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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians By Eric Lichtblau (NYTimes)

WASHINGTON — Computer systems used by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked in an attack that appears to have come from Russia’s intelligence services, a federal law enforcement official said on Friday.
The apparent breach, coming after the disclosure last month that the Democratic National Committee’s computer system had been compromised, escalates an international episode in which Clinton campaign officials have suggested that Russia might be trying to sway the outcome of the election.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said in a statement that intruders had gained access to an analytics program used by the campaign and maintained by the national committee, but it said that it did not believe that the campaign’s own internal computer systems had been compromised.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fund-raising arm for House Democrats, also said on Friday that its systems had been hacked. Together, the databases of the national committee and the House organization contain some of the party’s most sensitive communications and voter and financial data.
Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the congressional committee, said that after it discovered the breach, “we immediately took action and engaged with CrowdStrike, a leading forensic investigator, to assist us in addressing this incident.”The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation.
The same arm of Russia’s intelligence operation was also implicated in the attack on the national committee, in which it gained access to opposition research on Republicans, including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.
“It’s the same adversary,” the official involved in the forensic investigation said. “These are sophisticated actors.”
The F.B.I. said on Friday that it was examining reports of “cyberintrusions involving multiple political entities” but did not identify the targets of the attacks.
The Clinton campaign used the program that was hacked to analyze voter data, but it did not contain voters’ Social Security numbers or credit card information, a campaign aide said. The campaign said it was confident, based on a review by outside experts, that getting into the program would not have allowed the hackers to gain access to the campaign’s internal emails, voice mail messages or other data.

Impeach Her Why the e-mail scandal should bar Hillary from high office. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Friends and Colleagues, some travel over the last couple of weeks left me unable to circulate columns and posts as usual (and some time off meant there were fewer of those anyway). Today I am sending out the latest, including the full version of a feature article about Hillary Clinton written for the print version of National Review, from our August 1 special Democratic Convention issue (which is available online only to subscribers). Links to other columns are below that article. Hope everyone enjoys what’s left of the summer. All the best, Andy
In early July, in a performance as legally baffling as it was politically predictable, Federal Bureau of Investigation director James B. Comey recommended against a felony prosecution of the former secretary of state and certain Democratic presidential nominee. The recommendation was gratuitous: It is the FBI’s function to investigate crimes; the Justice Department alone exercises charging discretion. It is a commonplace for case agents and government prosecutors to consult on both investigative tactics and charging decisions. It is a rarity, though, for the FBI director to get directly involved in, much less make, an indictment decision. That, in effect, is what Comey did. That his recommendation was uncalled for makes it all the more indefensible.

To stick for a moment with the FBI’s actual function, let’s note that its agents performed admirably, particularly in the forensic aspects of the investigation: the examination of Mrs. Clinton’s “homebrew” servers, the painstaking reassembly of millions of bits of data into thousands of e-mails (out of the 30,000 e-mails that Clinton and her phalanx of lawyers and aides had quite intentionally sought to delete and destroy). The FBI thus carried its burden to uncover evidence that can be used to establish the essential elements of crimes defined in federal penal laws. In this instance, according to Director Comey’s unusually transparent and devastating account of what his investigators found, it is simply incontestable that then–secretary of state Clinton (a) mishandled classified information in a manner that was grossly negligent (indeed, Comey called it “extremely careless”) and (b) concealed and destroyed federal records.

Yet Comey claimed not only that no prosecution was warranted but also that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with this conclusion. The first assertion is flatly wrong; the second is breathtaking, and it evoked aptly spirited dissenting reactions from such iconic former prosecutors as Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who, as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, hired Comey as a young prosecutor in the mid Eighties, and Michael B. Mukasey, the distinguished former federal judge who served as U.S. attorney general in the George W. Bush administration not long after Comey served as deputy attorney general. (Like Comey, whom I have known as a friend and sometime colleague for nearly 30 years, I was hired as an assistant U.S. attorney by Mr. Giuliani.)

When Comey testified before a House committee just two days after rejecting an indictment of Clinton, the flaws in his rationale were painfully apparent. He suggested that “American tradition” and the Constitution forbid criminal prosecution on an offense as serious as mishandling classified information — a felony carrying a potential ten-year prison term — if the required mens rea (state of mind) element of the crime in the relevant statute calls for mere negligence rather than intent to do harm. To the contrary, many state and federal crimes do not require proof of intentional or willful wrongdoing — indeed, virtually every state has long criminalized negligent homicide. Moreover, Comey inaccurately portrayed the gross-negligence offense as if it were an isolated excrescence in federal law; in fact, it is the bottom of a sliding scale of crimes involving national-defense secrets, carefully calibrated by Congress so that the most serious offense — classic espionage involving intended harm to the U.S. — is at the top. Appropriately, the least serious offense of gross negligence involving national-defense secrets is narrowly tailored: It applies not to all Americans but to officials with security clearances who are intimately familiar with rules governing their special obligation to safeguard intelligence.

But in any case, far from being merely negligent, Clinton’s outrageous conduct screams of willfulness. She intentionally set up an unlawful non-government communication system specifically to evade federal disclosure and accountability laws. In her position at the pinnacle of American foreign relations, she had to know it was inevitable that extremely sensitive intelligence matters would be discussed over the system. The hundreds of classified e-mails discovered included 110 (in 52 e-mail chains) sent or received by Clinton herself. Seven of these involved “top secret/special access program” intelligence — the most highly classified secrets in government, concerning deep-cover informants and closely guarded intelligence-collection techniques (meaning: information the revelation of which can get our agents killed and fold up vital national-security operations).

“Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position,” Comey admonished, “should have known that an unclassified system was no place for” such exchanges. The director further acknowledged that Clinton’s homebrew system was woefully unsecure: It would have been better, though still against the rules, to use Gmail. Top Clinton aides exacerbated these security compromises, Comey recounted, by using unsecure communication systems while they were outside the United States and “in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Clinton clearly knew this practice was a major security breach, assuming she read her own memoir Hard Choices, which — though unmentioned by Comey — takes pains to describe the extraordinary communications precautions that must be taken overseas. The director, in fact, said it was almost certain that Clinton’s system had been penetrated by hostile foreign intelligence operatives (the deftness of whose methods prevents apodictic certainty). He further ruefully observed that, under Clinton, “the culture of the State Department in general” was cavalier, compared with that of other government agencies, when it came to safeguarding intelligence.

San Diego police say officer fatally shot, another wounded

Thomson Reuters BRENDAN O’BRIEN, IAN SIMPSON, W SIMON AND BILL TROTT

A San Diego police officer was fatally shot and another was wounded late on Thursday, the police department said on Friday, adding one suspect was taken into custody.

The officers, members of the department’s gang suppression unit, were shot during a traffic stop at about 11 p.m. PDT (0600 GMT) in Southcrest, a neighborhood in southeast San Diego, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The officers were taken to hospitals.

“It is with a very sad heart that we announce the death of one of our officers tonight,” the department said on Friday on its Twitter feed.

The second officer underwent surgery and is expected to survive, it said.

The police department said it was searching for suspects in addition to the one in custody.

Leaks, Hacks, and Liberals So now WikiLeaks is bad. by Gabriel Schoenfeld

The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked information founded by the Australian anarchist Julian Assange. Strong evidence rapidly emerged showing that the hackers were connected to or under the control of Russian intelligence. As the press picked through the mildly juicy revelations, the favoritism of the supposedly neutral DNC toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders was put before the world to see.

The result has been a continuing maelstrom. Supporters of Sanders, already agitated for having to swallow the bitter pill of defeat, were inflamed. Backers of Hillary, embarrassed and chagrined, decried the apparent Russian interference in party affairs. It did not take long for the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to be unceremoniously purged from her position and for the newly cleansed DNC to issue an apology to Sanders and everyone else it had wronged.

There the story has paused, but it is hardly over. There are grounds to believe that the Clinton Foundation was also hacked and quite possibly Hillary’s vulnerable private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., which housed her official emails during her tenure as secretary of state, including the 33,000 or so that she and her lawyers wiped from the memory because they were deemed “personal.”

The worry, of course, is that Russian intelligence has all of these, and that many more damaging disclosures of Clinton shenanigans are yet to come. Donald Trump, startling the world, has called upon the Russian government, if it did hack Hillary’s emails, to release them, with the obvious aim of injuring Hillary’s campaign and boosting his own. If that is indeed what happens, and WikiLeaks blasts new revelations onto the net on the eve of the elections in an October surprise, it could well propel Trump into the White House. That is exactly what Assange, who publicly favors Trump over Clinton, and who claims to have more of her secrets in his quiver, is threatening. The prospect has liberals wringing their hands.

A case in point is Franklin Foer, the former top editor at the New Republic and now a contributing editor at Slate. To Foer, the DNC email scandal is the sum of all his fears. “A foreign government,” he writes, “has hacked a political party’s computers .  .  . stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure.” It is “trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy.”

One cannot disagree. But how does this particular data breach, one is left wondering, differ from the leaks that Foer and other liberals routinely celebrate as the stock in trade of American investigative journalism?

Foer has a ready answer: What is especially “galling about the WikiLeaks dump,” he explains, is that it “has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks.” Hacks, to Foer, are bad, conducted by bad people for bad purposes. The Russian hack, he writes, is the equivalent of Watergate: “To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible.”

The Lawless Anti-White Identity Politics of the Democratic Party Is on Full Display in Philly The convention so far has featured a blatant racialist play for votes. By Jeremy Carl

If George Wallace had stood in the schoolhouse door and received the rapturous applause of thousands, slobbery encomiums from the mainstream media, and the blessings of one of the two major party nominees for president of the United States, you would have had something approximating what occurred in Philadelphia over the first two days of the Democratic convention.

Because, like Democrat Wallace’s dangerous rhetoric in 1963, the Democratic Party Convention of 2016 has, at times been a celebration of lawlessness and racial mythology that has led to violence – but the 2016 Democrats lack a President Kennedy to come in to restore order and demand the rule of law be followed. Instead, they’ve got Hillary Clinton, who is perfectly willing to take a blowtorch to truth and to light brushfires of racial conflict at a tense time if that will help her return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Witness what we have just seen: One candidate for president has been the first-ever candidate for president endorsed by the union of Border Patrol agents. The other candidate proudly features, on the first night of her convention, illegal aliens up on the main stage, while Democrats nationwide cheer. On the next night, we heard from “Mothers of the Movement” a sort of Black Lives Matter placeholder group that offers a fundamentally false racial narrative, which may do for racial tensions in 2016 what Wallace’s did in 1963.

If you wanted to understand the hold that Donald Trump has on a large swathe of conservatives and even fed-up Democrats and independents, the Democratic convention is pretty much a living explanation.

At this point, we’ve become so accustomed to the Democrats’ immigration lawlessness that too many of us accept it. We think there is simply nothing strange about one of our two political parties happily parading lawbreakers in a forum where they are celebrated for their law-breaking. To be fair, there’s nothing new with the Democrats celebrating lawbreakers – after all, they nearly nominated Ted Kennedy in 1980 just eleven years after Chappaquiddick – but to be honoring the lawbreakers specifically for their illegal conduct is something else entirely. One almost expected Bill Clinton to receive an award from Elizabeth Banks for perjury and sexual misconduct. I would have liked to see that acceptance speech rather than his tedious tribute to his longtime partner-in-crime.

But, of course, the Democrats have an advantage. They know that the media is so in the tank for them that their delusional fantasy narratives on racism and immigration will not be seriously challenged no matter what they do. Hillary Clinton could be escorted onstage by an armed contingent of the Fruit of Islam with a just-released illegal-immigrant murderer leading the way and the media would find a way to show that it means that Trump=Hitler. As the Geico commercial says: It’s what they do.

Even more breathtaking is the fact that the GOP, in response to this assault on both law and reason, will only whimper in response, because too many of them, even in the wake of a full-on populist revolt, are in the tank for Paul Ryan–style open borders and for accommodating the racial arsonists of the Black Lives Matter movement. One can only suppose they fear that otherwise they might be called “racists” by the media and have to sit in the corner wearing their collective dunce caps.

These blatant racialist plays by the Democrats are put out in hopes of getting a massive turnout of bloc-voting African Americans and Hispanics that they believe they will need if they are going to overcome Trump’s populist army. Given the media’s penchant for calling anything the GOP does that might serve the legitimate interests of its white base voters “white nationalist,” one might expect them to call the presence of some of the speakers “black nationalist” or “Hispanic nationalist” dog whistles – but that would assume we had a mainstream media more interested in equal treatment than leftist agitprop.

Last night audiences were treated to a standing ovation for Mothers of the Movement, a collection of women who, in the wake of admittedly tragic personal losses, have often been busy consorting with the likes of Al Sharpton in order to turn personal tragedies into national ones. With the camera spotlight on brightly, and in the wake of recent shootings of police officers, Mothers of the Movement were on their best behavior all week, one even giving a shout-out to police. But their polite rhetoric yesterday doesn’t dissolve their records of incitement. And the frequent chants of “Black Lives Matter” by the audience, left no doubt where the audience’s sympathies lay.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Challenger, Tim Canova, Visits Radical Mosque IFSF brings al-Qaeda web designer to speak; mosque Youth Joe Kaufman see note pleaseDirector calls Israelis ‘demonic.’

Tim Canova is an uber left Democrat and Wall St. basher and “progressive” Sanders supporter…..even Debbie is better….At present, in District 23, there is no Republican challenger…..rsk

It is election season here in the US, and candidates are clamoring for votes. A problem arises, though, when those seeking votes look for them from those who would wish America harm. That was the case, when politicos, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz primary challenger Tim Canova, showed up to the Islamic Foundation of South Florida, an extremist mosque located in Sunrise, Florida, for an event sponsored by the organization Emerge USA.

Emerge USA is a radical Muslim group which tries to mask its Islamist agenda by claiming to be a political advocacy organization. The main individual behind Emerge is Khurrum Wahid, a South Florida attorney who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda and financiers of the Taliban. The group holds events at mosques tied to terrorism. They include Tampa’s al-Qassam Mosque, which was founded by Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, and Pembroke Pines’ Darul Uloom, which has served a number of al-Qaeda operatives and which is headed by an anti-gay imam, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed.

On June 8th, Emerge organized an event – its annual Ramadan Iftar dinner – held at another extremist mosque, the Islamic Foundation of South Florida. Attending the affair were elected officials Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness, Coconut Creek Mayor Mikkie Belvedere, School Board Member Robin Bartleman, State Representative Hazelle Rogers, Broward County Clerk of Courts Howard Forman, and United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Wifredo Ferrer. Many candidates attended as well, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz primary challenger Democrat Tim Canova.

Formerly named the School of Islamic Studies of Broward, the Islamic Foundation of South Florida (IFSF) has been incorporated since September 2009. The Registered Agent for the group’s corporation is Emerge USA’s Khurrum Wahid.

One of the co-founders and current director of IFSF is Mohammed Javed Quereshi. Quereshi was the Manager of the Taco Bell where “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, worked before Padilla met with al-Qaeda leaders and plotted to set off a radiological bomb in the US. According to Padilla, Quereshi gave him his first Quran and invited him to attend mosque. Following Padilla’s conversion, Quereshi would see him at IFSF and the Islamic Center of South Florida in Pompano Beach. Padilla also spent much time at Darul Uloom and Masjid Al-Iman in Sunrise, which was then-headed by imam and Hamas fundraiser Raed Awad.

Hillary’s Hate The Saul Alinsky devotee crystallizes who will be anointed — and who will be damned. Matthew Vadum

PHILADELPHIA — The legendary congenital liar Hillary Clinton accepted her party’s nomination for the presidency last night mercifully bringing the boisterous, chaotic freakshow that was the 2016 Democratic National Convention to an end.

A day of rain finally broke the oppressive heat wave enveloping the Wells Fargo Center complex which was surrounded by miles of temporary black metal walls, layers of police, and Secret Service checkpoints manned by TSA employees. Inside the conventional hall, Democrats railed against border walls, the supposed systemic racism of police and the justice system, and having to show any kind of identification to vote.

Chelsea Clinton introduced her mother on the stage. It was an unremarkable speech not worth detailing here. Next followed a slick video about Hillary that was narrated by actor Morgan Freeman. The final words Freeman says are “How many ways will she light up the world? This is the woman.”

Hillary’s speech itself was interspersed not so much by boos but by anti-war chants and heckles by the legions of disgruntled Bernie Sanders fans. Her supporters came to her aid most of the time drowning out the dissenters by chanting “Hillary” and “U-S-A.”

The speech was like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was a poorly written address made worse because of Clinton’s stilted and at times strident delivery. Dressed in a white pantsuit, the former secretary of state over-pronounced her words as if she were a special education teacher or a singer in the Swedish band Abba. It had a slight air of condescension about it. And her cadence was weird, to say the least.

She is afflicted by her own special psychopathology. It is a mixture of sociopathy, incompetence, hubris, and contempt. She is our better so we’d better get with her. As David Horowitz tweeted during the speech, Clinton’s problem is that “most Americans know exactly what to make of her. This speech is so empty.”

ABC News footage seemed to show Bill Clinton dozing off momentarily during the long oration.

But Hillary gave the audience members what they wanted. It was a stroll through a liberal-progressive fantasy land, a place where money materializes out of thin air.

Welcome to the Communist Party, U.S.A. How Hillary’s scary speech revealed her mistake in wearing a white pants suit to her coronation. Daniel Greenfield

“This was a speech that could have been given in Moscow during the Cold War. Instead it was delivered to an enthusiastic audience of Democrats who love the idea of taking away someone else’s money. Beneath all the distractions, the celebrities and family stories, is the fundamental idea that Hillary has more of a right to your money than you do because she is “humbly” more enlightened than you are.”

Hillary made a mistake by wearing a white pants suit to her coronation. She should have worn red.

Wearing a white pantsuit, Hillary Clinton plodded out on stage to accept the nomination that she had schemed, plotted, lied, cheated, rigged and eventually fixed a series of elections to obtain.

Then she claimed that she was accepting the nomination of a race she had rigged with “humility”.

Humility is not the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Hillary Clinton. It is not even the last word. It is not in the Hillary dictionary at all. But this convention was a desperate effort to humanize Hillary. Everyone, including her philandering husband and dilettante daughter, down to assorted people she had met at one point, were brought up on stage to testify that she really is a very nice person.

This wasn’t a convention. It was a series of character witnesses for a woman with no character. It was an extensive apology for the Left’s radical agenda cloaked in fake patriotism and celebrity adulation.

Sinclair Lewis famously said, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”. More accurately, when Communism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s what the Democratic National Convention was.

This night presented Hillary Clinton as all things to all people. She was a passionate fighter who found plenty of time to spend with her family. She is for cops and for cop-killers. She likes the Founding Fathers and political correctness. She wants Democrats to be the party of working people and of elitist government technocrats. And, most especially, she cares about people like you.

The convention, like everything about Hillary, was awkward and insincere.

There was Bernie glaring into the camera just as Hillary was thanking him for rallying a bunch of young voters whom she hoped to exploit. There was Chelsea Clinton reminding everyone that the Clintons are a dynasty and that everyone in it gets a job because of their last name, right before introducing her mother whose only real qualification for her belated entry into politics was her last name. And there was Jennifer Granholm who got an opportunity to have an incoherent public meltdown at the convention.

Islamic American Relief Agency, Long Accused of Terror Finance, Pleads Guilty on Sanctions Violations :Kyle Shideler

Kyle Shideler is the director of the Counterterrorism Education and Analysis Project at the Center for Security Policy (centerforsecuritypolicy.org).

On July 20, 2016, federal prosecutors successfully secured a guilty plea from the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) organization known as the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA). The Missouri-based organization, also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency-USA, was an affiliate of a Sudan-based international relief organization of the same name.

The organization was raided in October of 2004 under suspicion of violating Iraq sanctions, money laundering and terrorism finance to Al Qaeda and Hamas.

The plea deal comes after the Department of Justice had already secured guilty pleas from IARA fundraiser Abdel Azim El-Siddig, Mubarak Hamed, Ahmed Mustafa, and former Republican Congressman Mark Siljander of Michigan.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department IARA had close ties to the Maktab Al-Khidamat (MK), also known as the Afghan Services Bureau, the precursor to Al Qaeda, co-founded by Osama Bin Laden and Muslim Brotherhood member and leading Jihadist thinker Abdullah Azzam.

IARA regional leader Mohammed Adam el-Sheikh is Imam of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama delivered a major speech earlier this year. El-Sheikh was a co-founder of the Muslim American Society, described by U.S. federal prosecutors as the “overt arm” of the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sheikh replaced Al Qaeda leader Anwar Awlaki at the Muslim Brotherhood led Dar al-Hijrah Mosque.

IARA was incorporated by Eric Vickers, executive director of the American Muslim Council, an organization founded by Al Qaeda financier and self-identified Muslim Brotherhood member Abdurrahman Alamoudi.

Among IARA’s earliest founders was Abdl Mouhaymen Al Sibai, whose name appears in the 1992 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood phone directory as Masul (leader) of the Michigan area.

Other IARA leaders included educational director Zayed Khaleel, a Missouri-based Palestinian American who served both as a Al Qaeda finance and Procurement specialist who supplied Osama Bin Laden with communications equipment, and as a webmaster for the terror organization Hamas. Khaleel worked closely with the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), the Muslim brotherhood organization focused on promoting Pro-Hamas propaganda. IAP played a key role in raising funds for the Holy Land Foundation(HLF), whose leaders were convicted of 108 terror related felonies. The Holy Land Foundation was also named explicitly in the recently release 28-page Congressional 9/11 report.

The Brouhaha Over Trump’s ‘Treason’By Andrew C. McCarthy

That the national security threat we are talking about today is Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton illustrates the wayward state of our politics.

Mrs. Clinton operated unlawful, amateurishly non-secure email servers and mishandled classified information – including the nation’s most closely guarded defense secrets, involving deep-cover informants and highly sensitive intelligence-gathering methods. She did these things in such a criminally reckless manner that it is virtually certain the ruthlessly adept Russian intelligence services (to say nothing of the Chinese, the Iranians, other sinister regimes, and cyber savvy jihadist organizations) have easily penetrated her communications and obtained our intelligence. In addition, though her emails were government records, she destroyed thousands of them.

Clinton has thus committed serious felony violations of federal law. These violations are flagrant betrayals of her public trust, the essence of high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment.

Nevertheless, tonight, one of our country’s two major political parties will nominate her to be the next president of the United States. That is atrocious … yet the story dominating today’s news is not Mrs. Clinton’s criminal and impeachable offenses; it is whether Donald Trump is guilty of treason.

Yes, treason – it’s apparently okay to use the word now. It is a word Republicans and their fellow ruling class Democrats would heretofore condemn any national security-minded American for using to describe the aid and comfort President Obama has given to our Iranian enemy. It is a word we still dare not utter in connection with the Obama/Clinton embrace of anti-American Islamists. But Trump’s own lack of restraint has evidently licensed Trump critique as a restraint-free activity.

And what on this occasion makes Trump guilty of treason rather than all-too-familiar Trumpian bombast? It is claimed that he has encouraged a hostile nation, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to conduct espionage against Mrs. Clinton for the purpose of influencing an American election.

This claim, it should be noted, comes from Democrats and Republicans who – it seems like only yesterday – have told us that Russia, far from being hostile, was our strategic partner. It comes from a Democratic nominee who, as secretary of state, enabled Russia to take control of one-fifth of the uranium production capacity of the United States while millions in relevant donations and speaking fees flowed to the Clinton Foundation and her husband. And as for the scourge of foreign influence on American elections, the money that came the Clintons’ way thanks to the Russian uranium deal is but a small fraction of the foreign “donations” that have poured into their “charitable” foundation – influence purchases from what donors hope will be the next Clinton administration.

The world is upside down.

Here is what Trump said:

Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press… By the way they hacked, they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there. So let’s see.

On their face – silly as I feel for taking the time to analyze something this stupid – Trump’s remarks did not, even in a jocular way, do what his hair-trigger critics accuse him of.