RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett published another eye-opening report about the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation. It elaborates on the pitched battle between FBI agents who believe they are building a strong case and Justice Department prosecutors who have thrown cold water on it, erecting roadblocks that have made the agents’ work much more difficult.

For reasons worth pausing over, the locus of that battle is the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which is headquartered in Brooklyn.

As I explained earlier this week, that is the office that Attorney General Loretta Lynch ran for several years after being appointed by President Obama during his first term — up until Obama appointed her U.S. attorney general. That was Ms. Lynch’s second tenure running the EDNY. She was launched into national prominence when President Bill Clinton made her the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 1999. So the Clinton Foundation investigation is being overseen by the prosecutors’ office to which Lynch is closest — filled with prosecutors she hired, trained, and supervised.

Is it any wonder, then, that the EDNY seems to have broadened its territorial reach?

There are 93 federal districts in the United States. Some states are small enough to be single districts; others are big enough to be carved into two districts or more. The federal law of venue (i.e., the district in which a criminal case may be prosecuted) is very elastic. In theory, a case may be brought in any district where some of the criminal conduct, however minimal, took place. In practice, though, the FBI customarily runs its investigation, and the Justice Department files any indictment, in the district where most of the criminal activity occurred.

Anchoring an investigation in the district that is the epicenter of the conspiracy, or is at least the locus of significant criminal conduct in the case, is obviously practical. It also serves the Sixth Amendment mandate that criminal cases be tried in the “district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Hillary Clinton deleted an email she sent to her daughter Chelsea in 2009, a new batch of email messages released by the State Department shows. State released 285 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Friday as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act request.

The email chain in question contained information that was upgraded to the confidential level of classification when it was released about a year ago.

clinton-classified-email-to-chelsea

Via The Daily Caller:

The Dec. 20, 2009 email chain, entitled “Update,” started with a message from Michael Froman, who served as a deputy assistant to President Obama and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs.

The email, which is redacted because it contains information classified as “Confidential,” was sent to Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser at the State Department, and several Obama aides. Sullivan sent it to Hillary Clinton who then forwarded it to Chelsea, who emailed under the pseudonym “Diane Reynolds.”

All of the text in the body portion of the classified emails is redacted because it contains foreign government information.

The State Department labeled the email a “near duplicate,” indicating that it was mostly similar to other emails that the agency has released from the trove of emails that Clinton turned over in Dec. 2014.

The U.S. State Department has released another batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Among them is an email containing classified information Clinton apparently sent to her daughter, Chelsea Clinton.

In 2009, Hillary Clinton forwarded an email from a White House staffer to an account reportedly linked to Chelsea Clinton. In 2015, the State Department determined that email contained confidential information — the lowest level of classification.The initial email was released during a previous State Department email dump. It was originally sent just after Hillary Clinton attended a round of international negotiations over climate change. The message was addressed to “Diane Reynolds,” a pseudonym Chelsea Clinton has used before.

The trouble is, we don’t know whether the information in the message was classified at the time or if the State Department upgraded it to classified after the fact.

And the State Department’s not telling. Spokesman Josh Kirby said, “As to whether emails were classified at the time they were sent, the State Department … is focusing on whether information needs to be protected today.”

Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton have made a bundle trading on the exchange rate between dollars and political power, and others seem to be learning that they too can cash in on the same business model. Take Katie McGinty, the Pennsylvania Democrat attempting to unseat Senator Pat Toomey.

Ms. McGinty is an old Clinton hand, starting as an aide to Al Gore and rising in the 1990s to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality for nearly six years. From 2003 to 2008 she was the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) under Governor Ed Rendell.

At DEP Ms. McGinty led the successful push for the 2008 Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard Act, which requires utilities to generate 18% of Pennsylvania’s electricity from wind, solar and other renewables by 2020. She also steered $2.7 million in grants from the Growing Greener Watershed Protection Program to an environmental nonprofit that employed her husband as a consultant. The state ethics board ruled that the arrangement violated financial conflict-of-interest laws.

For Ms. McGinty, this was merely a down payment. After she left the Rendell administration, she moved seamlessly into lucrative positions at companies she used to regulate or had subsidized, or both, all of which operated under her green-energy mandate and most of which received more DEP subsidies.

In 2009 she took a seat on the board of Iberdrola USA, the U.S. subsidiary of a Spanish utility. At DEP Ms. McGinty had made nearly $20 million in grants and loan guarantees to Gamesa, in which Iberdrola owned a controlling investment stake, to locate two windmill-making factories in Cambria and Bucks counties. The plants were built but have since shut down. In 2005 Ms. McGinty gave Community Energy, another Iberdrola subsidiary, $1 million to build a wind farm using Gamesa turbines.

Also at DEP, Ms. McGinty lobbied Mr. Rendell to serve as a character witness for Iberdrola’s “good corporate citizenship,” according to a 2008 letter she wrote. He followed through and urged then-New York Governor David Paterson to approve a merger of Iberdrola and Energy East, a utility in New York and New England that had nothing to do with Pennsylvania.

After hiring Ms. McGinty, Iberdrola received a $10 million stimulus grant, as selected by her DEP successor, to build a wind farm in Fayette County. Her campaign-finance disclosures show she earned $100,000 a year as a director.

From 2008 to 2013, Ms. McGinty made $1.1 million on the board of NRG Energy, a Pennsylvania utility. She resigned to become chief of staff to Democratic Governor Tom Wolf and emailed her old pals at NRG in 2015: “Miss all you guys and look forward to a big NRG solar push in PA. Please let me know if I can help in any way.”

The feeling is mutual. Finance disclosures show that the political-action committees of both Iberdrola USA and NRG Energy are donors to Ms. McGinty’s Senate campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

“There is a confidence from these [FBI] sources that her server had been hacked. And that it was a 99% accuracy that it had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that things had been taken from that.” — Brett Baier reporting on Fox News, November 2, 2016

The above statement should concern every American, but it doesn’t. The likely possibility of foreign spies hacking Hillary Clinton’s server — long suspected, now apparently confirmed — outrages most Republicans and a certain portion of independents, but very few Democrats.

Why isn’t the average Democratic member of Congress bothered, much less outraged, by the possibility that Clinton used an insecure server, allowing her e-mails and the classified information in them to be hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies? Why isn’t President Obama bothered by it?

At the same time most Democrats are finding ways to excuse or hand-wave away Clinton’s actions, they are genuinely outraged by another act of hacking: Someone — presumably hackers directed by or affiliated with the Russian government — found thousands of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s campaign. As Clinton herself put it in the final debate:

We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 — intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

It is indeed disturbing — but if the Kremlin’s hacking the e-mails of private individuals and private institutions to influence an election is disturbing, then the hacking of Hillary’s private server should be doubly so. But not only do no Democrats express any anger over the latter likelihood, they bend over backwards to insist it is no big deal.

Back in May, I had the opportunity to see a screening of Clinton Cash, the documentary based on Peter Schweizer’s book of the same title. I wrote about it in this space here. Now that the commentariat is finally beginning to catch up with reality — at last count, there were five, count ’em five, FBI investigations into the machinations of the money factory known as the Clinton Foundation — I thought it might be worth briefly revisiting the subject.

In May, I asked my readers: “Are you worried about ‘money in politics’?” If so, I suggested that they “Stop the car, get an extended-stay room, and take a long, hard look at the Clintons’ operation for the last sixteen years”:

The Associated Press estimated that their net worth when they left the White House in 2000 was zero (really, minus $500K). Now they are worth about $200 million.

How did they do it? By “reading The Wall Street Journal” (classical reference)?

Not quite. The Clintons have perfected pay-to-play political influence peddling on a breathtaking scale. Reading Clinton Cash (which I recommend) is a nauseating experience.

At the center of the book is not just a tale of private greed and venality. That is just business as usual in Washington (and elsewhere). No, what is downright scary is way the Clintons have been willing to trade away legitimate environmental concerns and even our national security for the sake of filthy lucre.

It’s this last item that’s most worrisome.

That the Clintons are a greedy, money-hoovering machine has been clear since they left the White House with cartloads of swag in tow (the exact amount is disputable, that they did so is not). There are some who say her mishandling of classified material is no big deal — it’s just a technicality, who really cares? Can’t we put this behind us? Can’t we move on? At this point, what difference does it make?

Well, there used to be such people. If they still exist, they are scarce on the ground now.

Thanks to WikiLeaks and some recent FBI revelations, it is now clear that Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material was no casual act of inadvertence. It was not, as she at first claimed with false naiveté, done simply as a matter of convenience by someone who was technically ill-informed and maladroit.

No, the whole process was a thoroughly calculated tactic.

Given what we know now, there is something slightly nauseating about watching clips of Clinton lie when asked about her emails.

One classic is this clip, in which, when asked about whether she wiped her server, she said coyly: “Like with with a cloth or something?” She knew all about wiping servers, since her IT guys employed a sophisticated tool called BleachBit to do the job. (The company even uses an image of Hillary Clinton at their web page.)

Scrutinize Clinton’s performance in this clip. In a way, it’s quite masterly. Watch how she coolly modulates between impatience, naiveté, evasion, and outright lies. We turned over the server, she says, what more can we do? “We turned over everything that was work related, every single thing.”

We now know (well, we’ve always known, but now we really do know) that assertion is a lie. Not just an untruth, but a deliberate lie.

It’s hard to know what is the most brazen thing about her behavior. Turning over a server for investigation after having it professionally wiped is a candidate for the prize.

But for my money, the most outrageous thing was responding to a congressional subpoena by destroying 33,000 emails. (Andy McCarthy lays out the whole story with his customary clarity here.)

The revelation by the FBI last week that material that could be “relevant” to the Clinton email investigation had been found on a laptop shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband — amateur photographer and pen-pal to pubescent multitudes Anthony Weiner — propelled the story to a new and vertiginous stage. Apparently, we are talking about 650,000 emails. How many had to do with yoga routines? How many concerned State Department business? How many did Anthony Weiner see or share? These are just a few of the questions prompted by this ever more bizarre story.

“I’ve got Republican friends who don’t think or act the way Donald Trump does,” President Obama said Wednesday at a Raleigh rally for Hillary Clinton. That’s totally believable except the part about his having Republican friends. The president continued: “This”—meaning Trump, not Mrs. Clinton—“is somebody who is uniquely unqualified. I ran against John McCain. I ran against Mitt Romney. I thought I’d be a better president, but I never thought that the republic was at risk if they were elected.”

National Review’s Charles Cooke finds Obama’s remarks vexatious. “Democrats really have limited their ability to credibly warn against the dangers posed by Trump,” he argues, noting that Obama and his supporters treated Romney quite viciously in 2012:

Then? Romney was dangerous and represented a departure. Then? He was no John McCain, that’s for sure! Now? Pah. Romney was a gentleman. A scholar. A safe pair of hands. Sure, in 2012 Obama ran a commercial arguing that Romney wasn’t “one of us.” Sure, Obama was so worried about Romney’s being in the White House that he tried to impose restraints on the drone program that he had run without restrictions. Sure, Joe Biden said that Romney would put African Americans “back in chains.” Sure, Harry Reid accused Romney of being a tax-cheat and a scoundrel. Sure, Obama’s campaigners repeatedly claimed that if Romney were elected he would continue his dastardly spree of killing people with cancer. Sure, the Atlantic characterized Obama’s approach toward Romney as being “My Opponent Is a Dangerous Radical (with a dash of My Opponent Is a Strange Weirdo thrown in).” But in retrospect? He was fine. In fact, he was no threat at all. Chill.

If we understand Cooke correctly, he is frustrated with liberals because he largely agrees with them about Trump—note he accepts the premise about the “dangers posed” by the GOP nominee—and finds the case more difficult to make persuasively because their lack of credibility tends to discredit his argument. To put it in fabulous terms, liberals cried wolf, and now that there really is a wolf, nobody is listening to Cooke’s cries.

To judge by the Twitter exchanges we read yesterday, Cooke did not find a receptive audience on the left. Some detractors argued that Romney was a dangerous radical, which illustrates Cooke’s point without conceding it. Others claimed that the anti-Romney rhetoric then was not actually as harsh as the anti-Trump rhetoric now. CONTINUE AT SITE