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2016

What About the Clinton Foundation Investigation? By Debra Heine

The investigation into the Clinton Foundation didn’t come up at all during FBI Director James Comey’s press conference Tuesday, prompting pundits like Fox News national security analyst K.T. McFarland to ask why.

“Isn’t there a second FBI investigation? A criminal FBI investigation into the Clinton foundation? What is status of that?”

Fox News reported Tuesday evening that despite the FBI’s ruling on her emails, “Hillary Clinton may not be completely in the clear. ”

“The Clinton Foundation may still be the subject of its own investigation,” Megyn Kelly reported Tuesday evening on The Kelly File. “Director Comey made no mention of the foundation today or whether the FBI is investigating it, at all.”

According to Chief Intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Jason Chaffetz pressed Comey after his statement at FBI headquarters about whether there would be charges against Clinton’s aides, and whether the entire investigation was closed.

“I specifically asked him what about the other people — what about the IT guy, what about the inner circle, what about the other things. And he quickly said, ‘I can’t tell you about that yet.'” Chaffetz explained on Special Report.

As Fox News reported back in January, the FBI expanded its investigation into Clinton’s emails to include the possible intersection of State Department business and the Clinton Foundation and whether public corruption laws were violated (as chronicled in Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash”).

Herridge noted that it wasn’t typical for Comey to not take questions after making a statement. “He seemed to anticipate the backlash,” she said.

James Comey, Loretta Lynch Called To Testify Before Congress Over Clinton Investigation By Debra Heine

Republicans in Congress have called for Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey to answer questions regarding the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Comey will appear before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday to defend his decision not to recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of State. Lynch, who recently faced heavy criticism over her secret meeting with former President Bill Clinton in Phoenix, was called by Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) to appear before the House Judiciary Committee next week.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

On Tuesday, Mr. Comey said Mrs. Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of emails containing classified material, but that the FBI was not recommending pressing charges against her. Many Republicans were critical of the decision and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) had called for a hearing on the issue.

“The FBI’s recommendation is surprising and confusing. The fact pattern presented by Director Comey makes clear Secretary Clinton violated the law,” Mr. Chaffetz said in a statement Wednesday. “Congress and the American people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the FBI’s investigation.”

Mr. Ryan has also said Mrs. Clinton should not receive classified information in briefings given to her as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Ms. Lynch is also set to testify before Congress regarding the Clinton email investigation, said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) in a Wednesday statement. A Justice Department spokesman affirmed Ms. Lynch plans to testify next week but said that the appearance had been confirmed since May. CONTINUE AT SITE

Westerners who don hijabs in Iran are a disgrace :Amir Taheri

In Iran, do as the mullahs say, not as Iranians do. This seems to be the motto adopted by a string of foreign dignitaries rushing to Tehran in the wake of the mythical “nuke deal” marketed by the Obama administration.

For more than a decade almost no one wanted to go to the capital of the Islamic Republic, designated by many as “the world No. 1 sponsor of international terrorism.” This year, however, heads of state and other senior officials from over 60 nations, including most Western powers, have taken the flying carpet to Tehran to pay tribute to Obama’s “new moderate Iran.”

President Obama’s seven-year campaign to restore diplomatic relations to Iran was never likely to alter the Khomeinist regime’s destructive behavior. But some European powers were keen to disregard the Islamic Republic’s visceral anti-Americanism and focus on obtaining juicy commercial deals.

The mullahs seized the opportunity to claim “total victory over the Great Satan” as part of a new narrative according to which “the whole world” was rushing to Iran to pay tribute to the “Supreme Guide” as the living incarnation of Islam.

It was no surprise that high-profile visitors like Russian President Vladimir Putin or his Chinese counterpart Xi Jingping failed to mention such issues as human rights, executions and terrorism in polite dinner-table conversation in Tehran.

The surprise came from Western leaders visiting the Islamic Republic and talking in strict accordance with scripts established by the ruling mullahs.

Turkey: Victim of Its Own Enthusiasm for Jihad by Burak Bekdil

“Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried Islam in the depths of history when they abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924 … We are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.” — Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief of Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey

“The magazine [Dabiq] creates propaganda for [ISIS]. It has an open address. Why does no one raid its offices?” — Opposition MP Turkey’s Parliament

The government big guns in Ankara just shrugged it off when on June 5, 2015, only two days before general elections in the country, homegrown jihadist militants for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS or IS) detonated bombs, killing four people and injuring over 100, at a pro-Kurdish political rally. Again, when IS, on July 20, 2015, bombed a meeting of pro-Kurdish peace activists in a small town on Turkey’s Syrian border, killing 33 people and injuring over 100, the government behaved as if it had never happened. After all, a bunch of “wild boys” from the ranks of jihad –which the ruling party in Ankara not-so-privately aspires to- were killing the common enemy: Kurds.

Then when IS jihadists, in October, killed over 100 people in the heart of Ankara, while targeting, once again, a public rally of pro-peace activists (including many Kurds), the Turkish government put the blame on “a cocktail of terror groups,” – meaning the attack may have been a product of Islamists, far-leftist and Kurdish militants. “IS, Kurdish or far-leftist militants could have carried out the bombing,” the prime minister at the time, Ahmet Davutoglu, said. It was the worst single terror attack in Turkey’s history, and the Ankara government was too demure even to name the perpetrators. An indictment against 36 suspects, completed nearly nine months after the attack, identified all defendants as IS members. So, there was no “cocktail of terror.” It was just the jihadists.

Sweden: Rampant Sexual Assaults Steam On One Month of Islam and Multiculture in Sweden: May 2016 by Ingrid Carlqvist

The police released a report noting that Sweden is at the top of the EU’s statistics on physical and sexual violence against women, sexual harassment and stalking. The report stated unequivocally that it is “asylum-seeker boys” and “foreign men” who commit the vast majority of the reported crimes.

As far as the widespread sexual assaults at public pools are concerned, the police said that in four out of five cases, the perpetrators have been “unaccompanied refugee children”.

A survey by the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) suggested that as many as 38,000 women in Sweden may have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Yet health care services rarely help women with the complications associated with FGM.

A Swedish father was told that he and his two children are being thrown out of the house they are renting from the municipality — to make room for an immigrant family.

May 4: The terrorist who turned out not to be a terrorist, but was chased by the police all over Sweden in November 2015, Mutar Muthanna Majid, demanded 1 million kronor (about $110,000) in damages from the Swedish government. However, the Chancellor of Justice decided that the standard sum for those wrongly incarcerated was enough compensation. Majid was held in custody for four days, which means he gets 12,000 kronor ($1,300).

May 4: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to the defense of Sweden’s Muslim Minister of Housing Mehmet Kaplan, who was forced to resign after his connections to Islamists and neo-Fascists were revealed, as was his defamatory comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. According to Erdogan, however, the forced resignation of Kaplan was symptomatic for how Muslims are treated in the West: “Just look at what Sweden has done to a Muslim who reached a position in Cabinet,” Erdogan indignantly said.

May 4: It is now up to Sweden’s Supreme Court to decide if an Algerian, Karim Ageri, should be deported from Sweden after knifing a 16-year-old girl because she refused to have sex with him. November 10, 2015, two teenage Swedish girls visited an asylum house for “unaccompanied refugee children” in the Stockholm metropolitan area. Karim Ageri, who claimed to be 16 years old, groped one of the girls, who climbed out a window to get away from him. Ageri then followed her, and slashed her face twice with a knife. The prosecutor in the case argued that Ageri is at least 21 years old, and should therefore be tried as an adult and, after serving his sentence, deported. However, the Municipal Court did not agree, and sentenced the Algerian to juvenile detention. The Court of Appeals increased the sentence to 18 months in prison, followed by deportation. Prosecutor My Hedström says she is now looking forward to having the case tried by the Supreme Court, to get a precedent on how “refugee children” who commit serious crimes should be handled legally.

It was a heck of an indictment until he got to the indictment part By Silvio Canto, Jr.

On Tuesday, I listened to FBI director James Comey on the radio. They broke with the flash that Director Comey would address the media, and I did not want to miss it. I even waited for him to finish before going into my appointment. (I was early, so I had the luxury of 10 minutes.)

My initial reaction to the director’s words was to say to myself: “She’s in bigger trouble than I thought…”

Then came the finish, and I got mad. Yes, I am angry, because the country deserves better. I found this editorial at the Wall Street Journal just right:

So there it is in the political raw: One standard exists for a Democratic candidate for President and another for the hoi polloi.

We’re not sure if Mr. Comey, the erstwhile Eliot Ness, intended to be so obvious, but what a depressing moment this is for the American rule of law.
No wonder so many voters think Washington is rigged for the powerful.

No wonder, indeed! No wonder people feel that some can get away with something and some can’t.

Some Democrats may cheer and say that the whole thing is over, but it is not. In fact, it is just beginning.

It does not take a partisan person to understand that people have suffered serious consequences for doing a lot less. Can you say General Petraeus?

Furthermore, how is the federal government going to prosecute the next person who decides to be sloppy with communications or emails? Will that person claim the Hillary Exemption? I’d bet that there are some defense lawyers out there thinking about new defense strategies.

Of course, it is now up to Mr. Trump to lead the political prosecution of Hillary Clinton. He will have to make the case that Mrs. Clinton cannot be trusted, and Director Comey gave him all the material he needs to put in the teleprompter.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump wasted the opportunity yesterday by getting into another explanation of how he opposed the Iraq War and Saddam Hussein killed terrorists.

Someone needs to hold a sign at the Trump rallies with a simple message: “The jobs report, FBI, and mess in Middle East, and say nothing else”!

Sorry, but it’s time for Trump to get message discipline or let the delegates choose someone else!

Film review: Captain Fantastic By Marion DS Dreyfus

Thanks to its socialist writers, this one brings to mind the famous quotation: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

Exalted literary icon Mary McCarthy had a years-long feud with literary avatar and non-capitalist Lillian Hellman. Said McCarthy of Hellman’s oeuvre: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

While Captain Fantastic is not wholly meretricious, it is filled with so many pretentious assumptions and memes that McCarthy could have had a field day.

Viggo Mortensen, for instance, usually a sexy, serious portrayer of classic males in some distress, future or past, in one genre or another, plays the strict, affect-deprived father of six lively children. Early in the film, their mother, stricken with bipolar or some other mental disorder, dies, a suicide.

The father is living the Walden Pond life, homeschooling his active troupe of kids in the woods, raising them with what used to be a classical education in science, philosophy, medicine (sort of), literature, and languages. Esperanto is apparently one of the latter, a tongue for some reason taboo on one of the family’s rides on the rickety converted school bus they ride when they need groceries or city contact.

But though the sprach is all Trotskist (as opposed to the verboten Trotskyite) sloganeering, and the father wears a faded T-shirt reading Jesse Jackson 1969 or something, and he is too young to have even worn such a T when Jackson rode the racialist bandwagon, the kids do not – contrary to what they sprout and the father hectors anyone who asks – wear homespun, but store bought’n clothes, trendy if dowdy city folks’ notions of what hicks in the woods might wear. They don’t know what Nikes or Adidas are, but they make stealing food from grocery emporia a fun regular event, after staging faux heart attacks. Though they make a thing of organic food, and Mortensen rejects a greasy spoon diner because “they don’t serve any real food here, kids, so let’s go,” the truth is, minutes later, he’s celebrating the odious Noam Chomsky’s birthday (instead of Christmas) with a sprinkle-covered store-made cake and – here’s the thing – Redi-Whip, which is completely artificial and damaging, one figures, to the chromosomes of all concerned. He spritzes it joyously into his mouth, as if it were nectar of the gods. Fake, fake, fake.

Austria Throws Out Its Presidential Election and May Throw Out Jihadists, Too By Michele Antaki

Europeans are revolting against their transnational elites, with Austria now throwing out its presidential election that cheated the nationalist candidate of victory. Friday last week took Austria through a roller-coaster of emotional news — alarming, then exhilarating or depressing, depending on one’s perspective.

It was first announced that Akhmed Chatayev, the Chechen Istanbul airport terror suspect, had been given asylum in Austria since 2003, then an Austrian passport that allowed him free travel within Europe and beyond. Yet, at the same time, he was on Russia’s wanted list. In multiple incidents that took place in various countries between 2003 and 2015, Chatayev was caught with explosives and ammunitions, or photos of victims killed in a blast. Astonishingly, he would either be acquitted, or released on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. Just once, he served a brief one-year jail sentence in a Swedish prison.

Russia repeatedly demanded his extradition, to no avail. The European Court of Human Rights and Amnesty International advocated twice on his behalf, fearing he would face torture. It is only when Chatayev entered Syria to join the Islamic State in 2015, that he was finally placed on the terror list of both the US and UN.

Chatayev’s case was by no means an isolated one. Austria had for years been a hub for global jihad — a “de facto base for Islamist extremists from southeastern Europe, a place to radicalize, recruit, raise and hide funds, thanks to Austria’s permissive laws and weak enforcement mechanisms.”

But a corner was turned with the 2014 serial arrests of nine Chechens who were legally present in the country as refugees and asylum seekers, planning to wage jihad with ISIS in Syria.

One also remembers the media sensation stirred in the same year by the “Jihad poster girls,” two blue-eyed Austrian teenagers of Bosnian heritage who had run off to Syria to marry jihadists, after undergoing sudden radicalization.

French Court Convicts Seven Tied to Islamic Extremist Group Brother of a Paris suicide attacker among those sentenced to prison terms

PARIS—A French court on Wednesday convicted seven young men who returned from weeks among the ranks of Islamic State extremists in Syria, including the brother of one of the suicide attackers who targeted Paris in November.

The defendants, ages 24 to 27, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to nine years for taking part in a group recruiting French jihadists to join a “terrorist group” in Syria in 2013-14—namely Islamic State—and for participating in military training and other activities.

Karim Mohamed-Aggad, the older brother of one of the extremists who attacked Paris’ Bataclan concert hall on Nov. 13, received a 9-year term, the harshest penalty among the seven, since the prosecutor said he was one of the ringleaders.

Mr. Mohamed-Aggad claimed he went to Syria only for humanitarian purposes and accused the French government of putting him on trial instead of his brother Foued, who returned to France with a Kalashnikov and suicide explosives strapped to his body in an operation that killed dozens in Paris.

Foued also went to Syria with the group.

In its ruling, the Paris court said while some of the defendants left Syria of their own free will, Karim Mohamed-Aggad was “in no hurry to return” to France and “showed a persistence in his active interest for jihadism.”

After the verdict, Mr. Mohamed-Aggad’s lawyer, Françoise Cotta, told reporters the ruling was “a decision of fear, returned in a France of fear, by a judge who is here to respond to the fear.”

The Trumpen Proletariat Barack Obama’s presidency of moral condescension has produced an electoral backlash.Daniel Henninger

Karl Marx, in a particularly dyspeptic moment, offered this description of what he dismissed as the lumpen proletariat:

“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.”

Even Donald Trump’s critics would not go so far as to suggest that his voter base consists of vagabonds, pickpockets or even, ugh, “literati.” But for the longest time, the American media saw the Trump base as an “indefinite, disintegrated mass” of mostly angry, lower-middle-class white males. The early Trump adopters often looked like bikers, with or without jobs. The Trumpen proletariat.

This was the original Trump bedrock, the proles who could look past him saying that John McCain, though tortured for years by the Vietnamese, wasn’t a hero. Even now they’ll blink right by Mr. Trump’s remark this week that Saddam Hussein was “good” at killing terrorists (“they didn’t read them their rights”), despite the unhappy fact that Saddam was a psychopathic, blood-soaked torturer responsible for the deaths of perhaps a half million non-terrorist Iraqi citizens.

(Still, one may ask: When the day after her Comey pardon, Hillary Clinton proposes “free” tuition at public colleges for families earning up to $85,000 a year, and $125,000 by 2021, how come her campaign isn’t universally laughed and mocked off the map?)

The media originally looked upon the emerging Trump base with suspicion and distrust, regarding it as a volatile and possibly dangerous political faction but one that would slip back to the shadows as the Trump candidacy faded.

We are 10 days from the party conventions, and Mr. Trump sits, uneasily as always, close to the polling margin of error against the former Secretary of State, former U.S. senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton. The Trumpen proletariat turns out to be bigger than imagined.

In the nonstop conversation about the 2016 election, the question at the center of everything is whether one is a “Trump supporter.” But if it is true that in this election all the rules have been broken, couldn’t it also be true that Donald Trump has himself become a bystander to the forces set in motion this year? CONTINUE AT SITE