RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s bad enough that FBI Director James Comey agreed to pass out immunity deals like candy to material witnesses and potential targets of his investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal private e-mail server.

But now we learn that some of them were immunized despite lying to Comey’s investigators.

In the latest bombshell from Congress’ probe into what’s looking more and more like an FBI whitewash (or coverup) of criminal behavior by the Democratic nominee and her aides, the Denver-based tech who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails from Clinton’s server allegedly lied to FBI agents after he got an immunity deal.
That’s normally a felony. As a federal prosecutor, Comey tossed Martha Stewart in jail for it and helped convict Scooter Libby for it as well. Yet the key Clinton witness still maintained his protection from criminal prosecution.

With Comey’s blessing, Obama prosecutors cut the deal with the e-mail administrator, Paul Combetta, in 2015 in exchange for his full cooperation and honest testimony. But the House Judiciary Committee revealed Wednesday that he falsely told agents in a Feb. 18 interview that he had no knowledge that e-mails he bleached from the server were under congressional orders to be preserved as evidence.

In a second interview on May 3, Combetta admitted he, in fact, did know. But he still refused to reveal what he discussed with Clinton’s former aides and lawyer during a 2014 conference call about deleting the e-mails.

Instead of asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to revoke his immunity deal and squeezing him, Comey let him go because he was a “low-level guy,” he testified at the House hearing. It’s yet another action by Comey that has left former prosecutors shaking their heads.

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sparred repeatedly with Republican lawmakers Wednesday as they questioned the handling of the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State.

The FBI announced in July that investigators found extremely careless conduct in Mrs. Clinton’s handling of sensitive government information under the email arrangement, but also concluded that no reasonable prosecutor would have brought a case under the circumstances. Conservatives have been highly critical of the FBI for not pursuing the case more aggressively and for not recommending prosecution of Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president.

That criticism has intensified in recent days when it was revealed that the Justice Department granted partial immunity to some witnesses, including Clinton aide and attorney Cheryl Mills, to get access to data or testimony.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, James Comey bristled at times when lawmakers suggested his agency gave Mrs. Clinton or her people a pass on conduct that would have merited charges for low-level government employees.

“We are not on anybody’s side. This was done exactly the way you would want it to be done,’’ Mr. Comey said. Partial and limited grants of immunity were given, he said, to get a laptop from a lawyer or testimony from a technology worker who otherwise refused to talk to investigators.

“You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels,’’ said Mr. Comey, who served as deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush.

FBI Director James Comey appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. The big question is why—if he believes Hillary Clinton committed no prosecutable offense—he has given immunity deals to no fewer than five Clinton associates. A Journal editorial cites Beth Wilkinson, who represents Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, saying the immunity deals were designed to protect her clients against “classification” disputes. “This is an admission that both women knew their unsecure laptops had been holding sensitive information for more than a year,” adds the editorial board.
Donald Trump is right about the “stop and frisk” police tactic and on Monday night he was “unfairly second-guessed by a moderator who didn’t give the viewing public all the facts,” notes a separate editorial. NBC’s Lester Holt and Mrs. Clinton called the tactic unconstitutional. “They are wrong,” adds former prosecutor and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani . “Stop and frisk is constitutional and the law of the land,” based on an 8-1 decision of the Supreme Court, Terry v. Ohio .

Speaking of Monday night’s debate, Jason Riley saw it as a clear Clinton victory and so did William Galston. But Holman Jenkins says the event helped clarify that this election “will resolve into very flawed outsider vs. very flawed insider—and will be decided by the American people in that vein.”

This column has long argued that the journalistic genre known as “fact checking” is a corruption of journalism. “The ‘fact check’ is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news,” we wrote in 2008. “The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment.”

Eight years later, we’d amend that slightly. “Fact checking” doesn’t pretend to be straight news exactly, but something more authoritative. The conceit of the “fact checker” is that he has some sort of heightened level of objectivity qualifying him to render verdicts in matters of public controversy.

Lately the “fact checkers” have been waging a campaign to portray Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war, contrary to his assertions that he was an opponent. In Monday’s debate, Hillary Clinton pleaded for their help: “I hope the fact checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard. Donald supported the invasion of Iraq.” Moderator Lester Holt obliged, basing a question to Trump on the premise that the matter was settled: “You supported the war in Iraq before the invasion.”

Trump somewhat inarticulately rebutted the claim: “The record shows that I’m right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very lightly, the first time anybody’s asked me that, I said, very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows.”

What Trump actually said on Sept. 11, 2002, when Stern asked him if he favored an invasion, was: “Yeah, I guess so.” That was an affirmative statement, but a highly equivocal one. Is it fair or accurate to characterize it as sufficient to establish that Trump was a “supporter”? In our opinion, no. He might well have had second thoughts immediately after getting off the air with Stern.

He certainly had second thoughts in the ensuing months, and he came to oppose the invasion long before Mrs. Clinton did. Even FactCheck.org was unable to come up with any other Trump statement supportive of the decision to go to war. By December 2003, according to the site’s timeline, Trump was observing (in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto) that “a lot of people” were “questioning the whole concept of going in, in the first place.” Five years later, according to PolitiFact.com, Trump was calling for President Bush’s impeachment because, as he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “he got us into the war with lies.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The pundit class seems to agree that Hillary Clinton, if she did not actually ‘win’ the first presidential debate, did better than Trump, while online polls suggest the wider public gave the nod to her rival. What’s certain is that the Republican has plenty of ammunition at hand for their next two encounters.
I cannot deny that I was disappointed at the end of the first presidential debate. Trump ought to have put her away with so many issues opened up for which there are answers aplenty. He went after her in the first half and drove her to the edge of the field but then let her back.

So let me think about this a bit more. First, the totally one-sided “moderating” really irritated. The issues that will matter, looking forward for the next four years, do not include where Obama was born or what Donald Trump shows on his tax form. These are not policy matters and do not much matter. What counts are the things that were not touched upon — Benghazi, her public email server which has allowed every foreign intelligence agency to read every email she sent, the open border that is not being sealed and would not be by Clinton, and her inveterate lying about everything large and small. These were not brought into the mix by the moderator.

Second, I think Trump is conscious of the Romney experience. Mitt Romney won the first debate, then didn’t win the election. If there is anything that Trump has shown, it is that he gets his timing right. I thought he let Clinton off the hook in a number of places which he ought to have driven an armoured column through, but didn’t. I don’t know if it was deliberate but, on purpose or not, he will be back for the second and third events. What did Hillary learn from this? Nothing that I think can help her, while Trump learned a lot.

Third, the Trump I saw was not the Trump I believe he can be. The Trump others saw for the first time was, however, someone who does not scare the horses and had as presidential a look about him as one could wish. That Trump has won every one of the online polls which asked who won the debate says something about the common expectation which he more than seems to have filled.

Fourth, Hillary’s desire to raise taxes on “the rich” and increase the minimum wage are massive disasters that would ruin the working lives of many, especially those at the bottom. Trump, on the other hand, wants to lower taxes and remove regulations on business. Hillary panders to the ignorant while Trump has a more sophisticated view of how a capitalist system works. It is not a zero-sum game in the way it is discussed by Clinton. Adding to that, his aim to re-negotiate the various trade deals, and have other nations contribute to the cost of their defence by the United States. These are the kinds of changes that really can make the American economy succeed. Nothing that Hillary says (or has ever done), makes you think she has much of an idea how things work, other than via various forms of patronage and corruption.

In all, I wish it had been more of a win for Trump. But on that very day the polls suggested the Electoral College for the first time rolled in his favour. He has until the start of November to build on what he has achieved, and there is no reason to think he cannot do what needs to be done. And there is always the possibility that the people who are voting understand that they are not selecting a debating team but the person who will lead their nation through one of the most perilous times in its history.

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with “systemic racism.” Race “determines” how people are “treated in the criminal justice system,” she said. Blacks are “more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated” for “doing the same thing.” Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton also complained that “too many young African-American and Latino men end . . . up in jail for non-violent offenses.” In fact, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for violent felonies. The enforcement of low-level public order offenses in New York City during the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg actually lowered New York State’s prison population by intervening in criminal behavior early, before it ripened into a serious felony. Even as misdemeanor arrests increased in the city, felony arrests and felony incarcerations dropped. The number of jail inmates and convicts under parole and probation supervision in New York City dropped as well. Hillary Clinton may think that low-level public-order enforcement (otherwise known as “broken windows” policing) is racist, but law-abiding residents of high-crime communities beg the police to enforce public-order laws because they know that out of street disorder erupts gun violence and other forms of predation.

A potentially explosive nugget from the FBI’s Friday document dump of investigatory notes from the Clinton email probe has been all but ignored by the media. And that is the revelation that Hillary Clinton deleted 1,000 work-related emails between herself and General David Petaeus from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

Via the Washington Examiner:

In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”

The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.

Hillary has long maintained that the emails her lawyers unilaterally deleted were personal emails pertaining to “yoga routines, family vacations” and other matters that had nothing to do with government. She repeated the same nonsense to Congress while under oath. In August of 2015, she signed a statement to a federal judge declaring “under penalty of perjury” that she turned over all work-related emails.

Now we find out that 1,000 emails between Clinton and General Petraeus were not turned over. This should be a bigger story. Petraeus started out as the leader of U.S. Central Command and then became the director of the CIA during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State, so not only were those emails obviously work related, they very likely were highly classified. The implications here are staggering.

But it gets worse. CONTINUE AT SITE