RUTHFULLY YOURS

The biggest and most damning takeaway from Hillary Clinton’s July interview with the FBI, at least as it concerns the FBI itself and by extension the rectitude of our government, is, to borrow from Arthur Conan Doyle, the dog that didn’t bark. That is, there is no indication that in the course of the interview, FBI agents once asked the former secretary of state about emails to and from Clinton aides regarding Clinton Foundation business.

Clinton’s lawyers deliberately withheld these emails from the public and forced the FBI to recover them. They clearly demonstrate Clinton’s motive in setting up the server, thereby intentionally endangering the classified material that she and her cohorts knew would inevitably be sent through it. This motive and intent is further demonstrated by Clinton’s obfuscations, lies, and destruction of evidence that followed in the course of over a year.

FBI agents never inquired about any of it during the interview. Since they are presumably well trained and experienced investigators (including a section chief), the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that they were deliberately tasked with not pursuing this obvious line of inquiry, as it would have undermined the narrative that Director James Comey intended to deliver to the nation a few days later – that Hillary should not be prosecuted due to insufficient evidence of intent.

The FBI’s investigatory reports covering Hillary Clinton’s July interview (cynically released just before Labor Day) confirm suppositions of FBI critics that the interview was mostly a farce, and show Hillary mostly restating her standard defenses to complacent and compliant agents who never pushed her or her phalanx of attorneys for more. Indeed, the documents show Hillary accompanied by a gaggle of lawyers that rival O.J.’s (David Kendall, Catherine Turner, Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, and evidently an attorney who shall not be named). Even O.J. did not have a secret lawyer. Getting much of anything done in such an environment would have been a challenge. But then again, the lines of inquiry were almost certainly vetted with Clinton’s lawyers in advance (let’s not forget the “coincidental” meeting on an Arizona tarmac between Bill and Loretta Lynch the week previous), producing a kind of legal kabuki dance designed to get Hillary in and out unscathed.

Although the FBI reports do not contain an actual transcript, a careful reading and a bit of experience clearly demonstrate what happened in that conference room. The FBI agents dutifully presented Hillary with various problematic classified emails and asked her for comment. Hillary’s comments generally took the form of “I don’t recall” or “I trusted State Department professionals.” She claimed ignorance of classification categories and procedures, denying at one point that she even received instruction about them, although she signed a document upon taking office certifying that she had. Not to mention she was the head of an important government agency and ultimately responsible for its security. She blamed her accidental fall in 2012 for some of the memory loss, otherwise just using the standard excuse of the white-collar criminal of ordinary forgetfulness of detail by a busy executive.

At no time is there any indication that the agents pressed her, nor did they seek at any time an admission from her of anything other than ignorance, inadvertence, or negligent conduct. This Hillary supplied in droves, with the connivance of both her attorneys and the agents, as apparently all concerned knew at the time that Directory Comey had already decided that Hillary’s violations of statutory provisions covering negligent conduct were not actionable.

The closest the agents came to seeking an admission of any kind was a single follow-up question on p. 9, part 2 of the Form 302. That occurred after Hillary explained rather incredibly that “she did not pay attention to the ‘level’ of classified information and took all classified information seriously.” An agent asked “whether Clinton believed information should be classified if its unauthorized release would cause damage to national security[,]” and “she responded, ‘yes that is the understanding.'”

The credibility of our government has been marginalized, and increasingly so for decades. The agenda-driven politicization of departments and agencies – government entities that are supposed to serve the people – has facilitated an all-encompassing bureaucracy loyal to elitist politicians over the American people. This corrupt, special interest-serving politicization has exploded in the almost eight-years of the Obama Administration.

In an unbelievable explanation covered by the Washington Examiner, Hillary Clinton testified under sworn deposition to FBI agents that she believed the classified “C” markings on emails recovered from her private emails were there as a way to alphabetically order paragraphs. This information comes from an 11-page summary of the deposition, alongside 58 pages of notes from the FBI investigation into her illegal use of a private email server and email accounts.

“When asked what the parenthetical ‘C’ meant before a paragraph…Clinton stated she did not know and could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order,” the FBI cited from notes created taken during its interview with her.

The interviewing agent’s notes stated that Clinton swore she had a “limited understanding” of the document classification process; of how and why certain documents are deemed classified. They also revealed that Clinton “couldn’t recall” ever being trained on how to handle sensitive material.

The new information also evidenced that Clinton testified to FBI investigators approximately three dozen times that she “couldn’t recall” specific details or events related to her use and establishment of her private email and server.

Clinton’s excuse for several of her lapses in memory was that the events in question occurred directly her head injury, which left the Democrat nominee with a blood clot on the brain and a concussion.

So, let’s take a brief recounting of Hillary Clinton’s political career to see if it is even possible for her to be so naïve about the document classification process and for her not to have any functional knowledge of how to handle classified and sensitive information.

Hillary Clinton used more than a dozen email devices during her time as secretary of state, and a technician took steps to delete an archive of her emails after House lawmakers demanded they be saved, according to documents released Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The newly public information also shows that Mrs. Clinton was warned at the outset of her tenure by former Secretary of State Colin Powell that her work-related email messages could become subject to public release. And in an interview with FBI agents in July, the Democratic presidential candidate offered a defense of her handling of sensitive drone-strike conversations.

The new disclosures were contained in two documents released by the FBI on Friday—a report summarizing the bureau’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement, which concluded with a recommendation that she not be prosecuted, and a summary of her interview. The FBI said it was releasing the material in the interests of transparency.
On Friday, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said, “We are pleased that the FBI has released the materials from Hillary Clinton’s interview, as we had requested.” He added, “While her use of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the Justice Department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case.”

The documents disclosed few dramatic new facts, but they painted a picture of Mrs. Clinton as inattentive to computer security and unsophisticated about the classification system. They also confirmed a Wall Street Journal report in June that the FBI was especially concerned about email exchanges including Mrs. Clinton that concerned possible drone strikes.

Much in the documents is redacted, with information removed for security, privacy or other reasons, leaving significant gaps in the FBI’s information and conclusions.

The report contains the descriptions of an email exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Powell, secretary of state under President George W. Bush, in which Mr. Powell warned her two days after she became secretary that if her use of a BlackBerry became “public,” her emails could become part of the “official record and subject to the law.”

“Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data,” said Mr. Powell. A spokeswoman for Mr. Powell didn’t respond to a request for comment. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left wins many arguments by setting the framework of the debate, often by indignant brushback pitches establishing that certain topics are strictly out of bounds – on pain of banishment from polite media society. Generally, those topics are the ones they know can hurt them. As Nathan J. Robinson illustrates in a striking profile of the Clinton Foundation in Current Affairs, Camp Clinton is striving to set a firm rule for discussions of the “charity” now at center stage in the presidential campaign: Don’t you dare question the good work done by the Foundation. Robinson notes, for example, James Carville’s admonition that “somebody is going to hell” for questioning the Foundation’s fundraising practices in light of all the wonderful things we are to believe it does.

As has reliably been the case over the years, establishment Republicans and other Clinton critics feel compelled to salute Bill and Hill’s heroic dedication to “public service” – their unimpeachable intentions and sincere efforts – before zeroing in on the shenanigans by which the pair has managed to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Recall the praise heaped on the Clintons by the Bush family and Senator John McCain.

Things are no different when it comes to the Clinton Foundation: Public etiquette requires genuflection to the Clintons’ selflessness before one may marvel at how they grab with all four hands.

It is a good strategy. The Clintons’ grubbiness is surely extraordinary, but only by degree – albeit big degree. Putting the State Department or the White House up for sale is huge, but it is not different in principle from what other shady pols do on the smaller scale available to them. Since the public tends to think of politics as an inherently shady business, the Clintons are apt to be given immunity, even for their monumental corruption, if it is stipulated from the start that it is all for the greater good of charity on a grand global scale.

But of course, it’s not. Indeed, it is not charity at all. As acknowledged (in Robinson’s piece) by longtime Clinton confidant Ira Magaziner, head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, “the whole thing is bankable…. It’s a commercial proposition. This is not charity.” Robinson continues:

Instead of aid, the Clinton Foundation spends much of its effort “creating new markets,” finding lucrative investment opportunities in the developing world for Western private capital. These have included everything from “using business methods to streamline fertilizer markets in Africa” to “working with credit card companies to expand the volume of low-cost loans offered to poor inner city residents.” (Note that typically, enticing poor people into taking on large amounts of credit card debt is not among the activities of a charitable foundation.) Bill Clinton is open about the fact that in this work, he is trying to help corporations profit from the developing world. He attempts to “reinvent philanthropy” as a lucrative enterprise for his partners because, in his words, “I think it’s wrong to ask anyone to lose money.”

It’s hard to keep track of all the “commercial propositions” the Foundation is engaged in, because it operates in a highly unusual fashion. Ordinarily, charitable foundations make grants to outside organizations. But only 15% of the Clinton Foundation’s spending is on charitable grants. Instead, it spends most of its money on its in-house programs, whose efficacy can be far more difficult to track. The task is made even more difficult thanks to the Foundation’s ongoing allergy to transparency.

Partly because of that, Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, at one point added the Clinton Foundation to its watch list of problematic charities, and still does not rate the organization because its “atypical business model. . . doesn’t meet our criteria.” The Clinton Health Access Initiative has refused to allow the charity evaluation organization GiveWell to analyze its outcomes, and the Better Business Bureau has listed the Clinton Foundation as failing to meet the basic standards for reporting the effectiveness of its programs. Bill Allison of the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation has gone much further, and said that the organization operates as a “slush fund for the Clintons.”

The FBI-302 report of the interview of Hillary Clinton, along with the other notes of investigation released today, make for mind boggling reading. Most bracing is the fact that Mrs. Clinton had her server wiped clean sometime between March 25 and 31, 2015, only three weeks after the New York Times on March 3 broke the story of the server system’s existence. David notes that, at the same time the Democrats’ Janus-faced presidential nominee was outwardly taking the position that she “want[ed] the public to see my email,” she was having her minions frantically purge her emails behind the scenes. I’d add that this was five months before she feigned ignorance when Fox News’s Ed Henry pressed her on whether she’d “tried to wipe the entire server … so there could be no email – no personal, no official.” Henry finally asked, “Did you wipe the server?”

Famously, Clinton scoffed, “Like with a cloth or something?” But we now know, as the FBI notes recount, she had the server purged with a sophisticated software program, BleachBit, which eventually made it extraordinarily difficult for the FBI to recover her emails, several thousand of which were successfully destroyed. And remember: We’ve just learned that 30 emails related to Benghazi were on the server Clinton purged – emails that she never turned over to the State Department despite claiming repeatedly that she’d surrendered all of her government-related emails. I would thus note that the March 2015 purge right after public revelation of the server’s existence occurred long after Mrs. Clinton was well aware of several official government investigations of the Benghazi massacre – one by the State Department, several by Congress, and a judicial proceeding involving the one defendant who has been indicted for the terrorist attack.

There were also, quite obviously, several relevant Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigations. From what I’ve been able to glean so far, it is not clear from the FBI’s notes (and it was certainly not clear from Director James Comey’s press conference and House testimony) whether any consideration was given to indicting Mrs. Clinton for obstruction of justice and of government investigations – and if not, why not. Among the most eye-popping claims Clinton made to the FBI was that she was unfamiliar with the markings on classified documents. Yes, you read that correctly: one of the highest ranking national security officials in the United States government – an official whose day-to-day responsibilities extensively involved classified information; who had secure facilities installed in her two homes (in addition to her office) so she could review classified information in them; and who acknowledged to the FBI that, as secretary of state, she was designated by the president as “an Original Classification Authority,” meaning she had the power to determine what information should be classified and at what level – had the audacity to tell the interviewing agents that she did not know what the different classification symbols in classified documents signified. For example, when asked about an email chain containing the symbol “(C)” – meaning “confidential,” a designation ubiquitous in classified documents – Clinton claimed not to know what it meant and, according to the notes, “could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.”

“The United States is an exceptional nation,” she said. “I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead.” She asserted that “we recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity” and that “our power comes with a responsibility to lead, humbly, thoughtfully, and with a fierce commitment to our values”:

Because, when America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void. So no matter how hard it gets, no matter how great the challenge, America must lead . . . [O]ur network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional. No other country in the world has alliances like ours. Russia and China have nothing close . . . At our best the United States is the global force for freedom, justice and human dignity.

Hillary Clinton’s global vision reflects the fundamentally flawed post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Beltway Duopoly—neoconservatives and neoliberals—subscribe with equal zeal. Its key tenet is that our unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of a global order in which the U.S. Government treats each and every spot on the globe as an area of vital American interest, fiercely resists any change of regional power balances, and actively promotes regime changes. The resulting military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (and, if Hillary wins, there will be one in Syria) have been validated by the rhetoric of . . . well, she reminded us: “peace and progress,” “freedom and opportunity,” “justice and human dignity,” and by the invocation of American exceptionalism and indispensability (M. Albright). In world affairs America is supposedly motivated by “a fierce commitment to our values,” rather than mere interests.

Trump immigration speech: A president was born on Wednesday

America, we were introduced to our next president on Wednesday night. He’s not a politician. He is one of a kind. He is an American. Welcome President Donald J. Trump.

I’m a cynical Jewish Ivy Leaguer from New York. Nothing gets me too excited. I don’t believe politicians. Nor do I believe in politicians. I don’t fall for theatrical political productions. I don’t believe rhetoric or propaganda. And I’ve never teared up over a political speech in my life.

Until now. . .

Wednesday night I found myself fist-pumping. I found myself chanting along with the crowd “USA, USA, USA.” And as the procession of mothers and fathers came up to the podium to state the name of their child — who was murdered by illegal immigrants — and then say “I’m voting for Trump” or “Trump is our last chance to save America” I found myself tearing up. And the amazing thing is… I couldn’t stop. The tears rolled down my face.