RUTHFULLY YOURS

As these lines are being written it is Thursday morning in the US. Wikileaks announced hours ago that it is about to drop the mother lode of material it has gathered on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Previous Wikileaks document drops set the stage for FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress last Friday, when he informed lawmakers that he has ordered his agents to reopen their probe of Clinton’s private email server, which he closed last July.

One week on, the FBI probe still dominates election coverage. If Wikileaks is true to its word, and even if it isn’t, Clinton and her campaign team will be unable to shift public attention away from the ballooning allegations of criminal corruption. This will remain the story of the election when polls open Tuesday morning.

The focus on Clinton’s alleged criminality in the final weeks of the election brings the 2016 presidential race full circle. Since the contest began in the summer of 2015, it was clear that this would be an election like no other.

After eight years of Barack Obama’s White House, America is a different place than it was in 2008, when Obama ran on a platform of hope and change.

Americans today are angry, scared, divided and cynical.

The outcome of this presidential election will determine whether Obama’s fundamental transformation of America will become a done deal. If Clinton prevails, the Obama revolution will be irreversible.

If Republican nominee Donald Trump emerges the winner, America will embark on a different course.

But even support or opposition to Obama’s revolution is not what this election is about. The anger that Americans’ feel is more powerful than mere policy differences – no matter how strongly felt.

Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.
***Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.

She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.

The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.

But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.

Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.

Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.

Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.

Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.

Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure.

This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton’s sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. Meanwhile, seemingly every day WikiLeaks produces more evidence of the Clinton Foundation leveraging the Clinton State Department for pay-for-play profiteering.

At this point, Clinton has trumped former president Richard Nixon’s skullduggery — but without the offset of Nixon’s foreign-policy accomplishments.

Even before the most recent scandals, Clinton’s campaign had an eerie resemblance to the Nixon playbook.

Compare the election of 2016 to the election of 1972. The favored Nixon re-election juggernaut (dubbed CREEP, or the “The Committee for the Re-election of the President”) squeezed corporations and wealthy individuals for millions in donations, in much the same way that Clinton’s multi-million-dollar cash machine has vastly outspent her opponent, Donald Trump.

The Watergate tapes later revealed an entirely cynical Nixon campaign team and a hard-nosed White House cadre led by H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman — plus a host of lesser toadies, such as the conniving John Dean. They all took for granted that Washington functioned on a quid pro quo and pay-for-play basis.

In that regard, the Clinton campaign under chairman John Podesta (the new Haldeman) has become Nixonian to the core, thanks to Podesta’s ruthlessness.

The WikiLeaks/Podesta e-mail trove reveals that Hillary’s consultants have no moral compass. They lampoon Latinos as “needy.” Catholics are written off as being stuck in medieval times. Aides bartered with plutocrats for Secretary of State Clinton’s face time on the basis of cash donations. A primary debate question was tipped off by CNN contributor and Democratic operative Donna Brazile.

The nickname “Tricky Dick” referred to Nixon’s perceived anything-goes campaign style and his “flexibility” on issues. CREEP’s “plumbers” staged break-ins to look for leaked information. Petty activists supposedly tried to disrupt rallies for Nixon’s 1972 opponent, George McGovern. Clinton is using similar tactics. In the ambush tapes of Project Veritas, Clinton’s for-hire thugs bragged on film of provoking violence at Trump rallies and bringing in voters by bus to cast illegal ballots.

Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.

The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies.
Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment.

The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.

These details on the probe are emerging amid the continuing furor surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure to Congress that new emails had emerged that could be relevant to a separate, previously closed FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement while she was secretary of state.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama took the unusual step of criticizing the FBI when asked about Mr. Comey’s disclosure of the emails. CONTINUE AT SITE

FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails has roiled once more the presidential election. Donald Trump has called the decision “courageous” and “bigger than Watergate.” Clinton, the DOJ, Democrat Senators, and their media flying monkeys are all having conniption fits over their quondam champion’s defection, calling the announcement “appalling,” “absurd,” “strange,” “deeply troubling,” an “attack,” and “unprecedented.” The bigger question is whether it will move enough voters over to Trump’s side and put him in the White House.

There’s no doubt that Comey’s announcement eleven days before the election is mystifying. Not because it is “unprecedented” as the Democrats keep squealing. They had no such qualms when the weekend before the 1992 election, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh indicted a poll-surging George H.W. Bush for his alleged involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. No, the mystery is Comey’s motives. Is Comey like Conrad’s Lord Jim, now sacrificing his FBI career––sure to be over if the notoriously vengeful Clinton is elected–– to atone for having besmirched his office, reputation, and the principle of equality before the law in service to careerist self-interest? Or was he facing a mutiny and leaks from disgruntled FBI investigators? To quote one of our candidates, “At this point, what difference does it make?”

The real question is whether it will make a difference to the voters. Right now we don’t know if the content of the 650,000 emails from the conjugal laptop used by serial sexter Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Clinton vizier Huma Abedin, will reveal something damning like, say, classified materials. But we already know that Clinton passed classified information over an unsecured server, which didn’t bother Comey back in July. So what could be in these new emails that rises above Comey’s sophistic “extreme carelessness,” and reaches the statute’s “gross negligence”? Or has Comey found new evidence of Hillary’s “intent,” his other exculpatory sophistry that had little to do with the law? There had to be something that made Comey subject himself to the scorched-earth wrath of the Democrats.

Whatever is found on the Abedin laptop, one wonders if will even matter to a sufficient number of voters. They have shrugged off so many scandals, lies, and failures that should have sunk a candidacy, that it’s hard to calculate what level of incompetence, unpleasantness, dishonesty, sleaze, and crime is disqualifying anymore. Here are the greatest hits from Hillary’s catalogue: