RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead and hoping that the election was sooner than later.

Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one.

With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal:

the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure;

Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader;

Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.

Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were mostly about yoga and Chelsea’s wedding – sort of like saying that one can beat 31 trillion-to-one odds of turning $1,000 into a $100,000 cattle-futures profit in no time by merely reading the Wall Street Journal. Until Friday, FBI director James Comey, in Hillary’s eyes, was a sober and judicious public servant who had rightly seen insufficient cause for her indictment. Now she believes that he is a rank Republican politico seeking to rob her of her presidency.

Clinton thought that she had survived Wikileaks, the Project Veritas ambush tapes, the hacked Colin Powell e-mails, the DNC disclosures, and so on – mostly because of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted wounds, some vicious-if-clever Democratic Party operatives, and a series of Democratic-planted IEDs about Trump’s foul mouth that exploded at preplanned and opportune moments.

Yet no one thought discredited deviant Anthony Weiner could much harm Hillary – except of course “conspiratorial” Donald Trump. He warned months ago that Clinton aide Huma Abedin might have been passing on classified materials to her dissolute husband. Because Weiner couldn’t repress his electronic libido with young girls, he ended up on the FBI’s radar – and by extension his smartphones, tablets, computers, and by further extension supposedly his estranged wife’s confidential communications. It was thought that Weiner might have stopped his sexting addiction when he lost his House seat, when he lost his mayor’s race, when he lost his wife, when he lost his jobs – or, at the very least, before he might lose Hillary (who supposedly fixed Abedin up with Weiner) her election.

Hillary’s team dared Comey to put up incriminating e-mails or shut up about investigating Hillary, hoping that the Obama Justice Department might quash any request for court-ordered warrants. But that demand assumed that Weiner is a loyal Clintonista and will put his fealty to Hillary and the Democrats above his own fear of federal prison and its supposed cultural intolerance for supposed predators. For now, the Clinton attack on the FBI might be not only futile but stupid – antagonizing her inquisitor, without the ability to apply pressure to silence him – if Weiner voluntarily surrenders his warrant-less communications to obtain some sort of deal.

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga. CONTINUE AT SITE

A nagging question has been lost amid the tempest over the FBI’s revival of the Clinton e-mails investigation. As everyone knows, the file has been reopened because of a trove of e-mails found on a laptop shared by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. What we don’t know, however, is: Why has the FBI only recently learned about a computer used by Ms. Abedin?

Remember, Abedin is said to have cooperated in the Clinton e-mails investigation and sat for a lengthy interview with FBI agents. The agents asked her about her e-mail practices. Assuming they asked basic questions, as agents are trained to do, they would have methodically itemized the computers and e-mail accounts she used. Yet, the Abedin/Weiner computer, which is said to contain 650,000 e-mails (an unknown number of which are relevant to the Clinton investigation), was not acquired by the bureau in connection with the Clinton investigation. It was seized in an unrelated investigation of Weiner, reportedly involving his alleged “sexting” with a teenage minor.

Why did the FBI agents on the Clinton e-mails investigation fail to acquire and search this computer months earlier? The question becomes more pressing in light of the Washington Examiner’s report that the FBI failed to ask not only Abedin but other Clinton aides to surrender their computers, smartphones, or other communications devices.

Now, there could be a good explanation, at least in connection with some Clinton aides. If, after a reasonably thorough investigation, the FBI had found no indication that potentially classified information was transmitted or stored on a particular device, there’d be no need to seize it. Let’s say X is a Clinton staffer. Let’s also say the FBI finds that X appears only to have used her government e-mail account for official business; that X did not have an account on the clintonemail.com domain; that whenever Clinton or other government officials e-mailed X, they addressed the e-mail to X’s state.gov account; and that X was cooperative when interviewed and convincingly said she never used her private e-mail for government business. Under those circumstances, it would be reasonable not to ask for the surrender of X’s private cellphone or computers.