RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Clinton campaign’s recent attacks on Donald Trump for his comments about a beauty queen’s weight problems were months in the making, according to an opposition research report uncovered in emails released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton invoked those comments during the first presidential debate on Sept. 26. Near the end of the showdown, during a sustained riff about the Republican nominee’s past remarks about women, Clinton cited the case of Miss Universe 1996 Alicia Machado.

“And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest,” Clinton said. “He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.”

Trump responded: “Where did you find this?”

The answer is: in a 157-page opposition research file that Clinton’s campaign had been using since at least Dec. 19, 2015, the day research director Tony Carrk emailed it – and research files on Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – to Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta. Podesta’s emails were subsequently hacked and more than 25,000 of them have been released so far by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

In a section on Page 31 titled “Trump Has Devalued And Demeaned Women Repeatedly Throughout His Career,” Trump’s comments to “This Morning” in 1997 are transcribed under the heading “Trump On Miss Universe Pageant Winner.”

“She weighed 118 pounds, or 117 pounds, and she went up to 160 or 170,” Trump said on “This Morning.” “So this is somebody that likes to eat.”

© FoxNews.com On ‘The Kelly File,’ the former Miss Universe says she is sharing her story for the Latino community

Machado is not identified by her last name, and her first name is misspelled “Alisa.” The supposed “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” put-downs do not appear either. However, Trump’s printed comments on Machado in the document seemingly show the Clinton campaign began considering using the episode against the business mogul before the primaries even began.

Her record on defense and foreign policy offers a cautionary tale

After yet another meeting of diplomats failed to resolve the war in Syria, our ever-clueless secretary of state, John Kerry, said on October 15 that diplomacy would continue because of “the urgency of trying to find something that works other than military action.”

As if it were intended to illustrate Kerry’s foolishness, a Russian navy battle group led by the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov sailed for Syria less than a week later to engage its combat aircraft against the U.S.-backed forces trying to topple Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

Sending the Kuznetsov wasn’t a militarily necessity. Other Russian aircraft could have easily been deployed to Syria. But sending the aircraft carrier is a demonstration of Russia’s ability to project power and a reminder to America and its allies that diplomacy cannot succeed unless it is backed by the threat of military force.

Though he may do more harm before he leaves office, President Obama will soon be irrelevant. It’s time to look to the future. As ghastly as that prospect is, unless the most reliable pollsters are badly wrong, that president will be Hillary Clinton.

Her record provides all the evidence we need to derive the bases on which she would decide matters of defense and foreign policy as well as the most likely result. Those factors compel the conclusion that the events of the next four years will prove far worse than we expect.

The relentless ineptitude of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team did not proceed from the same foundation as Mrs. Clinton would on her own. She is campaigning on her claims of experience in making the hardest decisions a president has to make.

There are four key proofs that enable us to determine the manner and means by which Mrs. Clinton will decide foreign policy and defense matters.

A thick fog of impropriety continues to linger around Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal.

Every time you think you must have heard the last of the irregularities in the Clinton e-mails investigation, another shoe drops. So now we learn that the political backers of a longtime Clinton crony and fixer, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, made $675,000 in cash and in-kind contributions to the election campaign of the wife of the FBI official who later ran the investigation of Mrs. Clinton.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the contributions went to the 2015 Virginia state senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, the wife of then-associate-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McAuliffe had recruited Dr. McCabe to run. After her campaign ended unsuccessfully (Dr. McCabe lost to incumbent Republican Dick Black), Andrew McCabe was promoted to deputy director, a role in which he assumed oversight of the Clinton e-mail investigation.

The donations to Dr. McCabe’s campaign included nearly half a million dollars from McAuliffe’s political action committee. The Virginia Democratic party, which McAuliffe substantially controls, also contributed over $200,000 in the form of “mailers.” McAuliffe is reportedly under investigation due to unrelated allegations of campaign-finance violations.

The appearance of impropriety here is disturbing, but it should be put in perspective. The FBI investigation overseen by Deputy Director McCabe uncovered significant evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Mrs. Clinton and her associates — they obviously put together a strong case despite being significantly undermined by the Justice Department. The decision to recommend against prosecution was made by FBI director James Comey, not McCabe. It was highly unusual for the FBI to make a public recommendation about prosecution, and Comey’s was primarily based not the evidence but on his legal analysis of the relevant statutes (which is even more unusual since that is not the FBI’s job).

The ultimate decision, moreover, was made not by the FBI but by the Obama Justice Department. On that score, we now know (a) the president, using an alias, had willfully e-mailed Clinton’s private account, notwithstanding that he later told the public he’d learned about her use of private e-mail from news reports, so any charges brought against Clinton would have implicated him — that was not going to happen; (b) while the investigation was still underway, President Obama endorsed Clinton, and he made public statements indicating her actions did not endanger national security, undermining the case against her; and (c) Obama’s attorney general furtively met with former President Bill Clinton — i.e., the husband of the main subject of the investigation — shortly before announcing (after Comey’s unusual public recommendation) that the case was being closed without charges.

Hillary Clinton’s “treatment of DS [Department of State] agents on her protective detail was so contemptuous that many of them sought reassignment or employment elsewhere,” according to a just-released summary of an FBI interview with a former State Department official. “Prior to CLINTON’s tenure, being an agent on the Secretary of State’s protective detail was seen as an honor and privilege reserved for senior agents. However, by the end of CLINTON’s tenure, it was staffed largely with new agents because it was difficult to find senior agents willing to work for her.”

Clinton’s State Department agents are hardly the first to complain about her bullying.

“She derives pleasure from lording over other people who cannot do anything about it and who are less powerful than she is,” author Ronald Kessler told Newsmax TV’s J. D. Hayworth.

In fact, Clinton’s well-documented history of profane, unhinged outbursts against those who work for her spans decades.

While Clinton’s vulgarity is presented here in relatively family-friendly form, fill in the blanks and imagine the pain that this woman inflicted when she uttered these words.

“I’m not voting for Clinton,” Air Force staff sergeant Eric Bonner posted on Facebook in July.

“It’s because she actually talked to me once. Almost a sentence,” wrote the Air Force K-9 handler. “I got to do a few details involving Distinguished Visitors.”

“One of my last details was for Hillary when she was Secretary of State,” Bonner continued. “I helped with sweeps of her DV quarters and staff vehicles. Her words to me?”

According to Bonner, Clinton told him, “Get that f***ing dog away from me.”

“Then she turns to her security detail and berates them up and down about why that animal was in her quarters,” Bonner added. “For the next 20 minutes, while I sit there waiting to be released, she lays into her detail, slamming the door in their faces when she’s done. The Detail lead walks over, apologizes, and releases me. I apologize to him for getting him in trouble. His words, ‘Happens every day, Brother.’”

“Hillary doesn’t care about anyone but Hillary.”

Hillary Clinton’s health has become a campaign issue, not due to conspiracy theorists but based on troubling videos of her bizarre facial tics, difficulty ascending a set of stairs, lengthy coughing fits, and her collapse after the 9/11 anniversary commemoration in Manhattan. More recently, there is video showing Mrs. Clinton’s eyes not tracking together, crossing and misaligning.

As the focus of the campaign turns to Russian hacking, rigged elections, and sketchy polls, Mrs. Clinton’s health has moved off center stage. Yet it still a legitimate concern. Although she has not stumbled or had a public coughing fit, her nontracking eye movements continue to be apparent. Not to big media, which are far more interested in the latest Trump accuser, a porn star who just happens to be opening an online sex store. Yet her crossed eyes resurfaced most recently at a Cleveland campaign appearance a few days ago. The only thing missing is her campaign blaming the Russians.

What do these abnormal eye movements suggest about her neurologic health? In 2012 Mrs. Clinton fell, suffering a concussion and a brain hemorrhage requiring treatment with Coumadin, a potent blood thinning medication. More than simply a bump on her head, but instead “a terrible concussion that required six months of very serious work to get over” according to her husband Bill Clinton.

More specifically, she suffered a cerebral venous thrombosis, a large blood clot in her transverse venous sinus. These sinuses collect blood draining from the brain and can be injured via trauma or a variety of medical conditions which increase blood clotting tendencies.

As an aside, blood clots are not just a recent problem for Mrs. Clinton. She suffered a blood clot in 1998 when she was first lady, and only in her mid-50s. Typically blood clots at this age signify an underlying clotting disorder, likely a genetic defect in the clotting cascade. This might explain her subsequent problems a decade later. Her blood clot when she was first lady was only recently revealed, consistent with Mrs. Clinton’s penchant for secrecy and lack of transparency.

Late complications of cerebral venous thrombosis include speech impairment, difficulty with body movement, seizures, and altered vision, including double vision. Watching the many videos of Mrs. Clinton suggest that she has suffered all these complications.

Western women need Trump. Feminists need Trump, as distasteful as this might seem to them. Christians need Trump. Jews need Trump. LGBTs need Trump. This is not the time to fret about Trump’s personal weaknesses. It is the time to rely on his strengths and his policies.
I switched on a BBC World News program and found myself listening to a round-table debate among three women and two men. There was only one white man. I know he was white because of his appearance and because, inevitably, he was referred to as such at one point to emphasise his innate bias. I recalled the BBC debates of my youth with people like Malcolm Muggeridge. They were all (‘biased’ and oldish) white men in those days. The standard of debate was far higher and the provincial accents not so evident or jarring. Or, is that my nostalgia showing? Or, is it yet one more symptom of a civilisation in its death throes? Both I would say.

Britain is allowing in some refugee children who have been encamped in Calais. The only trouble, as the white man said, is that some of them look as though they are 25 years old and all are male. I think it was agreed that the border-control people should lift their game without arriving at the obvious conclusion that corruption of one kind or another must be afoot.

A story was told of a lady with two young children who had agreed to foster a refugee child but, instead, had found a hulking young man on her doorstep. Reportedly, she is afraid for her safety and for her children’s safety. Ho-hum! I kid you not, at one point, we were told that it isn’t the fault of male refugees that they treat women badly; it is the fault of their culture. They know no better. No mention of Islam. Ho-hum!

All agreed, as you would expect from the BBC, that Britain had a responsibility to take in refugee children – though, to be fair, the white man did plaintively refer to homeless British children requiring support too. Nothing to see there; let’s move on — and they did, to Donald Trump. He was introduced into the conversation by one of the women as the “orange monster”. What followed was furious agreement that Mr Trump was unspeakable. But that wasn’t the end of it. Sexism is alive and well in the US apparently.

According to another of the women, the fact that Trump would win easily if only men voted and that Hillary Clinton would win easily if only women voted, showed that men were prejudiced against a woman candidate. The objection raised to this line of reasoning was that many women had found themselves voted into high office in the US and elsewhere with the support of men. But the more obvious retort that sexism can cut both ways was not made.

But there I go again forgetting that sexism, and racism too, only runs one way. Women couldn’t possibly be expected to vote for a lecherous man. On the other hand, Mrs Clinton’s persecution of women ill-used by her husband is forgivable. Because she is a woman?

As an older white man, I have a gender-related view of the voting landscape in the US. It is not the spurious and sexist one proffered on the program. Women for many years have been more wedded to the Democratic Party and less to the Republicans than have men. Men, relatively speaking, are more plugged into politics and therefore more likely to be swayed one way or the other by policies than are women, whose political preferences are more stable.

Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has responded to the WikiLeaks publication of his private emails by suggesting they were stolen by the Russians to elect Donald Trump. What he doesn’t like to talk about is the business he’s done with a Kremlin-backed investment firm and the lengths he’s gone to avoid scrutiny of this relationship.

“Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer and the Trump campaign have been urging the media to pay attention to Mr. Podesta’s Russian connection and perhaps they should. The story begins in 2011 when the solar energy startup Joule Unlimited announced that Mr. Podesta had been elected to its board of directors. In a company press release, Joule’s CEO at the time lauded Mr. Podesta’s “extensive experience within the US government and internationally as well.” No one claimed Mr. Podesta was a scientific expert, but the company’s founder expressed the hope that their new associate “can help Joule build the lasting relationships needed for long-term success.”
A former White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, Mr. Podesta at the time was running the Center for American Progress, which supported the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.” Mr. Podesta personally lauded the effort to “build a more constructive relationship” with Russia at a 2009 event hosted by his think tank.

Mr. Podesta certainly seems to have made the effort to build a business relationship. About eight months after Mr. Podesta joined Joule in 2011, an investment fund backed by the Russian government, Rusnano, announced plans to invest about $35 million in the company. Several months later, Joule announced that Rusnano Chairman Anatoly Chubais was joining its board of directors. Around the same time, Mr. Podesta joined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

It’s not illegal to invest alongside a Kremlin-backed investment vehicle tasked with developing and acquiring valuable technology to benefit Russia. Nor, as far as we know, is it illegal to do so while simultaneously serving as an outside adviser to the U.S. secretary of state.

But Mr. Podesta may have been concerned about the attention this association might draw when he went back into government in early 2014 to serve as a counselor to President Obama. That’s when Mr. Podesta declared on his federal financial disclosure form that he had divested himself of his Joule holdings. CONTINUE AT SITE