RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t the only one apparently baffled by newfangled technologies such as email (see nearby). In a withering ruling on Monday, a federal judge scored the Environmental Protection Agency for its contempt for its legal obligation to disclose documents and then lying to the courts about its stonewalling.

In 2012 the right-leaning Landmark Legal Foundation made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for emails related to regulations and the forthcoming election. As many suspected at the time and we now know, the White House commanded the agency to delay major anticarbon rules so the details couldn’t be debated in front of voters, thus undermining political accountability for the economic damage.
The EPA spent years attempting to deny Landmark a meaningful response, starting with the receipt of the FOIA request. The agency’s FOIA officer waited weeks before informing the offices of then EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her deputies of the obligation to retain documents. The agency subsequently refused to search either the official email accounts of top officials or the alias personal email addresses they used to conduct government business—“for reasons still unexplained,” Judge Royce Lamberth observes in a 25-page finding against the agency.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t even begun her expected presidential candidacy, but already Americans are being reminded of the political entertainment they can expect. To wit, the normal rules of government ethics and transparency apply to everyone except Bill and Hillary.

Last week we learned that the Clinton Foundation had accepted donations from foreign governments despite having made a public display of not doing so. The Family Clinton had agreed not to accept such donations while Mrs. Clinton was serving as Secretary of State, with rare exceptions approved by State’s ethics shop.

But, lo, the foundation quietly began accepting such gifts from the likes of Qatar and Algeria after she left the State Department—though everyone in the world knew she was likely to run for President in 2016. The foundation didn’t announce the donations, which our Journal colleagues discovered in a search of the foundation’s online data base.

President Obama thought so little of Benjamin Netanyahu ’s speech to Congress Tuesday that he made clear he hadn’t watched it and said the text didn’t “offer any viable alternatives” to the Administration’s pending nuclear deal with Iran. We’ll take that presidential passive-aggression as evidence that the Israeli Prime Minister’s critique was as powerful as Mr. Obama feared.

For all the White House’s fretting beforehand about the speech’s potential damage to U.S.-Israel relations, Mr. Netanyahu was both bipartisan and gracious to Mr. Obama for all he “has done for Israel,” citing examples previously not publicly known. But the power of the speech—the reason the Israeli leader was willing to risk breaking diplomatic china to give it—was its systematic case against the looming nuclear deal.

Point by point, he dismantled the emerging details and assumptions of what he called a “very bad deal.” The heart of his critique concerned the nature of the Iranian regime as a terror sponsor of long-standing that has threatened to “annihilate” Israel and is bent on regional domination.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was a devastating indictment of the P5+1′s entire approach, and it reminded and reunited Democrats and Republicans, as did Sen. Robert Menendez’s speech to AIPAC Monday, on what is at stake and why the deal under contemplation can never come to pass.

As a preliminary matter, it is evident that had the president not thrown a fit, Netanyahu’s speech might not have garnered quite so much attention. But to be honest, the fuss mostly remained in the media. When the chips were down, it appeared that all but far-left lawmakers and Congressional Black Caucus members attended. That, incidentally, is a problem on the left, which has become virulently anti-Israel, as has the left in Europe and elsewhere (hence the BDS movement’s prominence on left-wing campuses and European capitals).

The speech was not aimed at the president, who is immune to reason, nor to the negotiators who suffer from a variation of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby they come to identify with their bargaining opponents more than the country they represent. It was aimed at American public opinion and uncertain Democrats on whose good judgment Netanyahu must rely to derail a disastrous deal. By flattering the president and Democrats, Netanyahu gave them an out to agree with him without crossing the president or appearing to give in to Republicans. He said so bluntly it was starting: This is a bad deal. No deal is better. And he explained exactly why.

During debates in the House of Commons Winston Churchill was often polite to those he meant to execute. Today, when he spoke to a joint session of congress, Benjamin Netanyahu seized his “Churchill Moment”. He did not disappoint us.

Now at last Barack Obama must realize that Benjamin Netanyahu did not become prime minister of Israel in order to preside over the liquidation of his country due to the political myopia of a Muslim inclined president who adopted the Arab narrative long before he scrambled into the imperial box.

This was an historic speech. It described the chilling litany of terrorist attacks upon America and the West for which Iran has been responsible since 1979. It exposed the duplicity of the Iranian leadership and how they glorify, finance, train, arm and supply terrorists. It compared the difference between the liberal, democratic values enshrined in the constitution of the United States to the totalitarian, autocratic and genocidal goals of Iran’s constitution written in 1979 and it warned us that Iran’s behavior as destructive and lethal as it is now without a nuclear weapon will be far worse once she realizes her nuclear ambitions. Not to know all this is one thing but to know it and to pretend that Iran’s behavior will improve once she becomes a nuclear power is to deliberately lead us into the long dark shadow of the gallows.

Today’s speech by prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu was an amazingly public and frank repudiation of U.S. policy towards Iran. But before getting to his remarks, let’s dispose of a particularly ignorant criticism of Netanyahu. Chris Matthews said the speech was an inappropriate attempt to “take over” America’s foreign policy. That might be true if the policy in question were none of Israel’s business. But this policy is of even greater concern to Israel than it is to the United States. Obama knew that Israel would balk at his decision to abandon a tough sanctions strategy, a strategy on which Israel depended and in deference to which Israel has refused to strike Iran itself. If you think Obama is taken aback or somehow surprised or angry at Israel’s reaction, you must think he is an idiot. Given the scale of the interests involved, it was vitally necessary to coordinate with Israel and make sure they could live with any concessions we made; otherwise we were risking a rupture with a key ally. But Obama’s explicit policy is to accept an Iranian nuclear-weapons program so long as there is a one-year breakout time, and Israel cannot agree to that.

Maybe she doesn’t want to run in 2016, top Democrats wonder. Maybe she shouldn’t.
“Due respect, Clinton’s problem isn’t a lack of staff. It’s a lack of shame about money, personal accountability, and transparency.”
Maybe she should stay at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, where the former secretary of State could continue her life’s work of building stronger economies, health care systems, and families. Give paid speeches. Write best-selling books. Spend time with Charlotte, her beloved granddaughter.

Because she doesn’t seem ready for 2016. Like a blast of wintry air in July, the worst of 1990s-style politics is intruding on what needs to be a new millennium campaign: Transparent, inspirational, innovative, and beyond ethical reproach.

Two weeks ago, we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted contributions from foreign countries. Assurances from the Obama administration and Clinton aides that no donations were made during her tenure as secretary of State were proven false.
I called the actions sleazy and stupid. Sleazy because any fair-minded person would suspect the foreign countries of trying to buy Clinton’s influence. Stupid because the affair plays into a decades-old knock on the Clintons: They’ll cut any corner for campaign cash. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his top aides used the White House as a tool to court and reward big donors.

Now The New York Times is reporting that Clinton used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of State, an apparent violation of federal requirements that her records be retained.

Exposed by a House committee investigating the Benghazi Consulate attack, Clinton brazenly dug in her heels. Advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal email and decided which ones to release: Just 55,000 emails were given to the State Department.

Those are our emails, not hers. What is she hiding?

Israel’s prime minister delivered a sober reminder of the risks of dealing with Iran—and painted Obama as naive in the process.

Congressional Republicans haven’t had many victories in their lasting conflict with President Obama, but Tuesday brought one. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s somber, provocative speech to Congress checked all the boxes.

It called into question the efficacy of any deal the administration might strike with Iran over its nuclear program; it likely renewed momentum for another round of Iranian sanctions on the Hill; it positioned the GOP politically as the party more worried about Israeli security, and, despite the White House’s best efforts, made the president appear petty and churlish.

Obama, in an interview with Reuters, had dismissed the speech as a “distraction,” and aides made sure everyone knew he would be too busy to watch it. But if the president didn’t cast an eye at a TV, he might have been the only person in Washington not to. And that’s the problem.

In his speech to Congress on March 3 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a straightforward, simple, and extreme position on Iran’s nuclear program: there is to be none, or else there should be war. He does not want that program kept limited to civilian purposes, or internationally supervised; he wants it eliminated totally, permanently, unconditionally.
Netanyahu claimed that Iran wants to destroy Israel and the Jewish people, and called on Congress to help him stop Iran’s “march of conquest, subjugation, and terror.” All those seeking an agreement with Tehran were naïve or foolish. Iran “will always be an enemy of America,” he said. “Don’t be fooled.” Netanyahu was scathing about the strategy pursued by the Obama Administration and other four members of the Security Council plus Germany: “That deal will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons; it will all but guarantee that Iran gets those weapons.” He claimed that no agreement could be effectively monitored: “Iran has proved time and time again it cannot be trusted.”

The problem with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress March 3 was not the risk of offending Washington, but rather Washington’s receding relevance. President Barack Obama is not the only leader who wants to acknowledge what is already a fact in the ground, namely that “Iran has become the preeminent strategic player in West Asia to the increasing disadvantage of the US and its regional allies,” as a former Indian ambassador to Oman wrote this week.

For differing reasons, the powers of the world have elected to legitimize Iran’s dominant position, hoping to delay but not deter its eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. Except for Israel and
the Sunni Arab states, the world has no desire to confront Iran. Short of an American military strike, which is unthinkable for this administration, there may be little that Washington can do to influence the course of events. Its influence has fallen catastrophically in consequence of a chain of policy blunders.

The best that Prime Minister Netanyahu can hope for is that the US Congress will in some way disrupt the Administration’s efforts to strike a deal with Iran by provoking the Iranians. That is what the White House fears, and that explains its rage over Netanyahu’s appearance.