RUTHFULLY YOURS

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he heads is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world––the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for the far-left current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient––and now we know, subservient––accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things––“straight-shooter,” ”unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”–– don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in the latest Clinton fiasco case, (1) create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician off the hook, and (2) appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her e-mail account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!

Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, says that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy writes. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that “the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton’s email defense. Then, “in a whiplash-inducing change of narrative, he announced that `no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office.”

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

Our nation’s immigration laws are completely blind as to race, religion and ethnicity, and were enacted to protect national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

My previous post for CAPS, “Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Make Her Economic Promises Impossible to Achieve,” focused on how providing potentially tens of millions of illegal aliens with an equal standing in the overflowing labor pool of unemployed or underemployed American and lawful immigrant workers would exacerbate the plight of these desperate workers and their families.

Today my focus will be on how Hillary Clinton’s proposal to provide millions of illegal aliens with lawful status would do irreparable harm to national security and public safety.

Hillary has made much of having been Secretary of State. During her acceptance speech at the DNC she said, in part, “We will not build a wall,” thereby echoing the remarks of her successor at the State Department, John Kerry who, in his commencement address at Northeastern University several months ago, said, in part, that America could not remain great by hiding behind walls.

I recently wrote a commentary about Kerry’s dangerous globalist agenda that apparently is paralleled by Clinton, “John Kerry: Enthusiastic Proponent of a ‘Borderless World.’”

Metaphorically, America’s borders are her walls.

One of the critical roles of the State Department is to issue visas to aliens who seek entry into the United States. The visa process came under scrutiny by the 9/11 Commission. It identified failures in border security and failures of the visa process that enabled the 19 terrorists in the 9/11 hijackings and terrorists who preceded them. Visa fraud was a means to enter the U.S., allowing them to embed themselves in the country as they went about their deadly preparations.

Given this, any journalist who interviews Hillary Clinton should ask if she has read “The 9/11 Commission Report.”

That report should be required reading for the president of the U.S., all high-ranking members of the administration and every member of Congress.

The official government report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,”focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the U.S. and ultimately embed themselves here as they went about their deadly preparations to carry out an attack. The preface of this report begins with the following paragraph:

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.”

Donald Trump, to the degree he is coherent, wants Americans to think the following of the Obama administration, the Clinton candidacy, and the entire progressive enterprise. His three-part writ could be summed up as follows:

1) Obama has doubled the national debt in just eight years. He has abdicated U.S. leadership abroad, was taken for a patsy by duplicitous trade partners, has deliberately divided races and tribes at home for transient political advantage, has nationalized health care into a mess, has overregulated and overtaxed the economy into near-zero-growth stasis, and has whitewashed all of the above with upbeat banalities about hope and change.

2) During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the Obama administration oversaw the destruction of the modern Middle East, ignored the rise of ISIS, engineered a failed reset that empowered Putin’s Russia, let China systematize unfair and injurious trade practices that fuel an aggressive foreign policy, and alienated traditional friends while courting longstanding enemies. Clinton’s record of government service is one of decades of prevarication, malfeasance, and corruption.

3) Progressivism is a euphemism for a grievance-based agenda with mandated equality of result. An incompetent, uncaring, and always larger government is its agency — a project that demands constant tax increases and ever-greater social spending. It seeks to divide the country up by identity groups, politicize the bureaucracies, and ignore the old working classes, especially the white lower middle class.

The Democrats held a convention to prove all of Trump’s above depictions laughable by attacking Trump himself, often an easy target. Instead, they often seemed to confirm them. Consider:

A) Presidential candidates of the incumbent party usually have no choice but to promise more of the same good times. When they either will not or cannot offer rosy promises of continuity, they do not do well. Harry Truman and George H. W. Bush promised respectively more of Roosevelt and Reagan, and won; Adlai Stevenson and John McCain seemed to run away from their predecessors’ record, and lost.

Mainstream media figures from the New York Times to the Huffington Post to CNN are apoplectic Monday as their latest attack on Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has crumbled yet again under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Specifically, the newest line of attack to fall apart is the criticism of Trump over Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week.

Over the weekend and for the past few days since Khan spoke alongside his wife Ghazala Khan about their son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004, media-wide reporters, editors, producers, and anchors have tried to lay criticism on Trump over the matter. They thought they had a good one, a specific line of attack that pitted Trump against the military—and supposedly showed him as a big meanie racist in the process.

But, as Breitbart News showed on Monday midday, that clearly was not the case. Khizr Khan has all sorts of financial, legal, and political connections to the Clintons through his old law firm, the mega-D.C. firm Hogan Lovells LLP. That firm did Hillary Clinton’s taxes for years, starting when Khan still worked there involved in, according to his own website, matters “firm wide”—back in 2004. It also has represented, for years, the government of Saudi Arabia in the United States. Saudi Arabia, of course, is a Clinton Foundation donor which—along with the mega-bundlers of thousands upon thousands in political donations to both of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2016—plays right into the “Clinton Cash” narrative.

All of this information was publicly available, and accessible to anyone—including any of these reporters, and Breitbart News—with a basic Google search. Anyone interested in doing research about the subjects they are reporting on—otherwise known as responsible journalism—would have checked into these matters. But clearly, none in the mainstream media did—probably because, as Fox News’ Chad Pergram noted, Democrats “sense blood in the water over” the whole Khan controversy.

Earlier on Monday, as CNN host Kate Bolduan stacked a panel with three anti-Trump analysts against Scottie Nell Hughes—the only Trump supporter present—Bolduan admitted she has not done basic research about Khan.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, what law firm he’s connected to,” Bolduan, a CNN anchor, plainly admitted on live television on Monday during a discussion with Hughes.

Are the Saudis trying to make sure that the candidate of their choice is elected President of the United States this November?

Khizr Khan is more than just the father of slain Muslim U.S. serviceman Humayun Khan and the mainstream media’s flavor of the moment in its ongoing efforts to demonize and destroy Donald Trump. As far as the Obama administration and Hillary campaign are concerned, he is a living validation of the success of their strategy against “extremism”: by refusing to identify the enemy as having anything to do with Islam, they draw moderate Muslims to their side and move them to fight against terrorism. By contrast, Trump, in their view, alienates these moderates and drives them into the arms of the terrorists.

That all sounds great. There’s just one catch: Khizr Khan, and the Clinton campaign, have extensive ties to the Saudis – far more extensive than any possible connection that Donald Trump’s campaign may have had to Russia’s alleged involvement in the leak of emails that revealed that the entire Democratic Party presidential nominating process was rigged from the start. Not that the mainstream media will pause from speculating about Trump and the Russians long enough to tell you any facts about Khizr Khan, Hillary and the Saudis.

Intelius records that Khizr Khan has worked at Hogan Lovells Llp. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm hired by the Saudis, is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show. Robert Kyle, a lobbyist from the firm, has bundled $50,850 for Clinton’s campaign.”

The Free Beacon added that the Saudi government has “supplied the Clinton Foundation with millions. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has given between $10 and $25 million to the foundation while Friends of Saudi Arabia has contributed between $1 and $5 million.”

And so we were treated to the spectacle of an employee of a firm that is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia lambasting Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, and then (lo and behold!) becoming a media darling as he excoriates Trump for his “black soul.”

Might the government of Saudi Arabia, which has spent countless bullions of dollars spreading the virulent and violent Wahhabi strain of Islam around the world, have any interest in making sure that a presidential candidate who speaks more forthrightly about the Islamic terror threat than any presidential candidate has since John Quincy Adams, and who has vowed to take concrete steps to counter that threat, is defeated? Is that why Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous indignation and misleading disinformation about the relationship of Islamic jihad terrorism to Islam, was not only featured at the Democratic National Convention but has dominated the news cycle ever since?

This has gone on long enough. The 28-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in the September 11, 2001 jihad attacks were just finally released (albeit with substantial portions still redacted), after being kept classified for fifteen years by one President who held hands with the Saudi King and another who bowed to him. And for fifteen years, the U.S. has done little or nothing to free itself from dependence upon Saudi oil and develop alternative energy sources. Why not? We know the Saudis have kept the Clintons’ palms abundantly greased. Who else’s?

Hillary Clinton has spent a lifetime in politics lying about matters both big and small. This is not exactly a revelation. Over twenty years ago, longtime New York Times political columnist William Safire wrote about his painful realization that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was a “congenital liar” in his famous essay “Blizzard of Lies.” While most of time her tendency toward dishonesty manifests itself to cover up her own corruption and malfeasance, sometimes her fibs are intended to evoke sympathy. Other times — one suspects — she lies just for the fun of it.

It should be well established at this point that Clinton is not one to shy away from telling whoppers when the situation requires it. Her modus operandi these days in fact seems to be “lie big or go home.”

Which is exactly what she did on Fox News this weekend, earning herself four Pinocchios from the Washington Post.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace played a video of Clinton saying: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time. I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified.” Following the clip, Wallace said, “After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”

Clinton said in reply: “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”

Unfortunately for Hillary, that wasn’t the end of it. Wallace then played a video of the exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?

COMEY: That’s not true.

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Was that true?

COMEY: There was classified material emailed.

Clinton stumbled a bit after that.

During last week’s Democrat National Convention there was one speaking engagement that was the epitome of mockery and hypocrisy. As a retired military officer I was appalled at this charade. That was the appearance by a gentleman Mr. Khizr Muazzam Khan and his wife, who lost a son in Iraq. I will say this once. I am extremely saddened for any family who loses a loved one in conflict fighting for this country.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media never gave a damn about Gold Star American mothers and their families over the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Global War on Terror and their suffering. Now, in just a single case, the case of immigrant Muslim parents who lost their son, there suddenly is extreme and massive interest…albeit, just for these parents.

What is more obvious and apparent, is the degree to which the Democrats and the Clinton campaign demonstrated and showed their hypocrisy by seeking to politicize their story totally for political purposes, to use this stunt to go after Donald Trump. Worst, it is abundantly clear, the parents without any reservation agreed to use their story, themselves, and the unfortunately loss of their son as political props in a made for TV political exhibition.

Again, it is time to speak out on the Anti-Trump Political Media show. What went on last weekend mainly on CNN and Sunday News/Talk shows is an outrage. The liberal media is in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and they know it. First of all the Khans stood on the stage of the DNC Convention and not only told their story, but savagely attacked Mr. Trump. They said two things that were way out of bounds; The First, that Mr. Trump has made no sacrifice, and the Second, that Mr. Trump never read the Constitution.

Mr. Khan’s first attack, presumes that a person needs to lose a child in war as a pre-condition to have an opinion on things. I served nearly 30-years in the U.S. military, through many wars, and have seen death, destruction, and I know many who have lost loved ones; son, daughters, husbands, and wives. In America, there is no pre-condition for opinion. In America there is one condition — it’s called the First Amendment.

Mr. Khan’s second attack on Mr. Trump has nothing to do with whether Mr. Trump has ever read, or did not read the Constitution. That was a clearly Democratic Party scripted stunt for this convention. His comment does however, have everything to do with Mr. Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims, from Muslim countries involved with, and or supporting terrorists and radical-Islamic terrorism.

What is one to make of the Democratic Convention speech of Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-born Virginia lawyer whose son Humayun was killed in action in Iraq in 2004?

According to Byron York:

Khan’s brief speech wasn’t a finely-detailed case. But he suggested that Trump’s Muslim ban and Mexican border wall proposals are unconstitutional. Specifically, Khan cited the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the law’ in suggesting that Trump’s policies violate the Constitution.

But, in fact, “there’s simply no sense in which a border wall violates the Constitution.” There is also “nothing unconstitutional about deporting people who are in the United States illegally.”

York emphasizes that “[a]s far as a Muslim ban is concerned, Trump … amended his proposal to focus on immigration from countries ‘compromised by terrorism.’ But assume that Khan was addressing Trump’s original, more extensive, proposal: a temporary ban on foreign Muslims from entering the United States.”

In fact, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution applies to “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States. It does not refer to foreign persons in foreign countries. Trump made it clear that this ban “would not apply to U.S. citizens, members of the U.S. military and others with a legal right to be in the United States.” Whether one approves or disapproves of Trump’s building a wall, deporting illegal immigrants, and temporarily banning the entry of foreign Muslims, the fact is that Trump’s proposals are not unconstitutional.

In an effort toward clarification, Donald Trump released a statement:

Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible.

Moreover, Trump reiterated that “Captain Khan, killed 12 years ago, was a hero, but this is about RADICAL ISLAMIC TERROR and the weakness of our ‘leaders’ to eradicate it!”