RUTHFULLY YOURS

The WikiLeaks email dumps are giving voters some insights into the realities of hardball politics. It isn’t pretty. Take the recent disclosures that show how the Clinton campaign plotted to raise a bundle of campaign cash but then use the government to attack opponents for trying to do the same thing.

In an email exchange in May 2015, John Podesta, now the Clinton campaign chairman, Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias and other staffers including Jennifer Palmieri and Huma Abedin discussed an article claiming the Federal Election Commission was unable to curb election abuses because its bipartisan makeup led to 3-3 deadlocks.

The campaign crew had been discussing the idea of stacking the FEC with new members to end the tie votes. In the meantime, “[Marc] Elias may have some legal ideas to slow them down,” Mr. Podesta wrote. “We have 3 things we have to do. Raise the primary $ by expanding the bundler network. Get Priorities functional. Use this [theme of FEC dysfunction] to scare our people into giving bigger sums.”

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook responded, “I agree with you, John. I think we focus hard on raising as much as we can and then throw the kitchen sink at everyone who we believe steps over the line, understanding that has limited impact.”

Marc Elias responded that he thought the article overstated the problem but noted that, “There is every reason to think DOJ will increasingly police the campaign finance laws.” He added, “Every time a GOP candidate does something even close to the line, they are hit by a complaint.”

When my late father got our citizenship papers and first American passport he paraphrased Descartes : “In America, I vote, therefore I am.” He never missed an election and died shortly after voting from Ronald Reagan in 1984 convinced that the franchise was the ultimate form of participation in a democracy.

Now, I can put up with the hyperbole and insult of those with whom I disagree. What upsets me far more is the suspicion of election fraud and the increasing evidence of dead people voting, illegal and non citizens voting, intimidation, and orchestrated violence at Trump rallies. There is documented evidence of all the above by reputable reporters and investigators.

The Republicans mostly ignore it, preferring to bash the messenger rather than protesting the truth, and the Democrats who would howl if it did not benefit their candidate dismiss it. Why wouldn’t they?

I increasingly feel that I vote but it does not count and my fear is that an increasing number of citizens will stop voting and turn to apathy rather than election choices.

We should always be on guard against presentism, but in this instance I do not hesitate to say that the upcoming presidential election is the most alarming in American history. I can make that statement with confidence because I do not believe the most disturbing aspect of the election is the choice of candidates – even though the two major party nominees present the worst choice the American people have faced in my lifetime (Eisenhower was president when I was born), and perhaps ever.

The reason this is such a frightening election is that the Constitution’s mechanisms for reining in or ousting a rogue president are in tatters.

We are not supposed to have transformative elections, contests that will forever change our system of government or enable government to orchestrate cultural upheaval. The Constitution is supposed to be our guarantee against that.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called Faithless Execution in an attempt to explain this and campaign, in my own small way, for a restoration. The theory I posited was straightforward. Among the greatest fears of those who founded our constitutional republic was that the powerful new office they were creating, the President of the United States, could be a path to authoritarianism and eventual tyranny. Much of the deliberation over the drafting and adoption of the new Constitution was dedicated to ensuring adequate safeguards against that possibility.

The Constitution’s aim is to preserve liberty and self-determination. Its prescription for doing so is to constrain government (and thus increase the realm of free, unregulated activity) by limiting and dividing governmental powers. Federal authority was balanced by states that maintained sovereign power. The limited powers delegated to the federal government were divided among three branches, each given sufficient inherent authority that it could not be overwhelmed by the others.

John Podesta’s e-mails, which we now have courtesy of WikiLeaks, confirm what we already knew: The Justice Department’s decision not to indict Hillary Clinton was a politicized travesty.

Podesta, a longtime Clinton hand and Democratic party operative, was President Obama’s top political adviser before becoming chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign in February 2015. As he was transitioning, it was revealed that, as secretary of state, Clinton had regularly transacted government business over a private e-mail account and, in a major national-security breach, had used a non-secure server to send and store highly classified information. Moreover, to (further) evade transparency requirements, Clinton destroyed 33,000 e-mails, falsely representing them as “personal,” having to do with her daughter’s wedding and “yoga.” Nonetheless, the Justice Department declined to bring a case.

FBI director James Comey’s she-did-but-she-didn’t press conference had already made it clear that Clinton was given special treatment, as had investigative reports and interview summaries pried from the bureau by congressional Republicans. Podesta’s e-mails illuminate the improper coordination between the campaign, the White House, and the State and Justice Departments that led to Clinton’s getting a complete pass.

Although it was ostensibly investigating Clinton and her State Department staff (many of whom had become her campaign staff), the Justice Department kept campaign officials in the loop about developments in Freedom of Information Act cases related to Clinton’s e-mails, and about administration efforts to delay and minimize disclosures. The DOJ worked with the Clinton team’s defense lawyers to restrict the FBI’s ability to ask key questions and examine critical evidence. It also declined to present the case to a grand jury, which the DOJ must do in order to subpoena critical evidence and indict culpable suspects. Instead, it gave the suspects immunity from prosecution and made other gratuitous concessions in order to acquire evidence the production of which could have been compelled.

Meanwhile, as the former secretary’s claims about never having sent or received classified information were exposed as lies — in fact, some of her e-mails contained information classified at the very highest levels of secrecy — the State Department colluded with Clinton aides to control the fallout. Newly disclosed FBI documents suggest that high-ranking State Department official Patrick Kennedy leaned on the FBI, and perhaps other agencies, to downgrade classification of Clinton’s e-mails (which might bolster her false denial of transmitting classified information) and to exploit Freedom of Information Act exemptions (which would allow the State Department to withhold disclosure of e-mails that would be politically harmful). This news should come as no surprise. FBI reports had previously indicated that State Department brass were pressuring career officials to change designations to minimize Clinton’s apparent misconduct.

As everyone knows, history repeats itself, or as the late great Peter Allen sang, “Everything old is new again.”

Once upon a time, Democrat president Harry Truman effectively ended World War II by dropping the first nuclear bombs ever detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6, 1945, resulting in multi-thousands of deaths. It was a decision that promised to end his presidency.

All the political experts—pundits, writers, radio newscasters—agreed that the unassuming former haberdasher who became the unlikely choice of VP in the election of 1944 didn’t have the charisma of the man whose shoes he had stepped into after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a stroke just three months after his fourth presidential inauguration, and that Truman’s war-mongering act was not only antithetical to the values of peace-loving Americans who were exhausted by World War II’s profound losses in bodies and blood, but that it would ultimately condemn him to political ignominy.

But when Truman ran for a second term in 1948, Americans turned out in record numbers for the plain-spoken, decisive Missourian whose action, they recognized, spared the deaths of thousands of American troops, and voted overwhelmingly against the smooth-talking Republican, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York.

As it turned out, all the “expert” predictions of the media were dead wrong!

So arrogantly confident were Truman’s naysayers—sound familiar?—that a political writer of The Chicago Daily Tribune wrote an article declaring Dewey’s victory before the results were in, and the hapless publisher ran with the story!

The latest FBI document release reveals that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy urged the FBI to downgrade from classified to unclassified a Benghazi-related email that had sat on Mrs. Clinton’s server. “At the time Mrs. Clinton was still insisting she’d never transmitted classified information,” notes a Journal editorial. “Mr. Kennedy proposed that rather than mark the email classified, he’d give it a special exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, which would allow him ‘to archive the document in the basement of [State] never to be seen again.’”
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Our columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. notes that “Hillary Clinton is her party’s nominee and on her way to the White House only because the Obama administration decided to waive the law on handling classified material—and the FBI went along—in order to assure that its designated heiress would succeed to the presidency.”

A separate editorial notes that the U.S. is engaged in five hot conflicts as Barack Obama prepares to leave office. “An eternal law of global affairs is that weakness invites aggression that can lead to war. The latest validation of this truth is that in the eighth year of the Obama Presidency the tide of war is building on multiple fronts and the U.S. can’t escape the consequences,” writes the editorial board.

The Journal’s Kate Bachelder Odell says that Nevada Republican Joe Heck could win the Senate seat of retiring Minority Leader Harry Reid. “Mr. Heck is a sharp and disciplined candidate, his opponent has no discernible ideas, and he’s running to expand the GOP’s appeal,” writes Ms. Odell.

As this year’s rough-and-tumble election campaign heads toward a conclusion, Craig Shirley and Frank Donatelli share an anecdote from America’s 40th president: “In 1987, when he was informed that Democratic presidential aspirant Gary Hart was accused of extramarital activities, President Ronald Reagan reportedly quipped, ‘Boys will be boys. But boys will not be president.’”

Marc Siegel, a professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, notes the temptation for reporters and even physicians to “make pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses” of presidential candidates. “Such assessments are so common in this election season that you would think the two candidates were as familiar to you as your own uncle or aunt. But the truth is, we don’t actually know them except through the fog of the media lens.”

If the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server has shown anything, it’s that the Clintons have many helpers in Washington. This includes the State Department, where even the civil servants have tried to protect their former boss.

The latest FBI document release on Monday contains interviews with officials revealing that in spring 2015 Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy contacted an FBI official to coax the FBI to downgrade from classified to unclassified a Benghazi-related email that had sat on Mrs. Clinton’s server. At the time Mrs. Clinton was still insisting she’d never transmitted classified information.

The headlines have focused on whether the Kennedy request to FBI official Brian McCauley was a quid pro quo: an offer that State would allow the FBI to place more agents in foreign countries, in exchange for downgrading the document. There is a dispute in the FBI interview notes over whether this was proposed by Mr. Kennedy or by Mr. McCauley, and both State and FBI deny an explicit tit for tat, as do Mr. Kennedy and Mr. McCauley. The FBI also did not downgrade the document. Yet even the FBI concedes it referred the “allegations” to “appropriate officials for review,” which makes the episode ripe for Congressional investigation.

Even without a quid quo pro, the episode shows that the State Department has been assisting the Clinton campaign. Especially notable is evidence that Mr. Kennedy knew the FBI had grounds for classifying the document. According to the McCauley interview notes, Mr. Kennedy called asking for the downgrade, explaining that the email “caused problems” for him.

Mr. Kennedy proposed that rather than mark the email classified, he’d give it a special exemption from Freedom of Information Act requests, which would allow him “to archive the document in the basement of [State] never to be seen again.” Mr. Kennedy seemed to agree that the email was too sensitive for public consumption but wanted to spare Mrs. Clinton the classified reality.

Mr. Kennedy waged a sustained campaign to get Mrs. Clinton off the classification hook. One unnamed official claims Mr. Kennedy followed up his telephone request with a private meeting in which he again asked if the FBI would “see their way to marking the email unclassified.” He also, according to the notes, went directly to Michael Steinbach, the assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, to press his case.

Donald Trump probably is not helping his cause much with his conspiracy-mongering about a “rigged” election but Democrats should be thankful for small favors.

Mr. Trump lacks message discipline. Instead of scattershot claims that the race is being manipulated, wild conspiracy theories about ballot box-stuffing, which both parties and Americans of decency and goodwill strongly refute, he might be focusing laser-like on the “rigged” argument that nobody can confidently refute.

That’s the argument that Hillary Clinton is her party’s nominee and on her way to the White House only because the Obama administration decided to waive the law on handling classified material—and the FBI went along—in order to assure that its designated heiress would succeed to the presidency.

Google says the question “is Trump trying to lose?” has skyrocketed in popularity in the last few days. Mr. Trump is perhaps willing to be president but hasn’t been willing to do what was necessary to win. He never seriously tried to expand beyond his core support. He never wanted to spend the money, especially on TV advertising, that would be needed to do so.

If, in a deeper realism, he suspected that something like the Billy Bush tape was always going to stand in his way, he was rational to limit his financial risk—though he did the country no favor by accepting the nomination. In any case, Mr. Trump is now behaving as we knew he would. The appeal of “rigged” is obvious. It’s an argument that can continue to be prosecuted on-air after Election Day. Mr. Trump need not, as losing candidates do, concede defeat and disappear. His son-in-law, we’re told by the Financial Times this week, has already reached out to an investment banker about starting a Trump TV network after the election.

America, you’ve been played.

If today’s Democratic campaign were being fought against a generic Republican without Mr. Trump’s distinct qualities and history, here’s what would dominate the news:

Mrs. Clinton was verbally convicted by the FBI chief for mishandling classified information yet somehow not formally charged.

Her aides were allowed to cut curious deals with FBI investigators that effectively swept under the rug any possible charges against them for obstruction or evidence tampering.

Those same aides have been revealed, through email leaks, to have freely mixed public and private interests, including their own and Clinton private interests, in the performance of jobs that, in some cases, saw them receiving salaries from the Clinton Foundation or the Clinton family even as they also worked for the taxpayer at the State Department. CONTINUE AT SITE