RUTHFULLY YOURS

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has seen some FBI documents that have potential bombshell information.

Senior Clinton aide Patrick Kennedy apparently tried to make a deal with the FBI to reclassify emails that were marked “classified” in exchange for approving overseas posts for FBI agents.

BREAKING: A senior State Dept official discussed a “quid pro quo” w/the FBI in exchange for reclassification of HRC emails, per FBI docs.
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) October 15, 2016

The FBI refused to play ball:

FBI officials, including CT Dir Michael Steinbach, nixed the arrangement and refused to change the classification of the HRC emails.
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) October 15, 2016

Kennedy also asked FBI to make one sensitive HRC email “B9” FOIA exempt so it was “never to be seen again,” per FBI docs.
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) October 15, 2016

Patrick Kennedy was Clinton’s “fixer” at the State Department, helping to facilitate access to Clinton for Clinton Foundation donors. He was also the point man for Clinton in the Benghazi investigation and played an important role in the email scandal.

Among the most noteworthy of the hacked e-mails from John Podesta’s accounts is an exchange in which Podesta consults Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills about the private e-mail exchanges between President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

As readers may recall, I have long maintained (see here and here) that the principal reason why Mrs. Clinton was not prosecuted, despite a mountain of evidence that she committed felony mishandling of classified information, is the fact that Obama engaged in the same kind of misconduct. The president’s use of a private, non-secure channel to discuss sensitive matters with high level officials may not have been systematic, as Mrs. Clinton’s was. (Obama’s disturbing use of an alias, however, suggests that Clinton was not the only one he was privately e-mailing.) Nevertheless, the fact that the president was e-mailing Clinton means he not only participated in her misconduct but also that the Obama-Clinton e-mails would have been admissible evidence in any criminal trial of Clinton.

For the parties to prove such culpable conduct on the president’s part in a high-profile criminal trial would have been profoundly embarrassing to him, to say the least. Therefore, it was never going to happen. As I’ve noted before, after exclaiming, “How is that not classified?” upon being shown an Obama-Clinton e-mail by the FBI, Hillary’s confidant Huma Abedin asked agents if she could have a copy of the exchange. She obviously realized that if Obama had been communicating on Clinton’s non-secure server system, no one else who had done so was going to be prosecuted for it.

We now know that Podesta was very concerned about the Obama-Clinton e-mails and turned to Mills for advice. His succinct e-mail to Mills is dated March 4, 2015 (at 8:41 p.m.), and he entitled it “Special Category.” He stated:

The Gulf sheikhdom Qatar is a major ISIS and world terrorism sponsor. It is a little disturbing that the Sheikhs of Qatar gave Bill Clinton a one million dollar birthday present.

The WikiLeaks document dump of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has revealed Qatar’s previous desire to give her husband a $1 million “birthday” present.

Thousands of emails leaked by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s nonprofit organization continue to embarrass Democrat presidential hopeful Mrs. Clinton. The latest email thread shows an aide discussing conversations with ambassadors from Qatar, Brazil, Peru, Malawi, and Rwanda while in the nation’s capital.

“[Qatar] would like to see WJC ‘for five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC’s birthday in 2011,” an employee at The Clinton Foundationsaid to numerous aides, including Doug Brand. “Qatar would welcome our suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health. They have allocated most of their $20 million but are happy to consider projects we suggest. I’m collecting input from CF Haiti team.”

Even more disturbing is that he took it, knowing very well that Arab politicians expect a good return on their bhaksheesh.

With due respect, the estimable Charles Krauthammer is way off base in his weekly column, addressing Donald Trump’s “threat, if elected, to put Hillary Clinton in jail.” (The headline refers to this threat as a “promise,” but I don’t take that to be quite what Charles — or, for that matter, Trump — is saying.) I wrote about this topic right after Trump raised it in the second presidential debate, in response to Trump detractors who posited the claim that Krauthammer now advances: viz., Trump is criminalizing politics with threats to persecute political opponents. I generally agree with these detractors regarding the GOP nominee’s flaws and antics; on this, however, their comparisons of Trump to brutal dictators are so beyond the pale they make Trump seem tame.

Krauthammer is right that Trump has gone too far in his rhetoric. Yet, he overstates the case in suggesting that Trump is breaching important political boundaries. While he describes these as boundaries of “discourse” and “democratic decency,” Dr. K implies that they involve something even more fundamental, and thus that the breach is more perilous.

Mrs. Clinton appears to have committed serious crimes that undermined both national security and recordkeeping rules designed to promote accountability in government. If you want to talk about a truly profound threat to democratic norms, that’s the place to start. Obviously, these offenses are not just relevant but essential to the political case that should be made against Clinton, and would be by any opponent, not just by the unconventional, undisciplined Trump. Also pertinent is the fact that government officials who engage in Clinton’s type of misconduct do go to jail — to refrain from stating this would be to diminish the gravity of the crimes.

Moreover, even Krauthammer concedes that Clinton deserved to be prosecuted: “FBI director James Comey’s recommendation not to pursue charges was both troubling and puzzling.” Consequently, I don’t see why anyone, including Trump, should be faulted for asserting that there appears to be strong evidence that Mrs. Clinton has committed egregious offenses, which warrant prosecution and would call for imprisonment if she were convicted after a fair trial. Unless I am reading him wrong, that is Charles’s position on the matter — otherwise, why the dig at Comey?

Where Trump has overstepped is in his articulation of these points, not the fact that he is making them.

Political rhetoric inevitably involves a degree of exaggeration, and we must distinguish it from the realm of law-enforcement, in which officials are obliged to be circumspect. At the Republican convention, the most effective speech was New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s scathing indictment (in the rhetorical sense) of Mrs. Clinton’s misdeeds. It prompted the “lock her up!” chants that have punctuated Trump campaign appearances ever since. Now, when Americans say that someone ought to be “locked up” over this or that — which we say quite a lot — we are not urging an end run around the due-process protections that apply from investigation and indictment through trial and sentencing.

That goes without saying. During Obama’s 2008 campaign, his surrogate (and later his attorney general) Eric Holder called for a “reckoning” against Bush officials he depicted as guilty of war crimes and all manner of Constitution-shredding. I don’t think Mr. Holder was saying “jail now, trial later” — even if many on the left would have been delighted by such an arrangement.

Some conservatives have watched their evaluations of Donald Trump’s character drop so low in recent days that on this vital question they no longer see a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, they are forced back onto politics and policy; and naturally Mr. Trump wins in a walk. If conservatives who argue that Mr. Trump is worse than Mrs. Clinton had a case, it would be a relief to vote for Mrs. Clinton or for no one. But they don’t, and one is therefore forced for the good of the nation to vote for Mr. Trump.

In his Mr. Nauseating video of last weekend, Mr. Trump showed us that he had all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy. Yet the video taught us nothing; no one had ever mistaken him for anything but an infantile vulgarian. This week’s allegations of actual abuse are different. If these stories are true (and I don’t know why they shouldn’t be), there is nothing to be said for Mr. Trump. Unfortunately, there is nothing to be said for Mrs. Clinton either. If we don’t take both facts into account, we are not morally serious.

Mrs. Clinton has nothing on Mr. Trump when it comes to character. She lies (“Wipe? Like with a cloth?”—cute and charming Mrs. C.) the way basketball stars shoot baskets—constantly, nonstop, because it’s the one thing she is best at and (naturally) it gives her pleasure to hear herself lie—swish!—right onto the evening news. And her specialist talent of all is the verbal kick in the groin of a Secret Service man or state trooper who has the nerve to talk to her as if she were merely human. She is no mere rock star; she is Hillary the Queen. She is so big, and you are so small, she can barely even see you from up there. What are you? A macromolecule?

I’ll vote for Mr. Trump—grimly. But there is no alternative, no shadow of a responsible alternative.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a message from the voters. He is the empty gin bottle they have chosen to toss through the window. The message begins with the fact that voters hear what the leaders and pundits don’t: the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.

Mr. Obama is arch, patronizing, so magnificently weary of having to explain it all, again and again, to the dummies surrounding him. Mrs. Clinton has told us proudly how thoroughly she prepared for the first debate and has prepared to be president. For her, it is all a matter of learning your lines. Her whole life has been memorized in advance. Mr. Obama is at least sincere. Mrs. Clinton is as phony as a three-dollar bill, as a Clinton Global Initiative.

Mr. Obama has governed like a third-rate tyrant. He’s been a stern baby sitter to an American public that is increasingly getting on his nerves. ObamaCare and the Iran treaty are his big achievements. That the public has always disliked them, and hates them worse as it knows them better, strikes him as so unspeakably irrelevant; he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Do you ask 6-year-olds if they like going to school? Luckily, a few grown-ups have been set over the public to keep it in line. CONTINUE AT SITE