RUTHFULLY YOURS

As someone who grew up watching that wonderful FBI series on TV, it is shocking to see what people are saying about Mr. Comey, the FBI Director. I guess that’s what happens when you say that there is no evidence of intent on July 5th and then we spend the next two months learning that everything that Mrs. Clinton did was intended to evade the rules.

Roger Simon is calling for Mr. Comey to resign. He won’t be the last one. This is Mr. Simon’s argument:

If were I an FBI agent, I would despise James Comey. He has humiliated the FBI and all its employees. The institution will never be the same, at least not for decades to come. The FBI is no longer an instrument of justice. It is the reverse. It is an obfuscater of justice and an enabler of the rich and powerful. How depressing and disgusting.God help our republic.

Exaggerated? Not in the slightest.

Consider this:

Hillary Clinton, who had told us she had one cellphone, turned out to have had thirteen such phones and five iPads, all of which have mysteriously disappeared, two having been smashed by hammers — this, although the information on all of them was legally government property. Was she arrested for this or even cited? Did the FBI even ask why she did this or why she had so many phones? Some wag on television said she must have been a crack dealer.

More importantly, did the FBI even ask her the most obvious of questions: why in the world did she put ALL her government emails on a private home-brew server (and then have them deleted with the most advanced data eradication software available — five stars on CNET — two days after these emails came under subpoena)? Was that because the equally obvious answer — to avoid any possible public scrutiny of her actions (for a variety of suspicious reasons) — is itself felonious?

In most presidential elections, the two candidates spar over issues. The president campaigns for his party’s nominee in hopes of continuing his legacy.

Democrats champion liberalism, Republicans conservatism. In numerous press conferences, journalists try to force newsworthy and embarrassing admissions from the two candidates.

Not this year.

Barack Obama, who less than two years ago dipped to 40 percent in approval rating, is nowhere to be seen. He seems to know that the more he is absent and quiet, the more the public likes the idea rather than the reality of him as president — and his approval rating has risen to 51 percent.

In his self-imposed retreat, Obama makes no effort to defend the Affordable Care Act, which is all but disintegrating, as major insurers pull out and costs skyrocket.

Ditto the Iran deal. Obama is learning that it is better to be quiet about Iranian violations, ransom for hostages, and provocations than to explain them away.

Obama months ago gave up mentioning how the crushing national debt has almost doubled to nearly $20 trillion under his watch. No one seems to be defending the Obama administration’s lax immigration and border-enforcement policies.

He is also silent on his foreign policy — “reset” with Russia, the abrupt pullout from Iraq, the intervention in Libya, the growth of the Islamic State, the disintegration of Syria, and the decision not to associate global terrorism with radical Islamism.

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has kept a relatively low profile for someone who’s running for president. She has not held a press conference in more than nine months, counting on a compliant press to keep giving her a pass on her e-mail scandals.

Her campaign strategy is to agree to occasional one-on-one interviews with pre-selected friendly journalists, and to engage in chitchat on frivolous morning and late-evening TV talk shows. Clinton avoids large rallies, where she often grates rather than enthuses.

The Clinton strategy is to sit on her small lead in the last two months of the race, expecting that the mercurial Donald J. Trump will finally destroy his campaign with another outburst. She apparently assumes that nonstop fundraising, attack ads, and an army of staffers will bury the amateurish Trump campaign.

In August 1993, Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill dispatched a force of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos to war-torn Somalia in an effort to seize the Somali warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Military commanders had assessed the need for armor and air cover to carry out the dangerous mission. They requested M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, as well as AC-130 gunships but the Clinton administration obscenely denied the request placing U.S. forces in a very vulnerable situation.

On October 3, a taskforce of lightly armed U.S. forces seized a good portion of Aidid’s political and military echelon in Mogadishu as they assembled for a meeting in the capital but the operation stirred a hornet’s nest and the troops began engaging Somali militiamen in urban combat. Two Black Hawk helicopters were subsequently shot down with rocket propelled grenades. The nature and dynamic of the mission rapidly changed from a lightening operation involving quick seizure and extraction to one of protracted urban combat pitting outnumbered and outgunned U.S. forces against thousands of Somali militiamen armed to the teeth with machine guns, RPGs, mortars and recoilless rifles.

Though the Rangers and Delta Force commandos ultimately prevailed, 18 soldiers were killed (some of the bodies were mutilated), 73 were wounded and a helicopter pilot was captured. Had the request for armor and air cover been granted, there is no question that the outcome of the Battle of Mogadishu would have been vastly different and U.S. casualties would have been minimal. Adding insult to injury, Aidid’s aides, captured at great cost and sacrifice, were quickly released on orders from the political echelon.

Bill Clinton should have resigned but instead passed the buck to his loyal secretary of defense, Les Aspin, who resigned in disgrace a few months later. Bill Clinton never served in the military, never went to military school and had no concept of what it means to be a soldier and send men to battle to fight and die. Clinton was and still is a power hungry, political opportunist and nothing more. His inexcusable actions, in denying our service members the best equipment, cost lives.

This time there is no stained blue dress, but the Clinton machine’s rote rejection of all evidence pointing to influence peddling during the Democratic candidate’s time as Secretary of State is more of the same: we’re the innocent victims of rabid right wingers’ lies.
For Hillary Clinton there is no going back. Should she, like Macbeth, “wade no more” into her river of Emailgate deception and lies, the return journey would be “as tedious as go o’er”. It is either the White House or the Big House for the Democrats’ presidential candidate. Her best shot at winning on November 8 is to keep insisting that Donald Trump is KKK. She must also stick to the line that the FBI has cleared her of any wrongdoing while Secretary of State (2009-13) and disparage any dissenting opinion as “partisan conspiracy theorising”.

Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash – as book (2015), documentary (2016) and now graphic novel (2016) – threatens to derail Hillary Clinton’s campaign because it places Emailgate in a broader, and more ominous, framework. Schweizer’s research suggests Hillary, in agreement with husband Bill, made more than $200 million by monetising the overlap between global charitable organisations (in this case, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative) and non-global government oversight (the US Senate and Department of State). As mentioned in The Audacity of Crooked Hillary (Part 1), Hillary, Bill and daughter Chelsea have not made a cent out of the Clinton Foundation. Fifteen years of selflessly helping others – as they tell it – and the naysayers only want to knock their philanthropic enterprise. Only two weeks ago Bill Clinton tearfully reflected: “We’re trying to do good things. If there’s something wrong with creating jobs and saving lives, I don’t know what it is.”

The critics of the Clinton Foundation have not only come from the conservative side of the aisle. Ed Pilkington, writing in The Guardian in May of this year, had this to say about the film version of Clinton Cash: “Perhaps the most telling detail is the bald fact that between 2001 and 2013 Bill Clinton made 13 speeches in which he charged more than $500,000 in fees; 11 of those speeches were made within the period when his wife was working as America’s top diplomat.”

The insinuation, then, is that a smorgasbord of foreign governments and multinational companies would evade/rework US law by inviting Bill Clinton to speak at international seminars for more than half-a-million dollars a time – $750,000 in the Ericsson case – as part of a pay-to-play scheme. Donate to the Clinton Foundation and/or invite the loquacious Bill to opine on the general state of the world and the US Department of State would – as Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s personal assistant, expressed it in an email newly released by the FBI – “figure it out”.

Ed Pilkington, to be fair, does not entirely endorse Clinton Cash. For instance, he mentions the eight or so factual errors in the first edition of Schweizer’s book and, furthermore, insists that there is “no smoking gun” in the book or the film. Unquestionably, no email has emerged along these lines: ‘November 12, 2011, Hong Kong. Greetings, HRC! The Ericsson speech tonight…$750,000! Suppose I should jot down a few ideas – maybe after lunch. Don’t forget your end of the bargain. Get Ericsson off the sanctions list pronto. Cheers, Bill.’ One reason why such an email will not materialise could be that Bill Clinton apparently prefers face-to-face communication to sending off electronic missives – that, at least, is what he claims.

Chris Matthews, writing for Fortune magazine in June of this year, is another on the progressive side of politics to argue that while no documented proof exists to conclusively prove that Ericsson managed to circumvent US policy, “it was probably not a good idea for Bill Clinton to accept money from a company who had business in front of the State Department while his wife was running it.” In the rise and rise of the Clintons, from governor’s mansion in Little Rock to the White House, from US Congress to the Department of State, it is usually about this point – circumstantial evidence but no proverbial smoking gun – that the Bill & Hillary Obfuscation Show kicks into high gear: a two-part strategy of “Deny! Deny! Deny!” followed by a lethal counter-attack, consisting of a whirl of private threats and public slander directed at their accusers/victims.

The trusty stratagem appeared to slip perfectly into place in the earlier phase of the 1998 Monica Lewinsky Scandal. President Bill Clinton assured the public of his innocence: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, er, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.” President Bill Clinton, as per Chairman Bill Clinton of the Clinton Foundation, was “just trying to do good things”. Why, for heaven’s sake, are people so mean? First Lady Hillary Clinton then vilified the whistle-blowers as “a vast right-wing conspiracy”. Had Monica Lewinsky not been persuaded to save a certain semen-stained blue dress from a trip to the drycleaners, Zippergate would have played out very differently. As it was, President Bill Clinton subsequently confessed to a grand jury that he had an “improper physical relationship” with Lewinsky.

Today, caught up in the midst of Emailgate, Candidate Hillary Clinton has denounced the “conspiracy theory machine factory” – not as catchy, perhaps, as vast right-wing conspiracy but we get the drift. One comment-thread correspondent to Quadrant Online, in response to The Audacity of Hillary Clinton (Part 1), insisted that there was “a whiff of conspiracy” about the accusations against Hillary Clinton. Our missive writer is correct, but perhaps not for the reason he thinks. A “conspiracy”, we should note, does not have to be of the “tin-foil hat” variety. I argued, for instance, about the dangers of wild conspiracy theories in What JFK’s Assassination Did to America (Quadrant, November 2013). A far more plausible interpretation of conspiracy simply means the intent of two or more people to connive in order to circumvent the law or company policy. Occurrences of this kind are everyday events and, contraire Hillary Clinton, do not require total suspension of disbelief accompanied by the theme music for The Twilight Zone.

That said, to accuse someone – including, yes, Hillary Clinton – of underhanded scheming without any kind of evidence is a form of slander. Precisely because they are entrusted with power and influence, politicians are subject to every kind of allegation, foul or fair. That is why President Obama insisted that before she took up her post as Secretary of State in early 2009, Hillary Clinton signed a memorandum of understanding that guaranteed not just the separation of her leadership position in the State Department from her husband’s role as CEO of the Clinton Foundation but complete transparency on the matter. She was instructed not just to do the right thing but seen to be doing the right thing.

WASHINGTON — Throughout Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the Republican nomination, self-proclaimed Jewish neocons have mostly responded aghast. From William Kristol and Robert Kagan to Joshua Muravchick and Max Boot, the notion of a President Trump has been more than a little too much to bear.

Kristol has worked incessantly to recruit an alternative to run as an independent candidate; Kagan wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post saying Trump is bringing fascism to America; both Muravchick and Boot have said they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton; and Boot has insisted that Trump killed the Republican Party.

And yet, one of the intellectual godfathers of neoconservatism disagrees with all of them. When it comes to this roller coaster of a presidential election and the man who continues to confound virtually all of the political class, Norman Podhoretz is not exactly Pollyanna, but he does think the choice is easy, and that the vast majority of his ideological descendants are making a mistake by not embracing the GOP nominee.

“Many of the younger — they’re not so young anymore — neoconservatives have gone over to the Never Trump movement. And they are extremely angry with anybody who doesn’t share their view,” he recently told The Times of Israel. “But I describe myself as anti-anti Trump. While I have no great admiration for him, to put it mildly, I think she’s worse. Between the two, he’s the lesser evil.”

In a wide-ranging phone interview last week, the former longtime editor of Commentary magazine discussed what he thinks of the race and its implications for Israel. A critic of the Clintons since they gained national prominence decades ago, Podhoretz said the former secretary of state’s role in creating the conditions for the Iran nuclear deal is itself enough reason to support her rival.

The closer we look at the FBI’s investigative file on Hillary Clinton’s emails, the more we wonder if Director James Comey always intended to let her off the hook. The calculated release before the long Labor Day weekend suggests political favoritism, and the report shows the FBI didn’t pursue evidence of potential false statements, obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence.

Mr. Comey’s concessions start with his decision not to interview Mrs. Clinton until the end of his investigation, a mere three days before he announced his conclusions. Regular FBI practice is to get a subject on the record early then see if his story meshes with what agents find. In this case they accepted Mrs. Clinton’s I-don’t-recall defenses after the fact.

The notes also show the G-men never did grill Mrs. Clinton on her “intent” in setting up her server. Instead they bought her explanation that it was for personal convenience. This helped Mr. Comey avoid concluding that her purpose was to evade statutes like the Federal Records Act. Mr. Comey also told Congress that indicting her without criminal intent would pose a constitutional problem. But Congress has written many laws that don’t require criminal intent, and negligent homicide (for example) has never been unconstitutional.

The FBI notes also blow past evidence that Clinton advisers may have engaged in a cover-up. Consider page 10 of the FBI report: “Clinton’s immediate aides, to include [Huma] Abedin, [Cheryl] Mills, Jacob Sullivan, and [redacted] told the FBI they were unaware of the existence of the private server until after Clinton’s tenure at State or when it became public knowledge.”