RUTHFULLY YOURS

Speaking at a partisan fundraiser in Florida last month, President Barack Obama touched on a number of issues near and dear to the hearts of liberals. It was part stump speech, part farewell-tour stop — and part chance to knock efforts at ensuring election integrity one last time.

The president just doesn’t think there is such a thing as election fraud. As he informed the assembled Floridians, “You are much likelier to get struck by lightning than to have somebody next to you commit voter fraud.”

We can’t guess how many fraudsters were in the audience that night. But we know one thing for sure: The Left loves this old lightning-strike chestnut.

It’s a claim that was debunked more than four years ago, yet progressives keep trotting it out anyway. So, it’s time to debunk it again, by turning to the National Weather Service and The Heritage Foundation’s voter-fraud database, which contains hundreds of cases of election fraud, all of which have been proven in courts of law and resulted in criminal convictions or overturned elections.

In 2012, Florida suffered five fatalities from lightning strikes. But in the election that year, Jeffrey Garcia, chief of staff to then-Democratic representative Joe Garcia, ordered the congressman’s political campaign to illegally request absentee ballots for 1,800 voters without their consent. Jeffrey Garcia pleaded guilty to orchestrating this massive fraud and was sentenced to 90 days’ incarceration.

In that same year, Massachusetts — home to senator and election-fraud denier Elizabeth Warren — did not suffer a single lightning-related fatality, yet it did endure the criminal antics of Enrico “Jack” Villamaino, a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives. Villamaino conspired with his future wife to alter the party registrations of 280 registered Democrats in the town of East Longmeadow, and then request absentee ballots in their names. His goal was to secure additional votes for himself in the Republican primary, at the cost of nearly 300 voters’ right to participate in the Democratic primary.

In 2013, Texas suffered only two lightning fatalities. But it did see Weslaco city commissioner Guadalupe Rivera attempt to secure reelection through illegal means. Rivera initially beat his rival, Letty Lopez, by a scant 16 votes, but Lopez sued alleging fraud. A judge determined that at least 30 illegal ballots had been cast, enough to swing the election. A new election was ordered, and Lopez won. Rivera subsequently pleaded guilty, along with an accomplice, to the charge of “assisting” voters by filling out ballots on their behalf without consulting them, or in a manner contrary to their wishes — in other words, robbing citizens of their right to vote.

The 2016 elections are in the final stretch and were shaken to the core by the latest revelations from FBI Director James Comey on Friday, October 28, 2016 as reported by NBC News on October 30th, “FBI Obtains Warrant for Newly Discovered Emails in Clinton Probe — as Reid Accuses Comey of Hatch Act Violation.” Once again the Clinton scandal is creating turmoil in a presidential election that has gone way beyond “unconventional.” Indeed, Tom Clancy could not have scripted this year’s presidential election and intrigues.

While Comey’s recent remarks regarding the Clinton investigation have been extremely vague, the issue to focus on is how Hillary’s use of a private computer server, private e-mail account and non-secure digital devices to store, send and receive classified materials may have drawn others into her tangled web of deception.

The current focus of the Clinton quagmire is on whether or not the laptop computer shared by Weiner and his estranged wife contains sensitive information. If that laptop had been hacked both Weiner and Abedin could have been vulnerable to blackmail. This was an issue raised by Congressman Louie Gohmert, Texan Republican and former judge in a Fox News Business interview on October 31, 2016 in a segment that was posted under the title, “Rep. Gohmert: Clinton is a potential victim of blackmail.”

Additional individuals may also have been drawn into this web of deception through these e-mails as well. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. The weak links begin with Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and may now include Anthony Weiner and perhaps others. Meanwhile, there is no way to yet determine how many other weak links are “out there” petrified that WikiLeaks or perhaps, a hacker may yet disclose their improper dealings with the Clintons or their foundation.

Could not these additional individuals be subject to blackmail as well?

Let’s take a moment to understand how all of this began.

In the final stretch of the election, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone to war with the FBI.

The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around so often this election that it ought to be retired. But it’s still unprecedented for the nominee of a major political party to go war with the FBI.

But that’s exactly what Hillary and her people have done. Coma patients just waking up now and watching an hour of CNN from their hospital beds would assume that FBI Director James Comey is Hillary’s opponent in this election.

The FBI is under attack by everyone from Obama to CNN. Hillary’s people have circulated a letter attacking Comey. There are currently more media hit pieces lambasting him than targeting Trump. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Clintons or their allies were to start running attack ads against the FBI.

The FBI’s leadership is being warned that the entire left-wing establishment will form a lynch mob if they continue going after Hillary. And the FBI’s credibility is being attacked by the media and the Democrats to preemptively head off the results of the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton.

The covert struggle between FBI agents and Obama’s DOJ people has gone explosively public.

The New York Times has compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Its bizarre headline, “James Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s FBI, Fairly or Not” practically admits up front that it’s spouting nonsense. The Boston Globe has published a column calling for Comey’s resignation. Not to be outdone, Time has an editorial claiming that the scandal is really an attack on all women.

James Carville appeared on MSNBC to remind everyone that he was still alive and insane. He accused Comey of coordinating with House Republicans and the KGB. And you thought the “vast right wing conspiracy” was a stretch.

Countless media stories charge Comey with violating procedure. Do you know what’s a procedural violation? Emailing classified information stored on your bathroom server.

As readers of my columns know, I am a fan of Peter Schweizer, who runs the Government Accountability Institute and is author of the crucially important Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The book is an exhaustively researched account of the Clinton Foundation scheme, and media reporting indicates that it triggered the FBI’s investigation of the Foundation’s pay-to-play scheming.

Mr. Schweizer is the first to admit (maybe I should say, to brag) that he is not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar. He’s a first-rate investigative journalist. In that spirit, I want to rebut a legal error I’ve heard him make in a couple of interviews over the last few days, most recently when interviewed by Rush Limbaugh this afternoon. Apparently making some errant assumptions based on the fact that the FBI director, by statute, has a ten-year term, he has opined that the FBI is an agency independent of the executive branch; therefore, he concludes, the FBI director does not work for, and may not be fired by, the president.

This is incorrect.

In our system, law enforcement is an executive power. The FBI is thus an executive branch agency. Indeed, far from independent, it is a part of the Justice Department; the FBI director is subordinate to the attorney general in the chain-of-command.

Under the Constitution, all executive power is endowed in one official, the president of the United States. Every official who wields power in the executive branch thus wields it at the pleasure of the chief executive. The president may terminate any executive officer, even those who have been confirmed by Congress, for any reason or no reason. The FBI director is no different.

It is true that Congress has given the FBI director a ten-year term, but it is best thought of as a presumptive ten-year limit. There are two explanations for it.

The first is J.Edgar Hoover. After his legendary (and notorious) 43-year tenure, Congress and the Ford White House decided that such awesome power should not be in a single set of hands for so long. In 1976, a law was enacted limiting the director’s term to ten years.

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead and hoping that the election was sooner than later.

Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one.

With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal:

the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure;

Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader;

Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.

Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were mostly about yoga and Chelsea’s wedding – sort of like saying that one can beat 31 trillion-to-one odds of turning $1,000 into a $100,000 cattle-futures profit in no time by merely reading the Wall Street Journal. Until Friday, FBI director James Comey, in Hillary’s eyes, was a sober and judicious public servant who had rightly seen insufficient cause for her indictment. Now she believes that he is a rank Republican politico seeking to rob her of her presidency.

Clinton thought that she had survived Wikileaks, the Project Veritas ambush tapes, the hacked Colin Powell e-mails, the DNC disclosures, and so on – mostly because of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted wounds, some vicious-if-clever Democratic Party operatives, and a series of Democratic-planted IEDs about Trump’s foul mouth that exploded at preplanned and opportune moments.

Yet no one thought discredited deviant Anthony Weiner could much harm Hillary – except of course “conspiratorial” Donald Trump. He warned months ago that Clinton aide Huma Abedin might have been passing on classified materials to her dissolute husband. Because Weiner couldn’t repress his electronic libido with young girls, he ended up on the FBI’s radar – and by extension his smartphones, tablets, computers, and by further extension supposedly his estranged wife’s confidential communications. It was thought that Weiner might have stopped his sexting addiction when he lost his House seat, when he lost his mayor’s race, when he lost his wife, when he lost his jobs – or, at the very least, before he might lose Hillary (who supposedly fixed Abedin up with Weiner) her election.

Hillary’s team dared Comey to put up incriminating e-mails or shut up about investigating Hillary, hoping that the Obama Justice Department might quash any request for court-ordered warrants. But that demand assumed that Weiner is a loyal Clintonista and will put his fealty to Hillary and the Democrats above his own fear of federal prison and its supposed cultural intolerance for supposed predators. For now, the Clinton attack on the FBI might be not only futile but stupid – antagonizing her inquisitor, without the ability to apply pressure to silence him – if Weiner voluntarily surrenders his warrant-less communications to obtain some sort of deal.

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga. CONTINUE AT SITE

A nagging question has been lost amid the tempest over the FBI’s revival of the Clinton e-mails investigation. As everyone knows, the file has been reopened because of a trove of e-mails found on a laptop shared by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. What we don’t know, however, is: Why has the FBI only recently learned about a computer used by Ms. Abedin?

Remember, Abedin is said to have cooperated in the Clinton e-mails investigation and sat for a lengthy interview with FBI agents. The agents asked her about her e-mail practices. Assuming they asked basic questions, as agents are trained to do, they would have methodically itemized the computers and e-mail accounts she used. Yet, the Abedin/Weiner computer, which is said to contain 650,000 e-mails (an unknown number of which are relevant to the Clinton investigation), was not acquired by the bureau in connection with the Clinton investigation. It was seized in an unrelated investigation of Weiner, reportedly involving his alleged “sexting” with a teenage minor.

Why did the FBI agents on the Clinton e-mails investigation fail to acquire and search this computer months earlier? The question becomes more pressing in light of the Washington Examiner’s report that the FBI failed to ask not only Abedin but other Clinton aides to surrender their computers, smartphones, or other communications devices.

Now, there could be a good explanation, at least in connection with some Clinton aides. If, after a reasonably thorough investigation, the FBI had found no indication that potentially classified information was transmitted or stored on a particular device, there’d be no need to seize it. Let’s say X is a Clinton staffer. Let’s also say the FBI finds that X appears only to have used her government e-mail account for official business; that X did not have an account on the clintonemail.com domain; that whenever Clinton or other government officials e-mailed X, they addressed the e-mail to X’s state.gov account; and that X was cooperative when interviewed and convincingly said she never used her private e-mail for government business. Under those circumstances, it would be reasonable not to ask for the surrender of X’s private cellphone or computers.