RUTHFULLY YOURS

://www.nationalreview.com/node/440980/print

Although it’s been almost entirely drowned out in the furor over last weekend’s release of Donald Trump’s hot-mic lewd comments to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush and Sunday night’s no-holds-barred presidential debate, a third explosive story emerged in the last several days: WikiLeaks has begun releasing long-promised tranches of information on Hillary Clinton — so far in the form of three batches of e-mails purportedly from the hacked account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The e-mails contain information ranging from the mundane to the embarrassing to the politically damaging (e.g., what appear to be excerpts of Hillary’s Wall Street–speech transcripts) to the slightly bizarre — such as the fact that Tom DeLonge, the former lead singer of the punk-rock band Blink-182, was in contact with Podesta on the subject of aliens and what the government knows about UFO crashes.

WikiLeaks, the anti-privacy organization headed by Julian Assange, claims that the e-mails are proof of a web of corruption that surrounds the former secretary of state and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

While neither the Clinton campaign nor John Podesta has directly confirmed the veracity of the e-mails, neither have they specifically denied the provenience of their content (there are allegations, including from Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, that at least some of the e-mails have been edited or manipulated to put Clinton and her associates in the worst light possible).

So what exactly has WikiLeaks exposed? As of Tuesday afternoon, the e-mail that has grabbed the most headlines — and the one that may be the most politically damaging — is a roundup of Clinton’s paid speeches to financial firms. The e-mail, apparently written by Clinton campaign researcher Tony Carrk and sent to Podesta and other senior Clinton campaign operatives in January 2016, “flags” sensitive topics and subject matters. “I put some highlights below,” Carrk writes. “There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy.”

Carrk goes on to provide transcript excerpts along with his own headers indicating how the sections could be politically problematic, e.g., “Clinton Admits She Is Out of Touch,” “Clinton Says You Need to Have a Private and Public Position on Policy,” “Clinton Talks about Holding Wall Street Accountable only for Political Reasons,” etc. Written in the heat of the Democratic primary and facing a Bernie Sanders–led insurgency on her left flank, the e-mail focuses on how Clinton could be seen as too centrist, too business-friendly, or too out of touch to appeal to a liberal-activist base fired up by the “independent socialist” senator from Vermont.

eliminary consideration to the source, and to the degree, if any, that questions about the manner in which the documents were procured diminish their reliability.

Understandably, the Clinton camp has stressed the questionable nature of WikiLeaks’s operations. That is what lawyers tend to do when documents show up that cast their clients (and themselves) in an unflattering light. There is some persuasive force to these complaints. They are too convenient, though. When it came to top-secret information stolen and leaked by Edward Snowden, the reaction on the left and among many libertarians was that the documents appeared authentic and thus it was proper — essential, in fact — to base reporting and arguments on them. Concerns that what Snowden had done was illegal and treasonous, and that the leaks immensely damaged national security, were said to be trivial compared to the imperative of exposing supposedly monstrous government surveillance activities. Many to this day regard Snowden as a hero.

As I am often constrained to observe, our progressive politics today are not about right and wrong but about us and them — logic is out, “narrative” is in. So we shouldn’t go looking for the Left to take consistent positions. If theft and leaks help The Cause, what matters is the substance of the documents; if they hurt, then it’s time to start worrying about authenticity, moral hazard, etc.

But let’s try to sort out right and wrong, even if the answers are unsatisfying.

The basic rule applied in American courts is that even an atrocious source can produce authentic, reliable evidence. The more atrocious the source, though, the higher the burden to establish authenticity and reliability (there are salient differences between the latter two things, which we’ll get to presently). This is easier to grasp with documents than testimony: It can be very hard (often impossible) to establish the trustworthiness of testimony from a dubious source, while the authenticity of a document can often be verified pretty easily. If, upon examination, the document appears to be what it is represented to be, and especially if its authenticity is not refuted by those with a reason to refute it, it is generally admitted into evidence for the jury’s consideration. But how much the jury should rely on the document’s contents (the “weight” to be given them) depends on how much reason there is to suspect the document is fraudulent or misleadingly incomplete.

A State Department official close to Hillary Clinton appeared to give preference to former President Bill Clinton’s friends after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, emails leaked to ABC News revealed on Tuesday.

The official, Caitlin Klevorick, was one of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior aides. She was managing Clinton Foundation contacts who were offering assistance to the State Department.

In one email, Klevorick wrote, “Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC,” referring to William Jefferson Clinton. “Most I can probably ID but not all.”

She wrote in another email: “Is this a FOB [Friend of Bill]! If not, she should go tocidi.org,” referring to a general government website.

The person was emailing to offer medical supplies in the wake of the earthquake.

In another case, billionaire Clinton Foundation donor Denis O’Brien wrote to Clinton aide Doug Band and Clinton Foundation foreign policy director Amitabh Desai for help figuring out how to fly supplies into Haiti and get employees of his company, Haitian telecom firm Digicel, out of the country.

Desai referred to O’Brien as a “WJC VIP” in an email with the subject line “Friend of Clintons.”

O’Brien later wrote in an email to Band that he was “not making any progress through conventional channels.” Band then wrote to Desai to “pls get on this.”

While some offers of help were charitable, others might have been seeking lucrative government contracts as part of the Haiti reconstruction and recovery efforts, ABC noted.

Klevorick told ABC News that she asked questions about whether the contacts were friends of Bill Clinton to determine whether they had previously worked in Haiti or with disaster relief. She said the priority “was to get the necessary resources to the right places as soon as possible to save lives.”

Media Polling Fully Exposed – About That NBC/WSJ Clinton +11 Point Poll….https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/11/media-polling-fully-exposed-about-that-nbcwsj-clinton-11-point-poll/#more-123009

The Real Battle, is The Battle For Your Mind

Researchers and political analysts frequent CTH because we bring you hard, factual, and fully cited research enabling you to make up your own mind about the headlines.

What you are about to read (and see) below is a fully cited example of something we have discussed frequently, but withheld until today, so the oppositional forces cannot change strategies in their attempts to manipulate your mind.

It is now time to lay all media polling naked for you to grasp. Everything below is fully cited so you can fact-check it for yourself. However, we present this with a disclaimer: the entities exposed will industriously work to change their approach from this day forth.

You have probably seen the latest example of the media claiming a released presidential poll from NBC and The Wall Street Journal as an example of Hillary Clinton expanding to an 11 point lead in the weekend following the “controversial” leaked tape of Donald Trump.

The claim is complete and utter nonsense. Here’s the proof.

We begin with a google search showing hundreds of media citations referencing theNBC/WSJ Poll:

The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World. ”http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html?_r=0

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

The Sunday debate recalibrated the moribund Trump candidacy. It will not end this week. The stampede and groupthink calls for his resignation will ease. Trump might have lost the debate on points of detail, but by the end of hour one, he had won it on energy level and audacity.

No one has ever spoken so bluntly to Hillary Clinton in her 30 years in politics. The confrontation was long overdue. In an either/or race, Trump at least reminded the audience that he is running as a refutation of the status quo. Hillary still bores with the idea that Obama’s record is fine and her continuance of it will make things even better.

Trump, as the teenage delinquent, was at times, as expected, repetitive and brash. Hillary, as playground monitor, was characteristically off-putting, sanctimonious and disingenuous. At one point she foolishly explained her advocacy of being duplicitous by comparing herself to a supposed two-faced Abe Lincoln. Pulling Old Abe down to pull yourself up is not a good idea. Nor is referring voters to “fact-checking” at her own website! And there is something now surreal about Hillary’s promises to get tough with Putin, after she cooked up that ridiculous stunt of a red “reset” button in Geneva in 2009, while subsequently caving on almost everything the Russians wanted.

By the debate’s end, it was almost miraculously forgotten that hours earlier, Trump had been considered dead. That fact also translated into a Trump debate victory.

A leaked hot-mike tape from 11 years prior caught a married and near-60 Donald Trump talking dirty, in adolescent, misogynistic fashion — along with a celebrity scion of the Bush aristocracy.

The old, leaked recording revealed what most Americans knew already (from Trump’s own autobiographies, interviews, and past boasts): Trump is as crude as our crude culture, and sometimes as repellent in language and thought.

Whether he reified his braggadocio by grabbing women and sexually assaulting them through unwarranted touching — in the manner of former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or past president Bill Clinton — remains to be seen from future hit-leaks. If Trump was talking sex trash as he approached 60, we can only imagine what the Clinton campaign will dig up from his randier 40s and 50s — especially after Trump did well enough in the debate, and in response to more Wikileaks damage to Hillary.

Why did his decade-old locker-room talk matter? A cruder and raunchier America of Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé is now far more sexually sensitive than was the staid America of half a century ago — as if the dirtier we become, the more sanctimonious we end up. Past presidents, such as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, trumped even Trump in unleashing their reckless libidos on quite young White House staffers, an array of mistresses, and random women. But they were then young, liberal, loved by the media, and skilled incumbent politicians holding the power of the country at key moments in history.

Private buccaneer Trump so far has no such mitigating arguments to contextualize his reprehensible private banter. In the debate Trump played the Clinton defense of Moveon.org days: He was terribly sorry and now it was time to “move on” to solve problems — an argument that long ago had resonated with the Left.

In case that did not work, Trump used another Clinton liberal tactic: reminding us of others who do worse. Bill Clinton’s leaks about his sanctimonious opponents once led to the resignations of Republican congressmen whose private lives were said to be no better than Clinton’s. Never underestimate the comparative sleaze in Washington.