RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary plays the victim in her campaign memoir, then rips the peasants for not treating her like a man.

Hillary’s campaign memoir, What Happened, is as awful as expected, serving as yet another cracked window on her phoniness. She remains the baby-boomer feminist fraud, still pouting over alleged sexism even as she hurls herself upon various fainting couches.

She writes about her defeat with the emotional intensity of a parent who lost a child — a chilling and neurotic proof of her clawing, bottomless and now forever thwarted political ambition.

She is a failed Lady Macbeth, but a Lady Macbeth who wants us to feel sorry for her, what with her chardonnay-chugging and alternate nostril breathing after the election. She writes: “If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing, it’s worth a try.… It may sound silly, but it works for me. It wasn’t all yoga and breathing: I also drank my share of chardonnay.”

But in the course of acknowledging her post-election emotional tailspin, she gets in a curious dig at her husband and friends. She wants us to know that she is not as screwed up as they are. “I remember when Bill lost his reelection as Governor of Arkansas. He was so distraught at the outcome that I had to go to the hotel where the election night party was held to speak to his supporters on his behalf,” she writes. “For a good while afterward, he was so depressed that he practically couldn’t get off the ground. That’s not me. I keep going.”

About her friends, she writes that they “advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists.… But that wasn’t for me. Never has been.”

See, she is still the strong one! It is true that Bill did moon about after his defeat in 1980. He would hang out in grocery stores, following people to their cars as he explained why they should give him another shot. But it is not clear why Hillary thinks that is more pathetic than her frantic closet-cleaning, taking to her bed on election night (while her crying supporters sat stupidly at the Javits Center waiting for her to appear), or any of the other attempts at “self-care” that she reports in the book.

Hillary, when not insisting upon her own claimed superiority, sounds less like Lady Macbeth than Madame Bovary. Hillary, Bovary-like, cops to a frenzied attempt to find pleasure and meaning in the void of her denied dream, in everything from movies, plays, and evening soaps to sentimental books to even religion. “I prayed a lot,” she writes. “I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes.”

They should, especially after she likens her defeat to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. She ludicrously quotes a Methodist minister who told her, “You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming!”

The book is full of inadvertent humor. She pats herself on the back for the generosity that she showed the “4,400 members of my campaign staff” in the midst of her grief, such as when she re-gifted 1,200 red roses to them that a woman’s advocacy group had delivered to her Chappaqua mansion. It sounded less like a gift than more closet-cleaning.

After months of denials, the pretext for Susan Rice’s eavesdropping on Trump officials has finally been made public. It had been widely known that Obama’s former National Security Adviser had contrived to unmask the names of top Trump officials who had been spied on by the administration. And the same media that still treats Watergate as the Great American Scandal had claimed that there was nothing “improper” in an Obama loyalist eavesdropping on members of the opposition party.

Every time Obama Inc. was caught eavesdropping on opposition politicians, it presented its spin in a carefully packaged “scoop” to a major media outlet. This time was no different.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress to protect its Iran nuke sellout, it packaged the story to the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress”. The idea was that Obama Inc. was “legitimately” spying on Israel, that it just happened to intercept the conversations of some members of Congress and American Jews, and that the eavesdropping somehow meant that its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, rather than its White House perpetrators, should be ashamed.

The White House had demanded the conversations between Prime Minister Netanyahu, members of Congress and American Jews because it “believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign.” This was domestic surveillance carried out under the same pretext as in the Soviet Union which had also accused its dissident targets of secretly serving foreign interests.

Obama and his minions had used the NSA to spy on Americans opposed to its policies. Including members of Congress. They did this by conflating their own political agenda with national security.

Since Obama’s spin was that the Iran Deal was good for national security, opponents of it were a “national security” threat.

And its fig leaf for domestic surveillance was that a “foreign leader” was involved.

Now get ready for a flashback.

Susan Rice’s excuse for unmasking the names of top Trump officials in the Obama eavesdropping effort was that they were meeting with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The carefully packaged CNN story, which reeks of the Goebbelsian media manipulations of “Obama whisperer” Ben Rhodes, tries to clumsily tie the whole thing to the Russians. But for once it’s not about Russia. It’s about Islam.

The UAE has become best known for being the first regional Muslim oil state to turn against the Muslim Brotherhood and the entire Arab Spring enterprise. It helped mobilize opposition to the Qatari agenda. The ultimate outcome of that effort was that Egypt was stabilized under a non-Islamist president and the Islamist takeover in Libya is looking rather shaky. The Saudi coalition against Qatar, the sugar daddies of Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, has its origins in that effort.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress before, it was to protect Iran. This time around, the gang that couldn’t spy straight was trying to protect the Muslim Brotherhood. The Iran Deal was never about stopping Iran’s nuclear program. It certainly does not do that. Nor was it ever meant to do it.

Instead the real goal of the Iran negotiations was a diplomatic arrangement with the Islamic terror state. The fruits of that arrangement can be seen from Beirut to Baghdad. They are written in blood and steel across Syria, Israel and Yemen. And that arrangement had to be protected at all costs.

Even if it meant spying on Americans. Even if it meant spying on members of Congress.

Let’s begin with a brief flashback. On March 22, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes conducted a bizarre press conference on White House grounds. His claim? That Obama-administration officials had monitored members of the incoming Trump administration as part of routine surveillance of foreign officials.

The whole episode was strange enough that it ultimately led Nunes to recuse himself from the Russia probe. After all, he’d gone to White House grounds to “brief” the president on information he’d obtained from the White House. He did so without sharing that information with his committee and as part of a transparent effort to help the Trump administration muddle through one of its many self-imposed public firestorms. (In March, Trump had tweeted claims that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower before the election.) In short, he did the wrong thing the wrong way.

But that didn’t mean that all of Nunes’s claims were wrong. He asserted that he’d seen evidence that Obama administration officials had “unmasked,” or disclosed in intelligence reports, the identities of Trump officials who met or communicated with representatives of foreign governments and that “none of this surveillance was related to Russia.” These were serious claims, and while they may not involve criminal behavior (“unmasking” isn’t a criminal offense), it would be highly improper — corrupt, even — to abuse America’s national-security resources for partisan political advantage.

Former national-security adviser Susan Rice was at the center of the storm, accused of making a vast number of unmasking requests. What was her response? On the very day of Nunes’s press conference she said, “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

Here’s the video:

Over time, however, her story evolved. She later clarified that she was simply saying that she didn’t know “what reports Nunes was referring to.” In April she said she never did anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” she received. So, what was the truth? Did she “know nothing” or did she do nothing “untoward”? Those aren’t the same statements, and the differences matter.

Let’s flash forward to yesterday. Lost amidst the news of the Trump “deal” with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer was this little scoop from CNN:

Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN.

Allegedly, the meeting happened before the UAE tried to “facilitate a back-channel” between Russia and Trump transition officials. The story continues:

The Obama administration felt misled by the United Arab Emirates, which had failed to mention that Zayed was coming to the United States even though it’s customary for foreign dignitaries to notify the US government about their travels, according to several sources familiar with the matter. Rice, who served as then-President Obama’s national security adviser in his second term, told the House Intelligence Committee last week that she requested the names of the Americans mentioned in the classified report be revealed internally, a practice officials in both parties say is common.

President Trump had dinner Wednesday night with Chuck and Nancy, as he familiarly calls the Democratic leaders he apparently hopes will become his new governing partners.

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi left the repast and promptly announced that they had reached a deal with the president over codifying DACA. According to the Democrats, they had agreed with the president to seek legislation that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrants once covered under DACA in exchange for unspecified border-security measures, but not funding for “the wall.” Trump denied there was actually a deal, but confirmed the basic structure of a prospective agreement. According to Trump, DACA will be reinstituted in exchange for “massive” and “extreme” new border security, but not funding for the wall.

Who knows what will ultimately come of this, but it’s not encouraging. Since announcing the end of DACA, Trump has signaled that merely writing its provisions in legislation would constitute a triumph. But the point of rescinding DACA was not just to enshrine it into law via constitutional means (which is certainly better than the alternative). The point was also to extract concessions from Democrats that would create a better immigration system and cushion the effect of the amnesty. Almost from the beginning, Trump has undermined his own leverage and made this less likely.

As we’ve argued repeatedly, a sensible deal isn’t hard to discern. The problem with any amnesty is that it serves as a magnet for new illegal immigrants, and its recipients could become the next link in chain migration if granted legal status or especially citizenship. Pairing an amnesty for so-called Dreamers with some combination of a mandatory E-Verify for new hires and portions of the RAISE Act that will reduce chain migration would directly address the negative consequences of codifying a version of DACA.

The legislation that Trump, Schumer, and Pelosi are talking about would likely do neither. Trump wouldn’t even get funding for his signature border wall. (The wall is largely symbolism, and a trade of a permanent amnesty for some one-time funding for the wall would be a bad deal.) The parameters of this agreement appear to be about what you would expect from a negotiation between Schumer and Pelosi on one hand and Trump on the other. The Democrats are opposed to any meaningful tightening of the immigration system — they want to go in the opposite direction — while Trump has been a restrictionist, although one not well-versed in the policy implications of that position, to put it mildly.

We hope that the White House realizes what a mistake this deal would be, and failing that, that the Republican congressional leadership, with a push from immigration hawks, puts the kibosh on it and demands something better. Whatever Trump might think, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi aren’t his friends, and certainly aren’t the friends of sound immigration policy.

A clearer picture is coming into focus on the Democrat IT scandal that may help explain why Democrats have been so reluctant to condemn the Awans or help the police with the investigation. It also might explain why former DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been so jumpy lately.

New information about a massive cybersecurity breach, gleaned from a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation, implicates the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus, then-Rep. Xavier Becerra, who is now the attorney general of California and a rising star in Democrat politics.

This scandal isn’t about bank fraud, folks.

Kudos to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller for chasing down this story, even as the Democrat media complex either poo-pooed or ignored the growing scandal. As Ace of Spades noted, at some point the legacy media is going to have the explain to their audiences why they didn’t report on this major story all year long.

Via the Daily Caller:

A secret server is behind law enforcement’s decision to ban a former IT aide to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the House network.

Now-indicted former congressional IT aide Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server. Police grew suspicious and requested a copy of the server early this year, but they were provided with an elaborate falsified image designed to hide the massive violations. The falsified image is what ultimately triggered their ban from the House network Feb. 2, according to a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The secret server was connected to the House Democratic Caucus, an organization chaired by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra. Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

Data was also backed up to Dropbox in huge quantities, the official said. Congressional offices are prohibited from using Dropbox, so an unofficial account was used, meaning Awan could have still had access to the data even though he was banned from the congressional network.

Awan had access to all emails and office computer files of 45 members of Congress who are listed below. Fear among members that Awan could release embarrassing information if they cooperated with prosecutors could explain why the Democrats have refused to acknowledge the cybersecurity breach publicly or criticize the suspects.

According to the DCNF’s source, the Awans’ use of Dropbox went well beyond casual use. They were “funneling of huge quantities of data offsite where it could not be taken back by House authorities.”

Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran Awan on even after he was banned from using official computers, and only fired him after he was arrested at the airport back in July as he was trying to abscond to Pakistan. In May, she threatened the capitol police chief with “consequences” if he didn’t return her confiscated laptop.

Imran Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, who has been in Pakistan for months, has struck a deal with federal prosecutors, agreeing to return to the U.S. and face charges. Alvi was also an IT staffer for House Democrats. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans have issues, but Democrats have them too. Witness the two individuals who dominated this week’s news—and who conveniently represent the left’s most crippling problems.

Hillary Clinton is again everywhere, touting her new memoir and adding to the list of who and what are to blame for her loss: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, James Comey, Jill Stein, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Anthony Weiner, sexism, misogyny, the New York Times , lazy women, liberal activists and the “godforsaken Electoral College.” All she’s missing is climate change.

Hillary’s take on “What Happened” has unsurprisingly unleashed another round of analysis about her mistakes—Wisconsin, deplorables, email. These sorts of detailed postmortems of failed campaigns are popular, but they tend to obscure the bigger reasons for failure. In this case: The Democratic Party saddled itself with an ethically compromised and joyless candidate, because it had nobody else.

Hillary spent eight years planning her first presidential bid, and the next eight warning Democrats not to get in the way of her second. The Clinton Foundation was erected to serve as bank and Rolodex, and to enable the Clintons to retain their grip over the party. And that party was committed to a Clinton coronation, right up to Mr. Sanders’s cheeky assault.

Mr. Obama aided Mrs. Clinton’s ambitions by decimating his party. By the time Barack Obama finished his eight years in office, his party held 65 fewer House seats, 14 fewer governorships and controlled 30 fewer state legislatures. It had turned a once-filibuster-proof Senate majority into minority status. The big-tent Democratic coalition shriveled to a coastal, progressive minority, wiping out a generation of Democratic politicians and most of the party’s political diversity.

And so the party nominated perhaps the only Democrat in the country who could rival Donald Trump in unpopularity—and beat him in untrustworthiness. Mr. Sanders refused to go after Mrs. Clinton on her ethical baggage, even though it was her biggest weakness and despite how glaringly obvious was the risk that her foundation and server scandals would hobble a general-election campaign. The parties gave the country a choice between two unpopular people, and the country disliked her more. The real question is how Democrats rebuild a party whose senior leaders in the House boast an average age of 72 and which has almost no young, experienced up-and-comers.

Which brings us to Mr. Sanders, the symbol of Democrats’ other big problem. This week the senator, flanked by about one-third of Senate Democrats, released his “Medicare for All” proposal to nationalize health care. These are the ascendant voices in the party. Yet there are few of them, because their agenda is highly unpopular. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton spent a third of her miserable adult life trying to get into the White House. Now the nation’s failed Harridan-in-Chief is determined to spend her remaining years blaming everyone, from Matt Lauer to the Electoral College, for having to live out the rest of her life in flat broke poverty in the eleven rooms of her Georgian Colonial mansion (and the neighboring mansion in their cul-de-sac too).

Current ‘blamees’ include the FBI, millions of white people, sexism, the Russians, Russian sexism, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Matt Lauer and the Electoral College.

And probably the starting lineup of the Denver Broncos. You’ll have to buy the book for the full list.

But What Happened, Hillary’s spiteful magnum opus, does actually answer its titular question.

Hillary happened.

Hillary Clinton is a terrible person. Her politics are terrible. She’s a nasty creature whose hatred, entitlement and greed are in direct proportion to her mountainous avalanches of self-pity.

And What Happened sums up those qualities the way that none of her previous biographies ever did.

What Happened isn’t Hillary unfiltered. The only people privileged to witness that were the Secret Service agents she threw things at and the aides who had to frantically cater to her every whim.

But it’s close enough.

What Happened is still told in Hillary’s treacly insincere voice. But for the first time, its topic isn’t a bunch of insincere platitudes assembled by some combination of aides, staffers, ghostwriters and pollsters.

All that is over.

The carefully constructed machine built to take Hillary to the White House broke down on Wisconsin Highway 14, Florida State Road 20 and Pennsylvania Route 22. Only a skeleton staff of loyalists stayed to help Hillary turn her name recognition and remaining connections into filthy lucre and filthier spite.

That’s what What Happened is. Hillary gets to lash out at everyone and get paid for it. Not only is she upstaging Bernie’s book tour while trying to tie him to Trump, she’s taking shots at another likely Dem 2020er, Joe Biden, not to mention her own badly used DNC and everyone who didn’t vote for her.

If Hillary can’t be president, she’s going to make damn sure that none of her Dem rivals will either.

Hillary will be taking the millions that she had to spend to fight off Bernie in state after state out of his hide piece by piece. And Biden’s vacillation about the entering the race will cost him too.

How much vengeance can Hillary extract with a book? Ask Bernie.

The Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution print edition will be out on September 14. Hillary’s What Happened will be out on September 12.

Two days earlier.

Hillary’s book currently tops Amazon’s bestseller list. Bernie’s is at 39.

President Trump, through his press secretary, has recommended that the Justice Department, which answers to Trump, should consider prosecuting former FBI director James Comey. The statements by Sarah Huckabee Sanders were not a model of clarity, and the way they’ve been reported may have confused matters. There is no doubt, however, that the Trump administration is politicizing law enforcement — exactly what it accuses Comey of having done.

Ms. Sanders accused Comey of leaking “privileged information” to the media and giving false testimony to Congress. The disclosure of “privileged information” is generally not a crime unless the information is classified — and Ms. Sanders did not claim that Comey divulged classified matters. The spokeswoman, moreover, failed to specify what the purportedly false testimony was, although she appeared to be referring to statements the former FBI director made to Congress regarding the Hillary Clinton emails probe — the investigation she accused Comey of politicizing.

Sanders was not clear on whether the White House believed Comey had probably committed a crime or merely strayed into a legal gray area, burbling that his “improper” actions “likely could have been illegal.” While paying lip-service to the notion that encouraging a prosecution is “not the president’s role,” Sanders nonetheless asserted, “I think if there’s ever a moment where we feel someone’s broken the law, particularly if they’re the head of the FBI, I think that’s something that certainly should be looked at.”

The press secretary’s description of the former FBI director’s actions may or may not have been accurate, depending on whether her oral remarks have been correctly punctuated in reporting by the Washington Post (whose version is substantially duplicated by The Hill). The Post relates Sanders’s statement as follows (my italics to highlight the possible confusion):

Comey, by his own self-admission, leaked privileged government information weeks before President Trump fired him. Comey testified that [if?] an FBI agent engaged in the same practice, they’d [sic] face serious repercussions. I think he set his own stage for himself on that front.

Obviously, Sanders was referring to Comey’s disclosure to the New York Times of a portion of a memo he had written about a conversation with Trump. According to Comey, during that February 14 conversation, Trump pressured him to drop the investigation of retired General Michael Flynn, the national-security adviser Trump had just fired. The problem with Sanders’s account, as quoted above, is that the leak to the Times happened days after, not “weeks before,” Comey was fired by Trump.

To recap, Comey was fired on May 9. He has recounted that his leak was a reaction to a tweet by Trump on May 12 — three days later. In that tweet, Trump said, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.” Comey related (in Senate Intelligence Committee testimony) that a few days after the tweet, it dawned on him that Trump’s allusion to tapes implied the existence of recordings that could corroborate Comey’s version of events. Using an intermediary, he thus leaked a portion of his memo to the Times, which published a story about it on May 16. Comey hoped the leak would “prompt the appointment of a special counsel” — who obviously would attempt to obtain any relevant recordings. Soon afterwards, Robert Mueller, was in fact appointed special counsel. President Trump has since represented that he made no recordings.

If the Post has framed Sanders’s assertions accurately, she was clearly wrong about the timing of the leak. I suspect, however, that the Post’s punctuation is wrong — which obviously can happen when oral statements are transcribed. The phrase “weeks before President Trump fired him” may not have been the end of Sanders’s first sentence (about Comey’s leak); it may have been the beginning of her next sentence (about Comey’s testimony regarding possible FBI leaking). If I am correct about this, Sanders’s statements should have been reported as follows:

Comey, by his own self-admission, leaked privileged government information. Weeks before President Trump fired him, Comey testified that [if?] an FBI agent engaged in the same practice, they’d face serious repercussions. I think he set his own stage for himself on that front.

This would be closer to accurate. Comey has admitted leaking his memo. The information in the memo — a summary of a conversation between the president and FBI director — was clearly sensitive and, even if not classified, should not have been leaked. And, in a May 3 Senate hearing, Comey had testified that there would be “severe consequences” if he found out FBI agents leaked investigative information. (We should note that this was less than a week before Trump fired him, not “weeks before,” as Sanders said.) This seems like a more plausible rendering. After all, the point Sanders was trying to make was that Comey’s leaking of investigative information was condemnable under his own prior condemnation of such leaking.