidate to a criminal investigation 11 days out from the election, he owes the American people more than a vague promise to get back to us down the road.

Mrs. Clinton has responded by calling on Mr. Comey to release the emails the bureau has discovered on a home computer used by her aide, Huma Abedin. She demands this only because she is confident it will never happen.
Certainly there exist many practical obstacles to releasing the emails uncovered, including the inadvertent disclosure of classified information. Nevertheless, as unlikely as release may be, the case for more public information has become crucial now that the Justice Department has indicated this Clinton investigation, like the one before it, will go nowhere.

How do we know this? Mr. Comey may speak of going forward. But the objections of Justice suggest that it will again ensure that any investigation will be hindered by a lack of search warrants and subpoenas—and that whatever the FBI may turn up will never be put before a grand jury.

Justice inadvertently gave us a sign of just how important these tools are in a press release earlier this month touting the guilty felony plea by retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright for lying to the FBI in connection with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. In it, Justice boasts about using all the tools at its disposal to get the general, including “subpoenas, search warrants and document requests”—tools the FBI mostly lacked while investigating Mrs. Clinton.

A truly independent press corps might help here if it were not bent on validating Donald Trump’s complaints about a rigged system. In the dominant media narrative, not only is Mr. Comey now derided as “political,” his decision to investigate this newly discovered batch of emails is said to have been forced by “conservative” FBI agents.

Mr. Comey may indeed be in the thick of a huge battle within the bureau. But the main objections from FBI agents and former FBI agents have little to do with electoral politics and everything to do with investigative procedure.

FBI agents are professional investigators. In a case involving a former secretary of state who is now a candidate for president, they would expect their director to be telling his agents to make sure every “i” was dotted and every “t” crossed. And doing the same himself.CONTINUE AT SITE

Did the NYPD Just Save the Country? Jay Guy

As the Hillary Clinton/Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner sage unfolds, this morning a variety of unnamed NYPD sources have leaked a fascinating story to various media and social media outlets: the NYPD was investigating Anthony Weiner for sexting a 15 yr old and stumbled on tens of thousands of emails in a folder labeled “life insurance” on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Those emails, as we now know, contain content that is in some way shape or form are related to Hillary Clinton and her FBI investigation. The information was found by the NYPD Special Victims unit, who had a warrant per their involvement in the Weiner case.

Internal NYPD sources indicate that they discovered these files almost a month ago and turned them over to the FBI two weeks ago. These reports coincide with reports over the weekend of the NYPD’s involvement as they have investigated Weiner over the last month. Admittedly it’s speculative but is it difficult to imagine the FBI and DOJ attempted to keep this latest discovery quiet but were pressured to by the NYPD who would or could leak them themselves? Reports from a wide variety of news outlets indicate the DOJ refuses to give the FBI a warrant to review the evidence now in its possession – Comey revealing the presence of such evidence is a likely concession to the NYPD’s refusal to remain quiet.

Presuming NYPD involvement is true, a number of truths are immediately evident:

Hillary may be able to hush the corrupt DOJ and FBI. Hillary cannot hush the men in blue from the NYPD who Hillary has no impact or authority over.
This story will dominate the news cycles between now and November 8th. As sources from inside the NYPD leak out information related to the case, and content of Huma’s emails becomes widely known, Hillary’s criminal involvement will be the only relevant news story. NYPD are fine men who serve their city well but remaining silent in the face of an interesting news stories is not one of their strengths.
The NYPD has a long history of rising to the occasion in times of dire need. Although the circumstances on this occasion would be unique, it certainly would qualify as their most heroic act as the NYPD is quite literally standing up to the Obama and Hillary controlled corrupt FBI and DOJ.
Hillary will throw Huma under the bus effective immediately. Already today Huma is not traveling with the Clinton campaign and you can expect Hillary will continue to divorce herself from Huma, given the NYPD involvement indicates she is no longer in control of the investigation.

Hillary: No Commenting on Criminal Investigations … Unless It Helps Me July: Comey has exonerated me! October: Comey is undermining our republic! By Andrew C. McCarthy

How rich of Hillary Clinton to complain now that FBI director James Comey is threatening the democratic process by commenting publicly about a criminal investigation on the eve of an election.

Put aside that Comey did not say a single thing last week that implicates Clinton in a crime. The biggest coup for Clinton in the waning months of the campaign has been Comey’s decision not to prosecute her — a decision outside the responsibilities of the FBI director and publicly announced in a manner that contradicts law-enforcement protocols. There has been nothing more irregular, nothing that put law enforcement more in the service of politics, than that announcement. Yet, far from condemning it, Mrs. Clinton has worn it like a badge of honor since July. Indeed, she has contorted it into a wholesale exoneration, which it most certainly was not.

Just to remind those whose memories seem so conveniently to fail, Comey is the FBI director, not a Justice Department prosecutor, much less the attorney general. The FBI is not supposed to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The FBI is not supposed to decide whether the subject of a criminal investigation gets indicted. The FBI, moreover, is not obligated to make recommendations about prosecution at all; its recommendations, if it chooses to make them, are not binding on the Justice Department; and when it does make recommendations, it does so behind closed doors, not on the public record.

Yet, in the Clinton e-mails investigation, it was Comey who made the decision not to indict Clinton. Comey, furthermore, made the decision in the form of a public recommendation. In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. Comey, therefore, gave Mrs. Clinton a twofer: an unheard-of public proclamation that she should not be indicted by the head of the investigative agency; and a means of taking Lynch off the hook, which allowed the decision against prosecution to be portrayed as a careful weighing of evidence rather than a corrupt deal cooked up in the back of a plane parked on a remote tarmac.

Now, suddenly, Mrs. Clinton is worried about law-enforcement interference in politics. And her voice is joined by such allies as Jamie Gorelick (President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general) and Larry Thompson (Comey’s predecessor as President George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general and an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump). Like Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Gorelick and Mr. Thompson were delighted by Director Comey as long as his departures from orthodoxy were helping Clinton’s candidacy. But now, as they wrote in the Washington Post on Saturday, they are perturbed by the threat Comey purportedly poses to “long-standing and well-established traditions limiting disclosure of ongoing investigations . . . in a way that might be seen as influencing an election.”

Meet Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State Send a $200 million check to Iran. Daniel Greenfield

September 11, 2001 has come and gone. Countless bodies lie scattered in fragments around where two of the country’s tallest skyscrapers once stood. Some have burned to ash. Others had their throats slashed by Islamic terrorists. Still others fought and died on a plane to prevent another Islamic terror attack from taking place.

But Joe has an idea. Joe is a guy with lots of big ideas and this one is a real doozy.

The Senator from Delaware has come a long way since his days as a sixties shyster drumming up business in Wilmington. His formerly bald head is covered in hair so shiny is gleams under neon lights. His teeth are capped and shine almost as brightly. After a generation holding down a squeaky seat in the Senate, seniority makes him a man to be reckoned with. And therefore a man to be listened to.

Even if you wish he would shut up.

“I’m groping here,” Joe says. For once he isn’t referring to his notorious habits with women that will go on to make him the star of countless viral photographs, massaging, squeezing, caressing. Instead he’s talking about foreign policy. The Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has no clue.

Joe is worried that the Muslims will think badly of us after they murdered thousands of us. And he has a plan to make them feel better.

“Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” Senator Joe Biden says.

The remark isn’t quite as random as it seems. The Senator from Delaware, a state not known for its large Muslim or Iranian population, has a friendly relationship with the Iran Lobby. That relationship will only grow friendlier during the Bush era as he attacks America and appeases its enemies.

Iranian-Americans who hate the Jihadist government that has taken over their country and oppressed the Persian people are outraged when he attends a fundraiser at a pro-Iranian lobbyist’s home in California while treasonously attacking his own government for naming Iran one of the members of the ‘Axis of Evil’.

The Rats are Leaving the Ship By Frank Friday

The city I live in is sometimes called the biggest little town in the country because everybody seems to know everybody else’s business, but we have nothing on the nation’s capital. After James Comey’s bombshell announcement that thanks to Anthony Wiener’s laptop, the Hillary investigation is back on, who gets drafted by the Clintons to fight back? Jamie Gorelick. Yeah, that Jamie Gorelick, the Clinton’s cover-up artist who left DOJ for the big bucks at Fannie Mae, was involved in everything from the 9/11 hearings to the IRS scandal and was even considered by Obama to run the FBI. (Today, Ms. Gorelick tells us, James Comey is a threat to our very democracy, but just three years ago, her friend was “one of the great lawyers of the Justice Department.”)

Of course, when President Bush came to office he wanted to clear away all the Clinton mess, even appointing a lawyer of immeasurable talent and integrity, he was told, to look into the 2001 Pardongate scandal. A guy by the name of James Comey. It seems he had the goods on Hillary, her brother Hugh, Bill, and his brother Roger. But Mr. Comey went all squishy. If you’re a Republican, don’t expect that kind of treatment, though. Even if you quit and resign your office, then like Nixon, you’d better hope to get a pardon on the way out.

Comey certainly crossed me up earlier this year when I thought the enormous FBI investigation taking place meant he was serious about the Hillary’s latest scandals. In retrospect, it was just to keep from empaneling a grand jury that might get out of control. Comey is best friends with Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel/weasel who spent four years investigating the leak of CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame’s name, even though he knew within days of his appointment Richard Armitage was the leaker and no laws had been broken. No matter, scalps must be taken, so journalists were jailed for months on end and Scooter Libby eventually found guilty of an utterly trivial offense, most likely with false evidence.

Comey and Fitzgerald have an interesting pattern of prosecutorial toughness when it comes to Democrats. If you have no political pull, like Martha Stewart, or are an embarrassment like Rod Blagojevich, they throw the book at you, but the big shots get a pass. Lee Cary’s article in AT nicely explains the extent to which Comey, Fitzgerald and Loretta Lynch were willing to steer prosecutions around then Sen. Obama and nail Tony Resko and Blagojevich. No doubt Obama was grateful, for he even thought to reward Comey with a Supreme Court appointment.

Surrendering Our Birthright? By Eileen F. Toplansky

How do you tell a cynical millennial that there is still hope and promise in America? How do you persuade a young person who sees a tattered American dream that there are ways to reinvigorate this country? How do we convince a young American to realize that “if freedom is lost here there is no [other] place to escape to?”

How do you explain to a generation of students who have never learned about socialism and communism that these ideas are inimical to what the Founding Fathers wanted? How do you remind them of the radical idea that “government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people?” And that if we give up this birthright of ours, we have surrendered to the totalitarianism that describes far too much of the world.

How do you assert that America’s best years are not behind us but that the best is yet to be — if, and only if, we begin a return to America’s ideals of freedom and opportunity and not let an overweening government sap away our energies and our dreams?

How do you prove to a generation who receives its news in sound bites and from uninformed entertainers that a separation of powers is critical to maintaining a balance of power? How do you emphasize to them that when a government agency breaks the law and we do not rise up to demand a rectification, we, the American people, have foolishly chosen a “downward path?”

Time is truly short, but, it behooves us to be reminded of the words of Ronald Reagan when on October 27, 1964 he wrote “A Time for Choosing”

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, ‘The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.’

The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.

Consider that Hillary has hinted that she likes the confiscation of guns as she cites the Australian example and ignores the Second Amendment.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, ‘What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.’ But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.