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POLITICS

Judge Expands Investigation into Hillary Clinton’s Dealings with Foundation Donors E-mails ordered released Wednesday could contain evidence that Clinton kept a secret, off-the-books schedule of meetings with foreign foundation donors as secretary of state. By Brendan Bordelon

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to produce the e-mail records of Hillary Clinton’s scheduler during her tenure as secretary of state, expanding an investigation being pursued by conservative nonprofit Citizens United into the overlap between Clinton’s official travel and her meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors.

Citizens United is slated to receive all e-mails sent to and from Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s State Department scheduler, in the two-week periods before each of 14 international trips Clinton took during her four years in office. David Bossie, president of Citizens United, hopes to confirm suspicions that Clinton maintained an off-the-books schedule, meeting with Clinton Foundation donors on the taxpayer’s dime. “Citizens United wants to know how many overseas dinners Secretary Clinton attended with Clinton Foundation donors that didn’t make it on her schedule,” he says.

Judge Rosemary Collyer, the federal judge presiding over a public-records case brought by Citizens United, was initially hesitant to allow the release of Valmoro’s e-mails, and asked the group to provide one example of an off-the-books meeting with Clinton Foundation donors. As part of a joint filing with the State Department on Monday, Citizens United presented the judge with several pieces of evidence suggesting Valmoro deliberately struck from the official schedule a December 6, 2012, dinner in Dublin, Ireland, with several Clinton Foundation and Clinton campaign donors, organized by Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly. Though Valmoro was made aware of the Dublin meeting through an earlier e-mail chain, neither Clinton’s archived daily calendar nor her detailed official schedule make any note of it.

Benghazi Report Confirms Hillary’s Fraud Against the American People Will Clinton continue the Benghazi lie through the presidential campaign? Ari Lieberman

Hillary Clinton’s brief and lackluster tenure as secretary of state can best be summed up as scandal-ridden. But of all the scandals swirling around the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, none resonates more than the Benghazi fiasco, which resulted in the needless deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty since 1979.

After 25 months of work which included interviews with over 100 witnesses and the examination of thousands of documents and emails, including those obtained off Clinton’s unsecured bathroom server, the Select Committee on Benghazi has finally released its lengthy report which includes detailed findings that reflect poorly on the Obama White House and Ms. Clinton. Among its many damning conclusions, the report portrays a deceitful administration obsessed with pushing a false narrative on to the American people in an effort to deflect attention away from the administration’s glaring foreign policy failings.

The September 11, 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi came just 56 days before the general election at a sensitive time when Obama’s reelection campaign was in full swing. At the time, Obama was touting his “success” in liquidating Osama Bin Laden and was pushing the storyline that Al-Qaida was retreating and the worldwide terror threat was diminishing. But the well-organized, well-planned Benghazi terrorist assault, likely timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks, threw a wrench in Obama’s narrative, shattering the mendacious tale he was peddling.

The delay in deploying military assets to the theater, attributed by the committee to needless bureaucratic bungling, almost certainly cost those men their lives. The committee also found that some two-dozen people, who were saved during the assault, were rescued with the assistance of a unit known as the Libyan Military Intelligence, which was composed of fighters and officers loyal to the regime headed by the deposed Qaddafi. In other words, the army that the Obama/Clinton duo helped defeat was also instrumental in saving Americans, a bitter irony.

Good riddance to George Will By James Lewis

I like and respect George Will, and over the years I’ve been one of his fans. With the rise of Donald Trump, Will has decided to resign from the GOP, along with Mitt Romney and the other folks we might call “decorative conservatives” — the people who look good on the outside, but who have none of the fire in the belly that marked Teddy Roosevelt or Lincoln — not to mention the Founders, who were pretty robust and argumentative.

I believe Mr. Will has a genuine distaste for what may become Trump Conservatism. Trump represents a kind of happy warrior style of American politician, similar to Harry Truman and Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt. It’s obviously too low-class for Will, Romney and Jeb Bush, who are all too delicate for the political blood sport that the Left has imposed on our politics. Nothing is too low for the Left. Literally nothing.

The national GOP has been in decline for years, running decrepit candidates like Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney — who actually did flinch in the last debate with Obama, as Trump points out. Candidates like Dole and McCain were picked for their seniority, which is what made them weak and doddering candidates.

On the other side, the hard Left is back in charge of the Democrats, and they are killers. Their purpose is to destroy their opponents. In response, the GOP has run certain losers.

But then we see the killer thugs of the Washington Post and New York Times hiring a decorative conservative like George Will for “balance.” Balance, my foot. George Will is protective coloration for the WaPo’s inner mafia. The WaPo doesn’t play by any rules except its own. You may not see the glint of the daggers they all carry into the fight, but come election time, every honest conservative gets the shaft.

This is going to be a nasty, vicious election, and winners have to give as good as they get. I’m sorry. Reality.

The WaPo has carried off the complete myth of Watergate to destroy a Republican President who was no worse than LBJ or Robert Kennedy, or Carter, Clinton and Obama. American journalism is now based on a deliberate lie, the false mythology of Watergate — actually a power struggle between the Permanent Government in DC and an elected President, Richard Nixon. Watergate’s Deep Throat (Mark Felt, the Assistant Director of the FBI) plotted with the Washington Post to destroy Richard Nixon. That’s all there was to it. Everything else is lies.

Nixon was destroyed because he was an anti-Communist, and today, the Democrats have racialized Communism just like Dixiecrat Huey Long did long ago. They have placed one of their own in the White House, and the policy results are disastrous. People are dying in Syria and Libya because Barack Obama is still steeped in the phony socialism of Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. But Kenyatta was too practical to be a Marxist in an underdeveloped country like Kenya. Obama Sr., Barack’s father he never knew, preached radicalism and world revolution, so Kenyatta threw him out. Barack Obama is therefore playing out a childhood drama in his mind, a drama that lost any practical relevance half a century ago.

It’s strange how the Left always repeats the past, time after time after time, all in the cause of “Progressivism.”

Why Dems Try to Break Black Hearts and Only Trump Can Fix It By Karin McQuillan

Trump is the first Republican candidate we have ever had who has the temperament to fight back against the Dems’ shameful racial lies and ask blacks and Hispanics for their votes.

This election cycle is dominated by Democrat race-baiting as usual. Trump’s massively popular nationalist platform to stop illegal immigration and suspend Muslim immigration is labeled racist. What is new are perfidious Republican leaders and pundits rushing to join Democrats in their false accusation against Trump. Democrats have called every Presidential candidate for decades racist. They have to.

Telling blacks that Republicans wish them ill keeps Democrats in power. They don’t care about the damage they are doing to the country and to black lives. Blacks are cannon fodder in the Democrat war for power.

There is something profoundly depressing and pathetic that until Trump, our Republican leaders have been willing to write off the black vote and accept the Democrat poison that our party is made up of racist white people.

As I wrote on AT at the height of President Obama’s race-baiting on the Zimmerman trial:

Democrats have successfully re-written history to give themselves the starring role in the fight against racism — something they didn’t earn in the Civil Rights era and are not earning now. (snip)

Democrats cynically inflame racial fear and anger for political gain. They create false dramas of racial injustice, such as the Zimmerman trial, even though it wounds and damages blacks and the entire the country.

(snip) When the War on Poverty programs backfired, mortally wounding black families and creating nightmarish conditions for black children, Democrats found their party couldn’t do without the federal money, and the power and control it gave them over black voters.

The most recent polls on the Trump-Hillary fight show the crucial importance to Democrats of making blacks and Hispanics feel Trump, and all Republicans, are against them. Without a hurt and angry black and immigrant electorate, there would be no Democrat party, according to this analysis by John Hinderaker of why race relations in our country have deteriorated.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch Met Privately With Bill Clinton The two were coincidentally at the Phoenix airport at the same time ????!!!!By Devlin Barrett

Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton in Arizona on Tuesday, but Ms. Lynch told reporters that the two didn’t discuss the investigation into his wife’s email use as secretary of state.

Ms. Lynch said at a press conference that the Clinton meeting was unplanned. Mr. Clinton was apparently waiting to fly out of the Phoenix airport when Ms. Lynch’s plane coincidentally landed there. The former president then walked over to the attorney general’s plane to speak to Ms. Lynch and her husband.

“Our conversation was a great deal about his grandchildren. It was primarily social and about our travels,” Ms. Lynch told reporters in Phoenix on Tuesday.

“We talked about former Attorney General Janet Reno, for example, whom we both know, but there was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body. There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of the State Department emails, by way of example,” she said.

The two did discuss the recent vote in the U.K. to leave the European Union, but the Justice Department isn’t involved in that issue, she said.

An aide to Bill Clinton said no topics were discussed beyond what was described by Ms. Lynch. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

But others suggested the meeting could send the wrong message. “It’s probably ill-advised because it does create the appearance of impropriety,” said Ken Sukhia, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida who is now running for Congress as a Republican. “You don’t necessarily have to talk about the subject to garner some good will [from prosecutors] by having that kind of conversation.”

‘There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of the State Department emails, by way of example.’
—Attorney General Loretta Lynch

Even in cases that aren’t publicly known, a lawyer or prosecutor would know that “having an unscheduled, impromptu meeting like that raises a question of was there impropriety…and particularly given the high profile of the Clintons and the very heightened attention that is being given to this issue of the emails,” Mr. Sukhia said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Is Brexit vote a validation of Trump’s campaign? Up to a point. Mark Thiessen

Donald Trump’s trip to Scotland on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union looked, in hindsight, like a stroke of political genius. “My timing was great because I was here right at the epicenter of the crisis,” Trump told reporters. But Trump was not in Scotland because of Brexit; he was there to promote his golf courses. In an interview a few weeks earlier, he did not even know what Brexit was. It was serendipity, not strategy, that brought Trump to Scotland. Trump’s the guy who swallowed a lucky horseshoe.

But it’s true that his timing could not have been better. Trump is now arguing that the Brexit vote is validation of his upstart presidential candidacy. And he’s not entirely wrong.

Like Trump’s campaign, Brexit was a revolt against open borders. British voters blamed the E.U. for a wave of migration that has fundamentally transformed their country. One third of “Leave” voters said they cast their ballot for Brexit because it “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.”

Brexit was also, like Trump’s campaign, a revolt against an establishment out of touch with the struggles of ordinary, working-class citizens. With Brexit, in the words of Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, “pensioners in the seaside towns, the plumbers and chip-shop owners” delivered “the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage.”

As in the United States, the anti-establishment sentiment driving Brexit was on both the right and left. As former prime minister Tony Blair pointed out, the “Leave” campaign could not have succeeded “without finding common cause with a significant segment of Labour voters . . . worried about flatlining incomes and cuts in public spending . . . [who] saw Brexit as an opportunity to register an anti-government protest.” In Britain, Blair says, the Brexit campaign saw “a convergence of the far left and the far right.” Could the same happen here? A Post-ABC News poll last month found it might, with 20 percent of Sanders supporters saying they would support Trump over Hillary Clinton in the general election. This month that figure has slipped to just 8 percent.

But here is the fundamental difference between the Trump and Brexit campaigns: Brexit was also a revolt against centralized power. British voters were tired of edicts from Brussels and wanted to put decision-making power back in the hands of the British people. This was the single biggest driving force of the Brexit campaign. Nearly half of pro-Brexit voters said the principal reason they wanted to leave the E.U. was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.” As U.K. secretary of state for justice and Brexit supporter Michael Gove put it, “By leaving the EU we can take control . . . Like the Americans who declared their independence and never looked back.”

Clinton’s Benghazi Cover Story She wonders why she’s so distrusted. Here’s the reason.

Democrats have succeeded in persuading the Washington press corps that what happened when four Americans died at Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012 isn’t a story. But the House report released Monday about that night and its aftermath contains details that ought to concern Americans who care about political accountability.

Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in that attack that is dissected in 800-plus pages released by Republicans on a House Select Committee chaired by South Carolina’s Trey Gowdy. The report’s most disturbing facts concern the way the Obama Administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spun an alternative narrative that is contradicted by their private statements and the intelligence from the scene.

We learn from the report that the day after Mr. Stevens became the first American ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979, President Obama decided to skip his daily intelligence briefing.

We also learn that on the day of the attack, in a 5 p.m. meeting that included Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Mr. Obama said the U.S. should use all available resources. After that meeting, Mr. Panetta returned to the Pentagon to discuss what military resources were available. The Defense Secretary then issued an order to deploy military assets to Libya.

But nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was even in route when the last two Americans were killed almost eight hours after the attacks began. The holdup seems to have been caused in part by something else we learn from this report: a 7:30 p.m. teleconference of Defense and State officials, including Mrs. Clinton.

Ostensibly they were sharing intelligence and coordinating responses. But they debated whether they needed Libya’s permission to deploy American troops to defend endangered Americans, whether Marines should wear uniforms or civilian clothes, and so on.

Even more telling: Though there was no evidence linking the Benghazi attacks to a YouTube video mocking Islam, of the 10 “action items” from the notes of that meeting, five referred to the video.

Mrs. Clinton referred to the video more than once in her public statements. At 10:08 p.m. on the night of the attack, she issued a public statement on Benghazi: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” She repeated the point the next day at the State Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

One Week After Orlando, Democrats Feature Anti-Gay Imam at Banquet Shafayat Mohamed decries gay Muslims and claims gay sex causes natural disasters. Joe Kaufman

The Democratic Party used to embrace homosexuals. Now, its Florida leaders are inviting enemies of the gay community to speak at their functions, and only one week following one of the worst episodes of violence against gays in American history. That was the case earlier this month, when anti-gay imam Maulana Shafayat Mohamed was allowed to speak at the Leadership Blue Gala, the annual banquet of the Florida Democratic Party.

On June 19th, the Florida Democratic Party held its annual Leadership Blue Gala event. US Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker, was the keynote speaker. However, one of the other speakers, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, who partook in opening prayers, should have been the main concern.

Shafayat Mohamed is the imam of the Darul Uloom mosque, located in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The mosque has been a haven for terror-related individuals, many of whom have been imprisoned – or, in one case, killed in an overseas anti-insurgent raid – due to their jihadist activities.

“Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla was a student of Shafayat Mohamed’s at Darul Uloom. Now-deceased al-Qaeda Global Operations Chief, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, was a prayer leader at Darul Uloom. And Darul Uloom Arabic teacher Imran Mandhai, along with mosque goers Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Mossa Jokhan, hatched a plot at the mosque to blow up different South Florida structures, including area power stations, Jewish businesses, and a National Guard armory.

Shafayat Mohamed has his own sordid history. In February 2005, an article written by him was published on the Darul Uloom website, entitled ‘Tsunami: Wrath of God.’ In it, he claims that gay sex caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and that most Jews and Christians, whom he refers to as “People of the Book,” are “perverted transgressors.”

It is statements such as these that have gotten Shafayat Mohamed thrown off of a number of Broward County boards. Yet, the imam is unrepentant.

DARRYL GLENN FOR SENATE IN COLORADO

Darryl Glenn Might Break Out in Today’s Colorado Senate Primary He is attracting attention from GOP luminaries. By Alexis Levinson

Three months ago, El Paso (Colo.) county commissioner Darryl Glenn had just over $11,000 in his Senate-campaign account. He had no paid staffers. And though he’d elevated his profile with a stem-winder of a speech at Colorado’s GOP convention and won his way onto the ballot — much to the surprise of many onlookers — as recently as mid May, most Republicans were still writing him off.

But that was then.

Though several Colorado Republicans describe the primary race as a “crapshoot,” many now expect Glenn to emerge victorious when primary ballots are tallied Tuesday evening. In the five-way primary, he has managed to capitalize on the fractured field thanks to a surge of support from movement conservatives, including an outside group that has made independent expenditures on his behalf.

Glenn, an Air Force Veteran and an African American, is vying for the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic senator Michael Bennet, one of Republicans’ only two realistic opportunities to pick up a Senate seat in November. It’s a race that has left Republicans shaking their heads for months. After multiple top recruits opted not to run, Republicans were left with five candidates who have little name recognition. No candidate has done anything to break out of the pack, and the paucity of public polling has left many Republicans unsure as to how it will ultimately turn out.

But that fractured field, in part, is what some Republicans say opened the door for Glenn. The lack of any one defined candidate, little interest from outside groups, and the fact that only one candidate has been spending significantly on television advertising in the final weeks, meant that an outside group willing to put some money in could have a big impact.

A Long Trump Summer When have voters faced a choice between two such unpalatable, unprincipled candidates? By Victor Davis Hanson

Before summer is over, we may see things now scarcely imagined that will make Brexit seem anticlimactic.

Trump’s Attack Mode

I think the following is an accurate statement: No major public figure has ever before attacked the Clintons in the manner that Donald Trump did last week. The details and tone of his charges can be endlessly analyzed, but their central theme resonates: The Clinton couple, broke when they left the White House in 2001, leveraged Hillary Clinton’s planned political trajectories to amass a personal fortune of between $100 and $200 million — all in the form of quid pro quo investments by wealthy individuals and foreign governments in the likely continuance of Clinton political power. Government is not the jungle of Manhattan real estate, and should have demanded at least a veneer of honesty.

The scandals of the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton’s various get-rich and jet-set escapades, and much of Hillary Clinton’s paranoia over the audit of her e-mail communications all revolve around a Clinton circle that can never be squared even by liberal pieties: The wealthy do not make politicians fabulously rich — unless they assume that they will receive something of much greater value in return.

The Clintons are unique — like no other first couple in recent American history. Not the Carters, not the Reagans, not the two Bush couples, not any first family emeritus has so unapologetically charged banks, foreign governments, corporations, and universities so much money for overtly so little, but on the expectation of clandestinely offering so much.

The Clinton ethical miasma is emblemized by the Laureate International Universities scandal — the highbrow version of Trump University, but a public not a private debacle. Between 2010 and 2015 “Chancellor” Bill Clinton was paid $16.5 million by the for-profit Laureate — but for what services he was to become one of the highest-paid university officials in history is not clear. Mirabile dictu, an educational affiliate of Laureate saw its support from the State Department more than triple from a pre-Clinton $15.1 million.

True, Hillary Clinton, who deleted over 30,000 of her private-server e-mails, can demand hard proof of such payola, but she still cannot rationalize why her husband was paid so much for so little demonstrable work, while she, after stepping down as the nation’s top diplomatic official, followed his reprehensible cue in her retirement.

Trump will continue to expand these charges, no doubt in his characteristic nihilist, take-no-prisoners fashion. Hillary is already replying in like kind, rather than in exalted “Have you no shame?” stature. But the rounds of fire between the two candidates are not quite symmetrical. Trump is brash, crude, and a brawler. Hillary is a carefully scripted and choreographed establishmentarian. Recently, speech coaches seem to have had some success in sedating her screech-owl, nails-on-the-chalkboard rants. She has seemed calmer, quieter, more deliberate.

But in response to Trump’s charges, Hillary is starting to resort to her naturally unpleasant side, both in form and in content. She should learn from Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. When Trump unloaded on them in turn, each eventually stooped to reply in like kind — and seemed suddenly unpresidential. Trump, of course, never claimed to be or perhaps could be completely presidential. But his establishment targets became less presidential once he scraped often their veneers and they climbed down into his muck.