RUTHFULLY YOURS

The weekend’s terrorist attacks in New York and New Jersey were fortuitously timed for Garden State governor Chris Christie: Not only did he get to project steely determination in a sudden crisis; the jihad diverted attention from the explosive start of the Bridgegate trial. Opening to the New Jersey jury in the case against two of Christie’s most trusted (but now former) aides, a federal prosecutor argued that the governor knew about the 2013 lane shutdown at the George Washington Bridge while it was happening.

This contradicts Christie’s years of indignant (albeit likely false) insistence to the contrary. It also raises a question for the Obama Justice Department: If the governor knew of the partisan, retaliatory shenanigans being executed by his underlings, for his political benefit, and under circumstances in which he had the power to put a stop to them forthwith, why wasn’t he indicted along with his aides?

As readers of these columns know, I am not a Christie fan. In addition, I’ve found his claims of innocence in the Bridgegate scandal implausible from the start — based on both the circumstances and the governor’s economical approach to the truth when it comes to any of his administration’s foibles. Nevertheless, my many years as a prosecutor lead me to cut the governor some slack here, at least until we see the actual evidence.

In conspiracy cases, it is a commonplace for both defendants on trial and the prosecutor to take liberties in heaping blame on the dead and the missing — i.e., those who, though participants in the relevant events, are not present in court as defendants (e.g., fugitives, defendants whose cases are pending, and apparent participants whom the government has chosen not to charge, for reasons that can range from the obvious to the dubious). Political-corruption cases are no exception.

The dynamic is easy to understand. Piling ostensibly damning evidence on an uncharged person is a lay-up for the prosecutor. Since he is absent from the defense table, an uncharged man has no nettlesome lawyer fighting on his behalf to suppress the government’s evidence or at least minimize its impact. And while the defendants on trial may be damaged derivatively by that evidence (otherwise the prosecutor would not be offering it), they will not want to be perceived by the jury as taking on the defense of the uncharged person, so they don’t put up much of a fight. After all, the defendants on trial will inevitably seek to shift blame to the missing, uncharged person as well — to argue to the jury that the defendant is being scapegoated in order to protect some powerful missing person, or to obscure the prosecution’s investigative missteps that allowed the “real” culprit to slip the noose.

Since both sides of the case have motives to exaggerate the culpability of the missing, uncharged person, the lawyers’ opening comments have to be viewed with some skepticism. Rather than jumping to conclusions, it is better to wait for the witnesses’ testimony — to ask whether it is supported or contradicted by the paper trail of e-mails, sundry documents, and investigative reports.

A federal judge angrily denounced the Justice Department for not leaning on the Department of State to release some Hillary Clinton emails in a more timely manner.

U.S. district judge Richard Leon, who is overseeing the release of the emails under the Freedom of Information Act, warned DoJ that the government appears to be withholding information from voters in advance of the election.

Washington Times:

Judge Leon, who has earned a reputation as a funny but caustic jurist, particularly when he finds government bungling, said the Justice Department, by not forcing the State Department to cooperate better, is risking its own storied reputation.

He specifically called out the federal programs branch that acts as the lawyer for the rest of the government, and the head of that division, Marcia Berman. Ms. Berman wasn’t in the courtroom Monday, but has been a frequent figure at the courthouse over the last year as the administration has had to defend its handling of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Mondays’s case, filed by the Daily Caller News Foundation, concerned documents detailing Mrs. Clinton’s access to top secret programs. The State Department said it has found more than 1,000 documents dealing with the subject, but said it would take nearly a month to process 450 unclassified documents, and couldn’t say how long it would take to process the classified ones.

The case is one of dozens pending where the department has been accused of slow-walking, keeping information out of public view for far longer than is allowed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The State Department says it is overwhelmed by the requests and its own limited budget and manpower. Officials also say the Clinton emails are complicated because they involved classified information that requires a stricter, more time consuming process to clear for the public.

But the government has also been reluctant to divulge important details. At one point on Monday the government lawyer on the case, Jason Lee, said he didn’t know how many pages were in the documents, sparking the judge’s ire.

Judge Leon ordered a faster production of the 450, and when Mr. Lee said they would do their best, Judge Leon pounced.

“Do better than your best. Do it,” he ordered, then proceeded to scold the government for its bungling, and said it was something other judges at the courthouse had noticed.

“You have a client that, to say the least, is not impressing the judges on is court … at being all that cooperative,” he said. “This way of doing business needs to stop.”

There has never been a State Department so politicized as this one. Political appointees are bound not by their oaths, but by their loyalty to the Obama administration.

Over the past few years, several judges hearing FOIA cases have excoriated the State Department for dragging its heels in releasing pertinent documents. These are not isolated incidents. They point to a pattern of foot-dragging designed to run out the clock on the Obama administration’s and Hillary Clinton’s wrongdoing.

It appears that, despite the remonstrances from judges, the State Department is succeeding.

The Fragrance Foundation, a trade group for the perfume industry, paid former President Bill Clinton $260,000 to give a speech in January 2014 that lasted less than an hour.

In the months after the talk, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation organized and partially funded an effort to get hundreds of farmers in Haiti to plant thousands of lime trees, a project designed to help both the impoverished farmers and the perfume and beverage industries, which had been hurt by a spike in lime prices caused by drought and crop blight.

The Clinton Foundation’s partner on the project was one of the world’s largest fragrance and flavoring suppliers, Firmenich International SA, along with the Swiss company’s U.S. charity. The Firmenich Charitable Foundation put up about $250,000 for the Haiti lime-tree project. Some of it went to a unit of the Clinton Foundation in Haiti and some to a charity recruited for the project that works with the Clinton Foundation in Haiti, records and interviews show.

Mr. Clinton’s $260,000 speaking fee wasn’t a donation to the foundation but was reported as personal income—an honorarium—on the candidate financial-disclosure form of his wife, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. The speech was one of 104 paid speeches that earned Bill and Hillary Clinton about $25 million in the 16 months before she launched her presidential campaign.

The timing of Bill Clinton’s speech income, from a perfume trade group in which a large member would later benefit from a Clinton Foundation project in Haiti, represents the kind of overlapping of private and charitable interests that has become a political liability for his wife as she runs for office. The Clinton Foundation has previously drawn attention for accepting donations from companies and foreign governments with business before the State Department when it was led by Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Clinton, for his part, has given so many speeches to companies and groups in recent years, and the Clinton Foundation has collected donations from so many corporations and organizations, that this kind of overlap seems almost inevitable.

A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said his speech to the perfume industry “is in no way connected to the Clinton Foundation’s work in Haiti.” A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation also said there was no connection. The foundation said the lime-tree project is part of a major effort to reverse deforestation in Haiti and boost the economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton’s totally tone deaf Clinton Foundation will be honoring a Palestinian teacher. The problem arises when you learn that she is married to a terrorist. Hanan an-Hroub will be speaking at a Clinton Global Initiative event to honor her for a teacher award. The event takes place in New York. How’s that for location? Read the story below.http://conservativebyte.com/2016/09/breitbart-palestinian-terrorists-wife-to-address-clinton-foundation/

Hanan an-Hroub is scheduled to speak at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York after winning a $1 million teaching award from another charity that donates to the Clinton Foundation. Her husband, Omar al-Hroub, spent 10 years in an Israeli prison for his role in a 1980 bombing that killed six Israelis.

The event is going ahead as planned, in spite of the recent Islamist terrorist bombings in New York and New Jersey, which injured dozens.

The Wall Street Journal noted Tuesday:

Omar al-Hroub was convicted on charges that he was an accomplice in a deadly bombing attack in Hebron that killed Israelis walking home from Friday night Sabbath prayers. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said:

Today’s report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend’s attacks. The decision to honor the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton’s foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency.

The Republican National Committee has also reportedly objected.

The biography for Hanan al-Hroub on the Clinton Foundation website does not mention the terror connection:

Winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, an initiative of the Varkey Foundation, Hanan Al Hroub grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp, Bethlehem, where she was regularly exposed to acts of violence. She went into primary education after her children were left deeply traumatized by a shooting incident they witnessed on their way home from school. Her experiences in meetings and consultations to discuss her children’s behavior, development and academic performance in the years that followed led Al Hroub to try to help others who, having grown up in similar circumstances, require special handling at school. With so many troubled children in the region, Palestinian classrooms can be tense environments. Al Hroub embraces the slogan “No to Violence” and uses a specialized teaching approach she developed herself. Al Hroub has shared her perspective at conferences, meetings and teacher training seminars.

Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views.

In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.

When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.

In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque.

Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve?

The Orangeman Cometh

In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders.

Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower.

That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters.

For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc.

Hillary would rely on the old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers” would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.”

Yet for all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Trump at his worst was never put away by Hillary at her best, and he has stayed within six to eight points for most of his awful August and is now nipping her heels as October nears.

“As Robert Kaufmann wrote recently,

A vote for Hillary Clinton is therefore a vote for Mr. Obama’s dangerous doctrine, which fears American power more than it fears our enemies. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton contributed enormously to lowering the barriers to aggression everywhere—with much worse to come unless we reverse course.

Gates’ “pox on both your houses” rhetoric in the end leaves the door open to voting for Hillary, based solely on taking seriously campaign words while ignoring a 25-year-long record of dangerous deeds.”

Robert M. Gates, ex-CIA chief and Secretary of Defense for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, published a column in the Wall Street Journal last week criticizing both Trump and Hillary for their their lack of “credibility” on foreign policy. This seemingly even-handed critique, however, is in fact an exercise in an apples-and-oranges comparison that ends up as a back-handed endorsement of Hillary.

Gates begins with a well-known survey of the mess Barack Obama’s foreign policies will leave his successor. A surging China threatens the Far East despite the “pivot” to Asia. Vladimir Putin is expanding everywhere on Russia’s western border, and in the Middle East has replaced the U.S. as the number one power broker. Putin also has serially gulled our mediocre Secretary of State John Kerry with “cease fires” that give cover to his aggression, and exposed our president’s gutlessness by buzzing our naval vessels and taunting our military aircraft. North Korea has just tested a nuclear device and intercontinental missiles that can reach as far as Chicago. And ISIS continues to hold ground in Iraq and Syria, and inspire terrorist franchises and attacks in Europe, the U.S., and Africa. And of course, there is the disastrous appeasement of Iran on nukes, along with the mullocracy’s active support for terrorism and serial humiliation of the U.S.

For each crisis, Gates explains, neither Trump nor Hillary offer any specific strategy or response that can even start to repair this dangerous erosion of American prestige and influence. Rather, as Gates says of their announced plans for rolling back ISIS, both candidates propose what “in essence sounds like what President Obama is doing now—with more ideological fervor and some additional starch”.

Yet at this point Gates makes the same mistake (or employs the same rhetorical tactic) of the NeverTrump folks. He does not distinguish between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and Hillary’s long record of failure, only specifically mentioning one example, the intervention in Libya. No word of her active support of the “reset” with Russia that encouraged Putin’s geopolitical adventurism. Nor any mention of her role in the Iranian deal, easily the worst foreign policy mistake since World War II, given the stakes of allowing an apocalyptic cult to possess nuclear weapons.

Nor does he say a word about Clinton’s obvious character flaws––her long record of sacrificing the country’s security and interests to her own political and financial gain, as she did with her unsecured private server and her pay-for-play State Department. Nor does he mention Hillary’s numerous health issues that raise serious questions about whether she will be physically and cognitively able to handle a crisis.

“When it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own,” Gates asserts. Yet his catalogue of sins refers to campaign rhetoric and personal style, and even then Gates’ take on Trump’s comments is tendentious. For example, Gates criticizes the wall with Mexico proposed by Trump, which would enhance security by making it more difficult for terrorists to infiltrate the U.S. Next comes the old tired charge that Trump’s suggestion we bring back enhanced interrogation techniques advocates “torture.” Waterboarding is not torture under current U.S. statute, as even Eric Holder told Congress in May of 2009. And as ex-CIA director George Tenet detailed in his memoirs, it delivered valuable information that prevented numerous attacks and helped locate bin Laden’s hideout. Gates here is recycling an old progressive smear against George W. Bush. As for Trump’s call for “killing [terrorists’] families,” what does he think Obama’s drone strikes do at times? And is Gates now morally condemning Allied strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, which killed nearly a million civilians?

Then there’s Trump’s offhand comments about Putin’s qualities as a good leader for a “system” Trump said he doesn’t like. We’re supposed to think Trump’s words are more consequential than Hillary’s and Obama’s appeasing deeds that empowered Putin’s aggressive foreign policy? Or more significant than Obama’s pledge to be more “flexible” with Russia after his re-election? And given that the U.S. has dealt with much more murderous leaders like Mao and Khrushchev, does Gates and other NeverTrumpers think future dealings with Putin will be easier or harder if Trump preens morally about Putin’s evil like the pundits and retired government officials free of accountability do? More likely, hard-nosed calculations of national interest on both sides will be more important than American presidential campaign rhetoric whether positive or negative.

Jennifer Epstein, a reporter for Bloomberg and clearly the very model of a modern Leftist journalist, asked Hillary Clinton today:

Are you concerned that this weekend’s attacks or potential incidents in the coming weeks might be an attempt by ISIS or ISIS sympathizers, or really any other group, maybe the Russians, to influence the presidential race in some way, and presumably try to drive votes to Donald Trump?

In response, the former secretary of State for a president who has given billions to the Islamic Republic of Iran — a country which ordered its people to chant “Death to America” every Friday in their mosques — accused Trump of treason.

She said Trump was being used as a “recruiting sergeant for terrorists,” and that “the kinds of rhetoric and language that Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

Giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy is not a simple colloquialism. The phrase is part of the legal definition of treason.

Trump was a traitor, in Clinton’s view, because:

[W]e know that a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS, because they are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists, people who number maybe in the maybe tens of thousands, not the tens of millions, they want to use that to recruit more fighters to their cause, by turning it into a religious conflict. That’s why I’ve been very clear. We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going go after an entire religion and give ISIS exactly what it’s wanting in order for them to enhance their position.

How she proposed to distinguish the “bad guys” from the larger population of Muslims, Clinton didn’t say.

Nor did Clinton mention that hardly any Muslim organizations or authorities around the world have declared that someone who believes in the Islam of ISIS or al-Qaeda is not welcome in their mosques and Islamic schools.

“We’re going after the bad guys,” she said, on the same day the following was revealed:

[The Obama administration] mistakenly granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants from countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud who had pending deportation orders.

…

Mistakenly awarding citizenship to someone ordered deported can have serious consequences because U.S. citizens can typically apply for and receive security clearances or take security-sensitive jobs.

Hardly a promising indication of how effectively the Obama administration has been “going after the bad guys.”

Clinton likewise did not address the point of Trump’s proposed temporary moratorium on immigration from countries with a high incidence of jihad terror. Trump has not looked to demonize all Muslims or Islam as a whole, or to blame all Muslims for the crime of a few. In reality, Trump’s proposal is a recognition that there is no other means of preventing jihadis from entering the U.S. among peaceful refugees. There is no way to distinguish one from the other.

Also, he’ll consider it “a personal insult” if black people don’t vote for Hillary.Also, he’ll consider it “a personal insult” if black people don’t vote for Hillary. He will never change…he is hopeless…..rsk

President Barack Obama, speaking at an event in New York City on Sunday, suggested that sexist attitudes are the reason why the most qualified person in American history does not have a commanding lead in the polls.

The “Lecturer-in Chief” told liberal donors at a fundraiser in Manhattan that Americans are trying to “grapple” with electing a “powerful woman.” But he expressed confidence that the American people will make “the right decision” and elect Hillary Clinton.

“There’s a reason why we haven’t had a woman president,” Obama lectured. “We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women. And it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairly, and that expresses itself in all sorts of ways.” He concluded, “The good news is, despite all that, I have confidence in the American people that we’re going to make the right decision and we’re going to win this thing.”

See, there’s always a good explanation for why a Democrat might struggle to win over certain “deplorable” segments of society. In 2008, it was because the deplorables were bitter and clung “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In 2016, it’s because we are grappling “with what it means to see powerful women. And it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairly, and that expresses itself in all sorts of ways.” Okay, we get it. These are the Neanderthals who are voting for Trump.

Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented deluge of small-dollar donations for the GOP, one that Republican Party elders have dreamed about finding for much of the past decade as they’ve watched a succession of Democrats — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton — develop formidable fundraising operations $5, $10 and $20 at a time.

Trump has been actively soliciting cash for only a few months, but when he reveals his campaign’s financials later this week they will show he has crushed the total haul from small-dollar donors to the past two Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney — during the entirety of their campaigns.

All told, Trump is approaching, or may have already passed, $100 million from donors who have given $200 or less, according to an analysis of available Federal Election Commission filings, the campaign’s public statements and people familiar with his fundraising operation. It is a threshold no other Republican has ever achieved in a single campaign. And Trump has done so less than three months after signing his first email solicitation for donors on June 21 — a staggering speed to collect such a vast sum.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a senior Republican operative who has worked closely with the campaign’s small-dollar fundraising operation. “He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.”

Clinton counted 2.3 million donors as of the end of August, the result of decades of campaigning, a previous presidential bid and allies who painstakingly built her an email file of supporters even before she formally announced her second run. But Trump had zoomed to 2.1 million donors in the past three months alone, his campaign has said.

The question now is what the gusher means for the GOP. The Republican National Committee, through a deal struck with Trump in May, is getting 20 percent of the proceeds from its small-donor operation for Trump plus access to this invaluable new donor and email file. But can Trump’s candidacy help close the Republican Party’s small-donor divide in one fell swoop? Will these donors — 2.1 million and counting — give to other Republicans? Will they drag the Republican Party in Trump’s direction for years to come? Or, if he loses, will they simply vanish?