NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Cheryl Mills’s Legal Privileges The evidence of a politicized Clinton probe keeps building.

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

The more we learn about the Justice Department’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email, the worse it looks. The latest revelation is that, along with granting immunity to two Clinton aides, Justice agreed to secret side deals that provided highly unusual protections from potential prosecution.

The side agreements came to light this week in a letter from House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mr. Goodlatte says he learned about the side deals by examining the immunity agreements, which haven’t been released to the public.

We already knew that Justice offered immunity to at least five central figures in the private email probe, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the aides in charge of deciding which of the former Secretary of State’s emails on her private server would be turned over to the State Department. FBI Director James Comey struggled to explain to Congress last week why immunity was necessary to obtain the laptops the two had used for sorting the emails.

Now we learn that Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson also obtained guarantees that investigators would not search these laptops after Jan. 31, 2015. More amazing, Justice agreed to destroy both laptops after examining them. Think about that: Before the authorities knew what was on the laptops, they agreed to destroy potential evidence in their investigation. The evidence was also under a congressional subpoena and preservation order.

The “no-look” date beyond Jan. 31, 2015 means the FBI couldn’t see what the two aides said or did after the news of Mrs. Clinton’s private server became public in March 2015. Investigators would be unable to determine if Ms. Mills or Ms. Samuelson had engaged, as Mr. Goodlatte put it in his letter, in “destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server.” Why else would time limits be necessary given that the two women already had immunity?

We’re told by prosecutors that this kind of special treatment is all but unheard of. Justice would typically empanel a grand jury, which would issue subpoenas to obtain physical evidence like the laptops. No grant of immunity would have been necessary.

So why no grand jury? Mr. Comey told Congress last week that the FBI was eager to see the laptop evidence and that it is sometimes easier to have informal agreements to obtain it. But surely it’s possible to negotiate with lawyers and conduct a grand jury at the same time. Without the threat of a grand jury the Clinton entourage had all the leverage, and they were able to get away with what amounted to formal get-out-of-jail-free cards. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The FBI Treated Clinton With Kid Gloves Investigators went after Gov. Bob McDonnell with every tool they had. The double standard is obvious. By Noel J. Francisco and James M. Burnham

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

Tim Kaine repeatedly defended Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate. “The FBI did an investigation,” he said at one point, “and they concluded that there was no reasonable prosecutor who would take it further.” But such a statement is credible only if it follows a real criminal investigation—that is, the sort of investigation that the FBI and the Justice Department conduct when they actually care about a case and want convictions.

We know all too well what that kind of investigation looks like, as two of the lawyers who defended a recent target: former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. That story had a happy ending for the governor and his wife. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in their favor this summer and all charges were dropped in September. But their victory certainly wasn’t due to lack of investigatory zeal on the part of the FBI and Justice Department.

Below are only a few of the heavy-handed tactics federal investigators used to build their case against the McDonnells. See how they compare to how Mrs. Clinton was treated.

Conduct ambush interviews. The first contact between law enforcement and the McDonnells was an ambush interview of the governor’s wife. The agents lied to her about the topic of the meeting, forbade Gov. McDonnell’s staff from attending, and then grilled her on their suspicions about potential public corruption. Statements from that interview later took center stage in the trial of her and her husband.

In Mrs. Clinton’s case, no ambush interviews were conducted, and witnesses were generously accommodated. The FBI and Justice Department even allowed a fact witness and potential target— Cheryl Mills, formerly the State Department’s chief of staff—to simultaneously represent Mrs. Clinton as her counsel.

Immunize only witnesses who can help deliver convictions. One person in Gov. McDonnell’s case got immunity: Jonnie Williams, the prosecution’s star witness. For his testimony, Mr. Williams earned a wealth of blanket immunity—not simply from potential bribery prosecution but also from unrelated crimes he might have committed (including securities and tax fraud). Reluctant witnesses—Gov. McDonnell’s children and friends—were called before a grand jury and forced to testify. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

John Kerry Sends Regrets Obama officials start to wash their hands of the Syrian catastrophe.

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

Much of the city of Aleppo lies in ruins after days of airstrikes by Russian and Assad regime forces, and buried in the wreckage is whatever is left of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy. If it’s any consolation to the 275,000 souls trapped in the city, John Kerry has regrets.

That much is clear from a leaked recording of a conversation the Secretary of State had with a group of Syrian civilians engaged in humanitarian work during last month’s U.N. General Assembly. Mr. Kerry complained that “the Russians don’t care about international law, and we do.” He noted that “a lot of Americans don’t believe that we should be fighting and sending young Americans over to die in another country.”

Above all, he lamented that his diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s war were never backed by a credible threat of American military strikes. “I think you’re looking at three people, four people in the Administration who have all argued for use of force, and I lost the argument,” Mr. Kerry said.
The Secretary is right that President Obama doomed whatever chances the U.S. had of shaping a better outcome in Syria when Mr. Obama made clear that nothing, including chemical attacks against civilians, could induce him to deploy even modest force to ground Bashar Assad’s air force or establish no-fly/no-drive zones.

Then again, it’s hard to credit Mr. Kerry as the scorned voice of reason within the Administration when, until last week, he was the most vocal advocate of making common cause with Moscow in Syria.

In May 2015 Mr. Kerry first broke the informal diplomatic quarantine the U.S. had imposed on Russia after it granted Edward Snowden asylum in 2013 and invaded Ukraine the following year. Last month Mr. Kerry was pushing the Pentagon, over the objections of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, to share targeting intelligence with Russia to grease a new cease-fire deal. As with a similar cease-fire Mr. Kerry negotiated earlier this year, Russia violated it within days.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia’s Military Sophistication in the Arctic Sends Echoes of the Cold War Norwegian, NATO and U.S. officials express concerns over Moscow’s increased sophistication in region By Paul Sonne

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

BODO, Norway—When the U.S. wants to learn what Russia is doing in the Arctic, it often turns to the Norwegian military, which has been conducting operations for decades from this Arctic town amid the fiords.

These days, it isn’t the volume of Russian military activity in the region that concerns Norway and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanssen, Norway’s chief of defense, says Russian military activity in the Barents Sea has grown in recent years but still pales in comparison to Cold War levels.

What concerns him, he says, is the increased sophistication Norway is seeing in the far north, as the Kremlin modernizes its armed forces. NATO forces retain an upper hand in conventional equipment and prowess, he said, but Russia is catching up with new sensors, submarines and capabilities.

ENLARGE

“The equality between Russian military capability and Western military capability has started to come very close to each other, like it used to be in the Cold War,” Adm. Bruun-Hanssen said in an interview during a recent trip to Bodo by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

While the number of Russian intercepts and operations is “far smaller” than during the Cold War, he said, “the difference is now we are talking about new types of platforms, new types of sensors, new types of weapons systems that are far more flexible and far more capable than we had during the Cold War.”

The buildup has served as a wake-up call to U.S. military officials, especially as diplomatic ties with Moscow fray over Syria, and to European countries such as Norway, which scaled back their defenses in the 1990s and early 2000s after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

NATO officials say they have been stepping up antisubmarine and other naval exercises as part of their efforts to deter Russian aggression, conducting an antisubmarine exercise this summer in the Norwegian sea with eight allies. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Seeks to Redraw Ties With Russia in Syrian Conflict Kerry holds out possibility of working with Moscow again despite U.S. decision to pull out of cease-fire talks By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

The Obama administration has set about redrawing its relationship with Russia amid this week’s diplomatic breakdown over Syria, taking on one of its most complex foreign-policy challenges just three months before a new president takes office.

Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry held out the possibility of once again working with Moscow after pulling out of talks over a Syrian cease-fire deal the day before.

While he faulted Russia for prolonging the war by tying its interests to the Assad regime and turning a blind eye to its brutality, his comments also underscored Moscow’s influence in bringing any resolution to the conflict.
“Russia knows exactly what it needs to do to get that cessation implemented in a fair and reasonable way,” Mr. Kerry said, as he urged Russia and the Assad regime to grant humanitarian access in Syria.

The move to formally walk away Monday from the cease-fire and military-cooperation agreement reached with Russia last month heightens pressure on Washington to spell out its next steps in Syria. But neither Mr. Kerry nor officials in Washington offered any new specifics Tuesday.

Mr. Kerry said the U.S. wanted Russian and Syrian warplanes out of the skies over Aleppo, but didn’t lay out a plan to do so. U.S. officials also said that one option could involve U.S. strikes on Syrian forces, although they acknowledged such a move carried risks of escalating a confrontation with Russia and is unlikely.

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Better Brexit, Greater Britain Forget ‘hard’ or ‘soft.’ The U.K. should aim to be a free-trade mecca.

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

Theresa May promised that “Brexit means Brexit” when she became Britain’s Prime Minister this summer, and she seems to have meant it. She said this weekend that by March she will formally begin negotiations with Brussels to leave the European Union, setting the stage for Brexit in 2019. Now Britain needs to live up to the other half of her famous dictum and “make a success of it.”

Doing that requires thinking big—much bigger than most British and European politicians are currently doing. London is consumed with debates about “hard Brexit” versus “soft Brexit,” meaning how much of its newfound independence Britain will surrender back to Brussels in exchange for how much access to the European market. The softees say Britain should preserve market access even at the cost of subjecting itself to most EU rules, as Norway and Switzerland do. The hard side says Britain should walk away from the EU so London can impose stringent immigration controls.

This debate is a trap. Attempts to cater to Brussels’s innate protectionism by bargaining Britain back into the unhappy circle will let the EU whittle away the advantages of Britain’s new freedom. But Britain also can’t afford to abandon Europe given the mutual economic ties that already exist.

Instead of hard or soft, Mrs. May and her colleagues should focus on creating a better Brexit to build a Greater Britain. That means radically expanding Britain’s trading relations abroad while boosting competitiveness at home. Thinking big this way would make the most of Britain’s new opportunity while helping Britain drive the right kind of exit with the EU.

Britain needn’t wait until it leaves the EU to start negotiating trade deals, and potential trade partners shouldn’t hold back either. Brussels insists Britain can’t open trade talks on its own while still formally an EU member. Plenty of London bureaucrats and lawyers may be tempted to agree. But why should Jean-Claude Juncker or Angela Merkel get a veto over Washington’s, Ottawa’s or Canberra’s ability to strike a trade deal with London?

Britain should aspire to have high-quality free-trade agreements in place with the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand from the first post-Brexit day in 2019. Their historical ties are close, and all four countries of the Anglosphere have attempted to negotiate trade deals with the EU. Countries such as South Korea that already have EU deals could conclude new bilateral deals quickly. British Trade Secretary Liam Fox said last week he is also open to trade deals with developing countries. Brazil, China, India, Nigeria and others can jump at that invitation after years of trade difficulties with the EU. CONTINUE AT SITE

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Trump Tax Setup The means being used to defeat him are the best argument for his candidacy.By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

Worth a second glance is Rudy Giuliani defending Donald Trump in response to the media’s ridiculously disingenuous reaction to a leaked Trump tax return for 1995.

That return shows a giant net operating loss (NOL) of $916 million from the turmoil that engulfed Mr. Trump in the early 1990s. This loss Mr. Trump may—may—have used to offset his prodigious TV and licensing earnings in later years.

It was Mr. Giuliani, in a case that hasn’t stood the test of time, who indicted Michael Milken and brought down Drexel Burnham Lambert, collapsing the junk-bond market on which Mr. Trump was depending to refinance his then-tottering, recession-battered empire of Atlantic City casinos, New York’s Plaza Hotel and the Eastern Airlines Shuttle (renamed Trump Shuttle).
Trump properties began missing debt payments, some of which Mr. Trump personally guaranteed. By early 1992, Businessweek estimated that Mr. Trump was personally underwater by $1.4 billion.

A good 15 years later, Dale Black, CFO of Trump Entertainment Resorts, was still admitting that “absent a large change in income, we’re not going to pay cash taxes for the foreseeable future with the NOLs that we have.” It didn’t help. Last year the company was back in bankruptcy, though Mr. Trump’s stake by now had been whittled down to 10% (and that mostly in exchange for continued use of his name and likeness). Now owned by Carl Icahn, the last Trump-era casino in Atlantic City—the Taj Mahal—is finally slated for permanent closure this coming Monday.

Books have been written about the Trump casino disaster. It used to be the press’s business to check out claims. Now it’s satisfied to trumpet the possibility that Mr. Trump used the losses to offset his income-tax liability in later years.

It’s all part of a show, ably directed by the Clinton campaign, whose theme is not only that Mr. Trump is unfit to be president, but you are déclassé, a lowlife, a sucker if you vote for him.

But it’s also true that Mr. Trump hasn’t done even a passable job of late. To the observation (allegation? complaint?) that he received a loan from his father, how does he not say, Yes, that’s how businesses get started in America, with loans from family and friends. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump’s Best Debate Mike Pence shows how to make an optimistic case for change.

Posted By on October 5th, 2016

If Donald Trump could make the case for Donald Trump half as well as Mike Pence makes the case for Donald Trump, the New York businessman would be well on his way to the White House. That’s our conclusion from Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, in which the Indiana Governor made the sustained case against the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama status quo in Washington that Mr. Trump should have made last week.

Mr. Pence is a former radio talk show host, and it showed with his cool, articulate delivery. His earnest, low-key demeanor was a notable contrast to Tim Kaine, whose strategy seemed to be to interrupt Mr. Pence at every opportunity. Perhaps the Virginia Senator studied Joe Biden’s strategy from four years ago when the Vice President did the same against Paul Ryan, but Mr. Kaine is not a natural bully. Our guess is that his endless interruptions grated on millions of viewers.

Mr. Kaine’s marching orders clearly were to absorb the Clinton campaign’s opposition research file on Mr. Trump, keep repeating it, and dare Mr. Pence to defend it. The point seemed to be to remind Americans that Mr. Trump can be crude, nasty and untutored. This fits the Clinton campaign strategy to delegitimize Mr. Trump personally as a potential President. His affirmative case for Mrs. Clinton and her agenda were almost afterthoughts.

For the most part Mr. Pence dodged this trap, going back on offense against the Clinton-Obama record rather than defend every Trump statement, many of which are indefensible. This is a useful lesson for Mr. Trump to take into the next debate on Sunday night, a town hall in which audience members will ask the questions. People want to like their Presidents.

The most notable substantive exchanges occurred on foreign policy, with Mr. Pence offering a detailed critique of Mr. Obama’s record and growing global disorder. Mr. Kaine kept saying that Hillary Clinton was part of the team that killed Osama bin Laden, but that is old antiterror news. Mr. Pence replied that the main terror threat now is Islamic State, which he rightly said grew out of “the vacuum” left when President Obama withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq.

Also notable was the debate on Russia, with Mr. Kaine claiming that Mr. Trump has business ties with “oligarchs” that cause him to apologize for Vladimir Putin. Mr. Trump’s admiration for Mr. Putin is mysterious and worrisome. But Mr. Pence pointed out that Mrs. Clinton’s hawkishness-come-lately on Russia follows years of weak policy that invited Mr. Putin’s aggression. Mr. Pence reminded the audience what a classic Republican security policy sounds like—if only Mr. Trump would adopt it. CONTINUE AT SITE

BOOKS Comments turned off

MY SAY: A SOPHOMORE’S LAMENT

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

I am a sophomore sapien majoring in Genderal Studies with emphasis on violence and transphobia.

Before we can end violence against anyone we have to outlaw guns and all references to them that can evoke fear and despair and hives among students.

We must abolish terms like “bulletin” or verbs like “rifle” and “shoot” as in photography.

“Butt” is offensive and also evokes a weapon’s handle and “caliber” should never be used to describe character. “Target” should really change its name and logo.

Numbers that can cause a panic attack are “22” “38” and “45” and must be used with great care. “Magazines” should henceforth be called periodicals and any use of the words “ammunition “, “rounds “or “magnum” (even to describe booze) may cause vapors in a delicate sapien. “Arms” should be referred to as “upper limbs” and “ballistic” must be replaced with “outraged.” To “cock” is disgusting on several grounds and “barrel” is edgy and “muzzle” has two awful meanings.

Guns kill and words have consequences and Sapiens are soulful and determined to ban words that can drive us into safe spaces.

When assigned writing contains those words, we demand a statement at the start alerting us to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material.

We need and we demand trigger warnings.!!!!

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Bill Whittle’s Firewall: Debating Hillary, Part 1: The Economy Wow, Hillary: so many falsehoods and so little time

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

Today TruthRevolt unleashes Part 1 of a six part — that’s right, six-part — series from Firewall host Bill Whittle in response to the issues left untouched in the first presidential debate. Part 1 focuses on countering Hillary Clinton’s ECONOMIC proposals.

Transcript below:

Well, the first Trump-Clinton debate is behind us, and the thing that struck me so much about this first debate was not so much what Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton, but rather what he did not say.

So let me give the Conservative response to many of the points that Madam Clinton made and went unanswered.

CLINTON: We also have to make the economy fairer. That starts with raising the national minimum wage and also guarantee, finally, equal pay for women’s work. I also want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top.

How are we going to do it? We’re going to do it by having the wealthy pay their fair share and close the corporate loopholes.

Wow, Hillary: so many falsehoods and so little time…

Let’s start with the $15 minimum wage.

Some cities, like Seattle, have instituted $15/hr minimum wage laws. It turns out that small business owners – the kind of people that pay minimum wage – did not reluctantly lurk to their underground money cavern and drag up more sacks of gold stolen from the workers. The minimum wage was never INTENDED to be a “living wage:” it is and should be for entry-level jobs for people who want to START their work resume in a minimum-wage job – not END it there.

As far as unequal pay for women – the 80 cents on the dollar argument — well that is a gigantic lie and you know it. It is true that if you average all the male salaries, and all the female salaries, men do make more then women, and the reason they make more than women is because they put in longer hours at higher-paying and often vastly more dangerous jobs. The idea that someone at Wal-Mart could say to a woman applicant that the job pays $35,000 a year – for men — but only $27,000 for you sweet cheeks is absurd and you know it. It’s also illegal, and has been for decades, but needless to say, knowledge of and obedience to the law doesn’t seem to be one of your primary virtues.