Posted tagged ‘Clinton obstruction of justice’

You can Smell Hillary’s Fear

November 4, 2016

You can Smell Hillary’s Fear, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, November 4, 2016

hilsmells

Hillary Clinton has awkwardly wound her way through numerous scandals in just this election cycle. But she’s never shown fear or desperation before. Now that has changed. Whatever she is afraid of, it lies buried in her emails with Huma Abedin. And it can bring her down like nothing else has.

******************

In the final stretch of the election, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone to war with the FBI.

The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around so often this election that it ought to be retired. But it’s still unprecedented for the nominee of a major political party to go war with the FBI.

But that’s exactly what Hillary and her people have done. Coma patients just waking up now and watching an hour of CNN from their hospital beds would assume that FBI Director James Comey is Hillary’s opponent in this election.

The FBI is under attack by everyone from Obama to CNN. Hillary’s people have circulated a letter attacking Comey. There are currently more media hit pieces lambasting him than targeting Trump. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Clintons or their allies were to start running attack ads against the FBI.

The FBI’s leadership is being warned that the entire left-wing establishment will form a lynch mob if they continue going after Hillary. And the FBI’s credibility is being attacked by the media and the Democrats to preemptively head off the results of the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton.

The covert struggle between FBI agents and Obama’s DOJ people has gone explosively public.

The New York Times has compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Its bizarre headline, “James Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s FBI, Fairly or Not” practically admits up front that it’s spouting nonsense. The Boston Globe has published a column calling for Comey’s resignation. Not to be outdone, Time has an editorial claiming that the scandal is really an attack on all women.

James Carville appeared on MSNBC to remind everyone that he was still alive and insane. He accused Comey of coordinating with House Republicans and the KGB. And you thought the “vast right wing conspiracy” was a stretch.

Countless media stories charge Comey with violating procedure. Do you know what’s a procedural violation? Emailing classified information stored on your bathroom server.

Senator Harry Reid has sent Comey a letter accusing him of violating the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a nice idea that has as much relevance in the age of Obama as the Tenth Amendment. But the cable news spectrum quickly filled with media hacks glancing at the Wikipedia article on the Hatch Act under the table while accusing the FBI director of one of the most awkward conspiracies against Hillary ever.

If James Comey is really out to hurt Hillary, he picked one hell of a strange way to do it.

Not too long ago Democrats were breathing a sigh of relief when he gave Hillary Clinton a pass in a prominent public statement. If he really were out to elect Trump by keeping the email scandal going, why did he trash the investigation? Was he on the payroll of House Republicans and the KGB back then and playing it coy or was it a sudden development where Vladimir Putin and Paul Ryan talked him into taking a look at Anthony Weiner’s computer?

Either Comey is the most cunning FBI director that ever lived or he’s just awkwardly trying to navigate a political mess that has trapped him between a DOJ leadership whose political futures are tied to Hillary’s victory and his own bureau whose apolitical agents just want to be allowed to do their jobs.

The only truly mysterious thing is why Hillary and her associates decided to go to war with a respected Federal agency. Most Americans like the FBI while Hillary Clinton enjoys a 60% unfavorable rating.

And it’s an interesting question.

Hillary’s old strategy was to lie and deny that the FBI even had a criminal investigation underway. Instead her associates insisted that it was a security review. The FBI corrected her and she shrugged it off. But the old breezy denial approach has given way to a savage assault on the FBI.

Pretending that nothing was wrong was a bad strategy, but it was a better one that picking a fight with the FBI while lunatic Clinton associates try to claim that the FBI is really the KGB.

There are two possible explanations.

Hillary Clinton might be arrogant enough to lash out at the FBI now that she believes that victory is near. The same kind of hubris that led her to plan her victory fireworks display could lead her to declare a war on the FBI for irritating her during the final miles of her campaign.

But the other explanation is that her people panicked.

Going to war with the FBI is not the behavior of a smart and focused presidential campaign. It’s an act of desperation. When a presidential candidate decides that her only option is to try and destroy the credibility of the FBI, that’s not hubris, it’s fear of what the FBI might be about to reveal about her.

During the original FBI investigation, Hillary Clinton was confident that she could ride it out. And she had good reason for believing that. But that Hillary Clinton is gone. In her place is a paranoid wreck. Within a short space of time the “positive” Clinton campaign promising to unite the country has been replaced by a desperate and flailing operation that has focused all its energy on fighting the FBI.

There’s only one reason for such bizarre behavior.

The Clinton campaign has decided that an FBI investigation of the latest batch of emails poses a threat to its survival. And so it’s gone all in on fighting the FBI. It’s an unprecedented step born of fear. It’s hard to know whether that fear is justified. But the existence of that fear already tells us a whole lot.

Clinton loyalists rigged the old investigation. They knew the outcome ahead of time as well as they knew the debate questions. Now suddenly they are no longer in control. And they are afraid.

You can smell the fear.

The FBI has wiretaps from the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. It’s finding new emails all the time. And Clintonworld panicked. The spinmeisters of Clintonworld have claimed that the email scandal is just so much smoke without fire. All that’s here is the appearance of impropriety without any of the substance. But this isn’t how you react to smoke. It’s how you respond to a fire.

The misguided assault on the FBI tells us that Hillary Clinton and her allies are afraid of a revelation bigger than the fundamental illegality of her email setup. The email setup was a preemptive cover up. The Clinton campaign has panicked badly out of the belief, right or wrong, that whatever crime the illegal setup was meant to cover up is at risk of being exposed.

The Clintons have weathered countless scandals over the years. Whatever they are protecting this time around is bigger than the usual corruption, bribery, sexual assaults and abuses of power that have followed them around throughout the years. This is bigger and more damaging than any of the allegations that have already come out. And they don’t want FBI investigators anywhere near it.

The campaign against Comey is pure intimidation. It’s also a warning. Any senior FBI people who value their careers are being warned to stay away. The Democrats are closing ranks around their nominee against the FBI. It’s an ugly and unprecedented scene. It may also be their last stand.

Hillary Clinton has awkwardly wound her way through numerous scandals in just this election cycle. But she’s never shown fear or desperation before. Now that has changed. Whatever she is afraid of, it lies buried in her emails with Huma Abedin. And it can bring her down like nothing else has.

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)

What Should Americans Be Talking About?

October 17, 2016

What Should Americans Be Talking About? Gatestone Institute, Judith Bergman, October 17, 2016

Should Americans uphold the Judeo-Christian values, which have governed Western civilization until now? Or should they quietly allow the defeat of those values by a false liberalism — false, because it is anything but liberal — which will allow values, such as that of Islamic sharia religious law to settle over the United States? Will people willingly surrender their own culture in order to avoid becoming victims of intimidation?

Worse, these policies often come in the seemingly benign-sounding terms of “diversity”, “multiculturalism”, “peace”, “anti-racism”, and “human rights”; but are often used in an Orwellian way to mean their own opposites. “Diversity” means, “It is great to look different so long as you think the same way I do” and is also an acceptance of Islamic values. “Anti-racism” often means, in a racist way, anti-white or anti-Jew. “Human rights” now means a political agenda. “Peace” is used to mean the destruction of Israel. “Multiculturalism” means any culture except the Judeo-Christian one — regardless of whether that culture supports denigrating women, slavery, flogging, amputating limbs, murdering gays and the intolerance of all other religions and cultures. These inversions of language are having devastating consequences not only on university campuses, but also throughout the U.S. and abroad.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all [that] the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” — Muslim Brotherhood, 1991.

The question of whether to submit to these policies, as Europe is doing, or to uphold freedom, as Israel is doing, has arrived in the United States. The choice Americans make will immeasurably affect not just the US, but, despite sounding melodramatic, the future of Western civilization.

For the American voter, issues of immense urgency to the survival of the free world — such as individual freedom, dispassionate enquiry and freedom of speech and thought, which we dangerously have come to take for granted — are being derailed by crude language and behavior, when Americans need to be paying attention to serious threats to the United States, its allies and to the values of the West.

Internationally, these threats come from Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and countless terrorist groups.

Domestically, they appear in the form of massive corruption — financial and otherwise — that is visibly hollowing out American institutions, such as the FBI (the failure to follow investigative procedure, followed by calls for FBI Director James Comey’s resignation); the Department of Justice (the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal, and the Attorney General meeting with a former president whose wife is under investigation); the State Department (email leaks are still yielding up evidence of collusion between the Clinton Global Initiative and the State Department under Hillary Clinton); the IRS (targeting conservative non-profits, and raiding the businesses of private citizens, who disagree with policy); the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to acquire power over every puddle in America) and the Executive branch in the “I have a pen and I have a phone” president’s dealings with Iran.

There have also been attempts by outsiders to incite racial and religious anarchy. The entrepreneur George Soros, for example, donated $33 million to turn events in Ferguson, Missouri from a local protest into chaos.

1952There have been attempts by outsiders to incite racial and religious anarchy. The entrepreneur George Soros, for example, donated $33 million to turn events in Ferguson, Missouri from a local protest into chaos. (Image source: World Economic Forum)

Instead of helping Americans to create a safer, more prosperous way of life, the Ferguson events destroyed a community, devastated small business owners, and eroded security, the rule of law, and any hope for a better future. Who benefits? Creating chaos embeds a political dependency: rather than helping people to climb out of poverty, it keeps them voting for politicians to “rescue” them.

Jews and Israel are also targeted — often, regrettably, by other Jews, who appear naïvely to hope that they will thereby “immunize” themselves from attacks on Jews. Recently, for example, an article accused the U.S. Republican presidential election campaign of “significantly enhancing the presence of antisemitism in the public arena.”

Seriously?

While “conservative” radicals, such as white supremacists do exist, they are not even close to overtaking the mainstream discourse. That space, rather, seems to have been filled in the last decades by self-described “liberals” who now seem to dominate it to such a degree that the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago, John Ellison, felt obliged to write a letter warning prospective applicants not to expect a “safe space.” “Conservative” radicals are not the ones hunting down Jews — “liberals” and Islamists are victimizing and shutting them out.

Ironically of course, the liberals have not yet figured out that the agendas of these two groups are incompatible (as in gender equality); perhaps they are trying to “immunize” themselves, too.

Public debate in the US, particularly in the next few weeks, really needs to be about choosing what policies would actually improve the lives of Americans. Should they uphold the Judeo-Christian values, which have governed Western civilization until now? Or should they quietly allow the defeat of those values by a false liberalism — false, because it is anything but liberal — which will allow values, such as that of Islamic sharia religious law to settle over the United States? Will people willingly surrender their own culture in order to avoid becoming victims of intimidation?

American university campuses, which should proudly be championing debate of all ideas, have instead been rife with antisemitism for years, mostly because a “thought police” obsessed with identity politics — another way of saying my race, religion, skin color or sexual proclivity is good, yours is not — has overtaken campuses and turned them into embittered war-zones. It is postmodern Stalinism.

Worse, these policies often come in the seemingly benign-sounding terms of “diversity”, “multiculturalism”, “peace”, “anti-racism”, and “human rights”; but are often used in an Orwellian way to mean their own opposites. “Diversity” means, “it is great to look different so long as you think the same way I do” and is also and acceptance of Islamic values. “Anti-racism” often means, in a racist way, anti-white or anti-Jew. “Human rights” now means a political agenda. “Peace” is used to mean the destruction of Israel. “Multiculturalism” means any culture except the Judeo-Christian one — regardless of whether that culture supports denigrating women, slavery, flogging, amputating limbs, murdering gays and the intolerance of all other religions and cultures. These inversions of language are having devastating consequences not only on university campuses, but also throughout the U.S. and abroad.

The glue that brings “liberals” and Islamists, such as the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in the US (a front[1] for the Muslim Brotherhood), together in a common cause is the goal of eradicating Israel — of course always only under the euphemisms of “helping Palestinians” and “Peace,” even though Jihadi camps for children were organized first by Palestinians.

A 1991 official document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood outlines its strategic goals for civilizational jihad in North America. It depicts the Muslim Brotherhood’s plans for civilization jihad in the United States stating:

“The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all [that] the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers… [W]e must possess a mastery of the art of “coalitions”, the art of “absorption” and the principles of “cooperation.”

The question of whether to submit to these policies, as Europe is doing, or to uphold freedom, as Israel is doing, has arrived in the United States. The choice Americans make will immeasurably affect not just the US, but, despite sounding melodramatic, the future of Western civilization.

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[1] In a 1991 official document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood, outlining its strategic goals for civilizational jihad in North America, the Muslim Students Association was mentioned as “one of our organizations and the organizations of our friends”, that is, a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood. The document was entered as evidence in the 2008 Holyland Terror Funding Trial.

 

Obama operatives stripped Judicial Watch of ‘media’ status, overcharged for FOIA requests

September 30, 2016

Obama operatives stripped Judicial Watch of ‘media’ status, overcharged for FOIA requests, Washington Times

(But how could that be?

Oh well. — DM)

 

tomfitton_c0-46-1253-776_s885x516“This is what we put up all the time from the agencies,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. (Associated Press)

Political operatives within the Obama administration wrongly punished conservative legal group Judicial Watch, stripping it of “media” status and trying to force it to pay higher fees for its open records requests, the General Services Administration inspector general said in a letter released Thursday.

The GSA botched several high-profile open records requests, delaying them for months while political appointees got involved, Inspector General Carol F. Ochoa said. The findings were released while the administration was facing charges of slow-walking open records requests for Hillary Clinton’s emails, as well as other requests.

In the case of Judicial Watch, the order to strip it of media status came from political operatives with long ties to Democratic causes — and even from the White House.

The inspector general said the decision came at the behest of Gregory Mecher, a former Democratic campaign fundraiser who at the time was liaison to the White House. He is married to Jen Psaki, a longtime spokeswoman with the Obama administration and its election campaigns.

Ms. Ochoa said stripping Judicial Watch of media status violated several agency policies and things got worse when the GSA denied an appeal by the group.

The same person who ruled on the initial request also ruled on the appeal, “contrary to GSA procedures,” the inspector general said.

Judicial Watch ended up suing over the request, the agency finally agreed to waive all fees and even ended up paying Judicial Watch $750 as part of the settlement.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, questioned the agency’s decision to fight a losing case that ended up costing it money.

“It’s outrageous but not surprising. Welcome to our world. This is what we put up with all the time from the agencies,” he said.

President Obama promised an era of transparency when it came to open records requests under the Freedom of Information Act, which is the chief way for Americans to pry loose data from the federal government.

Despite the president’s exhortations, the government is increasingly fighting requests, forcing the public to file lawsuits to look at information.

Last year, the administration spent $31.3 million to fight FOIA cases — more than twice the $15.4 million the administration spent in 2008, the final year under President George W. Bush.

The GSA has not been one of the major offenders, reporting no FOIA legal spending in 2015 and just $11,000 a year in 2014 and 2013, when it faced Judicial Watch’s lawsuit and paid the $750 settlement.

That doesn’t mean the agency has been operating cleanly. In a 2010 letter, a previous inspector general said the agency botched a request seeking information about GSA communications with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and two other Democrats.

White House officials got involved and further delayed the request, the inspector general said.

Ms. Ochoa said in her letter that she found three bungled cases in the five years since that 2010 investigation. A 2013 request for records mentioning Donald Trump — now the Republican presidential nominee — took 242 days, five times the average. A 2012 request seeking information on GSA bonuses was blocked for 515 days.

The Judicial Watch request, though, was the most striking.

The group was trying to get a look at a goofy video produced by the agency’s New York office on company time and using company resources. The GSA at the time was facing fierce criticism from Capitol Hill for having wasted money on lavish conferences with questionable team-building activities such as the video.

Judicial Watch asked to be treated similar to a member of the media, which would mean an exemption from fees. Two weeks earlier, Judicial Watch was approved for the media exemption.

But ahead of the GSA request, Mr. Mecher, the political appointee with ties to the White House, requested that Judicial Watch’s status be re-examined, investigators said. Elliot Mincberg, a lawyer with deep Democratic ties who was on loan to the GSA at the time, issued a determination rejecting Judicial Watch as a media requester.

Ms. Ochoa said the justification for that was weak — a page from a Justice Department guide that predated the current law governing the definition of media. Mr. Mincberg “did not conduct any independent legal research” about the 2007 law, and that “shows a lack of due diligence,” Ms. Ochoa concluded.

The GSA then failed to follow its own procedures in its denial letter — despite internal misgivings — and again in mishandling the appeal, Ms. Ochoa wrote.

“Why are White House liaisons involved in our FOIA request?” said Mr. Fitton, the Judicial Watch president.

Mr. Mecher, who is now a top congressional staffer in the office of Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, did not respond to an email seeking comment on his role.

Mr. Mincberg said in an email that he “performed a relatively minor task” at Mr. Mecher’s request but declined to elaborate, saying he was acting at the time as an attorney for the agency and would need its approval to speak more.

Mr. Mincberg had been lent to the GSA as a FOIA troubleshooter — though his arrival was met with skepticism. Ms. Ochoa reported that one senior lawyer emailed a colleague saying, “This will not end well.”

Later, Mr. Mincberg would run into trouble at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he was a senior attorney.

In 2014, that department’s inspector general cited him for obstructing an investigation into the deputy secretary. Mr. Mincberg was accused of withholding information from investigators, appearing to coach witnesses and, during one interview, threatening to bring charges against the investigators themselves.

GSA spokeswoman Ashley Nash-Hahn did not respond to specific questions about Mr. Mincberg or Mr. Mecher, but insisted that her agency had improved its handling of FOIA requests. She said the agency has a new tracking system and increased training and coordination.

“With these improvements, GSA accelerated its processing time from an average of 21 days for simple requests and 63 days for complex requests in fiscal year 2013 to 12 days for simple requests and 46 days for complex requests last fiscal year,” she said.

Judicial Watch is fighting a series of court cases to get a look at Mrs. Clinton’s emails from the State Department and has other cases pending against the CIA, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the IRS.

A case against the Homeland Security Department, in which Judicial Watch argued that the department regularly obstructed its requests, was dismissed Thursday.

Judge Richard J. Leon, sitting in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that delays for Judicial Watch’s requests weren’t enough to prove that Homeland Security was violating its policies.

Judicial Watch points to no fact or statement to establish why the requests were delayed or how the delays were the result of an either formal or informal DHS policy or practice to violate FOIA’s requirements, rather than an inevitable but unintended delay attributable to a lack of resources,” the judge wrote.

Tom Fitton discussing the bombshell release of Clinton emails by Team Judicial Watch

August 22, 2016

Tom Fitton discussing the bombshell release of Clinton emails by Team Judicial Watch, Judicial Watch via YouTube, August 22, 2016

 

Compromised: Justice Dept. Refused FBI Probe of Clinton Foundation

August 11, 2016

Compromised: Justice Dept. Refused FBI Probe of Clinton Foundation, Front Page MagazineMatthew Vadum, August 11, 2016

(Please see also, Report: Justice Department declined FBI request to investigate Clinton Foundation. — DM)

gty_ap_loretta_lynch_hillary_clinton_jt_150726_16x9_992

The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.

CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”

It is not until the 25th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.”

At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to open a case.”

Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?

Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter.

As I’ve written before, various lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence — evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less — is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.

The only reason FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend she be prosecuted is because, well, he lacks a spine and he’s corrupt. He said there was no evidence of Clinton’s “efforts to obstruct justice,” a requirement that does not actually appear in the Espionage Act.

Evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation is everywhere, yet CNN and much of the mainstream media are still doing everything they can to ignore, misrepresent, or downplay the questionable things Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did through the foundation.

The congenitally corrupt Clintons created their private email system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to their corrupt foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.

These illegal, insecure private email servers Clinton used while at the State Department are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, four years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.

Every few days Judicial Watch has been releasing emails obtained under FoIA that may ultimately lead to evidence of political interference at the highest levels that provided cover for the anticipatory presidential bribe processing vehicle known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

“No wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts and Congress,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “They show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law.”

On Tuesday the watchdog group published emails sent to Abedin, Clinton’s longtime aide with generational ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking favors. Abedin now vice-chairs Clinton’s presidential campaign. She also worked at the State Department with Clinton and with her at the Clinton Foundation.

“The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate,” according to a Judicial Watch summary. “In the email Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides at the State Department Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is “important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that “Personnel has been sending him options.” Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative.”

Emails also show Abedin left then-Secretary Clinton’s daily schedule, presumably a  sensitive document, on a bed in an unlocked hotel room.

“An email on April 18, 2009, during a conference in Trinidad and Tobago, from aide Melissa J. Lan to Huma Abedin asks for the Secretary’s “day book binders.” Abedin replies: “Yes. It’s on the bed in my room. U can take it. My door is open. I’m in the lobby. Thx.” Moreover, the emails show the annoyance of another Clinton aide that the schedule was sent to an authorized State Department email address and not to an unsecured non-state.gov account.”

Other emails show Clinton campaign adviser and pollster Mark Penn provided Clinton advice on NATO and piracy. Clinton fundraiser Lana Moresky asked Clinton to have the State Department hire someone. Clinton asked Abedin to follow up and “help” the applicant and asked Abedin to “let me know” about the job.

Meanwhile, the Left is trying to take the focus off the Clinton Foundation.

A high-profile watchdog group controlled by Hillary Clinton ally David Brock is demanding the IRS investigate Donald Trump’s personal foundation for allegedly aiding his presidential campaign.

The call by CREW, or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has to be the most obvious political hit job of this election cycle.

CREW is a member of what some in the conservative think tank community call the “Brocktopus,” that is, the network of groups the disgraced former journalist runs, which spends oodles of money defending all things Clinton. An admitted serial liar, Brock’s empire of sleaze also includes “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America, pro-Hillary disaster-control spin site Correct the Record, and American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that promotes Hillary and attacks her critics.

CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder asked the IRS to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a tiny nonprofit founded by Trump decades ago to give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal.

How the foundation, which ranked 4,347th in the FoundationSearch “Top Foundations by Assets for the state of New York” list would help the Trump campaign isn’t clear. “The Trump Foundation has no full-time staff, and gave away just $591,000 in 2014 — the last year for which records are available,” the Washington Post reports.

It’s possible the Trump Foundation has been helping the Trump campaign but the philanthropy is so anemic it is difficult to imagine it doing much to help its benefactor’s political career. Even if the IRS takes up this piddling little case not much is likely to come of it. It’s a political stunt by CREW, a nakedly partisan group under the boot of one of Hillary’s biggest backers.

It’s the wheeling and dealing Clinton Foundation with its involvement in billion-dollar transactions, its ties to shady figures, and the debt it owes to the unsavory governments of countries around the world that needs to be properly and thoroughly examined.

Michael Cutler on The Hillary-FBI Fix — The Glazov Gang.

July 9, 2016

Michael Cutler on The Hillary-FBI Fix — The Glazov Gang. ViaYouTube, July 8, 2016

 

The Day the Rule of Law Died

July 5, 2016

The Day the Rule of Law Died, PJ MediaMichael Walsh, July 5, 2016

Laughing Hillary

And so once again the leading crime family in America skates, thumbing its nose at the rule of law as an earnest but politically clueless FBI director stands before the nation to repeat the well-worn Clinton mantra of “insufficient evidence,” and to attribute to Hillary another shopworn cliche that the Clintons habitually use in their defense: sloppiness.

In other words, it was a judgment call by James Comey. After laying out clear proof that Mrs. Clinton violated both the letter and the spirit of the law, he essentially punted by saying this is not the kind of case a reasonable prosecutor would make. Of course it isn’t — not if that prosecutor wants to both keep his job and stay above ground. As a moral failure, Comey even surpassed the supine John Roberts who twice turned down an opportunity to put a stake through Obamacare’s black heart and thereby inflicting it upon the American people with the patina of “settled law.”

“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey announced at FBI headquarters in Washington. “Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges. No charges are appropriate in this case. In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.”

But Comey had a bigger task: to prevent the nomination of a woman manifestly unsuited to the highest office in the land; a woman of no accomplishment except her sham marriage to a former president (himself impeached, disgraced and disbarred); a woman of Saul Alinsky levels of malevolence toward the nation as founded; and a woman whose candidacy would shame a banana republic in its sheer effrontery.

What Comey essentially said was that he could find no clear intent on the part of Mrs. Clinton — no intent to hide evidence, no intent to expose national secrets to enemy eyes. The 110 emails that contained classified information and blithely sent roaring along the intertubes by a “careless” Hillary Clinton are of no moment. For who could ever doubt that she, her husband, and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama have nothing but the best interests of the nation at heart?

Never mind that the woman was Secretary of State, for God’s sake, not some pencil-pushing bureaucrat toiling away in the bowels of Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State is the most distinguished cabinet position in the government, a honor generally bestowed by responsible presidents on their most trusted and able advisors. But, as it turns out, for Mrs. Clinton it was simply a resume-enhancer and if she had to let four Americans die at Benghazi at her boss’s behest in order to get her ticket punched, well, politics ain’t beanbag.

Hence the setup campaign we all just witnessed. The “accidental” meeting on a Phoenix tarmac last week between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton — an outrageous moral violation of the legal system. Lynch’s bold words that she would “accept” the FBI’s recommendations. The FBI’s sudden “invitation” on Saturday to Mrs. Clinton to “voluntarily” submit to examination. Hillary and Obama, all smiles, out campaigning together this very day.  The events of the past week would give any rational person sufficient grounds to believe that the fix was in, and has been all along.

At National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy writes:

It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged.It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we’ve decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me.

James Comey was the last man standing between Hillary Clinton and the complete corruption of the American government, and he failed his country. Eliot Ness, he wasn’t:

Those who know the FBI know that it’s still basically a band of Catholic schoolboys, dutifully filling in their investigator’s notebooks in order to produce beautifully typed book reports to be turned in to Sister Mary Margaret or get their palms whacked with a ruler. They may get the facts, but the bigger picture fairly consistently eludes them; but then again, the bigger picture is not their job. Comey bleated that “this investigation was done honestly, competently and independently, no outside influence of any kind was brought to bear” — but so what? Is this how the Republic falls, one dotted-i and crossed-t at a time?

But in times such as ours, more was needed than dutiful punctiliousness. Starting around the turn of the last century, the criminal urban gangs realized they could control — and steal — enormous sums of money and wield political power by taking over City Hall. Indeed, Tammany Hall was dedicated to doing precisely that — tit for tat, pay to play — and the young Bill Clinton got a priceless education in municipal corruption in Hot Springs (known at the time as “Tammany South”) It’s little wonder he brought that corrupting ethos with him to Little Rock and Washington.

Once a city was conquered, they could move on to the state level. During the 1930s, before Franklin Roosevelt turned Thomas Dewey loose on the gangs, gangland effectively owned New Jersey, Illinois, Arkansas and Nevada. From there, it was but a short hop toward national politics, leveraging the Electoral College via their control of the major population centers in vote-rich states. As a result, the Democrats now have a chokehold on the White House, as the election and re-election of a complete nonentity named Barack Hussein Obama has proven.

In failing to find sufficient evidence of a crime big enough to derail Hillary’s candidacy, Comey missed the chance to take down the far larger racket that’s strangling America. Dewey succeeded because he was ruthless, euchring Lepke into an electric chair bounce by convincing him to surrender to J. Edgar Hoover personally on federal narcotics charges. But Hoover double-crossed the murderer and turned him over to New York State, which fried him in Old Sparky on a murder beef.

I’ll leave it to others to sort out the electoral ramifications of today’s news, but in the end it’s not going to make a whit of difference. Hillary now cruises to her nomination, taps into the Obama network, and flounces around the country shouting to her true believers that this was just another trumped-up indignity at the hands of the Rethuglican attack machine. She will say — a lie, but she will say it — that she’s now been cleared by the FBI. Who cares that Comey essentially said this woman should never be allowed near a security clearance again; after all, if and when she’s president, she won’t need one.

It doesn’t matter how hard the FBI worked, or how diligent their work was. It doesn’t matter that they sleuthed or sussed out hidden, fragmentary, lost or concealed Clinton emails. It doesn’t matter how they arrived at their conclusion to do nothing.  All that matters is that they did nothing.