RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it.

His signature issue is concern over immigration — from Latin America but also, after Paris and San Bernardino, from the Middle East. He has exploited the yawning gap between elite opinion in both parties and the public on the issue, and feasted on the discontent over a government that can’t be bothered to enforce its own laws no matter how many times it says it will (President Obama has dispensed even with the pretense). But even on immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon. A few short years ago, he was criticizing Mitt Romney for having the temerity to propose “self-deportation,” or the entirely reasonable policy of reducing the illegal population through attrition while enforcing the nation’s laws. Now, Trump is a hawk’s hawk.

When Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal erupted last March, fair-minded people might have given her the benefit of the doubt. Distracted and perhaps overeager, the spanking-new secretary of state plowed into her duties and had her staff divert e-mails to her home-based computer server. This would be more convenient, she claimed, and would let her avoid the hassle of schlepping multiple handheld devices. Besides, “there is no classified material” on her server, she said, soothing journalists who covered this matter. “I did not receive nor send anything that was classified,” she reassured the media last July.

Things are now so much worse than they first appeared.

A top Clinton aide rebuffed a senior State Department official who tried to give Clinton standard computing gear. As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has reported, State’s executive secretary, Stephen D. Mull, wrote Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, on August 30, 2011.

“We are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry to replace her personal unit which is malfunctioning,” Mull explained. He thought it was on the fritz, “possibly because of [sic] her personal email server is down.”

Deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin dismissively replied: “Let’s discuss the state blackberry, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

Some of newly revealed emails on Hillary Clinton’s private, unsecured server are so sensitive that senior lawmakers on the oversight committees did not have high enough security clearances to read them, according to sources on Capitol Hill. Fox News reports today that lawmakers had to fulfill additional security requirements in order to read material in her emails described by Mrs. Clinton as “innocuous.”

The emails in question, as Fox News first reported earlier this week, contained intelligence classified at a level beyond “top secret.” Because of this designation, not all the lawmakers on key committees reviewing the case have high enough clearances.

A source with knowledge of the intelligence review told Fox News that senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite having high-level clearances, are among those not authorized to read the intelligence from so-called “special access programs” without taking additional security steps — like signing new non-disclosure agreements.

These programs are highly restricted to protect intelligence community sources and methods.

Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III identified “several dozen” additional classified emails this month — including classified intelligence from “special access programs” (SAP).

While the State Department and intelligence agencies finish picking through messages recovered from the private email server Hillary Clinton used to conduct public business as secretary of state, the contents of the periodic document dumps have become increasingly sensitive. State has been referring any email that appears to contain sensitive information for further consideration by the agency with jurisdiction over the relevant data. Thus the most problematic emails are dribbling out last.

As the number of disclosed classified messages from Mrs. Clinton’s server has climbed above 1,300, her explanations have come to look increasingly improvisational and contrived. Recall that last summer—even after abandoning the claim that she maintained a private email account for convenience and because she was too busy solving the world’s problems to navigate the intricacies of a government account—she insisted that, “I did not send classified information and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know that something is.”

When asked whether she had her server “wiped,” she assumed an air of grandmotherly befuddlement: “What, like with a cloth or something?” she said. “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”

The current news, reported in the Journal and elsewhere, is that her server contained information at the highest level of classification, known as SAP, or Special Access Program. This is a level so high that even the inspector general for the intelligence community who reported the discovery did not initially have clearance to examine it.

Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the US Intelligence Community, has informed Congress that Hillary Clinton had “several dozen emails containing classified information determined by the IC element to be at the confidential, secret, and top secret/sap levels” on that private homebrew server she kept in some guy’s bathroom closet in Colorado. “Sap” stands for “special access program” and is the level above “top secret” – or, in laymen’s terms, super-duper extra-top secret. It’s generally accepted that much of that “sap” material made its way from Hillary’s inbox to hostile intelligence agencies around the world.

Had anybody else treated years’ worth of the most confidential material so recklessly, they would now be in jail awaiting trial. By comparison, General Petraeus shared a tiny amount of “sap” material with just one person – his biographer-cum-mistress. He was prosecuted for breaching exactly the same non-disclosure agreement Hillary signed. As further punishment, it now seems the four-star general is likely to be demoted:

Reducing Petraeus’s rank, most likely to lieutenant general, could mean he’d have to pay back the difference in pension payments and other benefits that he received as a retired four-star general. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over his retirement. According to Pentagon figures, a four-star general with roughly the same years of experience as Petraeus was entitled to receive a yearly pension of nearly $220,000. A three-star officer would receive about $170,000.

I doubt he needs that extra 50 grand. Even so, I wonder how America’s best known general of the post-9/11 era feels at being demoted while Hillary is headed for the ultimate promotion. In his shoes, I’d rip off the three remaining stars, hurl them in Ash Carter’s face, and demote myself to private.

But look at that new poll from New Hampshire: Bernie 60 per cent, Hillary 33 per cent. Will President Sanders be willing to pardon Mrs Clinton? Or will it be left to Goldman Sachs to demote one zero from her “speaking fee”?

Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax “schemes” in the Caribbean. That is a worthy endeavor, given the loss of billions of dollars in U.S. tax revenue.

Yet her husband, Bill Clinton, reportedly made $10 million as an advisor and an occasional partner in the Yucaipa Global Partnership, a fund registered in the Cayman Islands.

Is Ms. Clinton’s implicit argument that she knows offshore tax dodging is unethical because her family has benefited from it? Does she plan to return millions of dollars of her family’s offshore-generated income?

Clinton is calling for “huge campaign-finance reform,” apparently to end the excessive and often pernicious role of big money in politics. But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, raised more than the $112 million that Clinton collected in 2015 for her primary campaign.

In 2013, Clinton earned nearly $1.6 million in speaking fees from Wall Street banks. She raked in $675,000 from Goldman Sachs, and $225,000 apiece from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Wealth Management. Did that profiteering finally make Clinton sour on Wall Street’s pay-for-play ethics?

Clinton has also vowed to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers. Is that a way of expressing displeasure with her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, who operates a $400 million hedge fund?

Hillary Clinton’s campaign went on the attack Wednesday morning against a new inspector general’s report that affirms the presence of “several dozen” highly classified e-mails on the former secretary of state’s private server, accusing the government watchdog of spearheading a “very coordinated leak” with Senate Republicans to damage her reputation.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that last week, intelligence community inspector general I. Charles McCullough sent an unclassified response to an inquiry from two Republican senators. McCullough’s letter is said to contain two sworn declarations from an “intelligence community element,” asserting that dozens of e-mails found on Clinton’s server were classified — including several judged to contain intelligence on so-called “special access programs,” which exists at a more rarefied level of classification than even the two “top secret” e-mails discovered on the server last summer.

On CNN Wednesday morning, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said McCullough was the ringleader behind an operation to “trump it up and resurface these allegations,” calling the new report “a very coordinated leak” between the inspector general and GOP lawmakers.

When Team Clinton warns of a vast right-wing conspiracy, it’s a sure sign of political distress. Hillary Clinton’s accusation that even an independent federal watchdog is conspiring against her is another sign that her email problems are escalating.

The Clinton attack is a response to a Jan. 14 letter from the intelligence community’s inspector general, Charles McCullough, to Congress’s intelligence committees. Mr. McCullough said he has received sworn declarations from the intelligence community that former Secretary of State Clinton’s private email server contained intelligence about the government’s most important secrets. Reviewers have found “several dozen emails” containing information deemed to be at “confidential, secret, and top secret/sap” levels.

The SAP—special access program—reference in particular is ringing Washington alarms. A SAP usually refers to a highly covert technology program, often weaponry. Knowledge of these programs is usually restricted to small groups of people on a need-to-know basis.

NBC News first reported that the SAP reference on Mrs. Clinton’s server is so sensitive that Mr. McCullough had to get special clearance before he could even view the intelligence-community declarations. Later on Wednesday NBC quoted “senior U.S. officials” as saying that the information was “innocuous” chatter about U.S. military drone strikes.

This quote looks like an attempt at political damage control because the SAP news undermines Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that the emails on her server weren’t classified “at the time.” The fact of drone strikes may have generally been known to the public, but classification levels often involve specific details—such as targets and timing. Mrs. Clinton would surely have recognized the sensitive nature of such a program—the details of which were sitting on her unsecured email server, affording “special access” to any quality Chinese hacker.