RUTHFULLY YOURS

What was the legal rationale under which Hillary Clinton quite intentionally shared classified information with her lawyers, including David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Heather Samuelson?

As I outlined in last weekend’s column, we know that Clinton’s e-mails were replete with classified information. According to the FBI, the classified e-mails included intelligence graded at the most closely guarded level: eight top-secret e-mails, and seven designated as “special access program” (SAP) information. (While FBI director James Comey’s presentation understandably left this vague, the likelihood is that seven of the eight top-secret e-mails are SAP.) Under President Bill Clinton’s 1995 executive order, top-secret intelligence is information the mishandling of which “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” The SAP designation is added when the unauthorized disclosure of intelligence could compromise critical intelligence-gathering methods or imperil the lives of intelligence sources.

That is why access to this information is so tightly restricted, and its unauthorized disclosure is routinely prosecuted.

With that as our backdrop, let’s get two things straight.

First, there is no lawyer exception to the federal criminal law that prohibits the transmission of classified information to unauthorized persons. When the government gives an official a security clearance, that does not mean any lawyer whom the official retains derivatively has one, too. The laws that make it a felony to transmit classified information to a person not authorized to have it apply whether the official transmits such information to the technician who services her private e-mail server or to her lawyers.

Second, merely having a security clearance — even a top-secret security clearance — does not make a person an authorized recipient of all classified information. Dissemination of a great deal of government intelligence, particularly if it is designated as SAP, is restricted to those officials who have been read into the program because they have a government-certified need to know the information in order to perform their duties.

RELATED: Why Hillary Clinton’s E-mail Scandal ‘Lawyers’ Are So Problematic

To take a prominent recent example, Paula Broadwell, General David Petraeus’s mistress, had a security clearance. This fact, however, was unavailing to Petraeus when he was prosecuted for disclosing his highly classified journals to her. Regardless of Broadwell’s holding of a security clearance, the transmission of the information to her was not authorized: She had not been read into the intelligence programs alluded to in the journals and did not have a certified need to know the information.

Well, on what basis did Clinton share top-secret, SAP information with her many lawyers?

It has been reported that Clinton’s principal defense lawyer, David Kendall, has a security clearance and that his firm, Williams and Connolly, has approved facilities for storing classified information, at least at some level of classification. If we assume (as I do) that these things are true, it would still have been illegal for Clinton to transmit top-secret, SAP intelligence to Kendall, and for that information to be stored at the firm.

Democrat Hillary Clinton personally authorized illegal dirty tricks operations against Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, according to top Democrats appearing in undercover video.

In the third Hillary-related video released by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas Action Fund this past Sunday (Oct. 23), Clinton is directly implicated in a scheme to use Donald Duck to mock Trump and troll his supporters at Trump campaign rallies.

Among Disney cartoon characters Donald Duck was a natural choice. After all, his name used to appear regularly on voter registration documents when Bill and Hillary Clinton’s favorite community organizing group, the now-defunct ACORN, hired hobos and felons to go on voter-registration drives.

Earlier this year Democrats in Donald Duck costumes started appearing at Trump events across America. Costumed individuals would walk around carrying signs. One said, “Trump ducks releasing his tax return.”

This cutesy publicity stunt isn’t necessarily the problem, though. The problem is that Hillary Clinton ordered it and apparently broke the law by coordinating with a tax-exempt nonprofit group.

Prominent in the video is political organizer Robert Creamer who is very high up in the Democratic Party’s hierarchy. He has reportedly visited the Obama White House 342 times, including 47 meetings with Obama personally.

One of the visits took place in Obama’s personal living quarters.

“It’s a very big deal that Creamer visited the president’s residence in the White House,” a former senior White House employee told FrontPage in an interview. “White House employees can work there for years and never visit the residence.”

Donald Trump is going to win on November 8th and the moment when this election turned from seeming defeat to certain victory will be the least expected and one of the most derisively attacked moments of his campaign. During the third debate when Trump said on being asked if he would accept the election results, “I will look at it at the time” the election was his. The uproar on both sides of the political spectrum has been an avalanche of criticism; this was Trump at his worst, the dooming moment of a quixotic and egomaniacal campaign. Or was it?

Decisiveness and boldness don’t always result in a victory on the field of battle but indecisiveness and hesitation, in the moment of crisis, most assuredly will result in inglorious defeat. Trump has been called a lot of things, probably the most flattering among, even his allies, is that he is a good “entertainer.” For political acumen, he might be given a 2, and that would be the score given by his friends. But too many have all missed something that Trump as seen since the beginning.

Trump is reading something different, a mood and frustration in this country that is not just confined to some 32%. The country is heading in the wrong direction, we on the right know that, but in fact, almost 70% of Americans overall sense that. And that is not just an indictment of the Obama years; it is an indictment of the entire bipartisan political class.

This election is not being run for the pundits, the media, the conservative gadflies and hangers on, the consultants and wise thinkers who tut-tut continually on television about how Trump, “just can’t do it this way,” he must pivot and be “presidential” and discuss nothing but the issues.

One radio pundit said that Trump obscured his otherwise solid speech on Obamacare by mentioning the “rigged” election. She went on to say that the national media only cover the segment on the rigged election and not the “substantive” part of the speech on Obamacare. For being smart pundits, they sure have one hell of a huge blindside. First of all, the main stream media would never exclusively cover a part of a speech that rips into Obamacare, it would never happen. The speech would be completely ignored, so therefore Trump gets zero coverage. His base gets a policy speech; the rest of the country gets darkness. Instead, CNN and the rest report on the rigged part and give Trump prime coverage. They think this makes Trump look and sounds like a fool and loon. But they aren’t the audience and Trump is not looking for approval from the D.C. to New York elites.

The middle of the country, already restive and suspicions of anything and everything that has to do with Washington D.C., hears Trump railing against the corrupt system and how we need to “clean house.” What is so arrogantly dismissed by the chattering elite class as bar room “unsophisticated” rhetoric, is hitting the voters across the country like a breath of fresh air and a lot of “you’re damn right, Trump!” exhortations.

Do Americans really want this hellacious, nihilistic harridan laughing at them from the Oval Office?

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as Negan, the “super” villain of Season 7 of The Walking Dead, has nothing over Hillary Clinton in terms of foul language. In fact, Clinton has a nonstop sewer of a mouth that puts Negan’s to shame. All the censors could permit Morgan to say on screen and repeat ad nauseam is the four letter term for feces.

Clinton has had no censor to control her mouth rage. In public appearances, she poses as a calm, clean-cut, well-bred, grandmotherly hostess about to serve you tea and nothing but the truth. But backstage, and in venues where cameras are not rolling, she is a harpy dedicated to befouling the minds of everyone she comes into contact with, which includes her campaign staff, her Foundation clients and donors, the Secret Service, and doubtless her husband, Bill, and daughter Chelsea. She makes “biker chicks” look like polished graduates of finishing school. She is about as “feminine” as a pig in a pantsuit.

A person, regardless of his gender, who uses that kind of language as an automatic, default means of expression has a festering ball of noxious grunge for a soul. Clinton has exhibited that soul many, many times, in public and off-camera.

Many Americans are justifiably worried about how our country can be brought together after this most divisive of elections in years.

Those who think that Hillary Clinton can do it are living in dreamland. The continued WikiLeaks revelations—and they are probably just getting started—coupled with the ongoing investigations on many fronts, lies multiplying on decades of lies, Obama himself implicated, will wound Mrs. Clinton, her husband, and their putative foundation through her entire administration and weaken her both at home and abroad to such a degree that her ability to govern will barely exist. It will be tragic for our country and the world.

Everyone honest knows Trump is right in one regard—she is a crook, a crook who got away with it.

But Trump, if he wins, will create aftershocks reverberating way beyond his enemies on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Beverly Hills. We may see riots, strikes and urban discontent unlike anything we have seen in many years.

In order to govern in this parlous situation, Trump has to break one of his campaign pledges immediately. He must pardon Hillary Clinton, not “lock her up”—or at the very least, don’t initiate new punitive actions against her—satisfying as that chant has been to his loyalists and much as she may deserve it.

Did President Obama mislead the public about what he knew about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server? That sounds possible based on the latest batch of WikiLeaks released Tuesday.

In March 2015 Mr. Obama said in an interview that he found out about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server “the same time everybody else learned it, through the news reports.” But we now know that answer alarmed Mrs. Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills, who emailed adviser John Podesta the same day: “We need to clean this up—he has emails from her—they do not say state.gov.”

So the President emailed with his Secretary of State over an address that wasn’t on the official government network. Hmmm.

“The President did not suggest he hadn’t traded emails with her,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday in an attempt to explain the seeming contradiction. “Of course the President had possession of Secretary Clinton’s email address but he did not have any knowledge of where her server was located or what sort of arrangements had been made to store her email.”

We suppose a President wouldn’t pay close attention to the email addresses of his cabinet officers, though that lack of state.gov sure was a red flag. The fact that he said he didn’t know about the server may also have protected him from an FBI interview. In any case, the Cheryl Mills email is more evidence of the ethical messes that attend the Clinton entourage, as well as the perpetual need to “clean this up” without coming clean to the American people.

ObamaCare has suddenly been injected back into the 2016 election debate, on the news of the law’s 25%-plus average premium increase for 2017. Even Donald Trump is talking about it. With only two weeks to go, this is a moment for voters to hold accountable the Democrats who imposed this debacle on the country over voter objections.

Next year’s enormous price increases are merely the latest expression of ObamaCare’s underlying problems, and the dysfunction is undermining the health security of Americans who lack employer coverage. A wave of major insurers have quit the exchanges, and those that are left have raised deductibles and copays and restricted choices of doctors and hospitals. The public is witnessing—and the unlucky are experiencing—the collapse of one progressive promise after another.

At every stage of the ObamaCare saga, liberals said not to worry. Sure, the law was unpopular when Democrats rammed it through Congress on a partisan vote in 2009-10, but voters would learn to love it once the subsidies started rolling. That didn’t happen, and in 2014 President Obama tried to buck up Democrats by saying that “five years from now” people will look back on the law as “a monumental achievement.” Two years later it’s worse.

Nothing could shake the liberal faith in their supposed landmark: Not the Healthcare.gov website fiasco of 2013, or the millions of individual health plans that were cancelled despite President Obama’s promise about keeping them. The left kept the faith as the entitlement subtracted from economic growth, hurt incomes and killed jobs. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber called the critics stupid, and Mr. Obama denigrates anyone who disagrees with him as illegitimate or politically motivated.

Now reality is confirming what the critics predicted. ObamaCare’s regulatory mix—benefit mandates, requiring insurers to sell coverage to all comers, and narrow ratings bands that limit how much premiums can vary by health status—was tried by several states in the 1980s and ’90s. Every one saw the same results that are now unspooling nationally: high and rising costs, low and declining enrollment, and less insurer and provider competition.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to solve these predictable disruptions with subsidies and a mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty. But most people don’t think ObamaCare plans provide value for the money, especially if they are non-subsidized. CONTINUE AT SITE

There was panic in Camp Clinton when President Obama falsely told the public he had not known about then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail until he heard about it “through news reports.”

In reality, Obama and Clinton exchanged at least 18 e-mails through Clinton’s private account and homebrew server system. And we now know, based on investigative reports released by the FBI, that Obama used a pseudonym in at least some of his e-mails with Clinton. Moreover, as I noted in a column ten days ago, top advisers to Obama and Clinton flagged the Obama–Clinton e-mails problem before Obama issued his false denial of knowledge.

Asked by Bill Plante of CBS News in a March 7, 2015, interview when he learned about Clinton’s private e-mail system, the president responded, “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

This assertion spun the Clinton campaign up, according to the latest WikiLeaks disclosure of e-mails hacked from the account of John Podesta. A longtime Clinton aide, Podesta was Obama’s top White House adviser until transitioning to the Clinton presidential campaign, which he chairs, in February 2016.

At 6:15 p.m. on March 7, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin e-mailed Jennifer Palmieri and several other Clinton campaign staffers, alerting them: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.”