RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earlier this month, CounterJihad.com broke the story that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was instrumental in cutting a special deal with the Saudi government to reverse post-9/11 restrictions on Saudi visas, triggering an unprecedented explosion in Saudi students entering the US. CJ has since learned that the seeds of this major change in immigration policy – one with serious national security implications – were planted during a 2010 visit by Clinton to a Saudi college founded by her top aide’s radical Muslim mother – a college that turns out to have direct ties to terrorists.

Clinton’s then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedinarranged the trip to the radical Saudi school, overruling concerns by diplomatic security, in what was yet another example of Abedin, a self-described “devout Muslim” whose family has direct ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, playing an outsize role in influencing US policy when it comes to the Middle East and Muslim empowerment.

The policy reversal appears to have had its roots in a speech Clinton gave at the Dar al-Hekma girls college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the behest of Abedin, whose mother, Saleha Abedin, helped found the school and currently serves as its dean. Abedin also runs the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which seeks to boost Muslim immigration rates in the the U.S. and other Western countries, while also propagating Sharia law in those nations.

“You know that after 9/11, the United States closed its borders to students from around the world, and the number of Saudi students studying in our country fell dramatically,” Clinton lamented in her talk before the elder Abedin and her students. “Well, I am very pleased that we are now back to the levels that we had before 9/11.”

In 2033, if we’re all still alive. We’ll find out what Hillary was emailing.

I bet you’re as shocked as I am that our nation’s greatest living national security threat continued living up to her reputation. But that she did.

Hillary Clinton continued sending classified information even after leaving the State Department, The Post has exclusively learned.

On May 28, 2013, months after stepping down as secretary of state, Clinton sent an email to a group of diplomats and top aides about the “123 Deal” with the United Arab Emirates.

But the email, which was obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of Information Act request, was heavily redacted upon its release by the State Department because it contains classified information.

The markings on the email state it will be declassified on May 28, 2033, and that information in the note is being redacted because it contains “information regarding foreign governors” and because it contains “Foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources.”

The email from Clinton was sent from the email account — hrod17@clintonemail.com — associated with her private email server.

Which means that the odds are good that the sort of people who shouldn’t have access to it probably already do without waiting until 2033.

The “123 Deal” was a 2009 agreement between the United Arab Emirates and the US on materials and technological sharing for nuclear energy production.

Yes, Hillary was emailing classified nuclear information in between all those yoga classes.

America’s immigration policies must promote “the well-being of the American people,” not the interests of the open-borders lobby, America-hating Islamists, and those who violate the nation’s laws, Donald Trump declared last night.

America cannot continue to be the dumping ground for all the world’s problems, was what the Republican candidate for president implied in his address in Phoenix, Ariz., last night.

The truth is, the central issue is not the needs of the 11 million illegal immigrants or however many there may be … but whatever the number, that’s never really been the central issue. It will never be a central issue. It doesn’t matter from that standpoint. Anyone who tells you that the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally has simply spent too much time in Washington.

The speech, which was met with loud applause, was a ringing, patriotic affirmation of conservative values, particularly the rule of law which has become all but a dead letter in the Obama era. Instead of backpedaling and watering down his stance on the illegal immigration crisis as pundits had expected, he refined it and put flesh on proposals that had until now been overly abstract. (A full transcript is available here.)

Trump made the case that immigration has to be rational and make America better, not worse, a radical idea in today’s political and cultural climate.

The “fundamental problem” with the immigration status quo “is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists and powerful, powerful politicians.” The current system “does not serve you, the American people.”

Is Donald Trump’s presidential nomination the vanguard of a new political movement in the Republican Party or an accident of circumstance in this odd election year? The answer won’t be clear at least until November, but the evidence in recent GOP primaries suggests it may be the latter.

That message came through Tuesday with the thumping primary victories by Senators Marco Rubio in Florida and John McCain in Arizona. Mr. Rubio received more than 70% of the vote in a multicandidate field that included businessman Carlos Beruff, who campaigned as a Trump clone on trade and immigration. He spent $8 million of his own money but didn’t get a fifth of the vote.

Mr. McCain defied predictions of a close primary in Arizona by whipping former state senator Kelli Ward by double digits. Ms. Ward was backed by Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund operator who financed Ted Cruz. Ms. Ward ran hard against immigration and tried to portray the five-term Senator, who turned 80 years old Monday, as a tainted fixture of Washington.

The impact of immigration is especially intriguing in these primaries. Messrs. Rubio and McCain were members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” Senators who negotiated the 2013 immigration reform. That bill passed the Senate but never made it to the House floor amid a conservative panic. Their opponents tried to make those Senate votes disqualifying, but GOP primary voters seem to have put immigration well down the list of priorities.

These races follow the defeat of businessman Paul Nehlen, another Trumpian, who received less than 16% against House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin in early August. Mr. Nehlen received lots of out-of-state money and publicity from the Trump network, especially Breitbart.com.

As Ian reports, it has now come to light that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy about 30 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi massacre. They were recovered by the FBI, notwithstanding the use by Mrs. “Like With a Cloth or Something” of an advanced software program – “BleachBit” – in a willful effort to erase the contents of her servers so thoroughly that no one would be able to recover her emails (many of which were government records, which it is a felony to horde and destroy).

Obviously, these emails were kept from the congressional committees that investigated the Benghazi massacre. Mrs. Clinton was also clearly trying to shield them from discovery by defense lawyers in the prosecution of the lone terrorist the Obama administration has thus far charged (in connection with an attack that involved scores of jihadists whom Obama promised to “bring to justice”).

The depth of Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct regarding the unlawful email system and the obstruction of investigations into a terrorist attack in which four Americans were killed is breathtaking – as is the media’s indifference to it. As I’ve repeatedly argued, Clinton ought to be impeached. How much more contempt for Congress does she need to exhibit before some dim memory of self-respect moves lawmakers to take some action?

Nearly as reprehensible, however, is the Obama administration at large. Evidently, it has just today gotten around to telling a United States court that these 30 emails have never been disclosed, even though they have been sought for years, the Justice Department has known the FBI had them for months, and the State Department, too, has to have known they were in the possession of the administration as it litigated Freedom of Information Act claims yet said nothing.

Just as astounding: In making their grudging disclosure today, administration lawyers claimed that they needed another month (until the end of September) to review the emails so that classified information could be redacted before they are disclosed.

Mind you: Mrs. Clinton told us there were no government-business related emails on her servers and certainly no classified information. It turned out there were tens of thousands of government-related emails, with thousands containing classified information. Clinton lawlessly withheld these emails for years, and the executive branch has known about them for months. Indeed, the FBI director told Congress and the public that the FBI went through a painstaking process with intelligence agencies to determine which of the recovered emails had classified information in them. And yet, despite all that, the State Department has the audacity to tell a federal judge that it needs another 30 days to review less than three dozen emails?

Seriously?

When I was a federal prosecutor, neither I nor any of the government lawyers I worked with would have had the nerve to look a federal judge in the eye and make such a mind-blowing request. We’d have been too worried about what we’d say when the judge inevitably asked, “Why am I just hearing about this now?” – and ordered us to produce affidavits from every government official potentially involved in the delay while all these investigations and FOIA requests regarding Benghazi were underway.

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.

In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda. The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.