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POLITICS

Donald ‘D-Minus’ Trump: Headed to a Courtroom Near You By Deroy Murdock

Donald “D-minus” Trump won big on Tuesday evening, but lost big on Tuesday morning. Before scoring victories in seven primaries, Trump suffered a legal setback that could explode in his face later this election year.

Donald “D-minus” Trump won big on Tuesday evening, but lost big on Tuesday morning. Before scoring victories in seven primaries, Trump suffered a legal setback that could explode in his face later this election year.

A four-judge Appellate Court panel in Albany rejected Trump’s motion to dismiss Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s (D., N.Y.) $40 million fraud lawsuit on behalf of some 5,000 students who spent up to $35,000 at Trump University. They learned little, and now ask — as Billy Joel once did — “Is that all you get for your money?” The judges unanimously cleared this case for trial. Thus, the potential Republican presidential nominee soon could address twelve Manhattan jurors under oath, rather than 12,000 Michigan voters under blue skies.

“I’ve won most of the lawsuits,” Trump told CNN February 25. “I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don’t want to do it out of principle.”

However, the Washington Post gave Trump’s denial three out of four Pinocchios for being “mostly false.” Trump has won specific court rulings. Regardless, he faces three suits that denounce him for highly shady business practices.

New York State’s case accuses Trump of “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct in connection with the operation of Trump University.”

Specifically, Schneiderman states that Trump & Co. “used the name ‘Trump University’ even though they lacked the charter necessary under New York law to call themselves a University.” State officials told them in 2005 that they were breaking the law. Nonetheless, “Trump University did not change its name until May 2010 and never received a license to operate in the state. As a result, many students believed they were attending a University, when they were not.”

FBI Investigating whether Hillary Shared Secret Passwords with Aides for Access to Classified Material By Debra Heine

In another exclusive for Fox News, intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports that the FBI is investigating whether Hillary Clinton shared computer passwords with her closest aides to allow sensitive intelligence to “jump the gap” between the classified systems and Clinton’s unsecured homebrew server. The government forbids sending or storing classified information outside secure, government-controlled channels, and has prosecuted employees for violations.

An intelligence source familiar with the Clinton probe told Fox News that “if [Clinton] was allowing other people to use her passwords, that is a big problem.” The sharing of passwords is strictly prohibited in the Foreign Service Officers Manual.

Such passwords are required to access each State Department network. This includes the network for highly classified intelligence — known as SCI or Sensitive Compartmented Information — and the unclassified system, known as SBU or Sensitive But Unclassified, according to former State Department employees.

According to Herridge, there are several potential ways classified information could have gotten onto Clinton’s server:

Reading intelligence reports or briefings, and then summarizing the findings in emails sent on Clinton’s unsecured personal server.
Accessing the classified intelligence computer network, and then lifting sections by typing them verbatim into a device such as an iPad or BlackBerry.
Taking pictures of a computer screen to capture the intelligence.

Trump Gives Another Hint About Abandoning Supporters on All Things Immigration By Stephen Kruiser

Last week, I pointed out that Donald Trump is a bit too comfortable with standard Democrat talking points regarding illegal immigration.

In Thursday’s debate, he tip-toed to the left a little more.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Thursday he is softening his stance on visas for highly-skilled workers.

“I’m changing. We need highly-skilled people in this country,” Trump said during the Fox News Republican debate in Detroit. “If we can’t do it, we will get them in.”

Trump’s stance toward awarding H1-B visas is different from the one he takes on his campaign website, which argues that more visas for highly-skilled foreigners would “decimate American workers.”

“One of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges … as soon as they’re finished, they get shoved out. They want to stay in this country,” Trump said at the debate. “They want to stay here desperately. They’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country.”

Trump said he was now in favor of the H1B-visa program – despite what his website still says.

“So you are abandoning the position on your website?” Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly asked.

“I’m changing it and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country,” Trump said.

It Ain’t Even Close to Over By Joe Herring

With Super Tuesday receding in the rearview mirror, it is prudent to turn our attention to the road ahead. This isn’t an ordinary election year – at least not in the fashion we have come to know in the post-WWII era – where primaries and caucuses easily winnow the field of candidates without upending the process itself.

This view, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. For a far longer period, the nominating convention was much more consequential than the state events that preceded it. Yes, primaries and caucuses were held, but the real decisions were made behind the scenes, at the convention, where alliances were struck and deals were made to coalesce support behind the strongest (or best connected) candidate. Ever heard the phrase “smoky backroom deals”?

The states choose the candidate to whom their delegates (delegates to the nominating convention) will be pledged for the first floor vote. Typically, by the time of the convention, a candidate has amassed enough delegates to win the nomination on the first vote. However, if no single candidate has enough pledged delegates to claim the nomination on the first vote, all delegates are released from their obligations and can vote however they choose in each subsequent vote.

Here’s where the deals are made. Here’s where second- and third-place candidates jockey for position (cabinet posts, ambassadorships, etc.) in return for urging their pledged delegates to support someone else.

It is this moment where the frontrunner is naked and exposed, vulnerable in the extreme, and it is this moment where a popular but politically naïve or poorly organized candidate can see his presumed nomination dissipate like so much smoke.

Trump a ‘Unifier’? Not Quite His favorable rating even within the Republican Party keeps dropping. Kimberley Strassel

The Donald Trump that showed up at his Super Tuesday news conference was a different Donald Trump than we’ve seen before. We’ve witnessed angry Trump, flustered Trump, (at least once) gracious Trump, and exuberant Trump. This was presidential Trump. Kind of.

The presidential bit was Mr. Trump’s pivot toward the general election, and his promise that he is a “unifier” who is creating “a much bigger party” that can’t be “beat.” He then reverted to true Trump style to warn that if Republican power players succeeded in taking him out, they’d also take out his new loyalists, meaning the party would “lose everything” in November.

Both claims are worthy of some analysis. GOP turnout, no question, is epic. More than 8.5 million people turned out for Republican races on Super Tuesday, a stunning 81% higher than the 4.7 million in 2012. (The other side, by contrast, saw turnout fall 32% from 2008, the last contested Democratic primary.) Vermont aside, every single Republican primary and caucus has drawn record numbers.

Let’s stipulate that Mr. Trump is behind some of this. Both surveys and anecdotal evidence show that he is pulling new people to the polls. Yet let’s also stipulate that so, too, are the other Republican candidates. The reality is that a lot of Americans are rebelling against the Obama presidency. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich are inspiring their own droves. CONTINUE AT SITE

The HillaryFiles Continue With More Israel Trash Talking From Blumenthal : Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Blumenthal repeatedly told Clinton the U.S. must punish Israel for “wrongdoings.” Clinton’s response? ‘Pls print.’

On May 31, 2010, there was an historic confrontation between the Israeli Navy and six ships sailing from Turkey, seeking to blow up the internationally-recognized legal naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Starting the very morning of the incident, Sidney Blumenthal began emailing Hillary Clinton, haranguing her to treat this grave tragedy as a whip with which to lash Israel.

Blumenthal also sent screeds written by his unhinged son Max, who insisted that the entire incident was orchestrated in advance by a bloodthirsty Israel as a means to blow up the peace process.

But this confrontation, known as the Mavi Marmara raid – after the lead Turkish ship – or as the Gaza Flotilla built to a crescendo when the IHH-terrorists aboard the ship ignored repeated warnings to change course and steer towards the Israeli coastal town of Ashdod, just north of Gaza. When the ships refused to heed the directions, elite IDF naval commandos were lowered from helicopters by ropes, onto the ship’s deck.

Immunity for Witness in Hillary E-Mails Caper — So Is There a Grand Jury? We don’t know for sure, but signs suggest that the answer is probably yes. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The Washington Post reports that Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department staffer who may have set up and maintained Hillary Clinton’s “homebrew” server, has been “granted immunity” by the Justice Department. The Post describes its source as a single, senior law-enforcement official — though I assume the paper corroborated its source before running with the story (which Politico elaborates on).

This important development raises a question we have considered before: Is there an active grand-jury investigation of Mrs. Clinton and her aides over their mishandling of classified information? The question is critical because (with exceptions not relevant to this discussion) the convening of a grand jury is a necessary precondition to the filing of a felony indictment. And the answer to the question is . . . probably, though not necessarily.

The question arises because the Clinton camp continues to downplay what is actually a criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton and other suspects. The Hillary campaign insists it is a mere “security inquiry,” focused only on the physical homebrew server. The FBI, of course, is in the criminal-investigation business. And as I pointed out when the New York Times reported that Mrs. Clinton was not the “subject” of an investigation, it makes no sense to talk about “subjects” (or “targets”) of an investigation unless there is a grand jury — the grand-jury investigation is what a “subject” is the subject of.

RELATED: Hillary’s E-Mail Recklessness Compromised Our National Security

Expressly relying on his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, Pagliano previously refused to testify before the House Benghazi Committee. Giving a witness immunity extinguishes that privilege, enabling the government to compel the witness’s testimony. There are two forms of witness immunity that commonly arise in federal criminal investigations: (1) the proffer agreement, which prosecutors and defense lawyers commonly call a “queen for a day” letter; and (2) statutory immunity.

Log-Cabin Candidates By Victor Davis Hanson…….

Which presidential candidate was born the poorest? Whose log cabin birthplace was the most ramshackle?

Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth well over $100 million, largely due to years of leveraging their government service to pull in astronomical speaking and consulting fees from Wall Street, foreign investors, and big banks. Yet Hillary Clinton, a graduate of elite Wellesley College and Yale Law School, often adopts a poor man’s drawl and Southern slang before particular audiences. She has claimed that “all my grandparents” were immigrants. Not true. Only one grandfather immigrated to the United States, from Britain. Hillary herself grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago, in a conservative upper-class household.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, governor of Ohio, a former investment banker and regional director of Lehman Brothers, cannot finish a speech without mentioning that his father was a mail carrier.

Ivy League graduate Ted Cruz, whose wife is a Goldman Sachs manager in Texas, reminds audiences that his father was a poor Cuban immigrant.

Lawyer and career politician Marco Rubio constantly references his Cuban-immigrant parents. His mother for a time was a hotel maid, his father a longtime bartender.

Retired world-renowned surgeon Ben Carson often recalls his impoverished inner-city childhood.

Bernie Sanders points to his outer-borough Brooklyn upbringing.

Barack Obama in 2008 perhaps best played the same weepy log-cabin violin.

Obama was brought up by upper-middle-class grandparents, and his grandmother was a successful Bank of Hawaii vice president. They sent Obama to Hawaii’s most exclusive prep school. Yet as an author and candidate, Obama talked mostly about his Kenyan-immigrant father, who abandoned his family and returned to Africa.

No matter how successful, how wealthy, or how well-educated, every presidential candidate poses — sometimes accurately, sometimes through exaggeration — as a modern version of salt-of-the-earth Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter born in a log cabin. Apparently, populist America always wants a man-of-the-people candidate who can relate to everyday folks — and who doesn’t think he or she is any better than the rest of us.

Ben Sasse Explains His #NeverTrump Stand By Elaina Plott

‘I don’t understand what motivates Chris Christie.”

That’s one of Senator Ben Sasse’s softer statements during our conversation Wednesday morning. We’re talking about the New Jersey governor’s recent endorsement of Donald Trump. After multiple media appearances this week following his declaration that he would not vote for Trump under any circumstance, Sasse can lambast the Republican front-runner on autopilot. But when reflecting on Trump’s latest string of high-profile surrogates, he struggles for the right words.

“I think — I mean — maybe you have to know Christie well to understand him, to speculate about it, and I don’t know him,” Sasse says. “But it’s pretty hard to read the transcripts of stuff he’s said in the past about Trump, put them up against what he says now, and say, ‘Oh, yeah. That is definitely a mature, adult consistency.’”

Beginning with a series of tweets in January questioning Trump for boasting about his marital infidelities, his support for single-payer healthcare, and his Second Amendment views, Sasse emerged early on as a vocal anti-Trump force. Now, through an open letter via Facebook, he’s pledging to oppose Trump no matter what, and is urging conservatives to unite around a third-party alternative should he clinch the nomination.

That Sasse — the wonky, conservative freshman from Nebraska — has joined the so-called #NeverTrump movement is not all that striking. What is striking is that he’s the only sitting senator to have done so, his voice echoing in a chamber empty of Republicans who will openly stand beside him. Sasse has grappled with that fact in recent days, especially as Christie and colleagues such as Alabama senator Jeff Sessions — Sasse says he still “like[s]” and “respect[s]” Sessions — join the Trump train. But in an arena where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan refuse to breathe the front-runner’s name, Sasse is launching his own offensive.

What’s a Conservative to Do? By Andrew Klavan

“More thoughtful G.O.P. voices argue that risking a bad Supreme Court nominee from Trump is better than guaranteeing a bad one from Hillary. And also: a Trump beholden to conservative voters is better than a Hillary at odds with them. But it won’t wash. American politics is a binary game, I know. Normally, I’m for the Buckley rule: go for the most conservative candidate you can get elected. But a dishonest big-government bully with a tendency to urge his crowds to violence exists nowhere on the spectrum of conservatism as I understand it.”

“As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm,” read the headline on the post-Super Tuesday analysis in the New York Times, a former newspaper. The article was typical of the Times’ modern work: a house of facts with a family of lies living inside. The gloating lede — “Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart” — was fair enough. It was even hard to argue with the accompanying front-page photo. It nastily captured Trump wearing a particularly supercilious smirk — and okay, fine; though I doubt any equally representative photos of a cackling, screeching Hillary Clinton have made the paper on any page.

But throughout the rest of the piece was scattered the usual Timestuff: dishonest leftist assertions casually tossed off as fact. The Republicans’ unwillingness to hold hearings on a replacement for Justice Scalia is a tactical error because it has energized the leftist base. (Ha.) The Obama economy is improving and unemployment is low. (That’s not what the Democrat candidates say.) Obama has a “nearly 50 percent” approval rating. (It’s closer to 46 percent, but more importantly he has plunged the nation into divisive rancor and racial violence we haven’t seen in years.)

But the worst was this:

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller.

If Professor Richardson thinks Donald Trump is a hard-line conservative, she should no more be writing about Republicans than I should be writing about quantum mechanics. Because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

What is splitting the Republican Party in two is the very fact that Trump is not a conservative. He favors government health care. He favors disastrous protectionism. He favors less freedom of speech in the form of new libel laws making it easier for him to sue those who criticize him. He sends friendly signals to the haters of blacks and Jews. Plus he’s a foul-mouthed thug who treats women like dirt — which may be fine for the Clintons, but is unacceptable behavior in any conservative circle I’ve ever been in.