RUTHFULLY YOURS

Almost a month ago, Fox News reported that the FBI’s investigation of possible national security violations stemming from Hillary Clinton’s private email system had expanded to include a corruption angle, centered on the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the possibility that Foundation donors received favorable government treatment during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The Fox report prompted indignant denials from Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign that there had been any broadening of the probe. Yet, the government is not required to disclose the course of its investigation publicly, much less to its subjects. And now, there are additional indications that the government is indeed scrutinizing the cozy relations the State Department enjoyed during Secretary Hillary Clinton’s tenure with both the Clinton Foundation and a Clinton-connected consulting firm called Teneo.

Last autumn, according to the Washington Post, the State Department’s inspector general (IG) issued subpoenas to the Clinton Foundation. The IG’s office has authority to investigate wrongdoing at the Department, including criminal wrongdoing. Its conclusions may be referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, and may also result in other forms of disciplinary action against government officials found to have committed misconduct. The subpoenas served on the Clinton Foundation reportedly focused on two areas of inquiry: (a) Clinton Foundation projects that may have required federal government approval during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state; and (b) Clinton Foundation records pertaining to the employment of Huma Abedin.

The conservative consensus around Trump has solidified into, “He’s the devil” or “He’s our savior.” Either Trump is going to destroy the establishment and save us all. Or he’s secretly in league with Hillary Clinton to rig the election. There’s very little room for the middle ground here.

But Trump isn’t either of these things. He’s just Trump. And it’s important to understand who he is. Instead of the narratives that the different sides are building around him.

Trump seems exotic in a Republican system dominated by D.C. insiders from northeastern suburbs and filled with southern and western candidates. But local politics in New York is filled with guys who have the same blend of liberal-conservative politics and talk and sound just like him.

Giuliani’s political career really began with him yelling, “He blames it on me! He blames it on you! Bulls__t” at a police rally. The cops then took over City Hall chanting, “No justice, no police.”

Christie’s national rise began with the release of videos in which he berated union members and humiliated questioners. Republicans fell in love, at least until the infamous Obama hug happened. And yet the establishment forgets that some of its key members were begging a guy who has the same personality, attitude and style as Trump to run for president before the last election.

Call it New York values, but some of what Trump’s critics object to is a New York-Jersey-Philly abrasive political style that puts a premium on “telling it like it is” at the expense of civility and sometimes substance. You can catch Bill O’Reilly doing the same thing on FOX News.

It’s disingenuous for the establishment to pretend that Trump is some sort of complete break from civility. It’s not. It’s just New York Values taken to their most obnoxious extreme. If the establishment thought that President Chris “Numbn__s” Christie had enough class, why not Trump?

But the trouble with the common sense tough guy style in urban politics is that it compensates for weakness elsewhere. Giuliani and Christie were very tough in one specific area. In Giuliani’s case that was crime and it was such a major issue for the city that some of his more liberal positions didn’t matter. In national politics, those positions did matter when Giuliani ran for president.

Hillary Clinton is struggling to connect with young women voters, so she has brought in… Madeleine Albright? Enlisting the 78-year-old to chase millennials may seem far-fetched, but it’s a gift to voters and to the GOP. Just as Hillary’s claims of advocacy for women encouraged criticism of her husband’s sexual misadventures, trotting out Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State allows us to revisit how her husband’s presidency all but ignored the brewing Islamic jihad against the U.S.

Hillary Clinton offers her husband’s time in office as a halcyon time of peace and prosperity. The truth is that Bill Clinton, like President Obama, made a cataclysmic choice early on that has cost this country untold amounts of blood and treasure. That choice was to ignore the numerous attacks on Americans by Islamic radicals, a decision which served to embolden the jihadists behind 9/11. Like President Obama, Bill Clinton, distracted by endless scandals, led from behind.

Americans may have forgotten that during the Clinton presidency al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in New York, leaving 6 dead and 1,040 injured. The administration, focused on pushing Hillary’s unpopular healthcare proposal, characterized the attacker as someone who “did something really stupid,” and handed the investigation over to the cops. Intelligence groups, who suspected that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the bombing, were muted.

Did one robotic moment in a single debate really bring down Marco Rubio in New Hampshire, probably finishing him off nationally? Unlikely.

It’s difficult to believe that voters would turn on a candidate over one gaffe — yet, somehow, it can also make perfect sense in this cycle. Either way, let’s stop pretending that 2016 voters are concerned about authenticity. What they’re really asking of politicians is for better acting while delivering canned lines. Because they’re all canned lines.

Nearly every candidate is a talking-point-spewing automaton. What Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz say — and even much of what Donald Trump says — is prefabricated, tested, and constructed to appeal to whatever subsection of the electorate they hope to entice. The most talented candidates can repeat those lines, jokes, and touching anecdotes with the same bogus earnestness every single time. This is their real talent. I mean, even Trump — probably the only top-tier candidate regularly going off script — strings together many of the same absurdities in mind-numbing platitudinous loops, and his fans eat it up.

Still, there’s no question that Rubio failed to deliver on this front last week. And while he’s no more prone to offer calculated responses than is Clinton or Sanders, Rubio let the political world create a caricature. All the usual suspects joined in, because, whether you like him or not, Democrats fear Rubio more than they do any other Republican.

The robot talking point was regurgitated in dozens of articles and a million tweets, and by political cartoonists. Activists, lacking basic self-respect, began following Rubio around in robot outfits. The Washington Post explained what it all meant — “what Marco Rubio’s robotic debate performance reveals.” Well, it probably reveals that we — pundits, bloggers, media, and probably most voters — like to turn candidates into one-dimensional cartoon characters who can be easily mocked, categorized, memed, and dispensed with.

Caricatures are easier to hate, and also easier to support. Trump the brash fighter. Mitt Romney the out-of-touch job killer. Cruz the Machiavellian meanie. Jeb the awkward establishmentarian. Bernie the pure-hearted ideologue. Rubio the robot. You know how it works.

While this line of attack, brought on by his own performance, almost certainly had something to do with his showing in New Hampshire, I’m not fully sold on the debate theory. Whatever you make of Rubio’s positions — and I’m not crazy about plenty of them – he’s an impressive politician. According to CNN, voters broke away from Rubio at the end, but exit polls (and you can take them for what they are) show that while the debate mattered to many voters, Rubio fared only slightly worse than most other Republicans.

Here is another example of a fine journalist using age as criticism….Neither Sanders nor Hillary are “senile”defined as “having or showing the weaknesses or diseases of old age, especially a loss of mental faculties.” Hillary has been corrupt and mendacious all her life and Bernie has been a hard lefty all his life. To attribute their serious shortcomings to their age is wrong and vulgar- akin to Trump’s reference to Caly Fiorina’s looks. rsk

PBS, a venerable leftist institution long since past its prime, hosted two other leftist institutions past their prime, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, for the special Wisconsin edition of the Democratic Party’s newest hit show, Who Wants to Be America’s Top Socialist.

“I believe in government,” Bernie Sanders declared. And that was the theme for the night.

A political party that does not believe in G-d or that 2 + 2 = 4 believes in and passionately loves government. Its perverted love affair with government gave birth to two political hacks who couldn’t manage to mow the lawn without setting it on fire, but who want to run the country and the world.

In an eye-meltingly mustard yellow jacket, the uniform of some alien space armada invading the planet, Hillary Clinton glared balefully into the camera and promised the nation twice as much free stuff in return for their submission to her ruthless rule. Bernie Sanders, who kept coughing as if he might not live through the debate, never mind the election, upped the ante to three times as much free stuff.

The FBI is investigating whether Hillary Clinton’s State Department improperly directed contracts to Clinton Foundation donors, in possible violation of public corruption laws, Fox News is reporting.

Three sources confirmed the previously-unknown investigation angle to Fox reporters Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne.

“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed,” one law enforcement source told Fox.

Examples abound of Clinton’s State Department opening doors for Clinton Foundation donors, as well as to the then-secretary of state’s friends and political allies. (RELATED: Ethics Complaint Says Big Clinton Donors Got State Dept Access)

According to one Fox source, the FBI opened its public corruption probe in April 2015, months before the bureau officially opened its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server to maintain her email account. Investigators seized Clinton’s server from a New Jersey data center in August after two “top secret” emails discovered on the device.

Another Fox source says that approximately 100 special agents have been assigned to the investigation and were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. The purpose of that step is unclear — it could be that FBI officials want to protect classified information or that they want to prevent leaks about the case.

Hillary Clinton Is Now Tied To At Least Four Investigations By Federal Agencies

The State Department’s inspector general last year subpoenaed the Clinton Foundation for documents related to work that required approval from the Hillary Clinton State Department, making it now at least four investigations involving the Democratic presidential candidate being conducted by federal agencies.

According to The Washington Post, the State Department inspector general’s subpoena, which was filed in the fall, also sought records related to longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s concurrent employment in 2012 with the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, and Teneo Holdings, a Clinton-connected consulting firm.

Clinton’s critics have asserted that the overlap between the State Department, her family’s foundation, and Teneo during her tenure created potential conflicts of interest. The book “Clinton Cash,” which was released last year, laid out numerous examples of the Clinton Foundation’s wealthy donors gaining special access to Clinton’s State Department. Other examples have emerged from the release of Clinton’s State Department emails.

No, this has nothing to do with New Hampshire. A former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should withdraw from the race for president of the United States — her email scandal is that serious.

“I think Hillary Clinton, for the good of the country, should step down and let this FBI investigation play out,” Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.) told The Daily Caller. Flynn led the DIA from July 2012 until August 2014. He said anyone who compromised intelligence at this level of classification has no business running for president.

The documents “had to be moved off electronically or removed out of the secure site physically, then it had to be put onto an unclassified email system,” Flynn said. “Someone who does this is completely irresponsible, but totally unaccountable and shows a streak of arrogance to the American public that is unworthy of anyone thinking they can run for President of the United States.”

“This is unbelievable,” Flynn said. “I don’t think anybody should be talking about her being potentially the next President of the United States.”

Flynn was referring to special access programs (SAP) documents, which are at the highest level of classification. Normal classified documents are placed in a storage facility known as a Special Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF). That’s not good enough for SAPs. “Top Secret” clearance is not enough for a government official to see an SAP document, and one SAP clearance does not entitle you to access another SAP program.

Hillary Clinton may be saying publicly that she’s “100% confident the FBI email probe will fizzle,” but with every new leak that comes out, the public can see that the case for her indictment has been strengthened.

In the latest exclusive from Fox News, Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne report that the “top secret” intelligence, recently found on Clinton’s server and deemed too damaging to national security to release, passed through at least a dozen of her underlings’ email accounts.

A U.S. government official close to the FBI investigation told Fox that “the accounts include not only Clinton’s but those of top aides – including Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines – as well as State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and others.”

There is no public evidence they were authorized to receive the intelligence some of which was beyond Top Secret.

A second source not authorized to speak on the record said the number of accounts involved could be as high as 30 and reflects how the intelligence was broadly shared, replied to, and copied to individuals using the unsecured server.

“My contacts with former colleagues and current active duty personnel involved in sensitive programs reveal a universal feeling that the HRC issue is more serious than the general public realizes,” Dan Maguire, a former strategic planner with Africom, and with 46 years combined service, told Fox. “Most opine they would already be behind bars if they had apparently compromised sensitive information as reported.”

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer that with every new leak that comes out, additional pressure is put on the Department of Justice and the White House to indict Hillary.

“Every revelation adds to the weight in the public domain, that she should be indicted,” Goodwin said. “And if she isn’t, this raises the bar on them. It makes it a tougher hill for them to climb if they do not indict her. It must be explained to the public.”