RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Friday afternoon, the FBI uncorked the mother of all October surprises, announcing in a letter to Congress that it has re-opened its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s “personal email server.” The reason? During an “unrelated investigation”* it uncovered e-mails that “appear to be pertinent” to Clinton’s case. It is seeking to determine whether the e-mails contain classified information and can’t yet determine their significance.

Stripped of the legalese, it means that Hillary is back in legal jeopardy. The FBI doesn’t investigate and recommend enforcement actions against computer servers. It holds people accountable, and Hillary is the person most responsible for her own e-mail. I have three initial thoughts.

First, these e-mails must be prima facie problematic. There is no way the FBI publicly re-opens this investigation on the eve of a presidential election if the new e-mails contained information about yoga routines or wedding plans. Moreover, the very fact that the FBI is trying to determine whether the e-mails contain classified information indicates that their content is setting off alarm bells in the Bureau. In other words, this is serious.

Second, the e-mails could have an impact on the decision whether to charge Hillary or her aides either under the Espionage Act or for obstructing the initial investigation, perhaps by lying to the FBI. Recall that Comey previously exonerated Clinton under a made-up legal standard, but if there are more e-mails — and if Clinton or her aides worked to conceal their existence from the FBI — then their conduct may even rise to the FBI’s arbitrary, higher threshold of lawlessness. At the very least, it renders the FBI’s previous decision not to prosecute even more suspect.

Third, unless the FBI announces the investigation and clears her within the span of basically one work week (an action that would be deeply problematic on its own terms), Hillary’s closing argument to the American people is going to be that Donald Trump is so dangerous that it’s worth gambling your vote on a woman under current criminal investigation.

Critics of WikiLeaks claim its leaking of sleazy Clinton e-mails is serving the interests of Vladimir Putin, who wants Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. But, if Putin is in fact behind the WikiLeaks dumps, he may actually be making a safer bet. Should Trump lose, a weakened Hillary Clinton will take office with a big chunk of the American people viewing her as illegitimate and many others as untrustworthy in foreign affairs. That kind of geopolitical advantage could be priceless.

The latest WikiLeaks revelation is a 2011 memo from top Clinton aide Doug Band outlining conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state. It essentially is a confession of massive charity fraud and corruption. As Politico reports: “The memo at one point refers bluntly to the money-making part of Clinton’s life as ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ and notes that in at least one case a company — global education firm Laureate International Universities — began paying Clinton personally after first being a donor to the Clinton Foundation.”

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, former Clinton Treasury official and Hillary defender Steve Rattner didn’t even bother to swat back at the sleazy appearance of the revelations. He insisted nothing illegal had been done, but admitted that, if elected, Hillary faces “continuing, ongoing investigations.” Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, confirmed that yesterday: “It’s a target-rich environment. Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.”

While clear evidence of a quid pro quo between donors to the Clinton Foundation and State Department officials hasn’t surfaced yet, there are lots of warm pistols. Peter Schweizer, the author of the book Clinton Cash, wrote last August in the Wall Street Journal about large donations to the Clinton Foundation from the Kremlin-backed Stolknovo Foundation:

The (Clinton) State Department recruited and facilitated the commitment of billions of American dollars in the creation of a Russian “Silicon Valley” whose technological innovations include Russian hypersonic cruise-missile engines, radar surveillance equipment, and vehicles capable of delivering airborne Russian troops.

A Russian reset, indeed.

Even if no improper favors beyond access to top State Department officials is ever shown, the WikiLeaks e-mails reveal a disturbing pattern of international solicitation fraud on the part of the Clinton Foundation. Formed as a vehicle to build a presidential library for Bill Clinton, the Foundation began work in Haiti and other countries in 2003. But it didn’t have clearance from New York authorities to operate internationally, which may explain why no official audit of its activities was conducted for several years. Even now, the Clinton Foundation has yet to fill in required lines on 990s for 1998 through 2007, aggregating their government grants.

I signed up with “True the Vote”http://truethevote.org/

They have state-by-state hot line numbers for reporting election fraud.

As I have reported in the past, in 2012 my wife had a machine that reported Democratic selection no matter how often she select Republican. This is being reported in Texas now.

I suggested photographing you vote. This is illegal in some states. Is it illegal if the machine is crooked? Only a lawyer can say.

Jan Mel Poller

A number of articles have pointed out the blatant double standard applied by the FBI and the Justice Department in the cases of retired Marine Corps general James Cartwright and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Cartwright, dogged by the FBI for years for leaking classified material, pleaded guilty last week to felony charges of lying to federal investigators and faces jail time and a huge fine when sentenced in January. Needless to say, he also lost his security clearance at the start of the investigation when still in uniform, and regardless of the sentencing, he has been publicly ruined. Clinton, who deliberately circumvented U.S. law and regulations for handling classified material, destroyed official government records, exposed thousands of sensitive documents to foreign hackers, obstructed justice, and lied to the American people and Congress, is probably just days away from being elected president.

The apparent double standard is so obvious that commentary about it has not been limited to the right. Even the determinedly pro-Clinton Washington Post noted that two sets of rules were applied by the government, and that Cartwright’s fall is at least in part a way for the FBI and Justice to maintain the fiction that they don’t play favorites because someone is well connected.

But generally speaking, the treatment of Cartwright and Clinton is so obviously disparate that the left has stayed away from it, concentrating instead on Donald Trump’s foibles and describing a virtually inevitable Hillary Clinton victory.

Inevitably, though, somebody had to try, and it came from the War on the Rocks website, a venue that previously tried to excuse FBI director James Comey’s refusal to refer the Clinton matter for prosecution. In “Clinton Cartwright Comparisons Don’t Hold Up,” the authors argue that Cartwright’s prosecution doesn’t reveal favoritism compared to Clinton. Rather, they contend that Cartwright lied to the FBI while Clinton did not, infuriating the feds and spurring his prosecution. Setting aside for now whether Clinton did lie to the FBI (and also the authors’ failure to note her open and obvious lying to Congress and the public), the article unintentionally puts in high relief the real disparity in treatment between Cartwright and Clinton. In fact, the FBI made no effort to catch Clinton in a lie and went out of their way to ensure that such a thing would not happen.

Hillary and Bill Clinton are asking for a third term in the White House, and voters who want to know what this portends should examine the 12-page memo written by a Clinton insider that was hacked and published Wednesday by WikiLeaks. This is the cold, hard reality of the Clinton political-business model.

Longtime Clinton aide Doug Band wrote the memo in 2011 to justify himself to lawyers at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett who were reviewing his role and conducting a governance review of the Clinton Foundation at the insistence of Chelsea Clinton. In an email two weeks earlier, also published on WikiLeaks, Ms. Clinton said her father had been told that Mr. Band’s firm Teneo was “hustling” business at the Clinton Global Initiative, a regular gathering of the wealthy and powerful that is ostensibly about charitable activity.

Poor innocent Chelsea. Bill and Hillary must never have told her what business they’re in. If she had known, she would never have hired a blue-chip law firm to sweep through the hallways of the Clinton Foundation searching for conflicts of interest. Instead of questioning Mr. Band’s compensation, she would have pleaded with him never to reveal the particulars of his job in writing.

But she didn’t, and so Mr. Band went ahead and described the “unorthodox nature” of his work while emphasizing his determination to help “protect the 501(c)3 status of the Foundation.” That’s the part of the tax code that has allowed the Clinton Foundation to remain tax-exempt on the premise that it is dedicated to serving humanity.

Mr. Band graciously copied John Podesta, then adviser to the board, who would eventually become Hillary’s campaign chief. His helpful reply was to suggest that Mr. Band “strip the defensive stuff out” and later “go through the details and how they have helped WJC” [ William Jefferson Clinton].

Donald Trump wears his character flaws on his sleeve. Hillary Clinton seeks to prevent documentation of hers, even when the law requires it. Yet despite her best efforts, facts about Mrs. Clinton that are now public should trouble voters more than any of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

Not that it’s easy for Republicans to appear on a ballot with Mr. Trump, especially since media folk spend days after each controversial remark demanding responses from other GOP candidates. The objective is to force them to endorse or condemn Mr. Trump and suffer the consequences.

Fair enough, but reporters don’t force down-ballot Democrats to take a position on each new Clinton email revelation. The result is wall-to-wall media coverage focused on whether GOP voters can possibly support their candidate. But why should Republicans have all the fun? Democratic voters have every right to be ashamed of their nominee.

We’ll review some of the reasons in a moment, but first let’s consider the importance of party loyalty in this year’s presidential election. In recent polls, Mr. Trump often leads among independents. But he generally trails overall because Mrs. Clinton enjoys stronger support among Democrats than Mr. Trump does among Republicans—or because pollsters don’t believe Republicans will turn out and therefore include many more Democrats than Republicans in their survey samples.

Clearly Mr. Trump needs more Republicans to support him. This could happen if holdout Republicans break his way or if some Democrats decide they can’t stomach another era of Clinton scandals.