RUTHFULLY YOURS

Embattled Hillary Clinton enforcer Huma Abedin gave foreign leaders and activists special access to Clinton when she was secretary of state after they donated to the congenitally corrupt Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, according to newly released emails.

It is yet more evidence that in the event Hillary becomes president her administration will be at least as venal and crooked as her husband Bill’s was. Bill sold nights in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House while he was president but Hillary has been selling her presidential favors in advance for years through the tax-exempt Clinton Foundation, which is little more than an anticipatory bribe processing center. With Hillary installed in the Oval Office, the sky’s the limit.

The trove of newly released emails obtained by watchdog group Judicial Watch through the courts appear to show that Abedin served as a gatekeeper auctioning access to the would-be president in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. When individuals wanted to meet with Hillary, Abedin would say no, and introduce them to the foundation. After the so-called donation was received access to Clinton would be approved.

Judicial Watch stated Monday that:

“In more than a dozen email exchanges, Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In many instances, Clinton Foundation top executive Doug Band, who worked with the Foundation throughout Hillary Clinton’s tenure at State, coordinated closely with Abedin. In Abedin’s June deposition to Judicial Watch, she conceded that part of her job at the State Department was taking care of ‘Clinton family affairs.”

“Among the Abedin-Band emails is an exchange revealing that when Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment,” Judicial Watch reveals. “Abedin advised Band that when she went through ‘normal channels’ at State, Clinton declined to meet. After Band intervened, however, the meeting was set up within forty-eight hours.”

The Clinton Foundation’s website indicates that in 2005 Salman committed to creating something called the Crown Prince’s International Scholarship Program (CPISP) for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a project of the foundation.

By 2010, Salman’s organization had given $32 million to CGI. The Kingdom of Bahrain reportedly donated somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 to the foundation. Bahrain Petroleum also contributed an extra $25,000 to $50,000.

Donald Trump has made overtures in the last few days to Hispanic and African-American voters, trying to whittle away the giant advantages Hillary Clinton enjoys among them.

There is a third group that gets less attention, but one that provides Democrats a similar strategic edge: Asian-Americans.

Asian-Americans are the nation’s fastest-growing racial group. More than nine million of them will be eligible to vote in November, up 16% from four years ago.

The bad news for Republicans is that this growth in the Asian-American electorate appears to be accompanied by an increasing tilt toward the Democrats. One national poll of Asian-American voters earlier this year found a 12-point increase in those who identify as Democrats since 2012, to 47% from 35%.

Can that matter? Ask Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. He won re-election two years ago by the narrowest of margins, defeating Republican Ed Gillespie by fewer than 18,000 votes out of 2.18 million cast. Virginia’s large population of Asian-Americans likely provided the difference. They make up 5% of the state’s electorate, and a pre-election poll showed them going for Mr. Warner by a 2-to-1 margin.

For Mr. Trump and his party, Asian-Americans are another example of how his get-tough stance on immigration represents a two-edged sword. It has helped galvanize support and drive up enthusiasm among working-class whites, many of whom think immigration has damaged them economically and undermined the American culture they have known. Meanwhile, on the sliding scale of the diverse American electorate, votes gained there are offset by votes lost to groups who hear chants of “build that wall” as an ominous sign.

Mr. Trump and his supporters insist that his policies are directed not at immigration generally but at illegal immigration specifically, but they have had a hard time getting that message across. Over the weekend, his campaign appeared to begin softening its tone; his new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said Mr. Trump wouldn’t necessarily stick with his pledge to seek deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants.

A federal judge prodded the State Department to quickly review a batch of 14,900 recently discovered emails as the controversy over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s correspondence while she served as America’s top diplomat continued to simmer.

Judge James Boasberg, in an order, set a deadline for the department to complete the email review by Sept. 22 to determine which ones contain sensitive government information and which are strictly personal conversations. That could pave the way for the emails to be released as early as mid-October.

The emails were found by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during its probe of Mrs. Clinton’s use of private email when she was secretary of state. The FBI concluded in July that no crimes had been committed.

The judge’s request came on the same day as the release of a separate batch of emails showing a Clinton Foundation official seeking access to the department while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state.

Those emails, obtained through a lawsuit by a conservative watchdog group, kept the Clinton family’s charitable foundation in the limelight as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was attacking its activities.

In one email exchange, from June 2009, Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation wrote to Huma Abedin, a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton at the State Department, seeking a meeting between the crown prince of Bahrain and Mrs. Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

Many Clinton scandals ago, when Hillary Clinton was trying to explain how she’d parlayed a $1,000 stake in cattle futures into $100,000 in 10 months (by talking to other people and reading The Wall Street Journal) folks were skeptical. How, they asked, could a novice make so much money in so short a time in such a risky market?

Turns out Mrs. Clinton is a better learner than she’s given credit for, and the Clinton emails released by Judicial Watch on Monday prove it. The emails were pried out of the system by Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, and they suggest why the Clinton Foundation could be so attractive to the rich and mighty. When a donor had a problem that required the secretary of state’s attention, there was Doug Band—a Clinton Foundation exec—emailing Hillary’s top staffers at the State Department to ask a favor.

Take a June 23, 2009, email from Doug Band to Huma Abedin. In his email Mr. Band noted that the Crown Prince of Bahrain (a “good friend of ours”) was asking to see Mrs. Clinton. There are, of course, many ways to be a “good friend,” but one sure way would be to contribute between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, as the kingdom of Bahrain had done. Not to mention that the prince had also spent $32 million on a scholarship launched through the Clinton Global Initiative.

Ms. Abedin responded that the prince had sought a meeting through “normal” channels but had been shot down. Less than 48 hours after Mr. Band had asked her, Ms. Abedin reported that “we have reached out through official channels.” The meeting was on.

It isn’t the only favor Mr. Band requested. A month earlier, he had emailed Ms. Abedin to ask her help in getting an English soccer player a visa to the U.S. The player was supposed to come to Las Vegas for a team celebration, but he needed a special interview with the visa section at the American Embassy in London due to a “criminal charge” against him.

Because of this, the office of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) had refused to intervene. Mr. Band’s email made clear the request was on behalf of Casey Wasserman, a sports and entertainment exec who had contributed between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation via the Wasserman Foundation.CONTINUE AT SIT

Standing tall in Youngstown.

Pundits had a blast this past week ripping apart Trump’s Youngstown national security address. And then there is Trump’s perspective, which calls to mind the “Simple Son” Jews read about each year in our Passover Haggadah.

This simplicity, scorned by college-educated voters, enables Trump to speak about radical Islam in vastly more direct terms than anything we have yet heard on either side of the aisle. Democrats vehemently reject the strategic imperative of connecting the words “radical” and “Islam.” Republicans have appropriately embraced the terminology but failed to call out radical Islam as a political movement.

Where others have tiptoed gingerly, Trump strikes boldly at the notion that radical Islam deserves protection under the First Amendment, defining it unequivocally as a totalitarian political movement. He underscores this point by equating radical Islamic terrorism with Fascism, Communism, and Nazism.

In referencing “networks in America that support radicalization,” Trump cites Gold Star dad Khizr Khan’s professional advocacy for implementing Sharia law and his facilitation of the immigration of Wahhabist extremists from Saudi Arabia. Trump defends our most cherished democratic principles as embodied in the U.S. Constitution, in contrast to grotesquely un-American Sharia law, in his insistence that “foreign nationals and would-be immigrants to this country must share our values to gain admission.”

Most significant is Trump’s grasp of the organic nature of radical Islam. Contrary to the prevailing narrative that puts ISIS body counts front and center, Trump sees radical Islam as much higher up on the food-chain — a well-oiled machine designed to operate innocuously on a global ideological platform from within the folds of all open and pluralistic societies. It is this modus operandi that has enabled the explosive growth of a legion of Islamist butchers that since 9/11 have been responsible for over 28,796 acts of terror worldwide. “Violent jihadists rely upon and exploit the infrastructure (including mosques, cultural centers, front groups, etc.) that has been systematically put into place in the West over the past fifty years by Islamic supremacists.”

While many have urged a more vigorous pursuit of ISIS and have accurately pointed to the connection between terrorist acts and radical Islamist ideology, none have taken the critical step of arguing for the demolition of the institutional firewalls between Islamist militarism and Islamist ideological institutions. Islamist ideology is actually the beating heart of today’s wave of Islamist terror but has been institutionally disconnected from its barbarous 1,400-year-old track record.

The political world is all atwitter following Donald Trump’s statement last Thursday in Charlotte, North Carolina that, “believe it or not,” he regrets having said “the wrong thing” in the past, “particularly where it may have caused personal pain,” a list which might include Heidi Cruz, Megyn Kelly, and Ghazala Khan.

I was less astonished than most, however, because I noticed a substantial and important change in Mr. Trump’s campaigning more than week earlier. Although I mentioned it during my radio show, it seemed to go mostly unnoticed in the broader media, perhaps because of justifiable initial skepticism.

In Abingdon, Virginia on Wednesday, August 10, Donald Trump gave nearly an hour of remarks in a tone entirely different from what he had offered in public before. No yelling, no venomous rasping in the back of his throat, and, although he was as strong as ever in his positions on issues (several of which, most particularly trade and NAFTA, I strongly disagree with him on), the seething anger and divisiveness which had characterized so much of his campaign to date was simply gone.

It was the first Trump speech I could watch, again putting aside my policy disagreements with him, without his tone and shouting and demeanor and sheer disagreeableness making my teeth itch. Until then, he had been almost as hard to listen to as Hillary is, and that’s saying something.

While Trump had been on good behavior briefly in the past only to return to “Trump being Trump” mere hours later, the Abingdon speech felt different. It felt as if someone — at this point I suspect it was Kellyanne Conway — had gotten him to realize that the path he was on was doomed to fail and that a possible road to victory did not involve forsaking policy positions but simply abandoning a poisonous rhetorical style.

I thought to myself — and said to my wife — “If Trump had been doing this for the past couple of months, he’d be beating Hillary right now.”