RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even Donald Trump might agree that a major reason he won the 2016 election is because voters couldn’t abide Hillary Clinton’s legacy of scandal, deception and stonewalling. Yet on the story of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, Mr. Trump and his family are repeating the mistakes that doomed Mrs. Clinton.

That’s the lesson the Trumps should draw from the fiasco over Don Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russians peddling dirt on Mrs. Clinton. First Don Jr. let news of the meeting leak without getting ahead of it. Then the White House tried to explain it away as a “nothingburger” that focused on adoptions from Russia.

When that was exposed as incomplete, Don Jr. released his emails that showed the Russian lure about Mrs. Clinton and Don Jr. all excited—“I love it.” Oh, and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Beltway bagman Paul Manafort were also at the meeting. Don Jr. told Sean Hannity this was the full story. But then news leaked that a Russian-American lobbyist was also at the meeting.

Even if the ultimate truth of this tale is merely that Don Jr. is a political dunce who took a meeting that went nowhere—the best case—the Trumps made it appear as if they have something to hide. They have created the appearance of a conspiracy that on the evidence Don Jr. lacks the wit to concoct. And they handed their opponents another of the swords that by now could arm a Roman legion.
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Don’t you get it, guys? Special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating the Russia story. Everything that is potentially damaging to the Trumps will come out, one way or another. Everything. Denouncing leaks as “fake news” won’t wash as a counter-strategy beyond the President’s base, as Mr. Trump’s latest 36% approval rating shows.

Mr. Trump seems to realize he has a problem because the White House has announced the hiring of white-collar Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to manage its Russia defense. He’ll presumably supersede the White House counsel, whom Mr. Trump ignores, and New York outside counsel Marc Kasowitz, who is out of his political depth.

Mr. Cobb has an opening to change the Trump strategy to one with the best chance of saving his Presidency: radical transparency. Release everything to the public ahead of the inevitable leaks. Mr. Cobb and his team should tell every Trump family member, campaign operative and White House aide to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations.

That means every meeting with any Russian or any American with Russian business ties. Every phone call or email. And every Trump business relationship with Russians going back years. This should include every relevant part of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which the President will resist but Mr. Mueller is sure to seek anyway.

The public learned on March 10, 2015 that Hillary Clinton had more than 60,000 emails on her private email system, and that she had turned over “about half” of them to the State Department and destroyed the rest, which she said were “personal” and “not in any way related” to her work as Secretary of State.

The public learned later the lengths to which Clinton went to make sure the “personal” emails were completely and permanently deleted. Her team used a commercial-strength program called BleachBit to erase all traces of the emails, and they used hammers to physically destroy mobile devices that might have had the emails on them. The person who did the actual deleting later cited legal privileges and the Fifth Amendment to avoid talking to the FBI and Congress.

Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, told Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, that investigators could forget about finding any of those emails, whether on a device or a server or anywhere. Sorry, Trey, he said; they’re all gone.

It was, as the New York Times’ Mark Landler said in August 2016, the “original sin” of the Clinton email affair — that Clinton herself, and no independent body, unilaterally decided which emails she would hand over to the State Department and which she would delete.

Still, there were people who did not believe that Clinton’s deleted emails, all 30,000-plus of them, were truly gone. What is ever truly gone on the Internet? And what if Clinton were not telling the truth? What if she deleted emails covering more than just personal matters? In that event, recovering the emails would have rocked the 2016 presidential campaign.

So, if there were an enormous trove of information potentially harmful to a presidential candidate just sitting out there — what opposing campaign wouldn’t want to find it?

There have been recent reports that last summer a Republican named Peter W. Smith made some sort of effort to find the missing Clinton emails, apparently getting in touch with hackers, some of whom may have been Russian. But nothing came of it, and no evidence has emerged that Smith was connected to the Trump campaign. (The 81-year-old Smith later committed suicide, apparently distraught over failing health.)

In a phone conversation Friday, Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager who was fired on June 20, 2016, said he never heard of or communicated with Smith, and wasn’t aware of any effort to find the missing Clinton emails. “I never solicited, or asked anybody to solicit or find a way to get these potential emails,” Lewandowski said. “And to the best of my knowledge, nobody [in the campaign] did either.”

Still, Lewandowski added that, “In the world of cybersecurity, it’s fairly well known that when you delete emails, they’re not gone.”

Another former top Trump aide said that was a common view in the campaign. “The feeling was that they [the emails] must exist somewhere,” the former aide said, “because once something is digital, it’s never truly gone.”

Is there an enduring American character?

For those who view our nation as at a tipping point, the question is urgent. Others scoff, “Why?” After all, if the American character is truly enduring, it will endure — the ship eventually will right itself to the extent it is off course. And if not, history will inevitably evolve it into something better, right?

My friend Mark Levin would counter that this is the wrong way to look at it. The foundation of Americanism, he posits, is natural law. That does not just spontaneously appear, nor passively persevere. Understanding our natural-law roots, reaffirming our attachment to them in the teeth of the progressive project to supersede them — this is hard work.

Necessary work, though. Discovering natural law is a prerequisite to rediscovering Americanism, an aim that, not coincidentally, is announced in the title of Mark’s ambitious new book, Rediscovering Americanismf: And the Tyranny of Progressivism. It is ambitious not merely because it endeavors to outline what it takes to grasp natural law, never an easy proposition and made all the harder by two centuries of contrarian political philosophy — with modern opinion elites poised to drive the last nail in the coffin.

Levin further undertakes to acquaint the lay reader with the political philosophers and theorists in the competing camps, in their own words.

Locke himself would have cautioned that this is an uphill climb. Not one he shied away from, of course. As philosophy students who have plowed their way through his much-debated oeuvre will recall, Locke divided his readers into the “hunters” and those “content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions.” Levin, with his wide reach as a popular talk-radio host, bestselling author (yet again), and constitutional litigator, is not just looking for hunters. He’s trying to create them.

Or at least enough of them to stem the tide of change — change being the radical antithesis of reformation, the restorative enterprise Levin channels Burke in championing. As Levin reads Locke, “the fact that every person has the ability to reason and discover natural law . . . does not mean that all people will do so.” A critical mass of them must try, though. We are a deeply divided nation, and the prospect of that’s easing any time soon is dim. The solution, as Levin sees it, is for lovers of America not merely to feel patriotic fervor but to become knowledgeable of and conversant with the ideals on which it is founded. That means going to the sources.

It all goes back to natural law because of the Declaration of Independence, which is not the foundation but the reflection of the American character, already formed. So says none other than Jefferson, the Declaration’s principal author. Reflecting on his handiwork nearly a half-century later, Jefferson explained (in a letter to Henry Lee) that the founders were striving “not to find out new principles,” nor to say things never said or thought before, but to set down “an expression of the American mind.”

Levin’s point, the same one made in Paul Johnson’s magisterial A History of the American People, is that there was — and is — an America that pre-existed and gave essential content to the American nation. It is an interesting observation given the heavy emphasis on the primacy of the Constitution in much of Levin’s work. But the march is straightforward: The Constitution promotes the principles and safeguards the liberties of the Americanism that the Declaration represents but did not create.

Even if, as the likes of Charles Krauthammer insist, Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer invited in bt President Barack Hussein Obama and his Attorney General Loretta Lynch is “empirical evidence” of collusion between Team Trump and Russia, the correct answer is so what?

Collusion in not a crime. Exchanging government favors for donations would be a crime, and neither Dr. Krauthammer nor anyone else has provided any evidence that any favor was granted as a result of that meeting, or that the Trump campaign benefited in any way from the meeting.

One cannot say the same thing about Hillary Clinton and her role in the Uranium One deal with Russia. Clinton played a pivotal role in the Uranium One deal which ended up giving Russian interests control of 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a federal crime. As “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweitzer has noted:

Tuesday on Fox Business Network, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Breitbart editor at large and the author of “Clinton Cash,” Peter Schweizer said there needs to be a federal investigation into the Russian uranium deal then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved after the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One….

Discussing the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One, he continued, “Look there are couple of things that are extremely troubling about the deal we touched on. number one is the amount of money $145 million. We are not talking about a super PAC giving a million dollars to support a candidate. We are not talking about campaign donations. We are talking about $145 million which by the way is 75 percent or more of the annual budget of the Clinton Foundation itself so it’s a huge sum of money. Second of all we are talking about a fundamental issue of national security which is uranium — it’s not like oil and gas that you can find all sorts of places. They are precious few places you can mine for uranium, in the United States is one of those areas. And number three we are talking about the Russian government. A lot of people don’t realize it now, in parts of the Midwest American soil is owned by Vladimir Putin’s government because this deal went through. And in addition to the $145 million Bill Clinton got half a billion dollars, $500,000 for a 20-minute speech from a Russian investment bank tied to the Kremlin, two months before the State Department signed off on this deal. It just stinks to high heaven and I think it requires a major investigation by the federal government.”

Yet seemingly the only thing warranting a major federal investigation is a wasted 20 minutes of Donald Trump Jr.s life that he will never get back. Democrats and the media and, again, apologies for the redundancy, had no problem with Bill and Hillary Clinton brokering deals giving Russia and Putin 20 percent of our uranium supply to benefit Clinton Foundation donors, including Canadian billionaire Frank Giustra.

Giustra earlier had a cozy relationship with Bill Clinton and participated in and benefitted from his involvement in a scam run by the Clinton Foundation in Colombia.

Clinton donor Giustra benefited significantly from his association, even if the people of Columbia didn’t:

When we met him (Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo) in his wood-paneled office in Colombia’s Capitol building in May, his desk was stacked high with papers related to Pacific Rubiales’s labor practices, the result of years of investigative work by his staff. He did not see the Clinton Foundation and its partnership with Giustra’s Pacific Rubiales as either progressive or positive. “The territory where Pacific Rubiales operated,” he said, thumbing through pages of alleged human-rights violations, “was a type of concentration camp for workers.”…

In September 2005, Giustra and Clinton flew to Kazakhstan together to meet the Central Asian nation’s president. Shortly thereafter, Giustra secured a lucrative concession to mine Kazakh uranium, despite his company’s lack of experience with the radioactive ore. As Bill Clinton opened doors for Giustra, the financier gave generously to Clinton’s foundation.

Columbia University Law School professor of legislative studies Richard Briffault explained the actual laws regarding treason, perjury, and collusion to MSNBC hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday afternoon.

Several prominent Democrats have accused the president’s son of “treason” with regard to a meeting he had with a Russian lawyer in 2016. The details of this meeting were published by the New York Times on Monday, but before that accusations of perjury and collusion with the Russians have also flown at Trump Jr., and many other members of the Trump campaign, from many elected Democrats and prominent media figures.

About allegations of treason against Trump Jr., the law professor explained: “Treason is a little extreme for this… [Russia] may not be our friend, but it is not clear they are our enemy. We are not at war.”

About allegations of perjury against President Trump, his son, or members of his administration, the law professor explained: “I’m not sure any of this has been under oath yet… but you would have to prove [one] was knowingly and maliciously misleading, and [their] claim is to say he just forgot. So we’re in a gray area there. ”

About collusion, the law professor explained: “Collusion isn’t really a crime, I think we are getting at things like conspiracy to commit a crime, or coordination of campaign finance stuff. Collusion is more of a political term than a legal term.”

About the final alegation, that Jared Kushner might have forgotten something on his security clearance form, but added it later, the law professor explained: “That’s irrelevant… The thing was that he was at the meeting and he didn’t report having been at the meeting –as I understand it– in his intial filing to get the security clearance. So, at the very least, he has corrected that, but there is still some question about how knowing that was. So, perjury no, lying to the government maybe.”

(Previous allegations of ‘obstruction of justice’ with regard to the firing of FBI director James Comey appear to have been forgotten.)

Transcript:

RICHARD BRIFFAULT, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: Treason is a little extreme for this, I mean it is not clear — [Russia] may not be our friend, but it is not clear they are our enemy. We are not at war. It is not clear this violates — it is against the U.S. government. So I am not up to treason yet.

STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC: So take ‘T’ off the table. What about the ‘P’? Perjury definition: ‘A person under oath states any material which he does not believe to be true.’ Would be constituted as perjury.

BRIEFAULT: Well, with the possible exception of Jared Kushner and the forms he filled out to get his security clearance, I’m not sure any of this has been under oath yet. On those, maybe it is not perjury, but there is a crime of lying to the U.S. government, but you would have to prove he was knowingly and maliciously misleading, and his claim is to say he just forgot. So we’re in a gray area there.

Depending on whom you wish to believe, the recent revelations that last June Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with one Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Moscow attorney advertised to have brought destructive opposition research on Hillary Clinton, prove there is finally meat on the “Trump and the Russians” bones being served to the public.

From this quarter, the story seems to have far more questions than answers to it.

The proposition those damning the president based on this latest revelation are offering involves the fact that Trump Junior is found on an email thread which he voluntarily disclosed on Twitter saying “I love it” in reaction to being told of the information on Clinton, that information having been characterized by its presenter, an English music publicist named Rob Goldstone, as part and parcel of a desire by the Russian government to help his father win.

This, we’re told, is evidence of collusion between Trump père and The Russians, and based on a timeline which included the Wikileaks disclosures of “hacked” Democratic National Committee emails and Trump’s request that The Russians make public the 30,000 emails Clinton had supposedly deleted from her illegal private server, it’s a smoking gun that Trump was the beneficiary of the Putin regime’s intelligence arm “hacking” the 2016 election.

Which is an awful lot of mileage on not quite so much fuel.

Veselnitskaya’s presence in the United States alone ought to be the source of suspicion that not only is the Trump-Russian collusion narrative suspect in this case but that the real inquiry ought to be into whether the encounter was a small part of a larger attempt to trap the Trump campaign.

The Russian lawyer wasn’t even supposed to be here. She had been denied a visa for entry into the United States in late 2015, but given a rather extraordinary “parole” by the federal government to assist preparation for a client subject to an asset forfeiture by the Justice Department. That was in January. The client was Prevezon Holdings, a Russian company suspected of having been paid some portion of $230 million stolen by Russian mobsters. When Sergey Magnitsky a Russian lawyer representing a company that had been the victim of the theft, reported it to authorities in Moscow he was promptly jailed and beaten to death. The American response to this atrocity was the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned several individuals connected to human rights abuses. The Russian government retaliated by preventing American adoptions of Russian children.

But in June, she was permitted to fly back to the U.S., have the meeting with Trump Junior — at Trump Tower, no less — and then end up in the front row for a congressional hearing involving testimony from a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, then turning up at a D.C. showing of a documentary film on the negative effects of the Magnitsky Act, and later appearing at a dinner involving Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and former Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA) who is now a lobbyist for the Russians. The repeal of that legislation is a priority item for the Russians and a personal project of Veselnitskaya’s; it, rather than any Clinton dirt, was reportedly the primary subject brought forth at the meeting with Donald Trump Jr.

All of this without a visa! Not to mention Veselnitskaya didn’t file a FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) document before acting as a lobbyist for a foreign entity, as required by law. Neither, apparently, did Dellums. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a fascinating letter Tuesday to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking them to please find out what in the hell Veselnitskaya was doing in this country last June.

Those of us following the news were unfortunately subjected to an unhealthy dose of Linda Sarsour this week. The self-promoting, egomaniacal, anti-Semite managed to deliberately stir a hornet’s nest with use of inflammatory rhetoric at a Muslim conference. In an address before the Islamic Society of North America, she called for a “Jihad” in the name of “Allah” against the Trump administration and encouraged her Muslim Brotherhood audience members (ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land-Hamas terror financing case) “not to assimilate and…not to please any other people and authority.”

Sasour, the crafty manipulator, then used the subsequent firestorm to insert herself into the news and the Washington Post provided her with a platform to spew her venomous propaganda. She penned an article where she claimed to have been “taken out of context,” feigned victimhood (victimizers are good at doing that) and termed those who criticized her, “Islamophobes.”

In Linda Sarsour’s world, those critical of her rancid views and actions – her support for BDS, her embrace of a convicted murderer, her tribalism and outright anti-Semitism and her desire to remove the vaginas of women with whom she finds disagreement – are branded “Islamophobes.” Sarsour then went on to give herself a gold star for being “their worst nightmare.” By “their” she meant “Islamophobes,” and by Islamophobes, she means everyone who disagrees with her, including those in the center-left camp (yes, they still exist).

The late Christopher Hitchens perceptively noted that the term “Islamophobic” is one that “was created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.” Sarsour’s banal employment of this dangerous and disingenuous term proves Hitchens’ point beyond any shadow of a doubt.

But Sarsour is a fraud. She claims to be a civil rights activist but is an anti-Semite. She preaches non-violence but encourages violence against Israelis. She claims to represent the feminist movement but advocates for Sharia which oppresses women, and bizarrely touts Saudi Arabia – a nation that forbids women drivers and punishes rape victims – as a nation that protects women’s rights. She claims to be an advocate for the LGBTQIA (she’s always careful to insert the “QIA” part) community but has yet to condemn the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Iran, Saudi Arabia or any Muslim country for their abysmal treatment of their respective LGBT communities.

Yet amazingly, Sarsour manages to find the time to relentlessly criticize Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy, and a nation that empowers women and provides statutory protections for its LGBT citizenry.

When I was a kid, an outfit called Big Time Wrestling would come to town. The favorite rivalry was between stage gringo Ray Stevens and the chivalric Pepper Gomez. Fierce disputes over which champion was better would break out on the playground after a bout. Then one day an older Mexican kid shattered our illusions by informing us that he had seen Stevens and Gomez laughing together over dinner in Chinatown.

Welcome to American politics, where the educational and economic elites, especially in the bicoastal politico-media complex, are bound together by a privilege that transcends the lurid dramas of conflicting ideologies.

Two recent columns talk about this divide between mass and elite in American society. David Brooks, house-conservative at the New York Times, wrote a much-ridiculed, but still perceptive column about what defines the American elite, and how they ensure that their children will inherit their privilege, and the less-privileged will be kept out. By using their wealth to “invest” in their kids’ success––the best schools, public or private; the means to pay for tutors, SAT prep courses, internships, and foreign travel; and the social connections to help them matriculate at Ivy League and other top-notch schools, 70% of whose admissions come from the top 25% of income distribution.

The gate-keeping comes in the form restrictive building codes that in deep-blue redoubts of privilege like San Francisco and Manhattan keep housing prices high, and schools demographically homogenous. The result is a shared social and cultural capital that is second-nature to insiders, but alien to those who have not been exposed to the knowledge, mores, manners, and taste that comprise it.

A specific example of elite solidarity across partisan lines appeared in a New York Post column by Maureen Callahan. She peruses the guest-list for an annual soiree hosted by Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth in the Hamptons:

It was full of politicians and power brokers — the ones who pantomime outrage daily, accusing the other side of crushing the little guy, sure that the same voter will never guess that behind closed doors, they all get along.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner partied with billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, who rubbed shoulders with billionaire GOP donor David Koch.

Chuck Schumer and Kellyanne Conway were there. So were Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Ronald Lauder, Carl Icahn, Joel Klein, Cathie Black, reporters Steve Clemons and Maria Bartiromo, columnists Richard Cohen and Margaret Carlson, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Ray Kelly, Bill Bratton and Steven Spielberg.

Like Pepper Gomez and Ray Stevens, these denizens of the 1% are fierce partisans in front of the cameras, but old pals at a tony party or a chic restaurant or a high-end golf resort. They share the same zip codes, the same tastes, the same amenities of celebrity and wealth, and ultimately the same interest: keeping themselves on top, and hoi polloi at a distance.

This social reality can help solve the mystery of Republican NeverTrumpers and their obsessive anger––Trump is a 1% traitor who has turned against his own in a bid for political power. From ancient Athens on, populist demagogues have usually been aristocrats who betray their class by enlisting the support of the grubby masses and legitimizing their grievances. They buy loyalty by promising to redistribute the property of the wealthy, and by sneering at their mores and taste, their education and proper pronunciation, and especially their reflexive sense of superiority.

In antiquity it was land and lineage that defined privilege. In our day, prep schools, top-ten university degrees, formal speech, correct diction, proper manners, and high-cult allusions all mark off the elite, and hide the fact that their position comes from money and connections as much as merit. Someone like Trump, who violates every one of these canons and enjoys the support of the “bitter clingers” and “deplorable” masses, infuriates the elite by challenging their right to rule by virtue of their presumed intellectual and cultural superiority.

It turns out the Moscow-based lawyer whose brief meeting with Trump campaign officials last year was obtained under false pretenses has significant ties to Democrat opposition researchers in the United States and was extended special privileges by the Obama administration.

Could this mean attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya came, or perhaps was sent, to America to hurt Donald Trump’s campaign for president? And if Veselnitskaya had less-than-honorable intentions, what role, if any, did Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee play in this unfolding drama?

The Hill newspaper reports that the Obama administration went to extraordinary lengths to allow Veselnitskaya to enter the U.S. and remain here to complete her business in this country. After Veselnitskaya, who reportedly has several pro-Hillary Clinton and anti-Donald Trump items on her Facebook page, was denied a U.S. visa, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch personally intervened and cleared the way for her to come to this country.

British music publicist Rob Goldstone helped to set up the storied June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan between Veselnitskaya, Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, claiming boastfully in an email exchange with Donald Jr. that the Russians wanted to share incriminating information about Democrat Hillary Clinton.

We now know Veselnitskaya had no earth-shattering revelations to impart about the Russia-friendly former secretary of state who was then running against Donald Trump. Instead of offering “Political Opposition Research” at the roughly 20-minute-long get-together, the Russian woman “had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act,” Donald Trump Jr. said earlier this week in a statement on Twitter.

The Magnitsky Act, which Russian President Vladimir Putin despises, allows the U.S. government to refuse visas to Russians considered guilty of human rights violations. After it was enacted at the end of 2012, Russia retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian orphans and banning entry to Russia by specific U.S. officials.

Veselnitskaya, who was a prosecutor in Russia 16 years ago, told NBC News she “never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton,” adding she wanted to let people know about “the real circumstances behind the Magnitsky Act,” and was hoping to testify about the sanctions statute before Congress.

There is some evidence that Democrats were working with Russia against the Trump campaign, radio talk show host Erick Erickson suggests.

“There is a remarkably small degree of separation between Natalia Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the Democrat opposition research firm that came up with the Trump dossier,” Erickson writes, and this “raise[s] the issue of whether Democrats and Russians were as collaborative as the Democrats claim the Trump team was.”

The “piss-gate” dossier is the unvetted 35-page report written by former British spy Christopher Steele and published by cat-video website BuzzFeed. The FBI had been considering paying Steele “for his Trump dossier work,” Erickson notes.

“Fusion GPS was paid by a Democratic ally of Hillary Clinton’s to conduct the research,” the Daily Caller reported. The dubious document claimed, among other things, that Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel room bed in Moscow.

WASHINGTON—Peter W. Smith, a Republican political activist and financier from Chicago who mounted an effort to obtain former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, died on May 14 after asphyxiating himself in a hotel room in Rochester, Minn., according to local authorities. He was 81 years old.

Mr. Smith’s body was found in the Aspen Suites hotel, located across the street from the Mayo Clinic, according to a medical examiner’s report. An associate of Mr. Smith said that he had recently visited the clinic. A representative for the facility wouldn’t confirm if Mr. Smith was a patient.

It wasn’t clear who found Mr. Smith’s body.

Mr. Smith died about 10 days after an interview with The Wall Street Journal in which he recounted his attempts to acquire what he believed were thousands of emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. He implied that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then serving as the senior national security adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, was aware of his efforts.
Peter W. Smith Photo: –

Mr. Smith’s attempts to obtain what he believed would be politically damaging emails marked the first potential evidence of coordination between members of the Trump campaign and Russian hackers, a central issue in probes by Congress and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

When the Journal reported on Mr. Smith’s efforts last month, it wasn’t clear how he died. His obituary listed no cause of death, officials in the town where he lived didn’t release information, and messages left at Mr. Smith’s home went unanswered.

The Chicago Tribune , which first reported Mr. Smith’s cause of death on Thursday, said a pile of documents and a statement that police called a suicide note were found with his body. The note said that Mr. Smith had been ill and that he held a life-insurance policy that was due to expire, the Tribune reported.

Mr. Smith apologized in the note and said that “no foul play whatsoever” had occurred with his death, according to the Tribune.

In emails and documents meant to recruit others to his efforts to find Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, Mr. Smith and an associate identified Mr. Flynn’s company, Flynn Intel Group, and Michael G. Flynn, the general’s son, as allies in the operation.
Peter W. Smith’s body was found in the Aspen Suites hotel, across the street from the Mayo Clinic. Here, the clinic’s campus in Rochester, Minn. Photo: Elizabeth Nida Obert/Associated Press

Neither Mr. Flynn nor his son responded to requests for comment at the time of the original article.

The group Mr. Smith assembled included technical experts, lawyers and a private investigator in Europe who spoke Russian, he said. The group made contacts with five groups of hackers, including two that were Russian, who claimed to have obtained Mrs. Clinton’s emails, Mr. Smith said. He ultimately didn’t acquire the messages because he said he couldn’t verify their authenticity. Instead, he urged the hackers to give the emails to WikiLeaks.