RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates believes that “the odds are pretty high” that countries like Iran, China, and Russia hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server when she was secretary of State.

Gates made the statement on Hugh Hewitt’s radio talk show on Thursday, where he discussed his new book “A Passion for Leadership,” as well as a host of other issues in the news.

Hewitt naturally wanted to draw out of Gates his impression of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.

“Are you surprised by the news that continues to come out about the former secretary of State’s server and the fact that the intelligence community’s inspector general has said there was a lot of very highly classified information on her server?” he asked.

Hillary Clinton’s political future is caught between an old hippie and the FBI.

Under fire, her collapsing campaign is retreating into paranoia and conspiracy theories. The Intelligence Community Inspector General, an Obama appointee, is being accused of conspiring with Republicans. The rise of Bernie Sanders is being attributed to “dark money” and political enemies by Clintonworld.

Hillary Clinton has a longstanding tendency to turn to a dark conspiratorial mindset when things don’t go her way. She blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. Her close friend’s papers reveal that Hillary thought Bill had been “driven” to the affair by his “political adversaries”. It was easier for Hillary to blame her husband’s misbehavior on Republicans than to deal with reality. And her campaign is showing that her worldview hasn’t changed any since then.

The real story is that Hillary Clinton’s paranoia preemptively trashed her own campaign.

The entire FBI investigation would not exist if Hillary Clinton had just followed the law. Instead she chose to engage in a preemptive cover-up of her emails as preparation for her presidential campaign. The job of Secretary of State had never meant anything to her except as a stepping stone to the White House. She took it to fundraise and build up her resume while maintaining total control over her emails, in violation of the law, while displaying no regard for national security by storing highly classified materials on her own server. But instead of protecting her campaign, the cover-up created its biggest challenge.

The revelation that emails containing beyond top secret intelligence from “special access programs” ended up on her server, which according to a former CIA officer placed the lives of intelligence sources in danger, shows that Hillary’s paranoia not only endangered national security, but even risked lives.

The same thing happened once again with Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton was so determined to avoid a contested primary that she raised obscene amounts of money to intimidate potential rivals. This desperate fundraising strategy instead backfired by creating controversies around some of her donors and alienating the voters that she was raising money to influence.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination
GLENN BECK, DAVID BOAZ, L. BRENT BOZELL III
MONA CHAREN, BEN DOMENECH. CAL THOMAS
THOMAS SOWELL, JOHN PODHORETZ ,KATIE PAVLICH
MICHAEL B. MUKASEY, EDWIN MEESE III,ANDREW C. McCARTHY
YUVAL LEVIN, MARK HELPRIN

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it.

His signature issue is concern over immigration — from Latin America but also, after Paris and San Bernardino, from the Middle East. He has exploited the yawning gap between elite opinion in both parties and the public on the issue, and feasted on the discontent over a government that can’t be bothered to enforce its own laws no matter how many times it says it will (President Obama has dispensed even with the pretense). But even on immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon. A few short years ago, he was criticizing Mitt Romney for having the temerity to propose “self-deportation,” or the entirely reasonable policy of reducing the illegal population through attrition while enforcing the nation’s laws. Now, Trump is a hawk’s hawk.

When Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal erupted last March, fair-minded people might have given her the benefit of the doubt. Distracted and perhaps overeager, the spanking-new secretary of state plowed into her duties and had her staff divert e-mails to her home-based computer server. This would be more convenient, she claimed, and would let her avoid the hassle of schlepping multiple handheld devices. Besides, “there is no classified material” on her server, she said, soothing journalists who covered this matter. “I did not receive nor send anything that was classified,” she reassured the media last July.

Things are now so much worse than they first appeared.

A top Clinton aide rebuffed a senior State Department official who tried to give Clinton standard computing gear. As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has reported, State’s executive secretary, Stephen D. Mull, wrote Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, on August 30, 2011.

“We are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry to replace her personal unit which is malfunctioning,” Mull explained. He thought it was on the fritz, “possibly because of [sic] her personal email server is down.”

Deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin dismissively replied: “Let’s discuss the state blackberry, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

Some of newly revealed emails on Hillary Clinton’s private, unsecured server are so sensitive that senior lawmakers on the oversight committees did not have high enough security clearances to read them, according to sources on Capitol Hill. Fox News reports today that lawmakers had to fulfill additional security requirements in order to read material in her emails described by Mrs. Clinton as “innocuous.”

The emails in question, as Fox News first reported earlier this week, contained intelligence classified at a level beyond “top secret.” Because of this designation, not all the lawmakers on key committees reviewing the case have high enough clearances.

A source with knowledge of the intelligence review told Fox News that senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite having high-level clearances, are among those not authorized to read the intelligence from so-called “special access programs” without taking additional security steps — like signing new non-disclosure agreements.

These programs are highly restricted to protect intelligence community sources and methods.

Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III identified “several dozen” additional classified emails this month — including classified intelligence from “special access programs” (SAP).

While the State Department and intelligence agencies finish picking through messages recovered from the private email server Hillary Clinton used to conduct public business as secretary of state, the contents of the periodic document dumps have become increasingly sensitive. State has been referring any email that appears to contain sensitive information for further consideration by the agency with jurisdiction over the relevant data. Thus the most problematic emails are dribbling out last.

As the number of disclosed classified messages from Mrs. Clinton’s server has climbed above 1,300, her explanations have come to look increasingly improvisational and contrived. Recall that last summer—even after abandoning the claim that she maintained a private email account for convenience and because she was too busy solving the world’s problems to navigate the intricacies of a government account—she insisted that, “I did not send classified information and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know that something is.”

When asked whether she had her server “wiped,” she assumed an air of grandmotherly befuddlement: “What, like with a cloth or something?” she said. “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”

The current news, reported in the Journal and elsewhere, is that her server contained information at the highest level of classification, known as SAP, or Special Access Program. This is a level so high that even the inspector general for the intelligence community who reported the discovery did not initially have clearance to examine it.

Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the US Intelligence Community, has informed Congress that Hillary Clinton had “several dozen emails containing classified information determined by the IC element to be at the confidential, secret, and top secret/sap levels” on that private homebrew server she kept in some guy’s bathroom closet in Colorado. “Sap” stands for “special access program” and is the level above “top secret” – or, in laymen’s terms, super-duper extra-top secret. It’s generally accepted that much of that “sap” material made its way from Hillary’s inbox to hostile intelligence agencies around the world.

Had anybody else treated years’ worth of the most confidential material so recklessly, they would now be in jail awaiting trial. By comparison, General Petraeus shared a tiny amount of “sap” material with just one person – his biographer-cum-mistress. He was prosecuted for breaching exactly the same non-disclosure agreement Hillary signed. As further punishment, it now seems the four-star general is likely to be demoted:

Reducing Petraeus’s rank, most likely to lieutenant general, could mean he’d have to pay back the difference in pension payments and other benefits that he received as a retired four-star general. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over his retirement. According to Pentagon figures, a four-star general with roughly the same years of experience as Petraeus was entitled to receive a yearly pension of nearly $220,000. A three-star officer would receive about $170,000.

I doubt he needs that extra 50 grand. Even so, I wonder how America’s best known general of the post-9/11 era feels at being demoted while Hillary is headed for the ultimate promotion. In his shoes, I’d rip off the three remaining stars, hurl them in Ash Carter’s face, and demote myself to private.

But look at that new poll from New Hampshire: Bernie 60 per cent, Hillary 33 per cent. Will President Sanders be willing to pardon Mrs Clinton? Or will it be left to Goldman Sachs to demote one zero from her “speaking fee”?