RUTHFULLY YOURS

White House: Comey Not ‘Intentionally Trying to Influence’ Election By Bridget Johnson

“And that is a posture that I won’t change and it is a posture that speaks to the kind of institutional responsibilities that are investigated — that are vested here in the White House, which is preserving the independence and integrity of independent investigations conducted by the Department of Justice,” he said.

Earnest said he didn’t “have any independent knowledge of how those decisions were made” or what factors were considered to release information about a new path of investigation since “all the way back to July when Director Comey announced the results of the investigation and spoke at length to the public about his decision not to prosecute Secretary Clinton.”

“Included in that news conference were some rather harsh condemnations of the way that Secretary Clinton handled that situation,” he noted. “Director Comey also testified before Congress at some length, on camera, under oath, and — about the investigation, and some of that testimony provided fodder to Secretary Clinton’s critics.”

The press secretary said he would “neither defend nor criticize what Director Comey has decided to communicate to the public about this investigation.”

“What I will say is that the Department of Justice in our democracy is given expansive authority to conduct investigations.”

Earnest added it’s “important in the mind of the president that those authorities are tempered by an adherence to longstanding tradition and practice and norms that limit public discussion of facts that are collected in the context of those investigations.”

In the ever more astounding Clinton email striptease, which has now hooked up with the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, a player who deserves a lot more mention than he’s been getting is President Barack Obama. True, it was Hillary Clinton, not Obama, who squirreled away State Department business on a private server, and then brought us the contortionist performance of denials, deletions, evasions and professed ignorance that “(C)” on a State Department document stands for “classified.” It is Clinton’s longtime top aide, Huma Abedin, who has some explaining to do about how emails pertinent to the Clinton server saga arrived on the computer of her now-estranged husband, Weiner, who is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually suggestive messages to a teenage girl.

But it is Obama who presides over the administration whence came this mudslide of wayward emails, classified information, pay-for-play opportunities and a Justice Department that has itself become part of the scandal. And it is at the president’s desk that the buck — or the mudslide — is supposed to stop.

It was Obama who tapped Hillary to be secretary of State. It was Obama’s administration that apparently shrugged off at the time Clinton’s extensive use of a private server (though Obama himself was among those who corresponded with her on her private account). It was Obama’s administration that allowed Hillary and Bill Clinton to spin the tangled web of connections between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

It is Obama who presides over an administration that failed to police a setup in which — as FBI Director James B. Comey finally told the press this July — Clinton or her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” As we now know, Clinton used her personal domain extensively while traveling abroad, and according to Comey, the FBI assesses “it is possible that hostile actors gained access.”

On all these fronts, the Clinton email saga is yet another of Obama’s legacies, along with the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, and an Iran nuclear deal that paves Iran’s way to the bomb. And what, precisely, does this Clinton-email legacy help to enshrine in America’s political culture? There are plenty of big things in play here: a self-interested disregard at high levels for matters of national security; the reek of crony favors; the subordination of rule of law to an amorphous official narrative, with corrosive effects on the American system of justice.

But if we look for a bottom line, it’s a code ruinous to the foundations of the American republic, and neatly summed up by George Orwell more than 70 years ago, toward the end of Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

Take, as one of the most glaring aspects of this tale, the administration’s approach to the handling of classified information. Let us specify that even in a free society, there is some information that for reasons such as national security must be kept secret. But the temptation for any administration is to exploit that authority to impose and enforce secrecy in service not of the American people, but of the political agenda or self-interest of those in charge.

Obama took office in 2009 promising to run the most transparent administration ever. Instead, he has run an administration so secretive that in 2013 the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report on “The Obama Administration and the Press,” documenting a Washington climate in which “government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.” Why? Because “those suspected of discussing with reporters anything the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and email records.” Among 30 veteran journalists interviewed in Washington for this CPJ report, not one could recall any precedent rivaling the aggressive nature of “the administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information.”

Exhibit A in this Obama administration campaign to control information is the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former contractor with the State Department, who, in the face of a possible 15-year sentence had he been convicted at trial, pled guilty in 2014 to leaking classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen, and was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

The Stephen Kim case dated back to 2009, Obama’s first year in office. That spring, North Korea carried out its second nuclear test, as well as a ballistic missile test. On June 11, 2009, Rosen published an article describing how the CIA, based on information from “sources inside North Korea,” expected North Korea might respond to a Security Council resolution condemning its actions. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are October Lucy Ma “Anne of Green Gables” 1908

The election, Mosul, Yemen, Hurricane Matthew, Bob Dylan, Chicago Cubs, Tom Haydn. They all made news in October. Apart from the Cubs and Bob Dillon, most of the news (as is so often the case) was bad. In the case of the election, it was dispiriting. On a happier note, October is leaf season in New England. This year, at least in my part of Connecticut, it was vibrant. The DEEP (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection), which publishes every year “The ten best places to see fall foliage in Connecticut,” did not this year include Essex, Lyme or Old Lyme among their recommendations. Not to take anything away from other parts of the State, but it is hard to beat the contrast between the blue of the Connecticut River and the green of evergreens that line its bank, with the golds and reds of our color guard – Oaks, Maples, Beeches, Hickories, Sumacs and Birches.

The October “surprise” was the bombshell emanating from a letter FBI Director James Comey sent, after first alerting the Department of Justice, to senior members of Congress. In the letter he asserted that, after submitting a laptop that belonged to Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin to metadata analysis, his only choice was to re-open the e-mail case against Hillary Clinton. While Democrats rose up in alarm, they have no one to blame but themselves. Mrs. Clinton chose to use a private e-mail account and server. She chose to lie about its use and chose to cover-up what she had done. She had e-mails destroyed. Her husband met covertly with Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. The Administration went along with her shenanigans, as did the Democrat establishment. These revelations not only expose Clinton corruption and the immorality of the Administration and the Justice Department, they could well determine the outcome of the election. Regardless, this “surprise” is symptomatic of an awful election year. If Hillary wins and the data shows she is indictable, what happens? If she loses and the data exonerates her, what happens?