RUTHFULLY YOURS

“There is a confidence from these [FBI] sources that her server had been hacked. And that it was a 99% accuracy that it had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that things had been taken from that.” — Brett Baier reporting on Fox News, November 2, 2016

The above statement should concern every American, but it doesn’t. The likely possibility of foreign spies hacking Hillary Clinton’s server — long suspected, now apparently confirmed — outrages most Republicans and a certain portion of independents, but very few Democrats.

Why isn’t the average Democratic member of Congress bothered, much less outraged, by the possibility that Clinton used an insecure server, allowing her e-mails and the classified information in them to be hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies? Why isn’t President Obama bothered by it?

At the same time most Democrats are finding ways to excuse or hand-wave away Clinton’s actions, they are genuinely outraged by another act of hacking: Someone — presumably hackers directed by or affiliated with the Russian government — found thousands of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s campaign. As Clinton herself put it in the final debate:

We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 — intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

It is indeed disturbing — but if the Kremlin’s hacking the e-mails of private individuals and private institutions to influence an election is disturbing, then the hacking of Hillary’s private server should be doubly so. But not only do no Democrats express any anger over the latter likelihood, they bend over backwards to insist it is no big deal.

Back in May, I had the opportunity to see a screening of Clinton Cash, the documentary based on Peter Schweizer’s book of the same title. I wrote about it in this space here. Now that the commentariat is finally beginning to catch up with reality — at last count, there were five, count ’em five, FBI investigations into the machinations of the money factory known as the Clinton Foundation — I thought it might be worth briefly revisiting the subject.

In May, I asked my readers: “Are you worried about ‘money in politics’?” If so, I suggested that they “Stop the car, get an extended-stay room, and take a long, hard look at the Clintons’ operation for the last sixteen years”:

The Associated Press estimated that their net worth when they left the White House in 2000 was zero (really, minus $500K). Now they are worth about $200 million.

How did they do it? By “reading The Wall Street Journal” (classical reference)?

Not quite. The Clintons have perfected pay-to-play political influence peddling on a breathtaking scale. Reading Clinton Cash (which I recommend) is a nauseating experience.

At the center of the book is not just a tale of private greed and venality. That is just business as usual in Washington (and elsewhere). No, what is downright scary is way the Clintons have been willing to trade away legitimate environmental concerns and even our national security for the sake of filthy lucre.

It’s this last item that’s most worrisome.

That the Clintons are a greedy, money-hoovering machine has been clear since they left the White House with cartloads of swag in tow (the exact amount is disputable, that they did so is not). There are some who say her mishandling of classified material is no big deal — it’s just a technicality, who really cares? Can’t we put this behind us? Can’t we move on? At this point, what difference does it make?

Well, there used to be such people. If they still exist, they are scarce on the ground now.

Thanks to WikiLeaks and some recent FBI revelations, it is now clear that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material was no casual act of inadvertence. It was not, as she at first claimed with false naiveté, done simply as a matter of convenience by someone who was technically ill-informed and maladroit.

No, the whole process was a thoroughly calculated tactic.

Given what we know now, there is something slightly nauseating about watching clips of Clinton lie when asked about her emails.

One classic is this clip, in which, when asked about whether she wiped her server, she said coyly: “Like with with a cloth or something?” She knew all about wiping servers, since her IT guys employed a sophisticated tool called BleachBit to do the job. (The company even uses an image of Hillary Clinton at their web page.)

Scrutinize Clinton’s performance in this clip. In a way, it’s quite masterly. Watch how she coolly modulates between impatience, naiveté, evasion, and outright lies. We turned over the server, she says, what more can we do? “We turned over everything that was work related, every single thing.”

We now know (well, we’ve always known, but now we really do know) that assertion is a lie. Not just an untruth, but a deliberate lie.

It’s hard to know what is the most brazen thing about her behavior. Turning over a server for investigation after having it professionally wiped is a candidate for the prize.

But for my money, the most outrageous thing was responding to a congressional subpoena by destroying 33,000 emails. (Andy McCarthy lays out the whole story with his customary clarity here.)

The revelation by the FBI last week that material that could be “relevant” to the Clinton email investigation had been found on a laptop shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband — amateur photographer and pen-pal to pubescent multitudes Anthony Weiner — propelled the story to a new and vertiginous stage. Apparently, we are talking about 650,000 emails. How many had to do with yoga routines? How many concerned State Department business? How many did Anthony Weiner see or share? These are just a few of the questions prompted by this ever more bizarre story.

“I’ve got Republican friends who don’t think or act the way Donald Trump does,” President Obama said Wednesday at a Raleigh rally for Hillary Clinton. That’s totally believable except the part about his having Republican friends. The president continued: “This”—meaning Trump, not Mrs. Clinton—“is somebody who is uniquely unqualified. I ran against John McCain. I ran against Mitt Romney. I thought I’d be a better president, but I never thought that the republic was at risk if they were elected.”

National Review’s Charles Cooke finds Obama’s remarks vexatious. “Democrats really have limited their ability to credibly warn against the dangers posed by Trump,” he argues, noting that Obama and his supporters treated Romney quite viciously in 2012:

Then? Romney was dangerous and represented a departure. Then? He was no John McCain, that’s for sure! Now? Pah. Romney was a gentleman. A scholar. A safe pair of hands. Sure, in 2012 Obama ran a commercial arguing that Romney wasn’t “one of us.” Sure, Obama was so worried about Romney’s being in the White House that he tried to impose restraints on the drone program that he had run without restrictions. Sure, Joe Biden said that Romney would put African Americans “back in chains.” Sure, Harry Reid accused Romney of being a tax-cheat and a scoundrel. Sure, Obama’s campaigners repeatedly claimed that if Romney were elected he would continue his dastardly spree of killing people with cancer. Sure, the Atlantic characterized Obama’s approach toward Romney as being “My Opponent Is a Dangerous Radical (with a dash of My Opponent Is a Strange Weirdo thrown in).” But in retrospect? He was fine. In fact, he was no threat at all. Chill.

If we understand Cooke correctly, he is frustrated with liberals because he largely agrees with them about Trump—note he accepts the premise about the “dangers posed” by the GOP nominee—and finds the case more difficult to make persuasively because their lack of credibility tends to discredit his argument. To put it in fabulous terms, liberals cried wolf, and now that there really is a wolf, nobody is listening to Cooke’s cries.

To judge by the Twitter exchanges we read yesterday, Cooke did not find a receptive audience on the left. Some detractors argued that Romney was a dangerous radical, which illustrates Cooke’s point without conceding it. Others claimed that the anti-Romney rhetoric then was not actually as harsh as the anti-Trump rhetoric now. CONTINUE AT SITE

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga.

WikiLeaks emails show the two chatting about birthday parties and dinner meetings with fellow Democratic power players. A 2014 email lists donors for a fundraiser that Mr. Podesta held for his daughter, running for a school board in California. Mr. Kadzik (as he sat at the Justice Department) is shown giving $250. Also appearing are the usual Clinton glitterati: Doug Band, Harold Ickes, Neera Tanden, Betty Currie, Madeleine Albright, Carol Browner. This is Mr. Kadzik’s social circle.

The Justice Department has tried to dismiss Mr. Kadzik’s tip-off to the Clinton campaign as a note “about public information,” sent “in his personal capacity, not during work hours.” But Mr. Kadzik is a senior government official. He does not get to feed any information to a potential target of an investigation, at any hour of the day or night. CONTINUE AT SITE

By now, Hillary Clinton is as polished as politicians come. At 69, her hair is perfectly coiffed and colored, her makeup is subtle and her clothes are expensive. A trained debater, educated at Wellesley and Yale Law School, with decades of public life, she speaks well.

In an election that she has framed around temperamental fitness for the presidency, her deliberate comments and careful parsing of words suggest that she possesses the steadiness and judgment required. That is the image we saw when she stood on a debate stage with the far less controlled, more hot-tempered Donald Trump.

Clinton’s public persona is a façade, though a well designed one, held up by her staff, masters of television illusion and a collaborating national media. With the release of WikiLeaks emails, it has become clear that her senior staff questions that image among themselves.

To understand what she is likely to do with the enormous, now largely unchecked power of the American presidency requires seeing the reality behind that façade. Judging by her actions over the past 35 years in Washington and Arkansas, in roles from governor’s wife to First Lady, senator to secretary of state, it is clear that Hillary’s deep character flaws and temperamental shortcomings, while better hidden than Donald Trump’s very visible ones, present a much greater danger to our democracy.

Clinton’s character-revealing behavior includes incessant lying to the public; vast personal greed leading to corruption in high office; abuse of power on behalf of herself and against private citizens and political rivals; disregard for the law, and the very idea of the Rule of Law; disdain for the “deplorable” half of her opponent’s supporters, and the confession, made during a private Goldman Sachs speech revealed by WikiLeaks, that she typically offers one position on policy and politics in private and another, often very different one, for public consumption.

This admission alone makes it impossible to know whether any policy agenda she has campaigned on reflects her intentions. Or is she actually planning to implement unwelcome policies voters would reject if she were honest about them?

Nor is the media helping find the truth. As we have learned lately, some top-tier news organizations have offered her staff questions before interviews and debates, so that she can rehearse, and her staff can veto uncomfortable questions. Reporters have run copy past her campaign staff. The press seems happily complicit in this corruption, but it makes any reporting hard to trust.