Posted tagged ‘Clinton character’

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Loretta Lynch, Swamp Thing

June 10, 2017

Loretta Lynch, Swamp Thing, American Thinker, Daniel John Sobieski, June 10, 2016

(Please see also OPINION: The damaging case against James Comey. — DM)

Arguably, the most interesting part of the testimony of James Comey, the cowardly lion of the criminal justice system, before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday is not that President Trump was cleared of even a scintilla of corruption and obstruction of justice but that President Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, is up to her eyeballs in both. As the Daily Caller reports:

Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general under Barack Obama, pressured former FBI Director James Comey to downplay the Clinton email server investigation and only refer to it as a “matter,” Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

Comey said that when he asked Lynch if she was going to authorize him to confirm the existence of the Clinton email investigation, her answer was, “Yes, but don’t call it that. Call it a matter.” When Comey asked why, he said, Lynch wouldn’t give him an explanation. “Just call it a matter,” she said….

Earlier in his testimony, Comey said Lynch instructed Comey not to call the criminal investigation into the Clinton server a criminal investigation. Instead, Lynch told Comey to call it a “matter,” Comey said, “which confused me.”

Comey cited that pressure from Lynch to downplay the investigation as one of the reasons he held a press conference to recommend the Department of Justice not seek to indict Clinton.

Comey also cited Lynch’s secret tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton as a reason he chose to hold the press conference, he said, as he was concerned about preserving the independence of the FBI.

This is far worse than President Trump asking Comey in a private conversation to wrap up the Flynn investigation after Flynn was dismissed as National Security Adviser. This was a direct order by Comey’s immediate superior to align his rhetoric with the Clinton campaign spin. This is what Comey did, calling it a “matter” and not a criminal investigation, which is the only thing the FBI does. Couple this submissive compliance to an order to help the Clinton campaign with their spin with the meeting on the tarmac between Lunch and Bill Clinton, the husband of the target of that criminal investigation, and you have an obvious case for charging Lynch with obstruction of justice.

If Comey was concerned about preserving the integrity of the FBI, he wouldn’t have leaked the memo of his private conversation with President Trump to the New York Times through a third party. That memo, prepared on a government computer by a government employee on government time, is the property of the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer. Its unauthorized dissemination is a clear violation of the Federal Records Act and executive privilege. Comey was charged to find leakers, not be the leaker-in-chief.

Just as he didn’t have the authority to leak the memo, he didn’t have the authority to go before the American people and declare that the multiple felonies committed by Hilary Clinton while she was Secretary of State were not prosecutable due to lack of intent. Not only was he wrong on the law, which does not require intent, but his job is to gather evidence not to recommend prosecution or not. If Comey wanted to preserve the independence of the FBI, he wouldn’t have held the press conference giving Hillary Clinton a pass. He would have thrown the evidence on Lynch’s desk and told her to do her job. He bailed both Clinton and Lynch out and gave the Clinton campaign a boost.

Lynch ordered Comey to drop the word “investigation.” Did she also order him to drop the investigation itself and take the hit for doing so? Questions still remain as to why Comey did not attend the final Clinton interview, why the interview was not recorded, why Clinton was not under oath, and why obvious follow-up questions were not asked. It would seem that Comey, perhaps at the order of Lynch, was doing everything that would benefit the Clinton campaign.

Let us not forget another example of the tangled web woven between the FBI and the Clinton campaign — the relationship between Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. As Caherine Herridge of Fox News reported:

A top FBI official who came under scrutiny last year over his wife’s campaign contributions from a Hillary Clinton ally did not list those 2015 donations or his wife’s salary in financial disclosure forms, according to records reviewed by Fox News.

The records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe left the box blank for wife Dr. Jill McCabe’s salary, as a doctor with Commonwealth Emergency Physicians. And there is no documentation of the hundreds of thousands of campaign funds she received in her unsuccessful 2015 Virginia state Senate race.

As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Clinton confidant and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe urged McCabe’s wife to run for statewide office shortly after news reports were published that Hillary Clinton used a private email server and address for all her government business while serving as secretary of State.

For the reporting period of October through November 2015, McCabe’s campaign filings show she received $467,500 from Common Good VA, a political action committee controlled by McAuliffe, as well as an additional $292,500 from a second Democratic PAC.

Well, isn’t that special? This is the swamp President Trump wants to drain. Let us also deal with Swamp Thing — Loretta Lynch.

Remember that Comey’s exoneration of Hillary came just days after Lynch met with Bill on the tarmac. Can you say “collusion” and “obstruction of justice”? The June 27, 2016 tarmac meeting on Lynch’s plane in Phoenix itself, in the light of Comey’s admission of Lynch’s pressure on him, is worthy of a special prosecutor all unto itself:, a fact not lost on Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton:

Lynch was caught off guard when a local Phoenix reporter asked her about the meeting at a press conference. She claimed at the time the discussion with the former President, which lasted 30 minutes, was simply about golf and grandchildren. After Hillary Clinton lost the White House to Donald Trump in November, Lynch said the meeting was regrettable.

“The infamous tarmac meeting between President Clinton and AG Lynch is a vivid example of why many Americans believe the Obama administration’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton was rigged,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement about the new lawsuit. “Now it will be up to Attorney General Sessions at the Trump Justice Department to finally shed some light on this subversion of justice.”

Let’s hope so. Let’s hope this DOJ will focus on real crimes and real obstruction of justice. It may turn out that Loretta Lynch and James Comey interfered in the 2016 election more than Vladimir Putin could even have dreamed of.

Categories: 2016 elections and Comey, 2016 elections and Russia, Clinton character, Clinton corruption, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Clinton investigation, Comey and AG Lynch, Comey leaks, Comey memos, Comey testifies, Comeygate, Great Trump - Russia conspiracy, Lynch meets Wm Clinton, Obstruction of justice, Swamp creatures
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The Stretch Drive (9)

November 4, 2016

The Stretch Drive (9), Power Line, Steven Hayward, November 4, 2016

• Just three or four weeks ago all the chatter from the Certified Smart People was that Hillary was “expanding the map,” and could concentrate on campaigning in red states like Georgia, Arizona, maybe even Texas. Now, Hillary’s campaign is frantically buying last minute ad time in . . . Michigan. (And Hillary has added a last minute campaign stop in Michigan today.) She’s suddenly campaigning hard in the key swing states. This should tell you everything you need to know about the state of the race with four days to go.

• The ABC/Washington Post tracking poll today has Hillary back up to a three-point lead, 47-44, though with the interesting finding that respondents give Trump a nine-point lead as the candidate best able to deal with corruption. Meanwhile, some new individual state polls show Trump within striking distance in blue states—down two points in Pennsylvania, tied in Colorado, comfortably ahead in New Hampshire and Arizona. But behind in Florida, which may yet again turn out to be the key state. Oh goody.

• It’s been obvious for a while now that Trump is actually running against four people: Hillary, her husband, President Obama, and Michelle Obama. I can’t recall a presidential election where the incumbent president made so many campaign appearances. Reagan made only one or two for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and of course Bill Clinton made none on behalf of Al Gore in 2000 (by Gore’s own choice reportedly). This shows how difficult it is to put Hillary over the top.

• Finally, in the miscellany department, a reader directs me to this very old ABC 20/20 expose of the Clinton standard operating sleaze. The video is 10 minutes long, but worth watching for its stomach-churning glory. Can we really want to put these people back in the White House?

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton character, Clinton corruption, Clinton supporters, Donald Trump campaign, Polls
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Podesta Warned: “I Hope Hillary Truly Understands Now How Batshit Crazy David Brock Is”

November 4, 2016

Podesta Warned: “I Hope Hillary Truly Understands Now How Batshit Crazy David Brock Is” Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, November 4, 2016

The consistent view from both inside and outside of the Clinton campaign referenced Brock in the same terms. The obvious conclusion is that it is precisely those attributes that proved the attraction.

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One of the issues that was raised repeatedly by Bernie Sanders and later by Donald Trump is the alliance between Hillary Clinton and David Brock, the founder of Media Matters. Brock has been widely attacked for what critics view as sleazy and vicious work on behalf of Hillary Clinton. You may recall Bernie Sanders denouncing Clinton for her continued alliance with Brock and use of his controversial PAC organizations. Sanders referred to Brock as simple “scum” but Clinton [neither? — DM] denounced Brock [n]or to discourage[d] Democrats from working with or contributing to his PACs. It turns out that even Clinton aides were disgusted by Clinton’s refusal to cut off Brock or to denounced his work. In the latest batch of Wikileaks, Neera Tanden, the President of Center for American Progress, allegedly emailed John Podesta that “I hope Hillary truly understands now how batshit crazy David Brock is.”

Of course, the question answers itself. The consistent view from both inside and outside of the Clinton campaign referenced Brock in the same terms. The obvious conclusion is that it is precisely those attributes that proved the attraction.

neera_tanden

The mainstream media has been repeatedly accused of ignoring the Clinton-Brock connection. Yet, the email (if accurate) shows that Clinton allies were equally concerned about the association. Tanden previously worked for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and later served as policy director for Barack Obama.

The subject of the email was simply “I Hope.”

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, David Brock, Media Matters, PACs
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Don’t Be Fooled: Hillarygate Probe Is Now a Formal Federal Criminal Investigation

November 1, 2016

Don’t Be Fooled: Hillarygate Probe Is Now a Formal Federal Criminal Investigation, American Thinker, James G. Wiles, November 1, 2016

The NY Times and the Wall Street Journal both reported on Monday morning that an FBI warrant application to a federal judge over the weekend for permission to search Huma Abedin’s emails and laptop had been granted. The application was made on the basis of the Clinton email investigation. Necessarily, that application (as required by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment) would have been supported by FBI affidavits.

This new fact is a development of immense potential significance – both for Mrs. Clinton personally and for us as American citizens. It is also unprecedented in American history.

At a minimum, it enables us to pierce the thick cloud of black ink and disinformation released over the weekend by Team Hillary and which is being widely misreported in the current news cycle.

The FBI agents had to make this warrant application because their existing Fourth Amendment search authority was on the basis of Anthony Weiner’s (unrelated) suspected misconduct with an underage girl. That investigation was already a grand jury matter. However, that grand jury’s authority – which is supervised by a federal judge — did not authorize the Bureau to pursue information which might be pertinent to the inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email server while she was Secretary of State. Making that application, under standard DOJ protocol, required approval from Main Justice. In this case, the assistant attorney in charge of the Criminal Division, if not the attorney general.

Since the application was made, it’s safe to conclude that the Criminal Division at Main Justice authorized the warrant application. Thus, at a minimum, the senior leadership of the Justice Department is not as unanimously condemnatory of FBI director Comey’s letter to Congress on Friday as media reports would lead us to believe.

It also explains why Director Comey issued his letter to Congress. The reporting tells us that the FBI’s decision to make a warrant application to the supervising judge of the Weiner grand jury triggered Mr. Comey’s decision to notify Congress. Having promised Congressional leaders (perhaps unwisely, since he was not required to do so) that, if the Bureau uncovered new evidence relating to Hillarygate which required further inquiry, he would so notify them, he proceeded on Friday to keep his word and do so.

Now he’s being condemned by the Democrats and the MSM for not saying why. We’ll get to the reason why he’s not in a minute. But, first, the granting of the warrant application means several important and new things:

1) A federal judge supervising a grand jury has now made a finding, based on FBI affidavits which present evidence gathered during the preliminary Hillary inquiry (the one which the FBI director stated had been closed back in July), that there’s probable cause to believe that a federal crime was committed in connection with Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server.

We still, however, don’t know what crime(s) are suspected to have been committed. Or by whom.

2) The FBI can use this new grant of grand jury authority to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server for the first time to issues subpoenaes to obtain testimony from witnesses and compel the production of documents and things. The Bureau and DOJ can, furthermore, use the judge’s probable cause finding to support further warrant applications.

This means that, if DOJ authorizes it, a United States attorney now has the ability for the first time to put subpoenaed witnesses before a grand jury. There, without their lawyer in the room, they may be questioned under oath by a federal prosecutor. If the witnesses take the Fifth – and the witness’s lawyer is allowed to sit outside the grand jury room and be consulted by the witness before answering a question, they can be immunized and, if they still refuse to testify, a judge can jail them indefinitely until they change their mind.

Huma Abedin, according to prior reporting, received a grant of immunity during the FBI’s preliminary investigation. During the first Clinton presidency, Clinton allies chose jail over cooperating with the federal grand jury investigating both Clintons.

We may get to see if a new generation of Clinton allies are willing to do the same.

3) The liberal media’s reporting that the Hillarygate email server investigation has not, in fact, been “reopened” is totally false.

Why?

Because, not only is the probe reopened, it has been upgraded and expanded. It has been upgraded from a preliminary inquiry to a formal criminal investigation with grand jury power. That also means that, at least at the level of the federal grand jury itself, assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to that grand jury are now for the first time formally involved.

In other words: the Beast is now fully awake.

4) This weekend’s development potentially escalates the threat to Mrs. Clinton. While several other procedural steps and processes are necessary, it is a federal grand jury, not the FBI,  which issues indictments. The FBI — using the the grand jury to obtain testimony, conduct searches and compel the production of documents and things – investigates crimes. The U.S. Attorneys, acting though the grand jury, charge and prosecute those persons whom the grand jury finds probable cause to believe have committed those crimes.

5) This weekend’s development also means that, for the first time in American history, a candidate for President of the United States is likely now a subject/target of a federal grand jury investigation.

These facts now enable us to analyze and dispel Team Clinton’s attempts to lay down a thick fog of misdirection over the scene.

Here it is: Mrs. Clinton’s demand that the FBI be “transparent” is pure posturing — spinning to the max (which Mrs. Clinton, as the most criminally investigated presidential candidate in U.S. history, well knows). Younger readers, please take note: this is not, to put it mildly, Hillary Clinton’s first rodeo.

Not for the first time, Mrs. Clinton is being totally disingenuous with the voters (and the media). She is also making FBI director Comey into her personal punching bag. And she’s doing it because she knows that the director can’t fight back.

In this, Mrs. Clinton is simply repeating a tactic which she and her catspaw Sidney Blumenthal used to good effect during the Whitewater, Travelgate, and Monica Lewinsky investigations in the 1990s. And that tactic worked.

It’s called grand jury secrecy. Now that Hillarygate is, for the first time, a grand jury investigation, Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) prohibits the FBI and prosecutors from saying anything about “matters occurring before the grand jury.” Their lips are sealed.

Team Hillary’s lips, however, are not. They are neither federal prosecutors nor “agents of the grand jury.” So, Mrs. Clinton and her spokesmen — unlike the federal law enforcement officials they’ve been targeting all weekend — are free to tell us everything they know.

Let’s see if they do. A reporter should ask them.

And, in the meantime, let’s not bother to hold our breaths.

If Hillary really wants “transparency,” let her release the FBI’s warrant application for permission to search Huma Abedin and Mr. Weiner’s emails for evidence relating to whether Hillary’s use of a private server violated federal law. Huma’s lawyers likely have it. If not, they can certainly get it.

Huma, of course, is also free to release the emails too.

That’s why Hillary’s demand for “transparency” by the FBI is moonshine. She damn well knows the feds can’t do it.

She also now knows that the threat level against her has just been upgraded to ORANGE.

William Safire and Christopher Hitchens, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Clinton investigation, Clinton lies, Clinton supporters, Comey, Department of Justice, FBI, Grand jury, U.S. courts
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Clinton’s State Department: A RICO Enterprise

October 29, 2016

Clinton’s State Department: A RICO Enterprise, National Review, Andres C. McCarthy, October 29, 2016

hillary-clinton-corruption-foundation-was-keyClinton is sworn in as secretary of state, February 2, 2009. (Reuters photo: Jonathan Ernst)

Whatever the relevance of the new e-mails to the probe of Clinton’s classified-information transgressions and attempt to destroy thousands of emails, these offenses may pale in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s most audacious violations of law: Crimes that should still be under investigation; crimes that will, in fitting Watergate parlance, be a cancer on the presidency if she manages to win on November 8.

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She appears to have used her official powers to do favors for major Clinton Foundation donors.

Felony mishandling of classified information, including our nation’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets; the misappropriation and destruction of tens of thousands of government records — these are serious criminal offenses. To this point, the Justice Department and FBI have found creative ways not to charge Hillary Clinton for them. Whether this will remain the case has yet to be seen. As we go to press, the stunning news has broken that the FBI’s investigation is being reopened. It appears, based on early reports, that in the course of examining communications devices in a separate “sexting” investigation of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the bureau stumbled on relevant e-mails — no doubt connected to Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner’s wife and, more significantly, Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidant. According to the New York Times, the FBI has seized at least one electronic device belonging to Ms. Abedin as well. New e-mails, never before reviewed by the FBI, have been recovered.

The news is still emerging, and there will be many questions — particularly if it turns out that the bureau failed to obtain Ms. Abedin’s communications devices earlier in the investigation, a seemingly obvious step. As we await answers, we can only observe that, whatever the FBI has found, it was significant enough for director James Comey to sense the need to notify Congress, despite knowing what a bombshell this would be just days before the presidential election.

One thing, however, is already clear. Whatever the relevance of the new e-mails to the probe of Clinton’s classified-information transgressions and attempt to destroy thousands of emails, these offenses may pale in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s most audacious violations of law: Crimes that should still be under investigation; crimes that will, in fitting Watergate parlance, be a cancer on the presidency if she manages to win on November 8.

Mrs. Clinton appears to have converted the office of secretary of state into a racketeering enterprise. This would be a violation of the RICO law — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971 (codified in the U.S. penal code at sections 1961 et seq.).

Hillary and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, operated the Clinton Foundation. Ostensibly a charity, the foundation was a de facto fraud scheme to monetize Hillary’s power as secretary of state (among other aspects of the Clintons’ political influence). The scheme involved (a) the exchange of political favors, access, and influence for millions of dollars in donations; (b) the circumvention of campaign-finance laws that prohibit political donations by foreign sources; (c) a vehicle for Mrs. Clinton to shield her State Department e-mail communications from public and congressional scrutiny while she and her husband exploited the fundraising potential of her position; and (d) a means for Clinton insiders to receive private-sector compensation and explore lucrative employment opportunities while drawing taxpayer-funded government salaries.

While the foundation did perform some charitable work, this camouflaged the fact that contributions were substantially diverted to pay lavish salaries and underwrite luxury travel for Clinton insiders. Contributions skyrocketed to $126 million in 2009, the year Mrs. Clinton arrived at Foggy Bottom. Breathtaking sums were “donated” by high-rollers and foreign governments that had crucial business before the State Department. Along with those staggering donations came a spike in speaking opportunities and fees for Bill Clinton. Of course, disproportionate payments and gifts to a spouse are common ways of bribing public officials — which is why, for example, high-ranking government officeholders must reveal their spouses’ income and other asset information on their financial-disclosure forms.

While there are other egregious transactions, the most notorious corruption episode of Secretary Clinton’s tenure involves the State Department’s approval of a deal that surrendered fully one-fifth of the United States’ uranium-mining capacity to Vladimir Putin’s anti-American thugocracy in Russia.

The story, significant background of which predates Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, has been recounted in ground-breaking reporting by the Hoover Institution’s Peter Schweizer (in his remarkable book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich) and the New York Times. In a nutshell, in 2005, under the guise of addressing the incidence of HIV/AIDS in Kazakhstan (where the disease is nearly nonexistent), Bill Clinton helped his Canadian billionaire pal Frank Giustra to convince the ruling despot, Nursultan Nazarbayev (an infamous torturer and human-rights violator), to grant coveted uranium-mining rights to Giustra’s company, Ur-Asia Energy (notwithstanding that it had no background in the highly competitive uranium business). Uranium is a key component of nuclear power, from which the United States derives 20 percent of its total electrical power.

In the months that followed, Giustra gave an astonishing $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation and pledged $100 million more. With the Kazakh rights secured, Ur-Asia was able to expand its holdings and attract new investors, like Ian Telfer, who also donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Ur-Asia merged with Uranium One, a South African company, in a $3.5 billion deal — with Telfer becoming Uranium One’s chairman. The new company proceeded to buy up major uranium assets in the United States.

Meanwhile, as tends to happen in dictatorships, Nazarbayev (the Kazakh dictator) turned on the head of his state-controlled uranium agency (Kazatomprom), who was arrested for selling valuable mining rights to foreign entities like Ur-Asia/Uranium One. This was likely done at the urging of Putin, the neighborhood bully whose state-controlled atomic-energy company (Rosatom) was hoping to grab the Kazakh mines — whether by taking them outright or by taking over Uranium One.

The arrest, which happened a few months after Obama took office, sent Uranium One stock into free fall, as investors fretted that the Kazakh mining rights would be lost. Uranium One turned to Secretary Clinton’s State Department for help. As State Department cables disclosed by WikiLeaks show, Uranium One officials wanted more than a U.S. statement to the media; they pressed for written confirmation that their mining licenses were valid. Secretary Clinton’s State Department leapt into action: An energy officer from the U.S. embassy immediately held meetings with the Kazakh regime. A few days later, it was announced that Russia’s Rosatom had purchased 17 percent of Uranium One. Problem solved.

Except it became a bigger problem when the Russian company sought to acquire a controlling interest in Uranium One. That would mean a takeover not only of the Kazakh mines but of the U.S. uranium assets as well. Such a foreign grab requires approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a powerful government tribunal that the secretary of state sits on and heavily influences. Though she had historically postured as a hawk against foreign acquisitions of American assets with critical national-security implications, Secretary Clinton approved the Russian takeover of Uranium One. During and right after the big-bucks Russian acquisition, Telfer contributed $1.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Other people with ties to Uranium One appear to have ponied up as much as $5.6 million in donations.

In 2009, the incoming Obama administration had been deeply concerned about the potential for corruption were Hillary to run the State Department while Bill and their family foundation were hauling in huge payments from foreign governments, businesses, and entrepreneurs. For precisely this reason, the White House required Mrs. Clinton to agree in writing that the Clinton Foundation would annually disclose its major donors and seek pre-approval from the White House before the foundation accepted foreign contributions. This agreement was repeated flouted — for example, by concealing the contributions from Telfer. Indeed, the foundation was recently forced to refile its tax returns for the years that Secretary Clinton ran the State Department after media reports that it failed to disclose foreign donations — approximately $20 million worth.

Under RICO, an “enterprise” can be any association of people, informal or formal, illegitimate or legitimate — it could be a Mafia family, an ostensibly charitable foundation, or a department of government. It is a racketeering enterprise if its affairs are conducted through “a pattern of racketeering activity.” A “pattern” means merely two or more violations of federal or state law; these violations constitute “racketeering activity” if they are included among the extensive list of felonies laid out in the statute.

Significantly for present purposes, the listed felonies include bribery, fraud, and obstruction of justice. Fraud encompasses both schemes to raise money on misleading pretexts (e.g., a charitable foundation that camouflages illegal political payoffs) and schemes to deprive Americans of their right to the honest services of a public official (e.g., quid pro quo arrangements in which official acts are performed in exchange for money). Both fraud and obstruction can be proved by false statements — whether they are public proclamations (e.g., “I turned over all work-related e-mails to the State Department”) or lies to government officials (e.g., concealing “charitable” donations from foreign sources after promising to disclose them, or claiming not to know that the “(C)” symbol in a government document means it is classified at the confidential level).

The WikiLeaks disclosures of e-mails hacked from Clinton presidential-campaign chairman John Podesta provide mounting confirmation that the Clinton Foundation was orchestrated for the purpose of enriching the Clintons personally and leveraging then-Secretary Clinton’s power to do it. Hillary and her underlings pulled this off by making access to her contingent on Clinton Foundation ties; by having top staff service Clinton Foundation donors and work on Clinton Foundation business; by systematically conducting her e-mail communications outside the government server system; by making false statements to the public, the White House, Congress, the courts, and the FBI; and by destroying thousands of e-mails — despite congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act demands — in order to cover up (among other things) the shocking interplay between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

Under federal law, that can amount to running an enterprise by a pattern of fraud, bribery, and obstruction. If so, it is a major crime. Like the major crimes involving the mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files, it cries out for a thorough and credible criminal investigation. More important, wholly apart from whether there is sufficient evidence for criminal convictions, there is overwhelming evidence of a major breach of trust that renders Mrs. Clinton unfit for any public office, let along the nation’s highest public office.

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton Cash, Clinton character, Clinton corruption, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Clinton Foundation, Clinton investigation, Clinton lies, Clinton obstructions of justice, Clinton unsecured server, Comey, FBI, RICO
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Newt Gingrich Full Interview with Sean Hannity (10/28/2016)

October 29, 2016

Newt Gingrich Full Interview with Sean Hannity (10/28/2016), Fox News via YouTube

(It’s about the re-opened FBI “investigation” of the Clinton e-mails and unsecured server. — DM)

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, Clinton corruption, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Clinton Foundation, Clinton investigation, Clinton lies, Clinton obstructions of justice, Clinton unsecured server, Comey, FBI
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Eric Trump Full Interview with George Stephanopoulos

October 23, 2016

Eric Trump Full Interview with George Stephanopoulos (10/23/2016), ABC via YouTube

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, Clinton lies, Clinton supporters, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Opinion polls, Project Veritas, Vote fraud
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WikiLeaks: Alliance of Hillary, Iran, Soros and left-wing Catholics

October 23, 2016

WikiLeaks: Alliance of Hillary, Iran, Soros and left-wing Catholics, Jihad Watch, , October 23, 2016

(Please see also, The Vatican Submits to Islam (2006-2016). Is the left trying to take over the Roman Catholic Church? — DM)

A leftist-jihadist alliance between the Clinton camp, Soros and the Catholic Church was exposed by WikiLeaks, followed by desperate attempts to try to explain away the leaks. Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta is said to have “responded favorably to an email forwarded to him from a leftwing ‘Catholic’ organization that said it was arranging meetings with Catholic prelates to urge them to press U.S. senators to vote for the Iran Treaty.”

The contents of the email:

I thought you might be interested in this report from the CACG [Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good] exec director Chris Hale on efforts to have the Catholic org community promote the Iran Treaty. There is a tremendous amount of potential in these inter Faith orgs including the ability to reach some working class voters…

But when Hale was confronted about the email that WikiLeaks claimed was sent by Podesta, all Hale could reply was this:

“What was communicated in that email is not the right way forward, but I also want to say that I know John Podesta. He’s a good man, he’s a good Catholic, he practices the faith seriously.”

Yet Podesta has stated:

We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this.

As exposed by WikiLeaks, Christopher Hale, Executive Director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said this in an email with the subject heading “Catholic Efforts on Iran Update”:

I think the top-line goal is pretty clear: we need Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl to make direct appeals to Senators Cardin and Mikulski on this issue. While I don’t have any advance knowledge, I have a sense from the conversations setting up the meetings that there might be willingness for that to happen.

I’ll be taking some time off on both today and Monday to rejuvenate myself as my colleagues and I continue our grueling preparation for Pope Francis’s apostolic trip to the US. As you can imagine, Iran is just a portion of the work we’re doing in preparation for the Holy Father’s trip.

Meanwhile, Dr. William Donohue, president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, stated that Podesta is “hell bent on creating mutiny in the Catholic Church.” Donohue further stated:

The evidence is indisputable: Both of these groups, Catholics in Alliance and Catholics United, were created by Podesta, and funded by Soros, for the express purpose of staging a revolt within the Catholic Church.

Together, they have sought to manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church.

In 2012, Sandy Newman, founder of the left-wing group, Voices for Progress, asked Podesta for advice on how best to “plant the seeds of the revolution.” The revolution he sought was an attempt to sunder the Catholic Church.

pope-and-iran-rouhani-ap-640x480

“Hillary Clinton Campaign Forwarded Plan to White House to Promote Iran Treaty Using Catholic Prelates’ Influence”, by Susan Berry, Breitbart, October 22, 2016:

An email from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta reveals White House chief of staff Denis McDonough responding favorably to an email forwarded to him by Podesta from a leftwing “Catholic” organization that said it was arranging meetings with Catholic prelates to urge them to press U.S. senators to vote for the Iran Treaty.

The email, revealed by WikiLeaks, shows a message originally forwarded to Podesta by Fred Rotondaro, chairman of the dissident Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), and a senior fellow with Podesta’s organization Center for American Progress.

Rotondaro wrote on August 21, 2015 to Podesta and other Clinton campaign staffers:

John,

I thought you might be interested in this report from the CACG exec director Chris Hale on efforts to have the Catholic org community promote the Iran Treaty. There is a tremendous amount of potential in these inter Faith orgs including the ability to reach some working class voters,

Fred

The forwarded message is from Ben Palumbo, a CACG board member, who wrote on the subject of “Catholic Efforts on Iran Update” to Diane Randall and members of the Quakers (Friends) political lobbying organization, CACG’s Hale, and James Salt of Catholics United, another leftwing dissident group that calls itself “Catholic.”

Palumbo wrote about plans to meet with several Democrat U.S. senators:

Hi Diane,

I wanted you to see this report from our Exec. Dir. Chris Hale.

We are going to seek a meeting with Warner, and requests are in the works for Coons and Casey.

Best wishes,

Ben

The report, from Hale, first announces CACG’s ad to support the Iran Treaty that is running on leftwing “Catholic” sites National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal.

Hale wrote:

Our advertisement began running on National Catholic Reporter andCommonweal yesterday. Right now, when you click the advertisement, the link takes you to MoveOn’s 60 Day to Stop A War Take Action website. From there, you are able to dial into your Member of Congress and request them to support the Iran Deal.

At some point today, that link will change to our own website, which will list all the groups’ names, simple talking points, and give people a chance to dial in three elected officials (their one US Representatives and two Senators). While the MoveOn site is very effective, ours will ensure that people calling into the offices identify as a person of faith, which is important in both our narrative creation (Catholics support the deal) and coalition building (the God Squad takes action).

Hale then pointed out that his organization is working on letters to Democrat U.S. Sens. Benjamin Cardin and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, to urge them to vote for the Iran deal.

He continued that CACG was planning to meet with Baltimore Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., to encourage them to urge the Maryland senators to vote for the Iran Treaty as well:

The letters to both Senators Cardin and Mikulski have been e-mailed, faxed, and snail mailed to the appropriate parties. This morning, I will make follow up calls to the state chief of staffs and schedulers. I imagine we’ll know early next week if they plan on meeting with our groups’ representatives. If it appears that isn’t the case, I’m developing a grass-tops digital strategy and local media strategy to encourage them to change their minds…

I have phone calls early next week with senior advocacy staffers for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Archdiocese of Washington (which includes territory in Maryland), and the Maryland Catholic Conference.

While I think there should be many goals for these meetings, I think the top-line goal is pretty clear: we need Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl to make direct appeals to Senators Cardin and Mikulski on this issue. While I don’t have any advance knowledge, I have a sense from the conversations setting up the meetings that there might be willingness for that to happen.

I will be sending an additional e-mail to our C4 community on Tuesday to asking them to contact their Members of Congress. This was remarkably successful last week. Based on the digital metrics, we can safely assume thousands of our Catholic brothers and sisters are taking action on this issue. My colleagues will be working with our allies to scan the local newspapers this upcoming week to see if people are communicating faith values in supporting the deal to letters to the editors in newspapers across the nation. My initial sense is that they are. That would be something to be proud of for our group.

I’ll be taking some time off on both today and Monday to rejuvenate myself as my colleagues and I continue our grueling preparation for Pope Francis’s apostolic trip to the US. As you can imagine, Iran is just a portion of the work we’re doing in preparation for the Holy Father’s trip…

I spoke to the White House yesterday and they assure us the media’s moniker calling us “God Squad” isn’t just sweet nothings, but actually a fair assessment of the substantial difference we’re making in this conversation.

Christopher J. Hale

Executive Director

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good

641 S Street Northwest, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20001

Rebuilding Our Nation, Renewing Our Society

Podesta forwarded the report to McDonough at the White House, who responded to him, “Terrific.”

In a prior email unveiled by WikiLeaks, dated February of 2012, Podesta assured Voices of Progress president Sandy Newman that a “Catholic Spring” which would “plant the seeds of revolution” in the Catholic Church would be realized with the help of his dissident “Catholic” groups.

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” wrote Podesta. “Likewise Catholics United.”

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, George Soros, Iran scam, Leftists and the Roman Catholic Church, Media and Hillary Clinton, Obama's America, Pope Francis
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The Incestuous Left and Those Who Provide Cover for them

October 23, 2016

The Incestuous Left and Those Who Provide Cover for them, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, October 23, 2016

As the election nears, the media hype, designed to affect the results, demoralize and demonize Trump and his supporters and confirm the bias of its elite coastal consumers, continues. Saturday’s opinion-posing-as-news lead in the Washington Post says the end is near for Trump — the polls have him down everywhere and he was booed for crass attacks at the Al Smith dinner in New York. What do you expect from media whose reporters are literally in bed with the administration?

Not only are reporters feeding debate questions to the Clinton campaign, we have a video of one of them, Andrea Mitchell, seemingly being fed what to ask by Hillary’s traveling press secretary.

Extensive evidence from Wikileaks, FOIA responses, and “human sources” of the incestuous and improper coordination between the media and the Democrats have been detailed by Sharyl Attkisson. She concludes:

It can be argued that some individual accounts can be rationalized and are not serious breaches of ethics. But taken as a whole, it’s easy to see how we as journalists have done a poor job protecting ourselves from being co-opted by organized interests, often ones that are paid and politically-motivated. Whether we realize it or not, they’ve figured out how to exploit the media and use us to publish their propaganda. It implies a broad and growing trend that has seriously undermined the credibility of the news industry.

Opinion reporters and those who work for obviously ideological news groups are entitled to publish party propaganda. It’s one matter to provide viewpoint journalism. But it’s quite another for us to act as a tool of any interest, publishing narratives or talking points upon suggestion or demand, without disclosing we’ve done just that.

Wikileaks promises to unleash even more insider accounts of the Clinton campaign and DNC shenanigans this coming week and has said it has even more current information — material respecting serious wrongdoing by the DNC head Donna Brazile and Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate Timothy Kaine coming up next. James O’Keefe of Project Veritas says that on Monday he is releasing a video of Robert Creamer, shown as a vote fixer in previous videos, coordinating with Clinton and Brazile. “Anything happens to me, there’s a deadman’s switch on Part III, which will be released Monday. @HillaryClinton and @donnabrazile implicated.”

The media has hardly reported these disclosures and when it has it has downplayed them, but it is no longer a gatekeeper deciding what we are allowed to know, although it tries hard to hide Hillary’s obvious physical disabilities from the public eye.

As for the polls, Democrat pollster Pat Caddell says we may be in for a shock election night:

“All of the tracking polls keep holding at Trump being ahead,” he continued. “And then all of these other polls that are one-off polls, or whatever… I don’t know how they’re doing some of these university polls. You just put the name of some university and apparently it becomes credible, whether they know what they’re doing, or not.

Caddell was pointing out the discrepancy between the different types of polls. “But in any event, polling is all over the place…. Something isn’t adding up,” said Caddell.

“Something is going to happen here, I just sense it,” he concluded. Either “Hillary will glide into the White House, or we’re headed for one of the greatest shocks in American politics. I think it’s a very close call. I think the shock potential is enormous.”

Our own Jared E. Peterson fleshes out Caddell‘s point:

Here are some of the numbers available Friday, October 21, 2016:

Goebbels/Pravda: (with NBC and CBS as reported by RCP on the afternoon of Friday, October 21, 2016):

ABC/Washington Post: 47-43, Clinton

NBC: 51-43, Clinton

CBS:  51-40, Clinton

Non-Propaganda Machine-affiliated: (as reported on the afternoon of Friday October 21, 2016):

IBT/TIPP: 41-40, Trump

LA Times/USC Tracking: 44.5-43.8, Trump

Rasmussen: 43-41, Trump

To say there’s a huge difference between the current state of the race as depicted by Goebbels/Pravda versus that shown by major independent polling organizations, would be risible understatement.

The propaganda arm of the Democratic Party is showing a runaway race, while the independents present an extremely tight one, with Trump frequently leading by a nose.

We know that at least one — the NBC/WSJ poll which early showed Clinton with an improbable 11-point lead — was a barely disguised effort intended to manipulate public opinion using a small pool of voters, improbably weighted and produced by a firm with extensive ties to the Clinton camp.

As for the media account of the Al Smith dinner, it seems like the fake accounts of Trump encouraging violence at his rallies, it’s not a true account. Joe Concha reports that you weren’t being told that Hillary got just as mean and personal as Trump did and also received some boos even from such an elite Democrat supporting party — and Concha who quotes from their remarks is joined in this assessment by Piers Morgan.

It’s hard to disagree with Concha’s conclusion:

“Who would think the 2016 Al Smith Dinner would encapsulate the prism our media sees this campaign in so perfectly?

A prism where only one candidate exists.

Because as we’re seeing on television and in print today, it just somehow did.”

The dinner itself reflects how even the Catholic Archdiocese, which sponsors this dinner for the benefit of Catholic Charities, has been coopted by the left and vast sums of federal money. It looks as if it has lost its way. Catholic Charities receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal treasury as a refugee resettlement contractor. They accept thousands of unvetted Syrian Moslems and place them in communities already struggling to provide basic services, get them signed up for welfare benefits for which taxpayers then have to foot the bill and then lobby Congress for more funds to repeat this operation.

Catholic Charities/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: These nominally Catholic organizations are the largest VOLAGs [voluntary organizations], with hundreds of offices spread throughout the country. They are prominent members of the open borders/amnesty movement. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) is “the domestic anti-poverty program of the U.S. Catholic Bishops” and a grant-making vehicle of the USCCB. It was founded in Chicago in 1969 with the help of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, specifically to fund Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. CCHD has been a radical leftist funding vehicle ever since, giving millions to ACORN, the radical training school Midwest Academy, and others. The Industrial Areas Foundation, where a young Barack Obama was trained in “community organizing” with financial support from the Chicago Archdiocese, receives the largest percentage of CCHD grants of any CCHD grantee.

President Obama had this to say about CCHD:

I got my start as a community organizer working with mostly Catholic parishes on the Southside of Chicago that were struggling because the steel plants had closed. The Campaign for Human Development helped fund the project and so, very early on, my career was intertwined with the belief in social justice that is so strong in the Church.

USCCB founded the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., a $7 million subsidiary which assists illegal aliens based on “the Gospel value of welcoming the stranger.” It aggressively promotes amnesty, believing that “all goods of the earth belong to all people. When persons cannot find employment in their country of origin to support themselves and their families, they have a right to find work elsewhere in order to survive. Sovereign nations should provide ways to accommodate this right.” USCCB has 270 field offices in 47 states. Board members include Donald D. Taylor, president of the extreme-left union UNITE HERE!

Catholics are not alone in this three-card Monte game — there are nine other such nominally faith-based organization receiving vast sums to bring refugees here, pushing for amnesty and more money for their operations which are disrupting American communities and transforming them.

Most if not all started out as private charitable institutions providing financial and other aid out of their own funds for this work. Iowahawk describes the transformation of so many of our once fine institutions as these:

“Take a respected institution.

Kill it.

Gut it.

Wear its carcass as a skin suit.

And demand respect.”

I don’t recall Catholic Charities or any of the voluntary resettlement contractors lobbying on the hill for better vetting of refugees or for a change in the UN processing of them abroad to include truly persecuted groups like Christian refugees. (They may have; I just haven’t seen it.) It’s a scandal — your money funds these nominally Christian and Jewish groups to bring in ever more inassimilable, low educated, unskilled, and sometimes very ill and dangerous hordes to transform us from a Christian-Judeo nation which believes in religious tolerance into one in which a growing minority of immigrants which a supremacist fantasy encourages demands for special privileges and the right to live off our bounty as they undermine what has created it.

The more refugee cases a volag is assigned, the more money the federal government hands over to the private agency. In some ways, the model resembles those charities that spend inordinately on fund raising and administration instead of on actually helping needy people.

Clearly, refugee resettlement policy and programs, from top to bottom, are overdue for congressional scrutiny and reform. Those organizations, including religious ones, receiving federal monies deserve close assessment. It is morally incumbent on religious refugee bureaus to examine their own hearts. As Christ said, it is impossible to serve both God and money (Luke 16:13). Their efforts would be a lot more honest and effective and a lot less harmful to their fellow countrymen and communities if they returned to reliance on private funding alone.

Hundreds of Catholic institutions are involved, including Catholic Charities of NY. The $177.2 million in federal grants to Catholic charities in 2015 are from a single charity organization. — the Catholic Charities of Chicago. So it’s fair to assume that the NY branch (for whom the Al Smith dinner is the beneficiary) itself garnered at least that much that year.

But the Al Smith dinner reflects more than its being a cover for leftist money-grubbing at our expense — it reveals a shocking disregard for Catholic sensibilities to curry favor with New York’s leftist elites and Hillary.

Recent history reveals the shift. Writing in the NC Register, Thomas Mcardle questions whether this dinner for the glitterati has passed its expiration date.

The overall message the Al Smith Dinner now sends to Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is that Catholic teachings on human life and marriage can’t be allowed to muss relations between the Church and an increasingly anti-Catholic state. But in both 1996 and 2004, the abortion-friendly position of first Bill Clinton and then Catholic Democrat nominee John Kerry led to both parties’ candidates not being invited by the Archdiocese of New York.

The decision to invite Hillary is even more inexplicable when the Archbishop had the same week demanded an apology from Hillary for the anti-Catholic material within her campaign disclosed by Wikileaks, and hasn’t received one.

Emails released last week by WikiLeaks showed Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri, both Catholics, in conversations with activists from two left-wing organizations. In the emails, Catholics were debased, with their beliefs being called “severely backwards.” Conservative Catholics also were accused of “an amazing bastardization of the faith,” and Rupert Murdoch was mocked for baptizing his children as Catholics in the River Jordan.

The U.S. Church’s bishops were slammed in the emails as well, referred to as “a middle ages dictatorship.”

Palmieri said in one of the emails she thought conservatives that had come to Catholicism did so because “they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” and that “their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

Podesta admitted to helping launch a “progressive” infiltration of the Church in another email, and he took an active role in attempting to incite a liberal Catholic revolt against the U.S. bishops.

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” Podesta wrote. “But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”

The “Catholic Spring” Podesta referred to had been broached in the email by Center for Progress president Sandy Newman, who had pondered how one would “plant the seeds of the revolution,” or “who would plant them.”

With even more damaging Wikileaks and Project Veritas disclosures coming, the Clinton camp is now trying to question their credibility, source, and organizer. So far, the claims seem unpersuasive. Donna Brazile whose head seems to be moving next under the Wikileakd guillotine has suggested the emails were tampered with.  (You might remember that in 1988 she was fired from the DNC and Dukakis apologized for her conduct when she spread a lie that George H.W. Bush had a mistress.) Cryptographers debunk that.

Hillary has claimed that U.S. Security agencies told her the hacks were Russian, suggesting Putin is trying to influence our election. Like everything else she says, this, too, is false.  Rumors smearing Assange as a pedophile have been spread — doubtless by the trolls within the Clinton network.  Reddit sleuths trace them to the address of an intelligence agency that seems to share an address with an outfit on whose board sit Larry Summers and Neera Tanden, both major players in the Clinton shadow government Center for American Progress.

Whether this will pan out on further investigation, remains to be seen, but given what we know of how the Clintons operate I’d consider it a distinct possibility.

Former UK foreign minister Craig Murray hints the Wikileaks come from inside the Clinton camp itself.

“I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is not any Russian state actor or proxy that gave the Democratic National Committee and Podesta material to WikiLeaks. The claim is nonsense. Journalists are also publishing that these were obtained by “hacking” with no evidence that this was the method used to obtain them. [snip]

But the key point is that WikiLeaks is a publisher. It is a vehicle for publishing leaks, and is much more of a vehicle for whistleblowers than for hackers. It does not originate the material. I have often seen comments such as “Why has WikiLeaks not published material on Israel/Putin/Trump?” The answer is that they have not been given any. They publish good, verifiable material that they are given by whistleblowers.”

It would warm my cold heart to think there is an honest person or two somewhere on the vast Clinton payroll.

 

Categories: 2016 elections, Al Smith Dinner, Charitable organizations, Clinton character, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Distractions, Hillary Clinton and immigration, Illegal immigration, Islamic refugees, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Opinion polls, Project Veritas, Roman Catholic Church, Russia, Trump Hater's Club, WikiLeaks
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Hillary Clinton Really Didn’t Want to Apologize for Her Email Use

October 21, 2016

Hillary Clinton Really Didn’t Want to Apologize for Her Email Use, Washington Free Beacon, , October 21, 2016

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., makes a campaign stop at Hemisfair Park, at the Arch, in San Antonio,Texas, Friday, Feb. 29, 2008. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton,  (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Hillary Clinton’s campaign struggled to get the candidate to apologize for using a private email server as secretary of state, recently hacked emails reveal.

Clinton’s team tried for weeks to convince her before she finally sat down with ABC News anchor David Muir to say “I’m sorry.” Campaign chairman John Podesta described the apology as very painful for Clinton.

On September 8, 2015, the night the interview aired, Podesta emailed Neera Tanden, a Clinton adviser and the president of the Center for American Progress.

“She ate her spinach,” Podesta said. “Shouldn’t have been this hard, but thanks for weighing in.”

“I was physically sick on the prep call this morning feeling her pain (of course, I was inflicting most of it.)” Podesta said. “I have to say Mandy [Grunwald] was pretty stand up on pushing her too.”

Podesta added that he wished viewers could only see the end of the interview, where Hillary talked about the movie A League of Their Own.

“The ending of this is just so great,” he said. “Can we ever imagine a strategy to just get the last two minutes out without people having to watch 10 minutes of email answers first?”

Clinton said it was a mistake to have a private email server, while still claiming it was “allowed.” The State Department’s inspector general said using a private server was not allowed because of “significant security risks.”

“I do think I could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier. I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that,” Clinton told Muir.

“What I had done was allowed, it was above board. But in retrospect, as I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”

Weeks before the interview, Clinton’s team wrestled with how to get their candidate to apologize because the scandal was causing a “character problem.”

“I know this email thing isn’t on the level,” Tanden wrote to Podesta on August 22. “I’m fully aware of that. But her inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more so than honesty).”

“People hate her arrogant, like her down,” Tanden said. “It’s a sexist context, but I think it’s the truth. I see no downside in her actually just saying, look, I’m sorry. I think it will take so much air out of this.”

Tanden said it is not in Clinton’s nature to be transparent.

“She always sees herself bending to ‘their’ will when she hands over information, etc.,” she said. “But the way she has to bend here is in the remorse. Not the ‘if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it.’ A real feeling of – this decision I made created a mess and I’m sorry I did that.”

Podesta agreed, and said he and Jen Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, were “in the same place.”

“Trying to figure out how to get [Hillary] there and best way to execute,” he said.

The emails were hacked from Podesta’s account and posted by Wikileaks. The U.S. director of national intelligence and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security have accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of hacking and leaking emails posted to Wikileaks and other sites in order to influence the 2016 election.

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton character, Clinton e-mails, Clinton unsecured server, WikiLeaks
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