RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax “schemes” in the Caribbean. That is a worthy endeavor, given the loss of billions of dollars in U.S. tax revenue.

Yet her husband, Bill Clinton, reportedly made $10 million as an advisor and an occasional partner in the Yucaipa Global Partnership, a fund registered in the Cayman Islands.

Is Ms. Clinton’s implicit argument that she knows offshore tax dodging is unethical because her family has benefited from it? Does she plan to return millions of dollars of her family’s offshore-generated income?

Clinton is calling for “huge campaign-finance reform,” apparently to end the excessive and often pernicious role of big money in politics. But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, raised more than the $112 million that Clinton collected in 2015 for her primary campaign.

In 2013, Clinton earned nearly $1.6 million in speaking fees from Wall Street banks. She raked in $675,000 from Goldman Sachs, and $225,000 apiece from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Wealth Management. Did that profiteering finally make Clinton sour on Wall Street’s pay-for-play ethics?

Clinton has also vowed to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers. Is that a way of expressing displeasure with her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, who operates a $400 million hedge fund?

Hillary Clinton’s campaign went on the attack Wednesday morning against a new inspector general’s report that affirms the presence of “several dozen” highly classified e-mails on the former secretary of state’s private server, accusing the government watchdog of spearheading a “very coordinated leak” with Senate Republicans to damage her reputation.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that last week, intelligence community inspector general I. Charles McCullough sent an unclassified response to an inquiry from two Republican senators. McCullough’s letter is said to contain two sworn declarations from an “intelligence community element,” asserting that dozens of e-mails found on Clinton’s server were classified — including several judged to contain intelligence on so-called “special access programs,” which exists at a more rarefied level of classification than even the two “top secret” e-mails discovered on the server last summer.

On CNN Wednesday morning, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said McCullough was the ringleader behind an operation to “trump it up and resurface these allegations,” calling the new report “a very coordinated leak” between the inspector general and GOP lawmakers.

When Team Clinton warns of a vast right-wing conspiracy, it’s a sure sign of political distress. Hillary Clinton’s accusation that even an independent federal watchdog is conspiring against her is another sign that her email problems are escalating.

The Clinton attack is a response to a Jan. 14 letter from the intelligence community’s inspector general, Charles McCullough, to Congress’s intelligence committees. Mr. McCullough said he has received sworn declarations from the intelligence community that former Secretary of State Clinton’s private email server contained intelligence about the government’s most important secrets. Reviewers have found “several dozen emails” containing information deemed to be at “confidential, secret, and top secret/sap” levels.

The SAP—special access program—reference in particular is ringing Washington alarms. A SAP usually refers to a highly covert technology program, often weaponry. Knowledge of these programs is usually restricted to small groups of people on a need-to-know basis.

NBC News first reported that the SAP reference on Mrs. Clinton’s server is so sensitive that Mr. McCullough had to get special clearance before he could even view the intelligence-community declarations. Later on Wednesday NBC quoted “senior U.S. officials” as saying that the information was “innocuous” chatter about U.S. military drone strikes.

This quote looks like an attempt at political damage control because the SAP news undermines Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that the emails on her server weren’t classified “at the time.” The fact of drone strikes may have generally been known to the public, but classification levels often involve specific details—such as targets and timing. Mrs. Clinton would surely have recognized the sensitive nature of such a program—the details of which were sitting on her unsecured email server, affording “special access” to any quality Chinese hacker.

This isn’t the cakewalk she expected. While not mentioning his name often, Hillary Clinton has tried marginalizing Bernie Sanders by moving left, narrowing the distance between them on income inequality and Wall Street regulation, then whacking him occasionally for opposing increased gun control. It hasn’t worked.

Last month Mrs. Clinton won all eight of the polls taken in Iowa, beating Bernie by an average of 16 points. But now her edge has fallen to only four points in the Real Clear Politics average for the state. Even that number is bolstered by an outlier, a poll that put her ahead by 21 points; remove it and Mrs. Clinton’s advantage all but disappears. In New Hampshire three polls were taken in December, two of which Mr. Sanders won, putting him ahead by 5.8 points in the Real Clear Politics average. With five fresh polls in January, his average lead has doubled to 11.4 points.

That’s why in Sunday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton deployed a new strategy with four components:

• Attack Mr. Sanders as a socialist. Mrs. Clinton now argues that her opponent would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his socialist schemes. An unlikely attack dog, daughter Chelsea Clinton, even went so far as to assail Mr. Sanders for supporting single-payer health care—“Medicare for all,” as he described it in the debate. It is strange to see the Democratic front-runner trash another Democratic hopeful for backing the expansion of a health-care entitlement.

• Hug President Obama as tightly as possible . During the debate, Mrs. Clinton frequently invoked Mr. Obama’s name and legacy. She depicted Mr. Sanders’s single-payer plan as an attack on ObamaCare, flipped a question on Wall Street regulation to hit Mr. Sanders for criticizing the president, and even defended Mr. Obama’s widely criticized failure to order military action after Syrian President Bashar Assad crossed the “red line” by using chemical weapons.

• Lock up the nomination by locking in African-American and Hispanic support. Sunday’s debate was held in South Carolina, where more than half of Democratic primary voters in 2008 were black. “There needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One out of three African-American men may well end up going to prison.”

It is possible to identify how far down the mountain American politics has fallen in one word—Benghazi.

Benghazi is no longer the place in Libya where U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by Islamist militias. “Benghazi” is now just another neutralized buzzword in the bad-mouthing wars of American politics. As a professional cynic aptly noted to Congress, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Forget Benghazi. It’s time to move on to more important matters.

Such as what?

The movie “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” opened last week, and the cold-water machines have been hosing it. No one cares about Benghazi anymore, the conventional sniffing goes, because the box-office is tepid. At 144 minutes, “13 Hours” is too long and, really, it’s just too political.

I sat through it, and these political faces and names appear nowhere in the movie: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice. But for the last 75 minutes, I could think of only one thing: the Obama administration’s YouTube coverup, the story—or “talking points”—about how an obscure anti-Islamic video made in California caused Benghazi to happen.

“13 Hours” is a graphic, reasonably accurate depiction of the events on Sept. 11, 2012: the consular assault, Chris Stevens’s death, an escape under heavy fire to the CIA annex a mile away, and the successful, nightlong defense of the annex. With apologies to the politically delicate, “13 Hours” makes the memory of the government’s tall tale, which it insisted on repeating for more than a week, hard to stomach.

Emails from Hillary Clinton’s home server contained information classified at levels higher than previously known, including a level meant to protect some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence, according to a document obtained by NBC News.
In a letter to lawmakers, the intelligence community’s internal watchdog says some of Clinton’s emails contained information classified Top Secret/Special Access Program, a secrecy designation that includes some of the most closely held U.S. intelligence matters.Two American intelligence officials tell NBC News these are not the same two emails from Clinton’s server that have long been reported as containing information deemed Top Secret.
The letter doesn’t make clear whether Clinton sent or received the emails in question, but in the past, emails containing classified information have tended to have been sent to Clinton, not written by her.
The new revelation underscores the extent to which the email classification issue could continue to dog Clinton, as State Department and intelligence officials review sensitive information within messages that were blacked out before being released to the public.
Clinton, who tops national primary polling as a Democratic presidential candidate, has repeatedly said that none of the information she sent or received while secretary of state was marked classified, and nothing has emerged to contradict that. But it’s become clear that classified information bled into the emails, which were sent over unencrypted channels open to interception by foreign intelligence agencies.

Where there are open flames, there will always be curious moths. Tonight, at a little after six o’clock, Sarah Palin will succumb at last to overwhelming temptation and sign up for Donald Trump’s ever-glistering light show. And in that remarkable moment, the mask will fall off completely.

If you are surprised by this development, you shouldn’t be. Ours is an age in which politics and entertainment are melted together without opposition or disfavor; a silly, self-indulgent, shallow age in which Kanye West thinks he can be the president of the United States and the president of the United States thinks he can be Kanye West. That Palin and Trump are together at last is no accident of ideology or timing; rather, it is the inevitable and rational confluence of two ghastly cults of personality — a fat-cutting, cash-saving merger that will serve to increase overall market share. Under their own steam, both figures have convinced a significant portion of the American population that their personal advancement is the key to the country’s success. Together, just think how great America can be!

Talk to a Palin fan and you will be told in a matter of moments that to oppose her is to oppose “real America.” Talk to a Trump fan, and you will be told that to knock him is to knock “We the people” — of which, it is made abundantly clear, you are no longer a valued part. All told, this symmetry makes sense, for the pair have of late become mirror images. Sarah Palin started in politics and moved seamlessly into television and entrepreneurship; Donald Trump started in business and, after a quick foray onto the small screen, readied himself for the ballot box. Now their most effective cudgels can be wielded as one: You’re not so effete that you’re against the both of them, are you?

WASHINGTON—Emails on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server contained national-security information classified at some of the highest levels, according to a new review by a government watchdog.

A letter from Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough finds that Mrs. Clinton’s email trove contains a type of highly classified intelligence information beyond “top secret,” referred to as “special access programs” or SAP. That designation is reserved for information shared on a need-to-know basis to protect intelligence sources, military operations or other highly sensitive government information.

In a separate review over the summer, Mr. McCullough’s office found “top secret” information on Mrs. Clinton’s home server. The new unclassified letter from Mr. McCullough to members of the House and Senate committees that oversee intelligence, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, says that the intelligence community now believes even more highly classified information was on the server. The letter was reported earlier by Fox News.

Mr. McCullough’s latest finding is that “several dozen” emails in Mrs. Clinton’s archive containing information classified at various levels, including SAP.

Most of Mrs. Clinton’s email trove of about 55,000 pages from her time in office has been released by the State Department. That includes more than 1,300 emails with some information blocked out, or redacted, because it is classified.

Presidential races are about the future and Hillary Clinton is stuck in the past. That pretty much explains why her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 has slumped.

Mrs. Clinton is not attuned to the political situation she faces. Her experience, family and fame aren’t much help. This year, angry voters have turned increasingly to populist, antiestablishment and future-oriented candidates. As a status quo candidate, she doesn’t fit the moment.

But her chief opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has captured it, just as Donald Trump has in the Republican presidential race. Mr. Sanders, 74, is a socialist from Vermont with a Brooklyn accent. But more than his left-wing ideology, it is his persistent calls for a “revolution” upending conventional politics that has brought him neck-and-neck with Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and ahead in New Hampshire, the first states to vote in the fight for the Democratic nomination.
We saw the difference between the two in Sunday night’s Democratic debate. She talked about preserving President Obama’s health-care program and the Dodd-Frank crackdown on Wall Street—in other words, the past. Mr. Sanders spoke of a future in which health care is inexpensive and a right for everyone, a future in which the wealthy cannot control politics with their campaign contributions and elect their allies.

My wife and I surprised ourselves. We didn’t move to the right or the left. We did what we believed to be sensible, and the responsible thing for ourselves and our children. We moved into a retirement community. We are not old. (Of course, that allegation is relative. I turn 75 later this month and Caroline is two years older.) We are physically active and have all our marbles, or, at least, I believe I do; though my grandchildren don’t always find my sense of humor amusing.

We did not make this move to escape what seems an increasingly discombobulated political environment. However, I admit that a respite is desirable, if just to maintain one’s sense of moral balance. This is especially true in an election year, and particularly so when the leading candidates are as distant from the center as they are. But extremism begets extremism. When dissatisfaction with the present and disillusionment for the future is rampant as it is, candidates and the electorate to whom they appeal hug the fringes. It is enough to make one want to slip beneath the counterpane, wishing for the morrow.

Speaking of retiring, President Obama gave his final State of the Union address last week. It is the moment when exiting Presidents look back and cite their accomplishments, or, at least, present what they have done in a favorable light, and then present their vision for the future. It is the natural way.

Mr. Obama is a good speaker, as long as his teleprompters function. Last Tuesday he was his eloquent self. He told the usual lies and made the expected exaggerations. He took more than the usual jibes at the opposition. His narcissism, as usual was on display. But, with a straight face, he said his biggest regret was a lack of compromise, an increase in unilateral decisions and a corresponding decline in civility. Most of us share that regret. But where does blame lie? Who was it in early 2009 that responded to a query from Representative Paul Ryan: “I won; you lost!”? Who was it that said to Republicans later that same year: “I’m driving; you’re in the back seat!”? Which Speaker admonished skeptical members of Congress when the Affordable Care Act was being considered: “We must pass this bill to find out what’s in it!”? If Mr. Obama had deliberately set out to sabotage any sense of commonality, he could not have done better.