RUTHFULLY YOURS

The former secretary of state turns over her private server to the Justice Department after investigators discover top-secret emails on it.The investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails is heating up.

The saga began with Representative Trey Gowdy’s select committee on Benghazi. Those investigations led to the public revelation that the former secretary of state had maintained a private email server, and produced a court order to release the emails in 30-day tranches. Clinton says she neither sent nor received any classified information on the account, but that some material has since been classified.

On Tuesday, federal investigators told members of Congress in a letter that two highly classified emails had been found on Clinton’s personal email system. In response, Clinton’s attorney turned over the server to the FBI, along with thumb drives containing thousands of emails that had previously been turned over to the State Department, The Washington Post reports.
In addition to the possible legal ramifications, the investigation has turned up some interesting facts about how much effort Clinton put into the running and upkeep of the server. The server itself had been purchased for her unsuccessful 2008 run for president. Initially, it was run by a former Senate aide, who was then hired by the State Department. Later, amid concerns about reliability, she hired Platte River, the Denver company now subject to FBI questions.

The email controversy is quickly turning into a classic Clinton scandal. Her use of a private email account became known during the course of an investigation into the 2012 deaths of U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya. Thus far, the investigations have found no wrongdoing on her part with respect to Benghazi, but Clinton’s private-email use and now the referral concerning classified information have become stories unto themselves. This is something of a pattern with the Clinton family, which has been in the public spotlight since Bill Clinton’s first run for office, in 1974: Something that appears potentially scandalous on its face turns out to be innocuous, but an investigation into it reveals other questionable behavior. The classic case is Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978. While no inquiry ever produced evidence of wrongdoing, investigations ultimately led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Dear Reader (including those reading this off my server),

On December 8, 1979 two Zairean air-force jets approached the airport in Kinshasa, the capital what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The tower radioed the pilots, telling them they couldn’t land; the air-traffic controllers were concerned about low visibility.

But when the pilots were told that they “couldn’t land,” they didn’t think, “I can’t land right now,” they thought, “I can’t land, ever.” So they ejected from their planes, letting two perfectly good Mirage jets crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

These men weren’t fools. Idiots don’t fly jets. It’s just that, for an instant, they were thinking according to an entirely different set of rules about how life works. “Can’t” means “never, ever, possible” according to these rules — not “wait an hour,” or “find a different runway.” And so they hit the eject button.

Longtime readers may recall I got this story from a great book, David Lamb’s The Africans. Lamb went on to observe that many Africans have a slightly different interpretation of cause and effect. In the West, the lesson the average person would take from a near-fatal car crash at high speeds on a hairpin turn would be “Man, that was close. I better not try that again.” But in Africa, Lamb writes, “if an oncoming car has to swerve off the road to avoid his vehicle, and there are no collisions or injuries, the African does not say, ‘Next time I’d better not do that.’”

I’ve heard similar stories about drivers throughout the developing world, particularly in Latin America, where traffic accidents and fatalities are much higher than in more advanced nations — even though the rate of car ownership is much lower.

The Third World Mind of the Clintons

I don’t bring all of this up to write a “news”letter on the perils of polylogism, but to offer some insight into the Clintonian mind.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are like that Third World driver who takes a hairpin curve at high speed and survives. Everything worked out, so why change your behavior?

The attempt to convict Khatallah for the attack that killed four Americans could falter over Clinton’s deleted e-mails.
Who cares if Hillary Clinton is convicted of a crime? What we ought to care about is if Ahmed Abu Khatallah is convicted of a crime.

Khatallah is the only person charged thus far in the attack on a shadowy U.S. government compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Dozens of jihadists participated in the attack, during which four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, were slain. Yet Khatallah has been singled out for prosecution. As I’ve previously detailed (here and here), the Obama Justice Department has filed an indictment that infuses evidence with politics: Trying to prove the terrorist conspiracy that actually occurred without refuting the Obama/Clinton fiction that the attack was a spontaneous protest ignited by an anti-Muslim Internet video.

That’s why there are worse jobs to have right now than defense counsel for a murderous jihadist.

This week, America marked two significant milestones in its history. Friday was the 80th anniversary of Social Security, a program that has helped millions of seniors, including my parents, retire with dignity. Saturday is the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, when the most violent conflict in human history ended as an American victory.

We refer to the Americans responsible for these accomplishments as the “Greatest Generation.” In less than two decades, they survived economic catastrophe, triumphed in a global conflict, and laid the foundation for unparalleled prosperity for their children in what would become an American century. When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, they took our nation to new heights. Because of their sacrifices, we have been able to enjoy what we call the American dream, promising that our children’s future will always be brighter than our own.

There was a lot going on today that affected the American people.

Capitulation to the Castro brothers was completed when Secretary of State John Kerry raised the American flag over the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

ISIS, which is using chemical weapons, was confirmed to have raped American hostage Kayla Mueller, keeping her as a sex slave for the caliph in two years of captivity before her death.

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban renewed their commitment vows.

Opposition to the Iran nuclear deal continues to mount, though the administration would rather bury its head in the sand for that development.

But President Obama’s playlist leads the White House website.

Yes, the White House announced, the commander in chief, who’s spent the week golfing along Cape Cod, joined Spotify this week! “And our inaugural playlist was hand-picked by none other than President Obama.”

“Your summer just got a little groovier,” the administration declared. “When asked to pick a few of his favorite songs for the summer, the President got serious. He grabbed a pen and paper and drafted up not one, but two separate summer playlists: One for the daytime, and one for the evening.”

And the White House provided official photographic evidence of POTUS picking his playlist:

Anyone living in Rhode Island who wants to get a free voter ID can get one

Although Rhode Island residents can easily get a photo voter ID, requiring one at a polling place suppresses “minority, low-income, disabled, and elderly voters,” according to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

So, of course, the ACLU has demanded an end to the state’s photo voter ID law enacted by a Democratic legislature in 2011.

Anyone living in Rhode Island who wants to get a free voter ID can get one. All you have to do is provide an employee ID card; an ID card provided by a commercial establishment; a credit or debit card; a military ID card; a student ID card; a health club ID card; an insurance plan ID card; or a public housing ID card.

Don’t have one of those forms of identification? No problem!

Years before Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, German scholars were advocating the killing of “worthless” people under the protection of the state. On April 7, 1933 the Nazis eliminated “long established ethical and administrative public supervisory bodies” when they introduced the “law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” Euthanasia and experimentation on human subjects became the Nazi norm. The purveyors of Nazism saw their system as “applied biology.”

Can one draw a parallel with the Nazi “applied biology” ideology and the recent revelations of Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby parts? Is it “erroneous thinking” to show sympathy for “lives [deemed] devoid of value” but from which parts of those lives medical benefit can be derived? And are any such “errors of judgment, diagnosis, and execution to be of concern when compared to the social benefits that might eventually accrue?”

In a New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson titled “Nazi Scientists and Ethics of Today” scientists discuss the ethical questions concerning the use of Nazi data. Dr. Benno Muller-Hill, a molecular biologist and director of the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne in West Germany maintains that people “should remember those who died. We should not try to squeeze profit out of it.” Others have “suggested that the use of the data would serve as a lesson to the world, that the victims did not die futilely, and that a post mortem use of the data would retroactively give ‘purpose’ to their otherwise meaningless deaths.” Yet, “Doctor Howard Spiro, of the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale University, insists that no one honors the memory of the dead victims by learning from experiments carried out on them. Instead, we make the Nazis… retroactive partners in the victims’ torture and death.”

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won’t be uncorking the champagne when Secretary of State John Kerry officially opens an American embassy in Cuba today for the first time in 54 years.

Instead, the Republican White House hopeful marked the historic occasion by delivering a stinging rebuke of President Barack Obama’s two signature diplomatic breakthroughs this year, vowing to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran and threatening to sever diplomatic ties with the Castro regime in Cuba.

Mr. Rubio outlined those positions in a Friday speech in New York hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, further casting himself as the candidate most eager to reignite tensions with two longtime adversaries.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat to become secretary of state in the Obama administration, making her the public face to the world for the man who dashed her own hopes for the presidency,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 22, 2008.

Well, that was a mistake.

Maybe even the mistake of a lifetime. You’ve probably heard that Mrs. Clinton is seeking the presidency again. As in 2008, she is the inevitable Democratic nominee but her prospects are looking shaky. This time virtually all of her problems, except those having to do with her character and political talent (or lack thereof), can be traced to her decision to leave the Senate and join the Obama administration.

Start with the one that is most obvious, and most severe: the metastasizing scandal over her improper use of a private email server. As the Associated Press reported in March, when the scandal first became public:

Members of Congress who are demanding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails are largely exempt from such scrutiny themselves.

Congress makes its own rules, and has never subjected itself to open records laws that force agencies such as the State Department to maintain records and turn them over to the public when asked.

There’s also no requirement for members of Congress to use official email accounts, or to retain, archive or store their emails, while in office or after. That’s in contrast to the White House and the rest of the executive branch.

The AP piece suggests that makes hypocrites of the Republicans who currently hold majorities in Congress, but then goes on to note that “open government advocates are largely unconcerned. They agree it makes sense for Congress to be treated differently from the executive branch.”

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign “is taking on the stale air of the bunker,” writes Peggy Noonan. “When you mention to Democrats that Nixon never burned the tapes but Hillary surely burned that server, they nod, smile or half-wince. No one grows defensive for her. It does not seem possible that more candidates, big ones, won’t get in.”

A Journal editorial today adds that the “admission that her aides were also using her server demolishes Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that she used this server for personal ‘convenience.’ She was really running a parallel mini-State email operation.”

And our columnist Kimberley Strassel notes that this week Mrs. Clinton’s “use of private emails while serving as secretary of state turned from a political problem into a potentially legal problem.”
It’s not the only problem. “Democrats also see new weakness in their favorite themes. Here is Mrs. Clinton trying out an inequality argument, as she builds up her personal bank account. Here she is floating the ‘war on women’ theme, as her foundation takes donations from countries that whip rape victims. Here she calls for lower college costs while charging these institutions $250,000 for a speech. Here is a candidate who was in the past for Keystone, and for trade, and for more intervention overseas. And who maybe now is not. Though they don’t really know.