RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Wall Street Journal’s report that, for over a year, the FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for potential financial crimes and influence peddling is, as Rich Lowry said Monday, a blockbuster. As I argued over the weekend, the manner in which the State Department was put in the service of the Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary is shocking. It is suggestive of a pattern of pay-to-play bribery, the monetizing of political influence, fraud, and obstruction of justice that the Justice Department should be investigating as a possible RICO conspiracy under the federal anti-racketeering laws.

The Journal’s Devlin Barrett buries the Clinton Foundation lede in the 14th paragraph of his report. Even more astonishing are his final three paragraphs:

In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.

Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.”

Not long after that discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau’s leaders about the Weiner laptop, prompting Mr. Comey’s disclosure to Congress and setting off the furor that promises to consume the final days of a tumultuous campaign.

Let me unpack this.

Readers are unlikely to know that the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn is not just any United States attorney’s office. It is the office that was headed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch until President Obama elevated her to attorney general less than two years ago.

It was in the EDNY that Ms. Lynch first came to national prominence in 1999, when she was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton — the husband of the main subject of the FBI’s investigations with whom Lynch furtively met in the back of a plane parked on an Arizona tarmac days before the announcement that Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted. Obama reappointed Lynch as the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 2010. She was thus in charge of staffing that office for nearly six years before coming to Main Justice in Washington. That means the EDNY is full of attorneys Lynch hired and supervised.

When we learn that Clinton Foundation investigators are being denied access to patently relevant evidence by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, those are the prosecutors — Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors — we are talking about.

SHOCK: 13 point swing in the polls puts Trump in the lead…
NYDailyNews doubles down on Hillary support…
CNN Boss Zucker: Donna Brazile’s leaks “disgusting, unethical”…
Preet Bharara takes down 6 Mexican drug traffickers…
Top Schumer aide lands lobbying gig…
Albany Biz Review: Highest paid NY state employees…
Mets pitcher arrested on domestic violence charge…
Poll: Zephyr leads by 3 points…
Poll: Hillary v Trump race tightening in NY…
Rep. Hanna says he is good Republican despite endorsing Hillary…
Rep. Reed on John Plumb: You recently got married to a beautiful lady…
Albany Mayor’s Chief of Staff jumps ship…
Pataki’s best moment of campaign? Drag show in Des Moines…
Cuomo pushes out thruway official…
Boom: NYC’s $720 million legal settlements make it highest in the nation…
Western NY’s ‘Guardian Angel’ dies…
Page Six: De Niro’s bad blood at mafia musical…
Tesla says SolarCity will generate $500 million in cash!!!
MUCH MORE…

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/reversal_of_fortune_for_the_democrats.html

Only a few weeks ago the #NeverTrump folks were moaning that any other Republican could have beaten Hillary Clinton, and now the Clinton supporters must be wondering if another Democrat could have beaten Donald Trump.

I was an early antagonist, but when Trump was the last man standing among a batch of senators, governors, a former congressman, a neurosurgeon, and a clever and gifted businesswoman, I made the decision to support him.

He won and he is the candidate, and may win despite an unprecedented barrage of ridicule, smear and bias from the media and the unconscionable Republicans who enabled Hillary Clinton by bailing from what they perceived to be a sinking ship.

The Republicans may be right and possibly another candidate would have bettered Hillary Clinton. The initial Comey report gave her a pass and her misdeeds were airbrushed by the media, obsessed with Trump’s vulgarity and accusations against him.

Now the tide has turned with a reopened investigation by the FBI. Even the biased media are taking note of the ethical and moral bankruptcy of Hillary Clinton, and bashing Comey cannot clear her reputation. Now the polls are trending against her. How could this happen just days away from a major election? Hillary was the odds-on favorite and her coronation was set.

The Democrat primaries were a joke. Hillary Clinton needed a tip from Donna Brazile to beat Bernie Sanders? Apparently, the hacked emails from John Podesta included a message from Ms. Brazile on the day before a CNN-sponsored Democratic primary debate in Flint, Mich., in March. It reads: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.”

This disclosure must be giving both women hives.

But, now the question is which Democrat could have won against Trump?

Let’s start with early contenders. Lincoln Chafee, a political tranny from Rhode Island who was for “Prosperity Through Peace”; Larry Lessing (who?); Martin O’Malley, Governor of Maryland whose impressive campaign slogan was “Stand Against Hate”; and former Senator James Webb a decorated veteran and political maverick.

They were all trounced early in the primaries.

It’s hard to generalize about Hillary Clinton’s email situation except that she tried to afford herself an extraordinary privilege as a high-ranking official, and then caused for herself exactly the problems (and worse) that she presumably was trying to avoid.

It’s the White House Travel Office, the Rose Law Firm billing records, the Seth Ward option (don’t ask), the health-care task force, etc., all over again.

Mrs. Clinton is a screw-up. And when a trait takes such trouble to announce itself, note must be taken.

Complicating the legal question, of course, is the fact that she didn’t exactly hide her behavior. The State Department knew she was conducting business on a private server. Her boss, the president, exchanged emails with her via what was self-evidently a private email account.

All this being so, many Americans probably would have been happy to see the difficulties bypassed by Mrs. Clinton simply returning all her emails and devices intact to the State Department. This she did not do. In response to reasonable and unavoidable questions about whether her arrangement and subsequent actions violated the law, the Obama administration had no choice but to launch a criminal investigation.

Now a simple home truth is that Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, from day one, were hardly indifferent, objective observers of the process. They did not want Mrs. Clinton charged.

In our imperfect world, most will understand the dilemma before FBI Director James Comey: Would it be more damaging for the country, FBI and personal reputation to actively intervene in the election by indicting Mrs. Clinton or to passively intervene in the election by giving her a pass?

A non-act is somehow easier to pass off than an act. Yet events of the last few days point to the absurdity of him clearing Mrs. Clinton when he still hadn’t seen 33,000 pieces of evidence. By definition, unless the FBI is full of remarkably unsuspicious cops, the emails that Mrs. Clinton and her aides deleted would seem the ones most likely to contain evidence of improper activity.

Mr. Comey perhaps failed also to foresee how the server issue would become entangled with the WikiLeaks theft of Clinton Foundation emails, contributing to a rather more multidimensional view of the back-scratching and buck-raking world the Clinton entourage inhabited. CONTINUE AT SITE

When the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn was founded in 1973, it had a worthy mission: to make healthy and affordable food available to everyone who wanted it. But recently, the Coop appears to have lost its way. In April, it suspended four loyal, long-time members for a whole year – three of them members from the Coop’s inception. The reason? Allegedly, the four disrupted a Coop meeting. But in reality, they were singled out from among hundreds of Coop members who vociferously objected to a hateful and bigoted anti-Israel presentation at a Coop meeting, which was aimed at getting the Coop to boycott an Israeli company called SodaStream.

This wasn’t the first time that an anti-Israel boycott was proposed at the Coop; the membership had already considered and soundly rejected one in 2012. But the Israel-bashers were persistent, this time displaying inflammatory anti-Israel photos at a Coop general meeting. The photos weren’t verified, they had no context, and the boycott proponents did not even establish their connection to SodaStream. Members at the meeting reported that not only was Israel viciously attacked; Jews were, too, with outrageous and incendiary comments like “Jews are aggressive toward black children.”

The four suspended Coop members were no doubt passionate and vocal about their objection to this anti-Israel boycott effort, and they had good reason to be: A boycott of Israeli products such as SodaStream would violate New York State law and could subject the Coop to liability.

New York’s Human Rights Law prohibits boycotts based on national origin, among several other protected categories. The law doesn’t require evidence of a formal boycott campaign; it’s enough if there’s a pattern of conduct that commercially disadvantages members of a protected class, which describes the anti-Israel vendetta at the Coop.The four suspended Coop members were no doubt passionate and vocal about their objection to this anti-Israel boycott effort, and they had good reason to be: A boycott of Israeli products such as SodaStream would violate New York State law and could subject the Coop to liability.

Camp owners were shocked by the comparison of Jewish campers emulating IDF exercises with Hamas terrorist training camps.http://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/ny/now-they-are-going-after-jewish-summer-camps/2016/11/02/

Camp Mesorah is a co-educational Modern Orthodox sleep-over camp sprawling across more than 100 acres in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. The camp focuses on sports, Torah, Jewish unity and love for Medinat Yisrael. Some people can’t stand that last part – especially any suggestion that the Israeli Defense Forces should be respected and emulated.

Why? Because the IDF, you know, is a military force and if Jewish campers in upstate New York emulate IDF troops while engaging in team-building and obstacle courses, that really is akin to glorifying torture and violence. In fact, “it’s like the Hamas camps.” At least that’s what some non-affiliated busybodies are claiming.

It’s absurd, but that’s how some Israel-denigrators – even Jewish ones – play the game. Even when it comes to attacking a team-building summer activity for Jewish campers.

Founded in 1990, Mesorah hosts approximatly 800 campers throughout the summers, starting from rising fourth graders through the tenth grade. Nearly one hundred of those Mesorahans come from Israel, and the camp has strong Zionist roots. Campers are encouraged to learn about and learn to love Israel, and making Aliyah is viewed as a positive aspiration. As Joseph Stansky, Mesorah’s co-owner, told the JewishPress.com on Tuesday, “many campers have IDF t-shirts and sweatshirts which they bought at novelty shops on Ben Yehudah [Street in Jerusalem].”

A brief visit to the camp’s website reveals hockey rinks and basketball courts, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, a lake for boating, and two shuls, a kollel, learning gazebos and a library. The owners have brought the camp into the digital age with a section on the website for parents and other family members to regularly see pictures and videos of the campers. There are also promotional videos for interested families.

The promotional videos are rolled out one at a time over the course of the post-summer year, in anticipation of the next summer’s season. One video rolled out just after the Jewish holidays this year focused on the camp’s “IDF-Paintball Program,” which shows campers in camouflage gear engaged in an intensive (by American Jewish camp standards) obstacle and team building course. Many of the campers are wearing their IDF t-shirts.

White House: Comey Not ‘Intentionally Trying to Influence’ Election By Bridget Johnson

“And that is a posture that I won’t change and it is a posture that speaks to the kind of institutional responsibilities that are investigated — that are vested here in the White House, which is preserving the independence and integrity of independent investigations conducted by the Department of Justice,” he said.

Earnest said he didn’t “have any independent knowledge of how those decisions were made” or what factors were considered to release information about a new path of investigation since “all the way back to July when Director Comey announced the results of the investigation and spoke at length to the public about his decision not to prosecute Secretary Clinton.”

“Included in that news conference were some rather harsh condemnations of the way that Secretary Clinton handled that situation,” he noted. “Director Comey also testified before Congress at some length, on camera, under oath, and — about the investigation, and some of that testimony provided fodder to Secretary Clinton’s critics.”

The press secretary said he would “neither defend nor criticize what Director Comey has decided to communicate to the public about this investigation.”

“What I will say is that the Department of Justice in our democracy is given expansive authority to conduct investigations.”

Earnest added it’s “important in the mind of the president that those authorities are tempered by an adherence to longstanding tradition and practice and norms that limit public discussion of facts that are collected in the context of those investigations.”