RUTHFULLY YOURS

Arcan Cetin faces five counts of murder after his shooting rampage at a Seattle-area mall last week. But he also turns out to be a non-citizen who has voted three times in state elections since 2014. Liberals claim non-citizen voting fraud is extremely rare, but Cetin’s case should cast light on both just how easy it is to commit and the efforts of federal and state officials to block efforts to uncover it.

Cetin, who is from Turkey, is a legal resident of the United States but not a citizen. In 2014, he registered to vote and voted three times, most recently in May’s presidential primary. Washington State, like all but a handful of states, doesn’t require any proof of citizenship. “Our hands are kind of tied,” Secretary of State Kim Wyman told a Seattle TV station, noting that the state doesn’t allow verification of a person’s citizenship for voting purposes. “But make no mistake,” she adds. “We want to make sure that everybody has confidence that people casting ballots are eligible. This is certainly going to be a topic at the next legislative session.” Local registrars can currently use a database to check the age and residence of people who register to vote, but a person’s claim to be a citizen is based on the honor system.

The problem is that not all non-citizens are honorable — or they may be led astray in being told they can vote. In our 2012 book Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk​, Hans von Spakovsky and I noted numerous cases of non-citizen registration and voting all over the country.

In 2014, a study released by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, estimated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election and that 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Since 80 percent of non-citizens vote Democratic, according to the study, non-citizen participation could have “been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes [in North Carolina in 2008], and congressional elections,” such as the 2008 race in Minnesota in which Al Franken was elected to the U.S. Senate, giving Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote to pass Obamacare.

The authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of non-citizen voting. In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people who were called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period in one of the 94 current U.S. district courts were non-citizens. In 2012, a local NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla., found that at least 100 individuals in one county had been excused from jury duty because they were not citizens but were registered to vote. Many had also voted in some elections.

But federal agencies refuse — in direct violation of federal law — to provide citizenship data to state election officials who attempt to verify citizenship status. Kansas and Arizona have put in place new commonsense proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting, but they have been fought tooth and nail by Obama’s Justice Department. The DOJ is even using strong-arm methods to intervene in a lawsuit challenging the right of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to allow states to require proof of citizenship when registering. Rather than fulfill its duty to represent a federal agency, the DOJ is siding with the League of Women Voters and the NAACP in the case. A federal judge, Richard Leon, has already been rebuked by the DOJ for its “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” refusal to defend a federal agency and its decision instead to side with the plaintiffs suing it.

Take Virginia, where last year Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to forward information to election officials on individuals who were excused from jury duty for not being a citizen. Then James Alcorn, one of McAuliffe’s two Democratic appointees on the Virginia Board of Elections, proposed that rules be changed so that people who left the citizenship question unanswered on the voter-registration form would still be allowed to register. A few years ago, the Fairfax County Electoral Board found close to 300 non-citizens who had illegally registered, about half of whom had also illegally voted in prior elections. No action was taken to prosecute any of those non-citizens.

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.

Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object.

Seriously?

In his testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI director James Comey inveighed against critics who have slimed the Bureau as “weasels” over its handling of the Clinton e-mails investigation. I am not one of those people. After a quarter-century in the trenches with the Bureau as a prosecutor, I am one of those hopeless romantics who love the FBI and harbor real affection for the director himself.

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Jim Comey says he didn’t make his final decision to recommend against prosecution until after Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at the end of the investigation, and that he did not coordinate that decision with his Obama-administration superiors. If he says so, that’s good enough for me. But it doesn’t mean the director made his decision detached from the dismal reality of the situation. And whatever one’s armchair-quarterback view on how he should have handled it, that reality was not of his making.

A professor of law at George Washington University is expressing grave concern over the “bizarre” way in which the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation.

Respected legal scholar Jonathan Turley had previously opined that “FBI Director James Comey was within accepted lines of prosecutorial discretion in declining criminal charges,” even though he believed that charges could have been brought. Now, due to recent revelations that the Department of Justice handed out at least five immunity deals, Turley believes the matter is a “legitimate matter of congressional concern and investigation.”
The Five Clinton Aides Covering for Her Who Were Granted Immunity

Turley writes at his blog, “the news of the immunity deals (and particularly the deal given top ranking Clinton aide Cheryl Mills) was baffling and those deals seriously undermined the ability to bring criminal charges in my view.”

Now, Comey has testified before both the Senate and the House. His answers only magnified concerns over the impact and even the intent of granting immunity to those most at risk of criminal charges.

Before his testimony in the House, Comey spoke in the Senate and stated that he gave immunity to Mills because she refused to turn over her laptop — a highly dubious rationale, as I previously discussed.

First the timeline is now becoming clear and it makes the immunity deal even more bizarre given what the FBI knew [about] Colorado-based tech specialist Paul Combetta and Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and IT specialist Bryan Pagliano.

In July 2014 , then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills was told that Clinton’s emails were being sought.

On July 23, 2014 Combetta got a call from Mills on the server and emails.

On July 24, 2014, Combetta received an email from Clinton IT specialist Pagliano.

On July 24, Combetta then went online to Reddit to solicit help on stripping out “a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived emails.” He revealed that “they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone.”

If the first presidential debate was a boxing match, Hillary dropped her guard and stuck out her chin at least half a dozen times, Donald threw wild haymakers that landed maybe once or twice, and the referee Lester Holt obviously had laid a six-figure bet on Hillary. Ali vs. Frazier it wasn’t.

Whether this debate makes a difference in the election is unknowable. Romney cleaned Obama’s clock during their first debate in 2012, but that mattered less than the leaked “47%” sound bite. Remember, in 2008, from September 5 to 17, McCain and Obama were virtually tied in the polls. After Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, McCain never again led in a poll, and Obama won by seven points. In every election, candidates are vulnerable to the sort of “event” that terrified British PM Harold Nicolson. Right now in 2016 the dice are still rolling.

More interesting to me is how this spectacle illustrates just how debased our political culture has become. First, what we call a “debate” is not a debate. Rather than two people directly confronting and challenging each other, we have a “moderator” choosing the questions and attempting to manage the answers. Holt’s obvious bias for Hillary illustrates the problem of having a moderator drawn from the media, which are clearly in one camp or another and choose questions and interventions consistent with their ideology.

Thus Holt wasted time scourging Trump with the stale “birther” issue, his tax returns, his alleged misogyny, his bankruptcies, stop-and-frisk, and his support for the Iraq war. But nary a question for Hillary on the Clinton Foundation and the evidence for a conflict of interest during her tenure as Secretary of State, nary a one on her documented lies about her email server through which she passed classified information, nary a word on her responsibility for the debacle in Benghazi and the deaths of four Americans. And how about Hillary’s “basket of deplorables,” or her accusation that whites have an “implicit bias” against blacks, or her support for the Iraq war, or her public insult of General David Petraeus when in 2007 she said his true data on the success of the surge in Iraq “required a willing suspension of disbelief”? More telling, Holt asked Trump six follow-up questions, and Hillary not a single one. And he interrupted Trump more than he did Hillary.

The point, however, is not that we need a “good” moderator rather than a bad one. Nor do I think Holt’s bias is why Trump didn’t do as well as he could have. Trump had every opportunity to pound Hillary with the issues Holt ignored, or to brush off Holt’s “gotcha” fishing. The real point is why do we have a moderator at all? There was no moderator in 1858 during the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, the perennial epitome of good political debates. Each candidate decided on the issue to address, posed questions to his opponent, or made a claim about him. Each candidate then responded and “fact-checked” his opponent’s assertions, as Lincoln did in the first debate when he responded to Douglas’ charge that he had conspired to “abolitionize” the Democrat and Whig parties. It was up to the some ten-thousand spectators to adjudicate between which candidate was truthful or which made the better argument, not some “moderator” with a partisan axe to grind.