RUTHFULLY YOURS

Among the most noteworthy of the hacked e-mails from John Podesta’s accounts is an exchange in which Podesta consults Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills about the private e-mail exchanges between President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

As readers may recall, I have long maintained (see here and here) that the principal reason why Mrs. Clinton was not prosecuted, despite a mountain of evidence that she committed felony mishandling of classified information, is the fact that Obama engaged in the same kind of misconduct. The president’s use of a private, non-secure channel to discuss sensitive matters with high level officials may not have been systematic, as Mrs. Clinton’s was. (Obama’s disturbing use of an alias, however, suggests that Clinton was not the only one he was privately e-mailing.) Nevertheless, the fact that the president was e-mailing Clinton means he not only participated in her misconduct but also that the Obama-Clinton e-mails would have been admissible evidence in any criminal trial of Clinton.

For the parties to prove such culpable conduct on the president’s part in a high-profile criminal trial would have been profoundly embarrassing to him, to say the least. Therefore, it was never going to happen. As I’ve noted before, after exclaiming, “How is that not classified?” upon being shown an Obama-Clinton e-mail by the FBI, Hillary’s confidant Huma Abedin asked agents if she could have a copy of the exchange. She obviously realized that if Obama had been communicating on Clinton’s non-secure server system, no one else who had done so was going to be prosecuted for it.

We now know that Podesta was very concerned about the Obama-Clinton e-mails and turned to Mills for advice. His succinct e-mail to Mills is dated March 4, 2015 (at 8:41 p.m.), and he entitled it “Special Category.” He stated:

The Gulf sheikhdom Qatar is a major ISIS and world terrorism sponsor. It is a little disturbing that the Sheikhs of Qatar gave Bill Clinton a one million dollar birthday present.

The WikiLeaks document dump of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has revealed Qatar’s previous desire to give her husband a $1 million “birthday” present.

Thousands of emails leaked by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s nonprofit organization continue to embarrass Democrat presidential hopeful Mrs. Clinton. The latest email thread shows an aide discussing conversations with ambassadors from Qatar, Brazil, Peru, Malawi, and Rwanda while in the nation’s capital.

“[Qatar] would like to see WJC ‘for five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC’s birthday in 2011,” an employee at The Clinton Foundationsaid to numerous aides, including Doug Brand. “Qatar would welcome our suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health. They have allocated most of their $20 million but are happy to consider projects we suggest. I’m collecting input from CF Haiti team.”

Even more disturbing is that he took it, knowing very well that Arab politicians expect a good return on their bhaksheesh.

With due respect, the estimable Charles Krauthammer is way off base in his weekly column, addressing Donald Trump’s “threat, if elected, to put Hillary Clinton in jail.” (The headline refers to this threat as a “promise,” but I don’t take that to be quite what Charles — or, for that matter, Trump — is saying.) I wrote about this topic right after Trump raised it in the second presidential debate, in response to Trump detractors who posited the claim that Krauthammer now advances: viz., Trump is criminalizing politics with threats to persecute political opponents. I generally agree with these detractors regarding the GOP nominee’s flaws and antics; on this, however, their comparisons of Trump to brutal dictators are so beyond the pale they make Trump seem tame.

Krauthammer is right that Trump has gone too far in his rhetoric. Yet, he overstates the case in suggesting that Trump is breaching important political boundaries. While he describes these as boundaries of “discourse” and “democratic decency,” Dr. K implies that they involve something even more fundamental, and thus that the breach is more perilous.

Mrs. Clinton appears to have committed serious crimes that undermined both national security and recordkeeping rules designed to promote accountability in government. If you want to talk about a truly profound threat to democratic norms, that’s the place to start. Obviously, these offenses are not just relevant but essential to the political case that should be made against Clinton, and would be by any opponent, not just by the unconventional, undisciplined Trump. Also pertinent is the fact that government officials who engage in Clinton’s type of misconduct do go to jail — to refrain from stating this would be to diminish the gravity of the crimes.

Moreover, even Krauthammer concedes that Clinton deserved to be prosecuted: “FBI director James Comey’s recommendation not to pursue charges was both troubling and puzzling.” Consequently, I don’t see why anyone, including Trump, should be faulted for asserting that there appears to be strong evidence that Mrs. Clinton has committed egregious offenses, which warrant prosecution and would call for imprisonment if she were convicted after a fair trial. Unless I am reading him wrong, that is Charles’s position on the matter — otherwise, why the dig at Comey?

Where Trump has overstepped is in his articulation of these points, not the fact that he is making them.

Political rhetoric inevitably involves a degree of exaggeration, and we must distinguish it from the realm of law-enforcement, in which officials are obliged to be circumspect. At the Republican convention, the most effective speech was New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s scathing indictment (in the rhetorical sense) of Mrs. Clinton’s misdeeds. It prompted the “lock her up!” chants that have punctuated Trump campaign appearances ever since. Now, when Americans say that someone ought to be “locked up” over this or that — which we say quite a lot — we are not urging an end run around the due-process protections that apply from investigation and indictment through trial and sentencing.

That goes without saying. During Obama’s 2008 campaign, his surrogate (and later his attorney general) Eric Holder called for a “reckoning” against Bush officials he depicted as guilty of war crimes and all manner of Constitution-shredding. I don’t think Mr. Holder was saying “jail now, trial later” — even if many on the left would have been delighted by such an arrangement.

Some conservatives have watched their evaluations of Donald Trump’s character drop so low in recent days that on this vital question they no longer see a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, they are forced back onto politics and policy; and naturally Mr. Trump wins in a walk. If conservatives who argue that Mr. Trump is worse than Mrs. Clinton had a case, it would be a relief to vote for Mrs. Clinton or for no one. But they don’t, and one is therefore forced for the good of the nation to vote for Mr. Trump.

In his Mr. Nauseating video of last weekend, Mr. Trump showed us that he had all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy. Yet the video taught us nothing; no one had ever mistaken him for anything but an infantile vulgarian. This week’s allegations of actual abuse are different. If these stories are true (and I don’t know why they shouldn’t be), there is nothing to be said for Mr. Trump. Unfortunately, there is nothing to be said for Mrs. Clinton either. If we don’t take both facts into account, we are not morally serious.

Mrs. Clinton has nothing on Mr. Trump when it comes to character. She lies (“Wipe? Like with a cloth?”—cute and charming Mrs. C.) the way basketball stars shoot baskets—constantly, nonstop, because it’s the one thing she is best at and (naturally) it gives her pleasure to hear herself lie—swish!—right onto the evening news. And her specialist talent of all is the verbal kick in the groin of a Secret Service man or state trooper who has the nerve to talk to her as if she were merely human. She is no mere rock star; she is Hillary the Queen. She is so big, and you are so small, she can barely even see you from up there. What are you? A macromolecule?

I’ll vote for Mr. Trump—grimly. But there is no alternative, no shadow of a responsible alternative.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a message from the voters. He is the empty gin bottle they have chosen to toss through the window. The message begins with the fact that voters hear what the leaders and pundits don’t: the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.

Mr. Obama is arch, patronizing, so magnificently weary of having to explain it all, again and again, to the dummies surrounding him. Mrs. Clinton has told us proudly how thoroughly she prepared for the first debate and has prepared to be president. For her, it is all a matter of learning your lines. Her whole life has been memorized in advance. Mr. Obama is at least sincere. Mrs. Clinton is as phony as a three-dollar bill, as a Clinton Global Initiative.

Mr. Obama has governed like a third-rate tyrant. He’s been a stern baby sitter to an American public that is increasingly getting on his nerves. ObamaCare and the Iran treaty are his big achievements. That the public has always disliked them, and hates them worse as it knows them better, strikes him as so unspeakably irrelevant; he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Do you ask 6-year-olds if they like going to school? Luckily, a few grown-ups have been set over the public to keep it in line. CONTINUE AT SITE

“In the final analysis, Hillary Clinton is a woman with a mindset that is totalitarian in every respect. To make matters worse, she is a lying, deceiving, manipulative, self-absorbed criminal without a shred of personal virtue. Truly it can be said that never before in American history has anyone so unfit and so undeserving, run for president. Never.”

Never in American history has anyone as unfit and undeserving as Hillary Clinton run for U.S. President. While she stands on the threshold of being elected to the White House, she quite literally belongs in a prison cell. This article lays out the case against her, chapter and verse.

Clinton’s Private Email Server & the Espionage Act

Throughout her entire four-year tenure as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton never acquired or used a government email account. Instead, she transmitted — in violation of government regulations — all of her official correspondences via a private email address that traced back to a secret, private, unsecured server that was housed at her New York residence.1 And immediately after those emails were subpoenaed by Congress, Clinton instructed a team of her advisers to unilaterally delete, with no oversight, almost 32,000 of the roughly 60,000 emails in question.2

Clinton claimed that her reason for having used only a personal email account, rather than both a personal and a government account, was that she found it “easier,” “better,” “simpler” and more convenient to “carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.”3 It was eventually learned, however, that Mrs. Clinton in fact had used no fewer than 13 mobile devices to access emails on her private server, but the FBI was unable to obtain any of those devices in its investigation, in some cases because Clinton aides had been instructed to smash them with a hammer.4

Clinton originally assured Americans that not even one piece of classified material had ever been transmitted via her unsecured, secret, personal server. But now it is known that at least 2,079 emails that she sent or received via that server, contained classified material.5 As the eminent broadcaster and legal scholar Mark Levin has made plain, each of those 2,079 offenses constituted a felonious violation of Section 793 of the Espionage Act.6 And each violation was punishable by a prison sentence of up to ten years.7

In January 2016, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said “the odds are pretty high” that Russia, China, and Iran had compromised Clinton’s unsecured email server.8

But hey, who cares? At least Mrs. Clinton, unlike Donald Trump, never engaged in crude, private trash talk that was recorded on tape. And all of her disparaging, condescending, hate-soaked, fiction-laced denunciations of her political rivals are delivered in measured, solemn, well-rehearsed tones. And she of course respects women deeply. In fact, she respects all people, including the 315 million Americans whose personal and national security was compromised when Mrs. Clinton willfully allowed top-secret information to wind up in the possession of our country’s most hostile enemies around the world.

The Clinton Foundation Scandals

In an effort to prevent foreign governments, organizations, and individuals from influencing the policy decisions of American national leaders, campaign-finance laws prohibit U.S. political figures from accepting money from foreign sources. But as the Washington Post noted in February 2015, the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation “has given donors a way to potentially gain favor with the Clintons outside the traditional political [donation] limits.”9

As of February 2015, foreign sources accounted for about one-third of all donors who had given the Clinton Foundation more than $1 million, and over half of those who had contributed more than $5 million.10 Foreign donors that gave money to the Foundation included: Hezbollah supporter Issam Fares, who once served as deputy prime minister of Lebanon;11 the Dubai Foundation, which also gave money to the families of Palestinian terrorists killed in action;12 the royal family of the United Arab Emirates; a Dubai-based company that promotes Sharia Law;13 a privately-held Chinese construction and trade conglomerate headed by a delegate of the Chinese parliament;14 and the governments of Saudi Arabia, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.15

Even during Clinton’s tenure (2009-13) as secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in donations from seven foreign governments.

Bill Clinton earned a total of $48 million from foreign sources for his appearance and speaking fees during his wife’s term as secretary.16

In August 2016, the Associated Press reported that 85 of Hillary Clinton’s 154 scheduled meetings and phone calls with non-governmental personnel during her time at the State Department were with donors who gave $156 million to the Clinton Foundation. The AP report also revealed that the Clinton Foundation had received $170 million in donations from at least 16 foreign governments whose representatives met personally with Mrs. Clinton.17

In May 2015, the International Business Times reported that the Clinton State Department had approved billions of dollars in arms deals with governments that donated to the Clinton Foundation, including governments that were infamous for their appalling human-rights records.18

But the Clinton Foundation certainly does many wonderful things for needy people around the world, doesn’t it? Well, according to a review of IRS documents by The Federalist, between 2009-12 the Clinton Foundation raised over $500 million in total. A mere 15% of that went towards programmatic grants. The other $425 million went to travel expenses, employee salaries and benefits, and “other expenses.”19 In 2013, the Clinton Foundation allocated only 6% of its revenues to direct charitable aid.20

But hey, who cares? At least Mrs. Clinton never engaged in crude, private trash talk that was recorded on tape. And all of her disparaging, condescending, hate-soaked, fiction-laced denunciations of her political rivals are delivered in measured, solemn, well-rehearsed tones. And she deeply respects women, including the millions of women around the world who have never benefited from the charitable services that the Clinton Foundation purports to provide, because the Foundation only spends a tiny percentage of its funds on actual charity.

Clinton’s Support for the Iran Nuclear Deal

For those concerned above all with what’s left of the rule of law in our republic, the most important dispatch of this nauseating campaign season has been Fox News’ “FBI, DOJ roiled by Comey, Lynch decision to let Clinton slide by on emails, says insider.”

Many of you may have read the first few paragraphs of this article before, but they’re worth reading again for purposes of discussion:

The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice, with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.

The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic July 5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General’s office that the former secretary of state be charged left members of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys from the DOJ’s National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.

“No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute — it was a top-down decision,” said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.

The article continues:

A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, “It was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton’s] security clearance yanked.”

“It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted,” the senior FBI official told Fox News. “We were floored while listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said ‘but we are doing nothing,’ which made no sense to us.”

So one anonymous insider said it was unanimous that Hillary should be prosecuted and a “high-ranking official” said the “vast majority” felt that way. Whichever is accurate, there were more than a hundred agents and analysts working with six lawyers on the case, but let’s round that off to an even 100.

What’re we to do about all those agents, analysts and lawyers who are not allowed to speak their minds and tell the American public they serve what they think about what happened?

It’s not the Chicago 7 who need to be freed this time. The situation has flipped. It’s the forces of law and order — the FBI 100.