RUTHFULLY YOURS

Partisans of Hillary Clinton insist the public has too much information about the FBI’s various inquiries into the Democratic presidential nominee and her associates. On its face, that claim seems reasonable. After all, Anthony Weiner is involved.

On Friday we learned, from director James Comey’s letter to Congress, that the FBI is once again investigating Mrs. Clinton’s illicit private email server. Two days later (and also in today’s print edition) The Wall Street Journal published a thorough report by Devlin Barrett revealing that for months the bureau has also been investigating the Clinton Foundation, “to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling.” That probe has met with resistance from Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department.
Late Friday the New York Times broke the news of the Weiner angle. The FBI has been looking into allegations, reported in September by DailyMail.com’s Alana Goodman, that the former congressman “carried on a months-long online sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl” who he knew was a minor. (In a statement to DailyMail.com, Weiner professed his innocence, though only of this particular allegation: “While I have provided the Daily Mail with information showing that I have likely been the subject of a hoax, I have no one to blame but me for putting myself in this position. I am sorry.”)

In 2010 the Times described Weiner as “one of the most eligible bachelors on Capitol Hill.” The occasion was Weiner’s marriage to Huma Abedin, a top aide to the most qualified person for anything ever. Weiner and Abedin, who “was once featured in a Vogue fashion spread,” were wed by Mr. Most Qualified, a k a Bill Clinton.

Abedin, who uses her maiden name (can you blame her?), had an account on Mrs. Clinton’s private server. According to the Times, FBI agents on the Weiner case found emails “pertinent” to the server investigation on a device Weiner and Abedin had shared. The Journal’s Barrett reports the Weiner laptop contained 650,000 emails.

That’s a gross figure, in more ways than one, but “underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state.” Agents couldn’t tell for sure because their warrant covered only the Weiner investigation. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports, they obtained an additional warrant to look for material relevant to the server investigation.

The Post notes that “an announcement from the FBI in early October, when the emails were discovered, might have been less politically damaging for Clinton than one coming less than two weeks before the Nov. 8 election.” That didn’t happen, it appears, because Comey wasn’t briefed on the find until last week.

According to the Journal, early this month “New York-based FBI officials notified Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command. . . . Mr. McCabe then instructed the email investigators to talk to the Weiner investigators and see whether the laptop’s contents could be relevant to the Clinton email probe.” Comey was told only after that determination.

Here are four words this columnist never thought he would type: Hillary Clinton is right.

Mrs. Clinton is right, at least, to this extent: When an FBI director links a presidential candidate to a criminal investigation 11 days out from the election, he owes the American people more than a vague promise to get back to us down the road.

Mrs. Clinton has responded by calling on Mr. Comey to release the emails the bureau has discovered on a home computer used by her aide, Huma Abedin. She demands this only because she is confident it will never happen.
Certainly there exist many practical obstacles to releasing the emails uncovered, including the inadvertent disclosure of classified information. Nevertheless, as unlikely as release may be, the case for more public information has become crucial now that the Justice Department has indicated this Clinton investigation, like the one before it, will go nowhere.

How do we know this? Mr. Comey may speak of going forward. But the objections of Justice suggest that it will again ensure that any investigation will be hindered by a lack of search warrants and subpoenas—and that whatever the FBI may turn up will never be put before a grand jury.

Justice inadvertently gave us a sign of just how important these tools are in a press release earlier this month touting the guilty felony plea by retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright for lying to the FBI in connection with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. In it, Justice boasts about using all the tools at its disposal to get the general, including “subpoenas, search warrants and document requests”—tools the FBI mostly lacked while investigating Mrs. Clinton.

A truly independent press corps might help here if it were not bent on validating Donald Trump’s complaints about a rigged system. In the dominant media narrative, not only is Mr. Comey now derided as “political,” his decision to investigate this newly discovered batch of emails is said to have been forced by “conservative” FBI agents.

Mr. Comey may indeed be in the thick of a huge battle within the bureau. But the main objections from FBI agents and former FBI agents have little to do with electoral politics and everything to do with investigative procedure.

FBI agents are professional investigators. In a case involving a former secretary of state who is now a candidate for president, they would expect their director to be telling his agents to make sure every “i” was dotted and every “t” crossed. And doing the same himself.CONTINUE AT SITE

As the Hillary Clinton/Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner sage unfolds, this morning a variety of unnamed NYPD sources have leaked a fascinating story to various media and social media outlets: the NYPD was investigating Anthony Weiner for sexting a 15 yr old and stumbled on tens of thousands of emails in a folder labeled “life insurance” on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Those emails, as we now know, contain content that is in some way shape or form are related to Hillary Clinton and her FBI investigation. The information was found by the NYPD Special Victims unit, who had a warrant per their involvement in the Weiner case.

Internal NYPD sources indicate that they discovered these files almost a month ago and turned them over to the FBI two weeks ago. These reports coincide with reports over the weekend of the NYPD’s involvement as they have investigated Weiner over the last month. Admittedly it’s speculative but is it difficult to imagine the FBI and DOJ attempted to keep this latest discovery quiet but were pressured to by the NYPD who would or could leak them themselves? Reports from a wide variety of news outlets indicate the DOJ refuses to give the FBI a warrant to review the evidence now in its possession – Comey revealing the presence of such evidence is a likely concession to the NYPD’s refusal to remain quiet.

Presuming NYPD involvement is true, a number of truths are immediately evident:

Hillary may be able to hush the corrupt DOJ and FBI. Hillary cannot hush the men in blue from the NYPD who Hillary has no impact or authority over.
This story will dominate the news cycles between now and November 8th. As sources from inside the NYPD leak out information related to the case, and content of Huma’s emails becomes widely known, Hillary’s criminal involvement will be the only relevant news story. NYPD are fine men who serve their city well but remaining silent in the face of an interesting news stories is not one of their strengths.
The NYPD has a long history of rising to the occasion in times of dire need. Although the circumstances on this occasion would be unique, it certainly would qualify as their most heroic act as the NYPD is quite literally standing up to the Obama and Hillary controlled corrupt FBI and DOJ.
Hillary will throw Huma under the bus effective immediately. Already today Huma is not traveling with the Clinton campaign and you can expect Hillary will continue to divorce herself from Huma, given the NYPD involvement indicates she is no longer in control of the investigation.

How rich of Hillary Clinton to complain now that FBI director James Comey is threatening the democratic process by commenting publicly about a criminal investigation on the eve of an election.

Put aside that Comey did not say a single thing last week that implicates Clinton in a crime. The biggest coup for Clinton in the waning months of the campaign has been Comey’s decision not to prosecute her — a decision outside the responsibilities of the FBI director and publicly announced in a manner that contradicts law-enforcement protocols. There has been nothing more irregular, nothing that put law enforcement more in the service of politics, than that announcement. Yet, far from condemning it, Mrs. Clinton has worn it like a badge of honor since July. Indeed, she has contorted it into a wholesale exoneration, which it most certainly was not.

Just to remind those whose memories seem so conveniently to fail, Comey is the FBI director, not a Justice Department prosecutor, much less the attorney general. The FBI is not supposed to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The FBI is not supposed to decide whether the subject of a criminal investigation gets indicted. The FBI, moreover, is not obligated to make recommendations about prosecution at all; its recommendations, if it chooses to make them, are not binding on the Justice Department; and when it does make recommendations, it does so behind closed doors, not on the public record.

Yet, in the Clinton e-mails investigation, it was Comey who made the decision not to indict Clinton. Comey, furthermore, made the decision in the form of a public recommendation. In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. Comey, therefore, gave Mrs. Clinton a twofer: an unheard-of public proclamation that she should not be indicted by the head of the investigative agency; and a means of taking Lynch off the hook, which allowed the decision against prosecution to be portrayed as a careful weighing of evidence rather than a corrupt deal cooked up in the back of a plane parked on a remote tarmac.

Now, suddenly, Mrs. Clinton is worried about law-enforcement interference in politics. And her voice is joined by such allies as Jamie Gorelick (President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general) and Larry Thompson (Comey’s predecessor as President George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general and an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump). Like Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Gorelick and Mr. Thompson were delighted by Director Comey as long as his departures from orthodoxy were helping Clinton’s candidacy. But now, as they wrote in the Washington Post on Saturday, they are perturbed by the threat Comey purportedly poses to “long-standing and well-established traditions limiting disclosure of ongoing investigations . . . in a way that might be seen as influencing an election.”

The city I live in is sometimes called the biggest little town in the country because everybody seems to know everybody else’s business, but we have nothing on the nation’s capital. After James Comey’s bombshell announcement that thanks to Anthony Wiener’s laptop, the Hillary investigation is back on, who gets drafted by the Clintons to fight back? Jamie Gorelick. Yeah, that Jamie Gorelick, the Clinton’s cover-up artist who left DOJ for the big bucks at Fannie Mae, was involved in everything from the 9/11 hearings to the IRS scandal and was even considered by Obama to run the FBI. (Today, Ms. Gorelick tells us, James Comey is a threat to our very democracy, but just three years ago, her friend was “one of the great lawyers of the Justice Department.”)

Of course, when President Bush came to office he wanted to clear away all the Clinton mess, even appointing a lawyer of immeasurable talent and integrity, he was told, to look into the 2001 Pardongate scandal. A guy by the name of James Comey. It seems he had the goods on Hillary, her brother Hugh, Bill, and his brother Roger. But Mr. Comey went all squishy. If you’re a Republican, don’t expect that kind of treatment, though. Even if you quit and resign your office, then like Nixon, you’d better hope to get a pardon on the way out.

Comey certainly crossed me up earlier this year when I thought the enormous FBI investigation taking place meant he was serious about the Hillary’s latest scandals. In retrospect, it was just to keep from empaneling a grand jury that might get out of control. Comey is best friends with Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel/weasel who spent four years investigating the leak of CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame’s name, even though he knew within days of his appointment Richard Armitage was the leaker and no laws had been broken. No matter, scalps must be taken, so journalists were jailed for months on end and Scooter Libby eventually found guilty of an utterly trivial offense, most likely with false evidence.

Comey and Fitzgerald have an interesting pattern of prosecutorial toughness when it comes to Democrats. If you have no political pull, like Martha Stewart, or are an embarrassment like Rod Blagojevich, they throw the book at you, but the big shots get a pass. Lee Cary’s article in AT nicely explains the extent to which Comey, Fitzgerald and Loretta Lynch were willing to steer prosecutions around then Sen. Obama and nail Tony Resko and Blagojevich. No doubt Obama was grateful, for he even thought to reward Comey with a Supreme Court appointment.

How do you tell a cynical millennial that there is still hope and promise in America? How do you persuade a young person who sees a tattered American dream that there are ways to reinvigorate this country? How do we convince a young American to realize that “if freedom is lost here there is no [other] place to escape to?”

How do you explain to a generation of students who have never learned about socialism and communism that these ideas are inimical to what the Founding Fathers wanted? How do you remind them of the radical idea that “government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people?” And that if we give up this birthright of ours, we have surrendered to the totalitarianism that describes far too much of the world.

How do you assert that America’s best years are not behind us but that the best is yet to be — if, and only if, we begin a return to America’s ideals of freedom and opportunity and not let an overweening government sap away our energies and our dreams?

How do you prove to a generation who receives its news in sound bites and from uninformed entertainers that a separation of powers is critical to maintaining a balance of power? How do you emphasize to them that when a government agency breaks the law and we do not rise up to demand a rectification, we, the American people, have foolishly chosen a “downward path?”

Time is truly short, but, it behooves us to be reminded of the words of Ronald Reagan when on October 27, 1964 he wrote “A Time for Choosing”

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, ‘The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.’

The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.

Consider that Hillary has hinted that she likes the confiscation of guns as she cites the Australian example and ignores the Second Amendment.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, ‘What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.’ But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

Back in Precambrian times — that’s to say, in June 2016 — I noted that, while the primaries were over, there was nothing to suggest that the multifarious oddities of this exceedingly odd election season had run their course. On the contrary, there were plenty of reasons to believe that the oddities would continue. “There is a powerful tendency,” I noted in that column,

to believe that, whatever local disruptions we face in the course of life’s vicissitudes, “normality” will soon reassert itself and the status quo ante will reinstall itself in the driver’s seat … Whether you embrace or repudiate Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton doesn’t signify in the context of my contention: the oddity of this campaign season is not over. We are likely to see not just local disturbances like the sudden sacking of campaign managers, but spectacular changes, reversals, upsets, and dei ex machina.

I’d like to take a moment to thank FBI Director James Comey for illustrating my thesis.

This election has been hard on pundits espousing the conventional wisdom. They might turn out to be correct—anything not self-contradictory might turn out to be the case—but mere possibility is cheap.

What about the odds, the probabilities? To be frank, I suspect the polls are more aspirational than accurate. What does it mean that a “respected” poll by The Washington Post and ABC reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton’s supposed 12-point lead on Donald Trump had suddenly narrowed to 2 points? That poll, by the way, was conducted before the revelation that thousands of new State Department emails were discovered on a device used by Anthony Weiner when he wasn’t sexting 15-year-olds.

The Clinton campaign has been thrown into hysterical (by which I do not mean “funny”) disarray by the revelations, which undermine The Narrative in about 38 different ways. (Remember that Clinton’s chief aide, Huma Abedin, swore under oath that she had given up all devices containing State Department emails.) CONTINUE AT SITE