RUTHFULLY YOURS

As our friend Guy Benson tallies things up in the Clinton email scandal, there were not only a whopping 2,079 emails containing classified information that were stored and transmitted on Hillary Clinton’s non-secure private server system. It turns out that she personally wrote 104 such emails – which, the Washington Post gingerly observes, “could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.” I’ll say. In fact, I have said: see my February 6 column describing the damage the former secretary of state has done to national security by exposing intelligence secrets, collection methods, and sources of information to hostile foreign intelligence services.

Let’s also keep in mind a fact that’s easy to forget since what’s before our eyes is so outrageous: For now, we are only talking about the Clinton emails that she deigned to turn over to the government. As Guy reminds us, there are another 32,000 emails that she attempted to delete. There have been reports indicating that the FBI has been able to recover at least some of these from the server. It is a shoe that has yet to drop.

Recall the state of play: Mrs. Clinton originally insisted no classified information was ever transmitted on her servers. When this became untenable, she changed her story to claim that she never personally sent or received classified emails – a claim that, even if true, would be of little legal relevance since she caused the creation of the private server system via which, because of the way she ran her office, the transmission of classified emails by her underlings was inevitable. But of course, we now know for sure that the claim is not true: Wholly apart from what she may have received, Clinton personally wrote and sent those aforementioned 104 emails containing classified information.

So the final evolution in this bogus defense is that there were “no classified markings” on emails stored or sent via the private server. Obviously, this is offered to intimate that she had no way of knowing she and her subordinates were handling classified information with criminal recklessness.

It isn’t just the ties.

Donald Trump has taken some grief for the fact that his signature neckties are made in China. But the scope of Trump-branded products made outside America is larger than has previously been reported — especially when that includes the clothing line named after Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, which is listed on the Trump Organization website as part of the Trump empire.

Thousands of items with the Trump name on them — furniture, shirts, shoes, salad bowls, even “Trump body soap,” and much of Ivanka’s growing jewelry and clothing line — have been made by companies, often paying Trump simply for the use of his name on their goods, that employ foreign workers.

Clothing and home goods are a small part of Trump’s fortune. His total income from licensed home goods was between $2.5 million and $13.1 million, according to his personal financial disclosure.

These Trump company business decisions are directly at odds with the central message of his presidential campaign: a promise to bring back jobs that have been sent abroad.

“I am going to bring jobs back to the United States like nobody else can,” Trump said in his closing statement at last week’s debate in Detroit, ahead of the Republican primary in Michigan on Tuesday.

“I’m going to bring jobs back from China. I’m going to bring jobs back from Mexico and from Japan,” Trump said during the Feb. 13 GOP debate in South Carolina.

In Detroit, Trump admitted he had his clothing line manufactured in China and Mexico. But he claimed that it is “impossible for clothing makers in this country to do clothing in this country.” Trump blamed the Chinese government’s devaluation of the yuan, which helps to make Chinese-made goods cheaper for American consumers than those made in the U.S.

Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition.
After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so strange candidates who brawled and embarrassed themselves, there had to be some formula to avoid repeating that mob-like mess. Instead, in 2016 there were 17 candidates and 13 debates along with seven forums. There were supposed to be tweaks and repairs that were designed to avoid the clown-like cavalcade of four years ago, but they apparently only ensured a repetition.

Three of the most experienced candidates, at least in the art of executive governance — Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker — were among the first to get out. The most experienced government CEOs somehow (or logically?) performed poorly in the raucous debates and lacked the charisma or the money or at least the zealous followers of Cruz, Rubio, and Trump.

Or they had too much pride (or sense) — unlike Carson, Christie, Kasich, and Paul — to insist that they were viable candidates when fairly early on, by most measurements, they were not. How strange that those who would have been more credible candidates saw the writing on the wall and left the field — to those marginalized candidates who had no such qualms and ended up wasting months of their time and ours in splintering the vote, engaging in endless bickering on crowded stages, and ensuring that there were few occasions for any of them to distinguish himself. At some point, someone should confess that Democratic debates further Democratic causes far more than Republican debates help Republican causes.

The other veteran governor in the race, Jeb Bush, may have felt, at 63 years old and eight years after the end of his brother’s administration, that his presidential ambitions — born in the pre-Trump-announcement days — were now or never.

Former secretaries of state and defense need to derail ‘classic demagogue’ and calm U.S. allies.

America faces grave threats from abroad. But with Donald Trump close to becoming the Republican nominee and possibly our next president, the most pressing danger to our national security comes from within. More than 100 Republican foreign-policy experts (including both of us) have already weighed in with an open letter, about the perils a Trump presidency would bring. Missing from the names on the letter, and distressingly silent in the debate, however, have been almost all of America’s senior statesmen — especially those who previously served in Republican administrations.

To be sure, a few top leaders have begun to speak out. Without wading into the political debate, retired four-star general Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, has pointed out that the United States military would be obligated to disobey unlawful orders to torture and kill of the sort that Trump has said he would issue as president. Former secretary of Defense William Cohen has warned that military officers would face Nuremberg-style tribunals if they carried out Trump’s promised plans.

But illegal military orders are, sadly, only part of a much larger menace. Trump is a classic demagogue: He stokes fears and kindles prejudice. His divisive, sometimes violent rhetoric and appeals to racism and xenophobia would destroy the domestic tranquility on which our democracy depends. Beyond the damage it would do at home, a Trump presidency would unravel the American-led international order that has kept us secure since the end of World War II, an order built on alliances, freedom of the seas, respect for international law, defense of human rights, opposition to aggression, free trade, and support for democracy and the rule of law. Trump either does not understand the importance of these principles, is unaware of them or he simply does not care.

Trump has expressed contempt for America’s closest allies, whom he dismisses as parasitic freeloaders, and admiration for the authoritarian regimes that are now hard at work trying to undercut American foreign policy in regions across the globe. He is on record praising Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and offered him a backhanded defense from allegations that he ordered the murder of journalists, explaining, “I think that our country does plenty of killing, too.” As for the Chinese Communist regime’s murderous 1989 crackdown on student protesters, “that shows you the power of strength,” Trump mused.