RUTHFULLY YOURS

The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, used a pseudonym to communicate with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her private, unsecured email server. As Andrew McCarthy contended, that was the reason the FBI declined to prosecute Clinton, because the president would have been part of the same action, and that wouldn’t be politically correct.

The current president of the United States is also on record that, contrary to custom, he will linger in Washington DC for a few years. Wherever he chooses to live, the email intrigue suggests continuing back-channel communications with Hillary Clinton, should she become president. That invites a look at what the man the New York Times dubbed “Obama’s narrator,” the White House adviser who sat closest to the president and signed off on his every word, had to say about the president’s vision of the future.

“Few of the decisions he had made would satisfy the politics of the moment,” David Axelrod explained in his massive 2015 Believer. “But at home and abroad, Obama was playing a longer game.” As he explained in Columbia, Missouri, on October 30, 2008, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

If this man was a liberal, as Barry Rubin wondered in Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, why did he see a need fundamentally to transform a nation shaped by liberals such as Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal and Lyndon Johnson with his Great Society? He saw the need because he was not a liberal but a lifelong leftist radical.

As David Horowitz explained in Volume 7 of the Black Book of the American Left, the president was “born, bred and trained in the progressive movement.” His mentors were “Communists and their progressive successors,” so no wonder he presided over “the institutionalizing of the policies of the left in government” for eight years. What that means in practical terms is becoming painfully evident.

The economy remains sluggish and under Obamacare, the president’s signature plan, premiums are skyrocketing. This suggests that, as many believe, Obamacare was simply a demolition plan. In the “longer game,” designated successor Hillary Clinton will impose government monopoly healthcare, what some candidates erroneously call “socialized medicine.”

LAS VEGAS — President Obama’s motorcade was still hurtling through Las Vegas traffic when the Rev. Anthony Harris took the microphone to deliver the opening prayer at a rally here for Hillary Clinton.

He looked out on the crowd of 3,000 in the high school gymnasium, waiting for the president to arrive. The feeling was different now than it had been eight years earlier, when Obama had just been elected and Harris led his congregation in prayer for the president. Then, there had been crying and cheering in his tiny storefront chapel and a sense that anything was possible.

Now, Harris, 47, took a deep breath. He hoped his words would rise above the anger and divisiveness of an election season unlike any in his lifetime.

“We pray that at the end of this political process we can learn to love each other, bless each other and trust each other,” he told the crowd, but that noble sentiment did not survive the rally’s first speaker.

Taking the microphone, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) blasted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a “liar,” a “racist” and a “fraud.” Lock him up! Lock him up!” the pro-Clinton crowd in the gym started to chant, echoing the anti-Clinton chants of “Lock her up!” that have become common at Trump rallies

“I know people are frustrated,” Harris recalled, thinking as he returned to his seat. “But what does ‘lock him up’ even mean?”

In the week leading up to Election Day, the president will crisscross the country in an effort to help Clinton win the White House and safeguard his legacy. If those events are anything like last week’s campaign stop in Las Vegas, Obama will be met by rowdy, cheering throngs eager to see him one last time before he leaves office.

For many, who will wait hours in line to hear him speak, Obama’s 2008 election represented one of the most hopeful moments in American politics in decades. He was not only the first African American president but a relative newcomer to national politics with a remarkable life story who promised to bridge the country’s historic divides. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said that election night in Chicago’s Grant Park.

As if facing down violent Islamist fanatics isn’t enough, Muslim reformers now have to dodge attacks from the American left. Consider the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision last week to brand two such reformers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Britain’s Maajid Nawaz, as “anti-Muslim extremists.”

Founded in 1971 by civil-rights activists, the Montgomery, Alabama-based law center says it’s committed to “fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.” That apparently doesn’t include civil rights in the Muslim world or among Muslims living in the U.S.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, who sometimes writes for these pages, is a native of Somalia who later immigrated to the Netherlands and then the U.S. She has braved death threats from jihadists for criticizing female genital mutilation, blasphemy laws, and repression of women and minorities in the Muslim world.

The report attempts to cast doubt on her personal story. Ms. Hirsi Ali, the group sneers, “says she endured female genital mutilation.” It goes on to call her “toxic” for arguing that there is an ideological and theological dimension to what used to be called the war on terror. By that measure France’s Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls is also an extremist.

Mr. Nawaz is a British-Pakistani former Islamist who now campaigns against jihadist ideology. He has opposed Islamist movements in the U.K. as well as far-right parties such as the English Defence League. Among the law center’s evidence for its anti-Muslim claim: Mr. Nawaz once posted a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on Twitter “despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous.” The Ayatollah Khomeini would agree.

The unstated premise of the report is that criticizing Islamist movements, ideologies and regimes, and Islam itself, is the same as hating Muslims. If the Western left believes this, then already-embattled reformers in the Muslim world will be even more isolated.

On Thursday, National Law Journal’s Marcia Coyle reported that Alaska lawyer Moira Smith recently claimed on Facebook that nearly 20 years ago, in 1999, Justice Clarence Thomas touched her buttocks at a dinner party. To say that Smith’s account raises questions about its accuracy is an understatement; the story was obviously fabricated.

Smith has produced no witnesses for the alleged incident, so Coyle ran with Smith’s version. As Smith tells it, she was helping to set the table at the small dinner party, hosted by the head of a legal scholarship program to which she belonged, and ended up standing next to Justice Thomas, who was mysteriously seated alone at the table before dinner while the other guests mingled elsewhere. At that point, Smith alleges, Justice Thomas squeezed her buttocks several times and suggested she sit next to him.

Since Smith had no witnesses, she helped Coyle track down several of her roommates from that period whom she claims to have told about the incident shortly after it happened. Those roommates have varying levels of recollection that seem to correlate pretty strongly with their level of involvement with liberal political causes.

Laura Fink, the most outspoken of the roommates, is the liberal co-founder of a California political-consulting firm connected to the Clintons and the SEIU. A second housemate remembers a discussion but has a “fuzzy” memory of the details, and a third had nothing but vague memories and wouldn’t let Coyle publish his or her name. The only other source to go on the record was Smith’s ex-husband, Paul Bodnar, a former senior director for energy and climate change in the Obama administration’s National Security Council.

Smith herself has been closely associated with partisan causes for more than two decades, including working for a Democratic state legislator, giving money to Senator Mark Begich (D., Alaska), and serving as national committeewoman for the Young Democrats of Alaska. Smith’s current husband, Jake Metcalfe, was chairman of the Alaska Democratic Party until he stepped down to run for Congress. He withdrew from that race during the primary after his campaign was revealed to be responsible for several fake websites attacking one of his rivals. Metcalfe has worked for unions, too, including the Alaska affiliate of the public-sector employee union AFSCME.

Felony mishandling of classified information, including our nation’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets; the misappropriation and destruction of tens of thousands of government records — these are serious criminal offenses. To this point, the Justice Department and FBI have found creative ways not to charge Hillary Clinton for them. Whether this will remain the case has yet to be seen. As we go to press, the stunning news has broken that the FBI’s investigation is being reopened. It appears, based on early reports, that in the course of examining communications devices in a separate “sexting” investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the bureau stumbled on relevant e-mails — no doubt connected to Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner’s wife and, more significantly, Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidant. According to the New York Times, the FBI has seized at least one electronic device belonging to Ms. Abedin as well. New e-mails, never before reviewed by the FBI, have been recovered.

The news is still emerging, and there will be many questions — particularly if it turns out that the bureau failed to obtain Ms. Abedin’s communications devices earlier in the investigation, a seemingly obvious step. As we await answers, we can only observe that, whatever the FBI has found, it was significant enough for director James Comey to sense the need to notify Congress, despite knowing what a bombshell this would be just days before the presidential election.

One thing, however, is already clear. Whatever the relevance of the new e-mails to the probe of Clinton’s classified-information transgressions and attempt to destroy thousands of emails, these offenses may pale in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s most audacious violations of law: Crimes that should still be under investigation; crimes that will, in fitting Watergate parlance, be a cancer on the presidency if she manages to win on November 8.

Mrs. Clinton appears to have converted the office of secretary of state into a racketeering enterprise. This would be a violation of the RICO law — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971 (codified in the U.S. penal code at sections 1961 et seq.).

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered.

In an Oct. 24 response, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran.

The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch, according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon.

The inquiry launched by the lawmakers is just one of several concurrent ongoing congressional probes aimed at unearthing a full accounting of the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran.

“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.”