RUTHFULLY YOURS

The people, not the prosecutors, should decide whether Hillary broke the law.

That is the real takeaway from FBI director James Comey’s decision not to refer Hillary Clinton and her aides to the Justice Department for prosecution. According to Comey, Clinton was “extremely careless” by diverting classified information through a home-brewed computer network that deliberately avoided the official system of the State Department — even though the FBI found that Clinton had sent 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains contained classified information, that she had not turned over all relevant e-mails, that she had used her private e-mail system while visiting our adversaries, and that her system had probably been hacked by them.

But Comey found that no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges because the FBI could find no “clearly intentional or willful mishandling of classified information or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way to support an inference of intentional misconduct or indications of disloyalty to the United States or an obstruction of justice.” This makes no sense because the law at issue, Section 793(f) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, does not require such a high level of intent, but only “gross negligence.” It also makes no sense of the facts, as they are known: Why, after all, create a private e-mail system other than to evade the secure, classified system? We agree with Andy McCarthy’s excellent dissection of the interpretation of Section 793(f) and why the case against Hillary is strong.

Comey’s decision also makes no sense as a matter of past prosecutorial practice. John Deutch, director of the CIA under Bill Clinton, was prosecuted for keeping classified material on unclassified laptops. Clinton national-security adviser Sandy Berger was prosecuted for removing classified documents from the National Archives. And of course David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing classified information with his girlfriend and biographer. And we should not forget the witch hunt for the leaker of Valerie Plame’s covert identity by independent counsel Pat Fitzgerald, which Comey ultimately oversaw. Comey allowed Fitzgerald to bring charges against Scooter Libby, even though Fitzgerald knew that the leaker was another official.

Hence our takeaway: All of them should have gotten out of their prosecutions by running for president, because that is the only significant difference between Clinton’s case and theirs. In fact, the Clinton case exposed far more of U.S. operations to far more dangerous readers, since our global rivals, who have shown no reluctance to hack U.S. government systems, would have easily broken into her system and read the communications of our top diplomatic officials.

The opportunities for corruption – insider trading of the worst kind – were obvious and deeply disturbing when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and her son-in-law went into a very specific kind of investing. And the fact that ne’er-do-well husband of Chelsea and father of two grandkids Mark Mezvinsky ended up botching his hedge fund and losing his investors’ money does not prove innocence.

In a long article at Foxnews.com, Peter Byrne lays out the tangled web of influence behind the big financial stakes swirling around Hillary’s actions as secretary of state in 2012.

Mezvinsky, who in earlier years had abandoned work and his wife to go be a ski bum for a number of months, returned to Wall Street and set up a hedge fund that was a kind of satellite operation for Goldman Sachs, the key player on Wall Street; supplier of many top executives to the Treasury Department; and, of course, mega-donor and speech honorarium payer to the Clintons.

In 2012, Mezvinski, the husband of Chelsea Clinton, created a $325 million basket of offshore funds under the Eaglevale Partners banner through a special arrangement with investment bank Goldman Sachs. The funds have lost tens of millions of dollars predicting that bailouts of the Greek banking system would pump up the value of the country’s distressed bonds. One fund, exclusively dedicated to Greek debt, suffered near-total losses.

Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in 2013 to run for president. But newly released emails from 2012 show that she and Clinton Foundation consultant, Sidney Blumenthal, shared classified information about how German leadership viewed the prospects for a Greek bailout. Clinton also shared “protected” State Department information about Greek bonds with her husband at the same time that her son-in-law aimed his hedge fund at Greece.

That America’s top diplomat kept a sharp eye on intelligence assessing the chances of a bailout of the Greek central bank is not a problem. However, sharing such sensitive information with friends and family would have been highly improper. Federal regulations prohibit the use of nonpublic information to further private interests or the interests of others. The mere perception of a conflict of interest is unacceptable.

Why isn’t Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame?

So he gambled. So what? There’s no code of ethics for athletic prowess. There are plenty of baseball players who’ve done far worse — racists, druggies, sex abusers, fathers who abandon their children. And on the other side of the coin, many players who were stellar enough to make it to Cooperstown couldn’t hold a candle to Charlie Hustle.

Yet almost 30 years after the Hall’s doors were slammed shut on the all-time major-league leader in base hits, Rose is still banned from baseball because he bet on games. Why? After all, gambling is legal in many places and generally considered a harmless vice even where it is outlawed. In the greater scheme of things, it is not in the same league as much of the thuggery despite which pro athletes are routinely given second chances, third chances, and chances ad infinitum.

Rose, however, remains disqualified. And rightly so.

In the narrow world of baseball, his offense is unpardonable. The place of the game in our history, culture, and consciousness depends on its being perceived as on the up-and-up. Professional baseball was nearly destroyed in 1919 by a conspiracy to fix the World Series — the famed “Black Sox” scandal dramatized in Eight Men Out. The cautionary lesson for the Powers That Be was stark: The public’s willingness to buy tickets and hot dogs and jerseys and caps and bobblehead dolls (to say nothing of the beer and Viagra sales that drive networks to plunk down billions for broadcast rights) hinges on its confidence that the fix is not in. The integrity of the game is why people live and die with every pitch, why they accept the final score with joy or mourning — not with the eye-rolling that attaches to such scripted performance art as professional wrestling.

I couldn’t help but think of Rose’s ban-for-life when news broke about the totally “spontaneous” meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former president Bill Clinton.

The latter, it so happens, is not just married to Hillary Clinton, the subject of the former’s most significant criminal investigation; he is quite possibly a subject in his own right — and, at the very least, a key witness. Meantime, the attorney general is the ultimate maker of what will be the Justice Department’s epic decision whether to indict Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the nation’s highest office — the Obama administration having turned a deaf ear to Republican calls for a so-called special prosecutor.

Baseball’s seemingly draconian ban on Rose sprang to mind when I read the pained but forgiving tweet by Democratic media-plant David Axelrod. He took the AG and former president “at their word” that there had been no discussion of the FBI’s Hillary probe during what we are to believe was an unplanned meeting — just one of those chance encounters between two of the most tightly guarded officials of the world’s only superpower, whose Praetorian phalanxes leave nothing to chance.

Hillary Clinton is currently the subject of the highest-profile national-security investigation in recent memory. She is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. She is also the wife of a former president (a Democrat). She is also a former member of the (Democratic) presidential cabinet whose attorney general, Loretta Lynch (a Democrat), is conducting the investigation and will determine whether to prosecute.

Someone who doesn’t know any better might wonder about a conflict — or conflicts — of interest.

Now it emerges that on Monday evening Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch spent a half-hour chatting aboard Lynch’s private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Rest assured, though: “There was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body,” Lynch told reporters afterward. She and the former president mainly discussed Clinton’s “grandchildren,” their travels, and “golf.”

If it was not already clear, it most certainly is now: It’s not simply that our highest officials are above the law. It’s that they know they are, and they can’t even be bothered to hide it.

For more than a year, we’ve known that Hillary Clinton broke the law. The Federal Records Act explicitly requires “the head of each Federal agency” — including the secretary of state — to preserve any “records,” including e-mails, related to the agency’s essential operations; and federal criminal law punishes as a felony anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys” an official government record.” Furthermore, at least 2,000 of the e-mails on Clinton’s private server contained classified, or even “top secret,” information — in direct contradiction of her assurances, and the law. Finally, it became public knowledge in October that Clinton forwarded the real name of a confidential CIA source over her unsecured private server; shortly after, the State Department refused to release three-dozen pages of e-mails on the grounds that the intelligence contained in them could potentially damage national security.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, Loretta Lynch is almost certainly not going to prosecute the former secretary of state. The Democrats’ hold on power is at stake. Failure to prosecute would be a grievous blow to the rule of law, but it seems that Democratic higher-ups don’t much care.

Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Affairs Department website contained a passage extolling jihad: “The Muslims are required to raise the banner of Jihad in order to make the Word of Allah supreme in this world…” (As published by The Middle East Media Research Institute) The Saudi government and some of its influential radical Islamic citizens and groups are pursuing the export of jihad in two ways. The first is through what has been referred to as “civilization jihad.” Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars in funding Sunni mosques, madrasas, and Sunni cultural centers all over the world, which spread the Saudis’ radical Islamic Wahhabi ideology. However, Saudi Arabia’s jihad also includes the support of terrorism. A cable released by WikiLeaks under then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s name stated: “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

The Muslim World League is an organization with ties to jihadist terrorist groups, including Hamas and al Qaeda. The Muslim World League was founded by members of the Saudi government. Abdullah Omar Naseef exemplifies the connection between the Saudi government and this terrorist-supporting organization. He served as Secretary-General of the Muslim World League from 1983 to 1993. He also served as Vice-President of the Kingdom’s Shura Council. In addition, he founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which, according to former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy, seeks to “grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West,” and to “infiltrate Sharia principles in our law, our institutions, and our public policy.”

The Muslim World League escaped being placed on the list of terror groups sanctioned by the United States shortly after the 9/11 attack, reportedly due to concern by President George W. Bush’s administration about embarrassing the Saudi government. Nearly thirteen years later, the Saudi government is still getting a free pass. The American people have still been denied access to the portion of the 9/11 Commission report relating to any Saudi Arabian government ties to the 9/11 hijackers.

Into this morass steps Huma Abedin, the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and a person likely to have significant influence in a Hillary Clinton White House. Huma Abedin has had murky associations in the past with the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which not only is a radical Islamist group in its own right but, as Breitbart has reported, was “located in the offices of Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League.”

Huma grew up in Saudi Arabia, where she was exposed to the Wahhabi ideology during her formative years. The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, has been an Abedin family affair. Huma herself served as the assistant editor of the institute’s journal for a dozen years until she joined Hillary’s State Department. Abdul lah Omar Naseef was on the board of advisers of the journal while Huma was its assistant editor.