RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s main opponent in the first presidential debate wasn’t Hillary Clinton. It was NBC anchor Lester Holt. Hillary, with forced smiles as brittle as china and an eerie fake laugh, continued her primary debate strategy of repeating canned talking points while waiting for the moderator to knock off her opponent. Hillary wasn’t there to debate, but to once again seem like the only possible option.

Holt’s job was to make her seem like the only possible option by targeting Trump.

There were fears that Lester Holt would be another Candy Crowley. That was unfair to Crowley. The entire debate was structurally biased. Its general topics were framed in narrow left-wing terms, instead of discussing the economy and moving the country forward, Holt defined the topics as class warfare and racial divisiveness. Even national security was narrowed down to Obama’s favorite battlespace, cyberspace, rather than the actual battlefield.

Trump was hit with repeated personal attacks and gotcha questions by Holt, who then took to arguing with him over the facts. Hillary, despite having been under investigation by the FBI, received only a perfunctory offer from Lester Holt to comment on her emails after Trump had raised the issue.

But Holt’s overt bias also proved to be his undoing. Candy Crowley had been effective because her interjection into the debate between Obama and Romney had come as something of a surprise. Holt made his agenda clear at the outset. And it also made him easy to ignore, as Trump frequently did.

Like small boys jumping into a mud pile, media personalities had been urging each other on for weeks to abandon even the pretense of objectivity and just go after Trump. That’s what Holt did in his awkward and impotent way. And it proved to be ineffective as he quickly lost control of the debate. Holt, like the rest of his media cohort, had failed to understand that overt bias makes them less effective.

Hillary’s role in the debate was to grit her teeth and smile awkwardly, then deliver a few scripted attacks and lines that would allow her media allies to hail her as the winner. It was an easy job that she botched.

Forget everything you read or heard about Lester Holt being a Republican. After Matt Lauer dared to ask Hillary Clinton a couple of very fair questions at the Commander-in-Chief Forum and was savaged by the likes of WaPo, The New York Times and MSNBC, Lester Holt made sure that he didn’t end up being the story in the MSM tomorrow.

The first part of the debate was actually all right for Holt, but the wheels flew off when they got to how each candidate would handle healing the racial divide in the U.S. Holt went for the birther issue with Trump, which isn’t off the table but has very little relevance to what faces our next president. Had Hillary brought it up it would have been fine. For Holt to interject it during what was supposed to be a substantive discussion on race relations made it seem as if he were being fed questions directly from Clinton HQ.

Holt then hit Trump with a question about him saying that Hillary didn’t have a presidential “look,” which obviously just served as a platform for Hillary to call Trump a sexist. It was George- Stephanopoulos-are-you-going-to-ban-contraception bad.

His final question asked the candidates if they would both accept the will of the voters in November, which is the kind of thing one might find precocious and adorable if asked by a third grader but was groan-worthy coming from a grown man.

The number of vulnerable areas he pressed Hillary about was zero so I can’t give you any examples of those.

Having said all that, Trump still could have done much better. He seemed like he was trying to cover ALL the ground with every answer. That meandering took away a lot of his bite. He would have been better off picking three or four really vulnerable areas (emails, Benghazi, etc.) and hammering away at those until she became irritated and imperious, as she always does. I know the press loves to talk about him being easily provoked, but she may still have the thinnest skin in this election. He wouldn’t have to push her buttons too many times to get her into the “We are not amused…” zone. CONTINUE AT SITE

Why did Cheryl Mills require criminal immunity?

This is the irksome question hanging over the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home-brew server in the wake of news that Ms. Mills was granted immunity for her laptop’s contents.

Ms. Mills was a top Clinton aide at the State Department who became Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer when she left. She was also a witness, as well as a potential target, in the same FBI investigation into her boss’s emails. The laptop the bureau wanted was one Ms. Mills used in 2014 to sort Clinton emails before deciding which would be turned over to State.

Here’s the problem. There are two ways a witness can get immunity: Either she invokes the Fifth Amendment on the grounds she might incriminate herself, or, worried something on the laptop might expose her to criminal liability, her lawyers reveal what this might be before prosecutors agree to an immunity deal.

As with so much else in this investigation, the way the laptop was handled was out of the ordinary. Normally, immunity is granted for testimony and interviews. The laptop was evidence. Standard practice would have been for the FBI to get a grand-jury subpoena to compel Ms. Mills to produce it.

Andrew McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney, puts it this way: “It’s like telling a bank robbery suspect, ‘If you turn over that bag, I’ll give you immunity as to the contents’—which means if the money you robbed is in there, I can’t use it against you.”

The Mills immunity, which we learned of on Friday, has unfortunately been overwhelmed by the first Trump-Clinton debate. But the week is still young. On Wednesday, Congress will have an opportunity to put the Mills questions to FBI director James Comey when he appears before the House Judiciary Committee.

Back in July, Mr. Comey must have thought he’d settled the issue of Mrs. Clinton’s emails with a grandstanding press conference in which he asserted “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her based on what the FBI had found. In so doing, he effectively wrested the indictment decision (and any hope for political accountability) from the Justice Department. Plainly even his own agents weren’t buying, given that Mr. Comey later felt the need to issue an internal memo whining that he wasn’t being political. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s amusing to listen to flacks for Hillary Clinton, a pathological liar, plead with Lester Holt that he must play activist debate moderator, ready to pounce on Donald Trump’s misstatements. The Clinton campaign, when not reviewing immunity agreements, has put out a “Seven Deadly Lies” script in hopes of enticing Mr. Holt to go all Candy Crowley this evening.

Personally, I’d far prefer no moderator to an activist one. Correcting the adversary’s misstatements and turning them to one’s advantage is the debater’s skill – you’re not supposed to need the moderator’s help, you’re supposed to show us you can handle it on your own.

When I was a prosecutor, it was par for the course for defense lawyers to misstate the record in closing arguments to the jury. To leap out of one’s chair and scream, “objection” when this happened was both unsatisfying and risky. Usually, the most you’d get would be a tepid admonition from the judge that “the jury’s recollection of the evidence” – not the lawyers’ – is what matters. But if the judge did try to correct the record, there was always the danger that the judge would either get it wrong (in which case the prosecutor is in the awkward position of having to correct the judge and thus make the defense lawyer look good), or appear to be bullying the defense lawyer – which could engender the jury’s sympathy.

I always preferred to let the lawyers say what they wanted to say. I knew I’d get my turn to rebut. In so doing, I’d not only be able to show the jury that the defense lawyers had made misleading arguments; it would also be the perfect opportunity to argue that people only try to spin you when they know the truth destroys them – which became the launch point for repeating my three or four best facts. That is, the adversary’s falsehoods didn’t hurt me; they were a chance for me to make them look bad while reinforcing my own case.

In any event, I don’t know how interested people are in Mrs. Clinton’s favorite “deadly lie,” the fact that Trump has been disingenuous in claiming he opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A number of us pointed this out during the GOP primary campaign (see, e.g., here), to no effect. Moreover, Clinton voted for the Iraq war and then became part of the withering Democratic campaign to undermine it. To me, that seems a lot more consequential than Trump’s comparatively uninformed and irrelevant meanderings on the subject. (By “comparatively uninformed and irrelevant,” I mean that Clinton, by comparison, (a) was a member of the Senate serving on the Armed Services Committee, who was thus keenly aware of the alarming intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein; and (b) famously accused General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker of lying about progress in Iraq after the surge.) It seems to me that Clinton’s harping about Trump’s stance on Iraq only calls attention to her own wavering – which even many Democrats have rebuked.

One lie I would like to see fact-checked, though, is Clinton’s repeated one – which she’s certain to rehash this evening, namely: The FBI’s year-long investigation “exonerated” her of wrongdoing in the email scandal.

In point of fact, the FBI merely drew the conclusion that Clinton should not be charged with a crime. Even if we assume for argument’s sake that this was a valid conclusion (in fact, it is hugely suspect), finding that someone should not be indicted is far from exoneration. CONTINUE AT SITE