RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m not sure what Stephens is trying to do here…but if he is continuing his fatwa against Trump he fails…..If Trump did deliver this speech I would applaud enthusiastically….and i be that was not Stephens’ intent…..Just as Dorothy Rabinowitz’s fulsome endorsement of Hillary brought more people to Trump’s defense so will this column….rsk

“What follows is a draft of a speech Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver Tuesday, Oct. 4 in Prescott Valley, Ariz. We haven’t confirmed its authenticity because, like the rest of the corrupt media, we’re totally dishonest.

Thank you, everybody, thank you. It’s good to be back in Arizona. And you know we’re going to win, right? The polls say we’re going to win in Arizona, and we will.

The polls also say we’d lose the general election if it were held today. But they’re wrong. So wrong. You know how pollsters work? They guess who will show up to vote on election day, and then they poll these “likely voters.”

But let me tell you something. The pollsters have no clue. None. They don’t have a clue who the electorate is, and they don’t have a clue of what’s going on in America. Believe me, folks, on election day they’re going to find out.

The other day, in Colombia—I’m talking about the country in South America—they held a vote. A referendum. President Santos staked his reputation on a, quote-unquote, peace deal with the terrorists of the FARC.

Now the FARC, they’re the worst people in the world. They’ve killed tens of thousands of people. They make their money through drug trafficking and kidnapping. They’ve been terrorizing Colombians for 50 years.

Along comes Santos, and he makes this terrible deal that says to the FARC: We’re not going to send you to jail. We’re going to sentence your leaders to community service. We’re even going to guarantee you seats in the Congress.

And all the polls said the deal was going to win in a landslide. Obama and Kerry lined up behind it. Santos told Colombians they had no choice, that it was the only road to peace.

Guess what? The polls were wrong. The Colombians knew a bad deal when they saw one. They weren’t going to let killers get away with their crimes. The only deal they want with the FARC is the same deal Reagan got from Russia: We win, they lose.

Folks, it was the same story with the Brexit vote in June. All the polls said the Brits wouldn’t vote to leave the European Union. They did. All the experts said the sky would fall if the Brits voted to go. It didn’t. These geniuses said that Britain was too small to be the master of its own destiny. The British people believe otherwise, and I’m with them!

What happened in Britain, in Colombia, it’s going to happen here. Because, like them, we’re sick of it.

We’re sick of hearing ObamaCare is working when even the New York Times admits it’s a total disaster. We’re sick of hearing how great the economy is when it’s floating on a big wave of cheap credit that benefits Wall Street at the expense of savers. We’re sick of hearing how great the Iran deal is, then watching our sailors being humiliated while we secretly fork over pallets of cash.

You know what we’re also sick of? Liberal hypocrites.

I’m not supposed to say the name I’m about to say. Well, two words: Alicia. Machado.

We wrote Monday that many liberals believe that defeating Donald Trump justifies anything, and right on time comes the egregious Eric Schneiderman. The New York Attorney General delivered his own personal October surprise for Hillary Clinton by announcing a supposed scandal over Mr. Trump’s charitable foundation.

Mr. Schneiderman’s office, in a letter sent Friday and released Monday, ordered the Donald J. Trump Foundation to cease raising money in New York. According to the letter, the Trump outfit is not correctly registered in the state to solicit funds.

The AG gave the foundation 15 days to turn over reams of paper, including audited financial statements and annual financial reports going back many years. Mr. Schneiderman warned in his letter that failure to comply will be deemed a “fraud upon the people of the state of New York.”

The announcement is Mr. Schneiderman’s latest misuse of his prosecutorial authority to attack his political enemies. The AG’s office first announced it was “investigating” Mr. Trump in mid-September—the better to begin a round of bad headlines—and has also been touting its inquiry into Trump University. While it’s possible the Trump Foundation has violated in some way “section 172 of Article 7-A New York’s Executive Law,” it’s notable that the best Mr. Schneiderman could drum up by way of “fraud” was a paperwork technicality.

The bigger point is timing. Mr. Schneiderman’s cease-and-desist order, coming a month before a general election, smells like partisan politics. The AG has endorsed Mrs. Clinton and sits on the Democratic nominee’s New York “leadership council,” which the Clinton campaign describes as the “in-state leadership” for her campaign, charged with “amplifying the campaign’s national voice to New York families” and “aiding the campaign with rapid response.”

Mr. Schneiderman’s prosecution of her opponent certainly qualifies as “rapid.” He could easily have waited until Nov. 9 to divulge his investigation and unveil his order. If the Trump Foundation has been deficient with its paperwork for as long as the AG’s office says, a few more weeks of delay would hardly hurt.

“To the public it will appear that Schneiderman acted not in the interest of his client, the State, but for whatever influence his announcement might have on the election outcome,” NYU School of Law Professor Stephen Gillers told LawNewz.com, and Mr. Gillers is no conservative. CONTINUE AT SITE

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.

Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object.

Seriously?

In his testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI director James Comey inveighed against critics who have slimed the Bureau as “weasels” over its handling of the Clinton e-mails investigation. I am not one of those people. After a quarter-century in the trenches with the Bureau as a prosecutor, I am one of those hopeless romantics who love the FBI and harbor real affection for the director himself.

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Jim Comey says he didn’t make his final decision to recommend against prosecution until after Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at the end of the investigation, and that he did not coordinate that decision with his Obama-administration superiors. If he says so, that’s good enough for me. But it doesn’t mean the director made his decision detached from the dismal reality of the situation. And whatever one’s armchair-quarterback view on how he should have handled it, that reality was not of his making.

But just as Director Comey rightly objects to being regarded as a weasel, I don’t much like being regarded as an idiot . . . which is what I’d have to be to swallow some of this stuff.

The FBI absolutely has control over who may be present at an interview with a subject of an investigation. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the most basic one is that an interview never has to happen unless the FBI consents to it.

In his testimony, Comey kept stressing that Mrs. Clinton’s interview was “voluntary” — contending that since she was not required to submit to it, she could impose any conditions on her agreement to do so. That is nonsense. The interview was voluntary on both sides. The FBI is never required to indulge conditions that make a mockery of its serious business.

In this regard, Comey is like a guy who ties his own hands behind his back and then says he was powerless to defend himself. If Clinton declined to submit to an FBI interview unless Mills (or the similarly situated lawyer Heather Samuelson) was permitted to be present, the investigators could simply have handed her a grand-jury subpoena. They could then have politely directed her to a chamber where she would be compelled to answer questions — under oath and all by her lonesome, without any of her lawyer legion in attendance.

But, you see, in this investigation — unlike every other major criminal investigation in which the government tries to make the case rather than not make the case — the Justice Department declined to convene a grand jury.

Arcan Cetin faces five counts of murder after his shooting rampage at a Seattle-area mall last week. But he also turns out to be a non-citizen who has voted three times in state elections since 2014. Liberals claim non-citizen voting fraud is extremely rare, but Cetin’s case should cast light on both just how easy it is to commit and the efforts of federal and state officials to block efforts to uncover it.

Cetin, who is from Turkey, is a legal resident of the United States but not a citizen. In 2014, he registered to vote and voted three times, most recently in May’s presidential primary. Washington State, like all but a handful of states, doesn’t require any proof of citizenship. “Our hands are kind of tied,” Secretary of State Kim Wyman told a Seattle TV station, noting that the state doesn’t allow verification of a person’s citizenship for voting purposes. “But make no mistake,” she adds. “We want to make sure that everybody has confidence that people casting ballots are eligible. This is certainly going to be a topic at the next legislative session.” Local registrars can currently use a database to check the age and residence of people who register to vote, but a person’s claim to be a citizen is based on the honor system.

The problem is that not all non-citizens are honorable — or they may be led astray in being told they can vote. In our 2012 book Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk​, Hans von Spakovsky and I noted numerous cases of non-citizen registration and voting all over the country.

In 2014, a study released by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, estimated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election and that 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Since 80 percent of non-citizens vote Democratic, according to the study, non-citizen participation could have “been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes [in North Carolina in 2008], and congressional elections,” such as the 2008 race in Minnesota in which Al Franken was elected to the U.S. Senate, giving Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote to pass Obamacare.

The authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of non-citizen voting. In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people who were called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period in one of the 94 current U.S. district courts were non-citizens. In 2012, a local NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla., found that at least 100 individuals in one county had been excused from jury duty because they were not citizens but were registered to vote. Many had also voted in some elections.

But federal agencies refuse — in direct violation of federal law — to provide citizenship data to state election officials who attempt to verify citizenship status. Kansas and Arizona have put in place new commonsense proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting, but they have been fought tooth and nail by Obama’s Justice Department. The DOJ is even using strong-arm methods to intervene in a lawsuit challenging the right of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to allow states to require proof of citizenship when registering. Rather than fulfill its duty to represent a federal agency, the DOJ is siding with the League of Women Voters and the NAACP in the case. A federal judge, Richard Leon, has already been rebuked by the DOJ for its “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” refusal to defend a federal agency and its decision instead to side with the plaintiffs suing it.

Take Virginia, where last year Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to forward information to election officials on individuals who were excused from jury duty for not being a citizen. Then James Alcorn, one of McAuliffe’s two Democratic appointees on the Virginia Board of Elections, proposed that rules be changed so that people who left the citizenship question unanswered on the voter-registration form would still be allowed to register. A few years ago, the Fairfax County Electoral Board found close to 300 non-citizens who had illegally registered, about half of whom had also illegally voted in prior elections. No action was taken to prosecute any of those non-citizens.

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.

Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object.

Seriously?

In his testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI director James Comey inveighed against critics who have slimed the Bureau as “weasels” over its handling of the Clinton e-mails investigation. I am not one of those people. After a quarter-century in the trenches with the Bureau as a prosecutor, I am one of those hopeless romantics who love the FBI and harbor real affection for the director himself.

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Jim Comey says he didn’t make his final decision to recommend against prosecution until after Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at the end of the investigation, and that he did not coordinate that decision with his Obama-administration superiors. If he says so, that’s good enough for me. But it doesn’t mean the director made his decision detached from the dismal reality of the situation. And whatever one’s armchair-quarterback view on how he should have handled it, that reality was not of his making.